It's Tuesday, October 22, 2024, two weeks from Election Day. Golfing legend Arnold Palmer is in the news this week, for reasons that beggar belief, and though an excessive amount of journalism has been expended on that topic, I'm simply using the episode as a news peg to write about an athlete who should be remembered for the right reasons.
And in Friday's newsletter, I'll will write about U.S. presidents and the game of golf, and about Arnold Palmer's friendship with several presidents.
Memories of Arnold Palmer have begun to fade in this country. Unless you are a dedicated golfer or a baby boomer (or older), when you hear that name you may be more likely to think of a non-alcoholic drink than man whose nickname – "The King" – described his outsized impact on the sporting world. An Arnold Palmer is unsweetened tea mixed with lemonade; Arnie himself liked it three parts tea to one part lemonade. Palmer and his wife Winnie – she brewed the tea – surely didn't invent this beverage, but they popularized it.
(If you like a little more kick in your drinks, you can add an ounce or two of vodka. This drink is called a "John Daly," after another free-swinging fan favorite. But be careful. Daly is an appealing person, but he has struggled with alcohol abuse, which derailed his career.)
Also, an additional word about Winnie Palmer, the drink's co-inventor, who died too young, at 65, from cancer. She was a business major at Brown University when she and Arnie met at a golf tournament in the Poconos in 1954, after Arnie had just won the Pennsylvania state amateur championship. "I met him on a Tuesday," she recalled. "He asked me to marry him on Saturday."
By then, Arnold Palmer was a young man in a hurry. He'd attended Wake Forest on a golf scholarship, spent three years in the U.S. Coast Guard and then returned to the game at age 23 when he won the 1954 U.S. Amateur in Detroit. After hugging his mother Doris, who was crying tears of joy, Arnie looked around in the crowd. "Where's my father?" he asked.
Milfred Jerome "Deacon" Palmer came out of the crowd, shook his son's hand and said, "You did pretty good, boy."
Deke Palmer was a tough man. Born with a club foot, he limped all his life. But he never complained, and didn't expect his eldest son to complain either. Arnie was born in 1929, just as the Great Depression hollowed out the nation's economy, in the western Pennsylvania village of Latrobe. "LAY-trobe," as the locals called it, was a coal and steel town. Boys joined the Army or went down in the mines or made it through sports, usually football. (Another Latrobe boy named Fred Rogers – the future "Mister Rogers" – was one year ahead of Arnie in high school and took an unusual path to success.)
By the time Arnie was born, the bankers and steel barons were constructing a golf course in Latrobe. Deacon Palmer took a job helping to build it. He worked his way from laborer to greenskeeper to superintendent of the Latrobe Country Club.
After he made it big, Arnold Palmer, who died six weeks before Donald Trump was elected president, bought the Latrobe club and expanded it. Trump, who owns 18 golf courses, belonged to a generation of American men who revered Arnold Palmer. Even men who didn't golf tried to model the guy.
Charisma is an elusive quality, as those in politics well know. How is it, for instance, that Mister Rogers would don a cardigan sweater to convey a nurturing adult who put children and their parents at ease, whereas when Arnold Palmer rocked a navy blue cardigan on the golf course women would swoon, and movie stars like Steve McQueen would start wearing them too? Clothes make the man," the old saying goes. Arnold Palmer showed it's the other way around.
Am I exaggerating? Maybe a little. But I was a boy in the 1960s and my normal object of adoration was Willie Mays. When Palmer started showing up on television taking the world of professional golf by storm, however, he was similarly mesmerizing.
Part of it was obvious. Like Mays, Palmer was handsome and confident and sublimely talented. He was working class all the way and interacted on the course as easily with the masses as he did with his competitors and the wealthy lords of golf who owned the courses and ran the tournaments.
Mostly, though, it was the way Palmer played the game.
At that 1954 U.S. Amateur in Detroit, a golf journalist noticed this slender, sandy-haired guy hitting off the practice tee and asked well-known professional star Gene Littler who he was. "That's Arnold Palmer," Littler replied. "He's going to be a great player someday. When he hits the ball, the earth shakes."
He would fall far behind one of the other great golfers of the day – Littler, or Jack Nicklaus, or Gary Player – and then come charging down the back nine. His furious comebacks were called "Arnie's Charges," and the adoring crowds that propelled him along with their shouts were called "Arnie's Army."
"I used to hear cheers go up from the crowd around Palmer," fellow pro Lee Trevino once noted, "and I never knew whether he'd made a birdie or just hitched up his pants."
"We loved him with a mythic American joy," Palmer biographer James Dodson said when Arnie died. "He represented everything that is great about golf. The friendship, the fellowship, the laughter, the impossibility of golf, the sudden rapture moment that brings you back, a moment that you never forget, that's Arnold Palmer in spades. He's the defining figure in golf."
And this is from the New York Times obituary written by Dave Anderson: "Handsome and charming, his sandy hair falling across his forehead, his shirttail flapping, a cigarette sometimes dangling from his lips, Palmer would stride down a fairway acknowledging his army of fans with a sunny smile and a raised club, like Sir Lancelot amid the multitude in Camelot."
"No one did more to popularize the sport than Palmer," eulogized golf writer Adam Schupak. His dashing presence singlehandedly took golf out of the country clubs and into the mainstream. Quite simply, he made golf cool."
Schupak also noted that Palmer's game complemented his persona, which was utterly authentic. "Palmer didn't lay up or leave putts short," he said. His go-for-broke style meant he played out of the woods and ditches with equal abandon, and resulted in a string of memorable charges."
Finally, I'll quote Los Angeles Times stylist Jim Murray, who took Palmer outside of the game of golf and placed him in the sports pantheon: "Palmer on a golf course was Jack Dempsey with his man on the ropes, Henry Aaron with a three-and-two fastball, Rod Laver at set point, Joe Montana with a minute to play, A.J. Foyt with a lap to go and a car to catch."
I think that's what Donald Trump meant to say, but who knows?
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
