Mr. Ryder Cup
A sublime player in tour matches, Arnold Palmer’s performances in golf’s preeminent team competition were no less inspiring
A storied individual player, Arnold Palmer was as formidable on teams
OON OCTOBER 4, 2016, the light falling on the Ryder Cup trophy filtered not through a clubhouse lobby or museum’s glass case, but through the high windows of a church—and, really, the Cup never looked more at peace. Hundreds had gathered in the basilica at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to honor one of the town’s favorite sons, Arnold Palmer, and the crowd included most of that year’s U.S. Ryder Cup team. Palmer’s death just five days before the start of the 2016 Ryder Cup had cast the competition in a glow that was at once reflective and inspiring. Ultimately, that glow helped the Americans to victory at Minnesota’s Hazeltine National Golf Club. And so, when a 27-year-old Rickie Fowler brought the Cup into the church and carefully placed it atop a table behind the last row of pews, it felt as if the trophy was where it was meant to be, back with one of its finest heroes.
Palmer’s 22 wins, 8 losses and two halves puts him among the greatest Ryder Cup players ever, a record gilded by his perfect 2–0 as the U.S. Captain. In his seven total appearances, six as a player (including one as the last playing Captain, in 1963), Palmer’s teams never lost the Cup and Palmer himself never lost his affection for the tournament, which he always considered to be one of golf’s greatest.
“I loved the Ryder Cup because it simply wasn’t about playing for money,” he wrote in his autobiography, A Golfer’s Life. “It was about playing for something far grander and more personal than income and money lists. It was all about playing for your country, your people, and therefore yourself, and it was pure joy to try to beat the best of Britain and Ireland in an honorable game almost as old as the Magna Carta.”
Since 1979, when players from the European continent joined the GB&I team, it’s been the U.S. vs Europe (although which flag(s) will fly over the American opponents postBrexit will be interesting to see), but the spirit remains the same as when Palmer was charging to Ryder victories, with the tournament’s “far grander” purpose often inspiring tremendous performances from its competitors. As Palmer himself said, “The game brings out the best in us, and the best will always bring out their games at the Ryder Cup.”
In Palmer’s case, he had to wait until 1961 to bring out his game, despite being one of the best players available for the previous event. Due to arcane PGA rules in place at the time, which required a five-year apprenticeship of sorts before pros could join the PGA or compete in the PGA Championship, Palmer wasn’t allowed to collect Ryder Cup points leading up to the 1959 Cup. As he told Kingdom in 2012, “I didn’t get my membership until it was too late to compile enough points to make the 1959 team, even though I had won five times [during the qualifying period], including the Masters. So, in effect, the PGA said I was not qualified to make the team, that I didn’t belong. The funny thing was that they gave me a spot in the 1958 PGA Championship because I had won the Masters that year. It was a sore point for me for a long time. I had to sit at home and watch my friends play while I couldn’t. I was pretty hot about having to sit out the Ryder Cup until 1961.”
Still, when his turn finally came, he was ready.
“What I remember most was standing with my teammates near the first tee and feeling a lump rise in my throat and tears fill my eyes as the brass band played the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ followed by ‘God Save the Queen,’” Palmer wrote, remembering his first Ryder Cup appearance
in 1961 at Royal Lytham and St. Annes Golf Club. “There is simply no experience in golf quite like being part of your first Ryder Cup opening ceremony, unless perhaps it’s the closing ceremonies after your side has won.”
His first match in the singles competition was against Peter Alliss, the British luminary who went on to have a perhaps equally storied career in broadcasting. Speaking with Kingdom, Palmer remembered: “Peter Alliss always gave me a real dog fight. Like a lot of Europeans, he played a nice controlled fade, shaping his shots from left to right. I had to work my tail off just to halve him. He was very tenacious and I enjoyed playing against Peter.” Halving the match with Alliss, Palmer went on to the foursomes, teaming up with Billy Casper to defeat Dai Rees and Ken Bousfield, 2 and 1. In the end, Palmer left Lytham with three victories and one tie, contributing 3 1/2 points to the Americans’ winning total of 14.
Two years later Palmer was at it again at East Lake in Atlanta, and narrowly defeated Dow Finsterwald in a close vote to become team captain. Ultimately this meant Palmer would be the last playing captain in a Ryder Cup, a role he loved. When asked how he coped with being both the captain and a player, Palmer told Kingdom, “Cope? It was all a lot of fun. I enjoyed all the aspects of playing and captaining at once. I had a really great team and enjoyed working with all the players. And getting to play, too, made it even more special.”
Great team, indeed. Palmer; Casper; Gene Littler; Finsterwald (playing in his third Ryder Cup); and a 43-year-old Julius Boros were joined by five Ryder rookies: Bob Goalby; Billy Maxwell; Johnny Pott; Dave Ragan; and Tony Lema. Jack Nicklaus, then 23, was feeling the same sting Palmer had felt in 1959 as the PGA rules at the time made him ineligible for the 1963 Ryder Cup, despite his having won that year’s Masters—and the 1963 PGA Championship, his third major.
As for Palmer’s double duty, if anything it sharpened his play: he made four victories to two defeats (one of those to Alliss in the singles) and added four points toward the Americans’ decisive 23–9 victory.
Back in England in 1965, this time at Royal Birkdale, the site of his incredible 1961 Open Championship win, Palmer again was confounded by Alliss, with the team of Palmer and Dave Marr splitting the four-ball matches against Alliss and Christy O’Connor (having already done the same in the foursomes against Dave Thomas and George Will). Palmer took both of his singles matches, however, ultimately going 4–2 and contributing to a 19 1/2 to 12 1/2 U.S. win.
Champions Golf Club in Houston was the site of the Ryder Cup in 1967, and here Palmer needed a timely bit of inspiration to pull out a win in the four-balls. Palmer and Julius Boros (then 47) had fallen behind the team of Hugh Boyle and George Will when Champions’ resident pro, Jackie Burke, bet Palmer he couldn’t escape defeat.
“I tell you what,” Palmer remembers Burke as saying, “If you somehow get out of this mess and win this match, I’ll make you a clock.’”
On the very next hole Palmer and Boros started a rally and ended up with a come-from-behind one-up win. Palmer got his clock as well, with the 12 letters of his name where the numbers should be. It’s still in his office workshop.
The next Ryder Cup, for the first time, ended in a tie due to “The Concession,” as it became known, when Nicklaus (in his first Ryder Cup) picked up Tony Jacklin’s marker. It’s the only Ryder Cup that Palmer missed between 1961 and 1975, and there was no mystery to his absence, as he told Kingdom: “Simple,” he said. “I didn’t have the points, and back then there were no captain’s picks.”
At Old Warson Country Club in St. Louis in 1971, however, Palmer was back, and teamed with Nicklaus to beat Peter Townsend and Harry Bannerman in a 1-up four-ball. Additional success with Gardner Dickinson saw the pair take three of the team matches, to give Palmer a record of four wins against one loss and one tie en route to an 18 1/2 to 13 1/2 U.S. victory.
Palmer’s Ryder Cup career had been incredible to this point, but by 1973—the year of his last PGA Tour victory, at the Bob Hope Desert Classic—it was obvious there was a shift. He made the competition at Muirfield, but turned in his poorest Ryder performance yet, for the first time failing both to win a singles match and to have more wins than losses. Still, the U.S. won 19–13, in the first year that “& Ireland” was added to the “Great Britain & Ireland” team name (although players from Ireland had played for years).
Palmer’s last Ryder Cup in 1975 appropriately came at Laurel Valley, and in a Golfer’s Life he admitted that was no accident: “With my Ryder Cup career clearly waning,” he wrote, “I pulled just about every string available with the sponsoring PGA of America to arrange for the Cup to come to Laurel Valley in 1975… for what would clearly be my farethee-well to Ryder Cup participation.”
Though Palmer wrote that his selection as team captain for that year was “a deeply symbolic and sentimental choice,” it was also savvy. At the time, no one had a better win-loss record in the Ryder Cup, and the then-46-year-old Palmer already had the respect of his “dream team,” as he called it. Littler (at 45 years of age); Casper (44); Nicklaus; Lee Trevino; Tom Weiskopf; Raymond Floyd; Al Geiberger; Lou Graham; Hale Irwin; Johnny Miller; Bob Murphy; and J.C. Snead handily won 21–11, sweeping the first morning’s foursomes in a feat not repeated until 2016.
“Peter Alliss always gave me a real dog fight... I had to work my tail off just to halve him”
— Palmer
On the first morning at Hazeltine National in 2016, with Palmer’s 1975 Ryder Cup bag standing on the first tee, the crowd (and players from both teams) made sure his presence was felt, chanting “AR-NOLD, PAL-MER! AR-NOLD, PAL-MER!” before things got underway. Once they did, Palmer’s presence continued to be a factor, all the way to the U.S. team’s 21–11 victory.
“Arnold was watching over us this week,” U.S. Captain Davis Love III said after the win. “I stressed with all the guys that we didn’t want to make this Ryder Cup all of a sudden about calling on the spirit of Arnold Palmer and make it a public display, because we were all mourning together. Then we sat down at the first lunch on the Monday in the team room and we were asked what we wanted to drink. Rickie Fowler said ‘I’ll have an Arnold Palmer.’ We all ordered Arnold Palmers. We went on from there and did it quietly, thinking about Arnold. We didn’t have a speech every night—‘win it for Arnold’—but everybody felt it.”