GOLF ICON MOURNED
Arnold Palmer dead at 87
The King is dead. There will be no successor.
No one else can make television discover golf for the first time. No one else can be the first to charm and swashbuckle the sport away from its snooty country club image and take it to the masses of both sexes.
No other golfer can put his name on the inception of the Golf Channel.
Arnold Palmer did all of that, and did it with a plain-spoken decency and humility that made him the most cherished figure in the game, even a half-century after he won the last of his seven major championships. Truly, he was The King. Palmer died Sunday at age 87 after a long period of declining health that included battles with cancer and a heart ailment. Near the end, he had difficult with balance, and had suffered some injuries from falls. The hand that signed hundreds of thousands of autographs in classic penmanship was shaky and the ears that heard millions scream his name couldn’t hear much of anything.
He made only the briefest of appearances at this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational in mid-March, the PGA Tour event held at his Bay Hill Club & Lodge near Orlando, Fla.
“He’s feeling his age,” said his grandson, touring professional Sam Saunders — and had earlier declared himself unable to hit the opening tee shot of the Masters in April as an honorary starter alongside his old rivals Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.
As much as today’s touring professionals will all say they owe their wealth to Tiger Woods’ massive influence on television ratings, they should all remove their caps and visors to mourn the passing of the man whose Hollywood good looks and heart-on-sleeve emotions made him the first superstar of golf’s television age.
With Nicklaus and Player, he was part of golf’s Big Three, and they parlayed that friendly rivalry into a series of televised matches that helped blazed the trail for TV coverage of the sport.
Well after the millennium, the Big Three were still a magnetic grouping for the Masters’ Wednesday Par-3 contest.
Nicklaus would become the greatest player of the group — greatest ever, by most estimates — but he wasn’t fully embraced by the public until after Palmer, with his “Arnie’s Army” of smitten followers, had mostly exited the stage as a major threat.
He appeared on many TV variety and talk shows, including a famous appearance on The Tonight Show during which Johnny Carson asked Winnie whether she had any pre-tournament superstitions and replied: “Yes, I kiss his balls for luck.”
“I’ll bet that makes his putter stand up,” said Carson.
It was said of James Bond, and later of Palmer: “Women want to be with him, men want to be him.” He was that appealing to both sexes — and his persona was so large, especially after he crossed the ocean to help rekindle American interest in the (British) Open Championship — that he actually appeared in a Bond film, 1964’s Goldfinger ... or at least his name did.
“If that’s his original ball, I’m Arnold Palmer,” Bond’s caddie said during a match against Goldfinger, in which the villain’s caddie, Oddjob, surreptitiously dropped a ball in the rough after Goldfinger’s ball was lost.
It’s hard to fathom, given the Championship and the seasonlong FedEx Cup.
But Palmer earned 20 times his salary off the course during some of his best, post-retirement years because of a partnership with pioneering sports agent Mark McCormack, who founded the International Management Group (IMG) with Palmer as his first client.
McCormack parlayed Palmer’s affable charm and charisma into an empire that included a line of golf apparel at Sears, a golf course design company (with partner Ed Seay) that has built over 200 courses worldwide, and a myriad of endorsement and commercial ventures under the banner of Arnold Palmer Enterprises.
He even had a soft drink named after him: the Arnold Palmer, made of sweet iced tea and lemonade.
Palmer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.