Loss of ‘The King’
Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer dies at age 87
Arnold Palmer, the son of a Pennsylvania golf-course greens keeper who combined movie-star magnetism, go-for-broke daring and the nascent power of television to become a seven-time professional major tournament champion and the sport’s first international corporate icon, died Sunday.
The United States Golf Association announced his passing on Twitter: “We are deeply saddened by the death of Arnold Palmer, golf’s greatest ambassador, at age 87.”
Palmer captivated golf audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s with an ungainly, homemade swing and hitchup-his-pants swagger. He won 62 PGA Tour events and more than 90 tournaments worldwide, but his swath cut far beyond fairways. He was not golf’s most accomplished star, even as Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Tom Watson claimed more major victories.
Sam Snead compiled more PGA wins (82), while five players, but not Palmer, have captured golf’s modern career “Grand Slam.” (Palmer won four Masters titles, two British Opens and one U.S. Open, but he failed to win the PGA Championship.)
Yet it was Palmer who earned, and never relinquished, the sobriquet “King.” His impact on golf was unequivocal and transcendent. Armed with big biceps and a flat stomach, Palmer brought raw athleticism to a discipline many considered more skill than sport.
He revolutionized sports marketing as it is known today, and his success contributed to increased incomes for athletes across the sporting spectrum.
Palmer’s first professional major victory, at the 1958 Masters, serendipitously intersected with the phenomena of television. His chiseled looks and bold — some called it reckless — style of play made him a compelling lead actor in golf’s weekly playhouse theatre.
“Television and Palmer took over golf simultaneously,” Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist, once wrote.
Palmer’s historic victories were matched only by his historic collapses. The same man who rallied from seven shots behind on the final day to win the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills Country Club in Colorado also blew a final-day seven-shot lead to lose the 1966 U.S. Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.
“He was the Perils of Pauline,” Murray wrote. “Every round was a cliffhanger. Continued next week.”
Palmer’s homemade, corkscrew swing — once likened to someone wrestling a snake — appealed to weekend hackers who also lacked textbook form.
“I was often where they were as I came down the stretch, in the rough, the trees, or up the creek,” Palmer wrote in his 1999 biography, “A Golfer’s Life.”
He boomed low-trajectory shots that might land, as Murray once described, “into a hole or the back of a convertible.”
Palmer chain-smoked L&M cigarettes (he later kicked the habit) and swigged Coca Cola to calm his nerves — he would later endorse both products.
His putting could be sizzling hot or disastrously frigid. Palmer, sometimes to his detriment, never changed his attack approach.
“Critics who have said a safer shot here or there would undoubtedly have won me a few more tournaments are probably correct,” Palmer wrote, adding, “going for the green in two was who I was as a boy — and it’s who I remain as a man.”
Palmer maintained careerlong eye contact with a devoted fan base known as “Arnie’s Army.” It was not uncommon for Palmer to chat up bystanders and reporters.
However, it was Palmer’s appeal to non-golfers, and women especially, that made him a cross-over star. Television brought Palmer into Middle America’s living room, where he became a multimillionaire who never lost connection to the common Joe.
“The camera is strange,” Frank Chirkinian, the longtime CBS golf producer who worked his first Masters in 1959, once told Golf Digest. “It’s all revealing. It either loves you or hates you, and it loved Arnold.”
With a handshake agreement in 1960, Palmer joined forces with Mark McCormack and a fledgling company, International Management Group. The condition, at inception, was that Palmer would be McCormack’s only client.
McCormack helped promote Palmer’s brand into a corporate empire, while IMG grew to become a world-renowned sports, entertainment and media management company.
Palmer’s second Masters victory in 1960, punctuated with a birdie-birdie finish, sparked a dizzying array of income opportunities.
Palmer obtained his pilot’s license and became a true jet-setter, zigzagging across the globe to promote his interests. He hobnobbed, golfed and dined with entertainers, dignitaries and presidents, developing close friendships with Bob Hope and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1966, as part of a well-kept secret to mark his 37th birthday, Palmer received a surprise knock on his door at his home in Latrobe, Pa.
“You wouldn’t have a room to put up an old man for the night, would you?” the man, carrying an overnight bag, wondered. It was Eisenhower. “I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course,” he said. “I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yards.”
Palmer also hated the moniker bestowed on him.
“There is no king of golf,” he once scoffed. “Never has been, never will be. Golf is the most democratic game on Earth … . It punishes and exalts us all with splendid equal opportunity.”