To Absent Friends - Arnold Palmer

Arnold Palmer

1929-2016

The Great, and I mean the Truly Great, Arnold Palmer died last night at the age of 87.   The winner of over sixty tournaments on the PGA tour, including seven major championships and four Masters Championships, Arnold Palmer cannot be summarized in mere numbers and statistics.  Palmer exploded onto the professional golf scene at about the same time another force, television, did and the convergence of those two forces was a Perfect Storm that took golf out of the stuffy milieu of the country clubs and took the game to the masses.  Arnie moved the needle of television ratings like no one before or since, and television's money brought the game to previously unimagined heights.

I have read many quotes over the years from one pro golfer or another that pretty much said the same thing: that every golfer on tour owes a large portion of their earnings to Arnold Palmer, because it was Palmer who made all of them rich.  If you read enough golf history books you will know that Palmer was revered, almost universally so, by every golfer with whom he came in contact and competed against. No one will ever make the case that Palmer was the Greatest Golfer of all time, although he was pretty great, but a case can easily be made, for the reasons I stated above, that Palmer was easily the Most Important Golfer of All Time.

Like literally millions of other people, both Marilyn and I had personal encounters with Palmer.  Mine came at a charity golf outing at Latrobe Country Club sometime in the mid-00's.  Late in the day, as my foursome approached the tenth hole, which was our eighteenth hole of the day, there stood on the tee taking practice swings the Man Himself.  He was playing that day with Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and a gaggle of secret service agents surrounded them, but Palmer insisted that we the tee it up and finish our round ahead of them.  I was happy to shake his hand on that tee, and I have to say, hitting that particular tee shot was one of the most difficult swings I've ever had to make on a golf course!

Marilyn's came in the early nineties when her company, MAC, was one of the  sponsors of the Bell Atlantic Seniors Tournament in Philadelphia.  At the draw of players for the Pro-Am event, MAC drew Arnold Palmer!  Marilyn got to meet him then, and in recounting the story this morning, she remarked what a great gentleman he was with all of them and their customers.  While other players acted like they could hardly be bothered playing in a pro-am, Palmer was as enthusiastic as you could possibly be, and that the four guys who played with him that day had the absolute thrill of their lifetimes.

I once read that the distinctive Arnold Palmer autograph reproduced above is virtually worthless on the sports memorabilia market.  Why? Because Palmer signed all the time, for everybody.  In his later years, a large part of his day was spent signing balls, gloves, pictures, flags, anything that anyone sent him, he signed.  Says a lot about the man.

Palmer became a public figure, I suppose, when he won the US Amateur in 1954, turned pro a year later and never looked back.  It was public lifetime that lasted over sixty years and was lived without a whiff of scandal or bad behavior.  What a legacy.

On Facebook today, the man most closely associated with Palmer as a competitor, business rival, and, most importantly, good friend, Jack Nicklaus released a statement that read in part:

Arnold transcended the game of golf. He was more than a golfer or even great golfer. He was an icon. He was a legend. Arnold was someone who was a pioneer in his sport. He took the game from one level to a higher level, virtually by himself. Along the way, he had millions of adoring fans—Barbara and I among them. We were great competitors, who loved competing against each other, but we were always great friends along the way. Arnold always had my back, and I had his. We were always there for each other. That never changed.

He was the king of our sport and always will be.

What more is there that can be said?

RIP Arnold Palmer.

Arnie

If you were watching any of the Opening Round of The Masters on television yesterday, you no doubt saw the scene of the traditional ceremonial "Opening Tee Shots" taken by Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus.  Also participating, but not taking a shot, was 86 year old Arnold Palmer. It has been known for several weeks now that Palmer, due to some "health issues", would not be taking that tee shot this year, but even knowing that it was still a shock to see Palmer yesterday.  If any athlete ever seemed invincible while practicing his sport, it was Arnold Palmer, which made yesterday's ceremony all the more jarring.  

Check out the column in today's Post-Gazette by Gerry Dulac...

http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/golf/2016/04/08/Gerry-Dulac-Decades-after-Masters-glory-Palmer-s-presence-at-major-much-different/stories/201604080141

....and it seems obvious, to me, anyway, from the comments of his lifelong rivals and pals, Player and Nicklaus, that they feel much the same as all of the legions of Arnie's Army must feel.

"Men in Green" by Michael Bamberger

If you are a golfer, watch professional golf on television, or if you're just a golf nerd who  appreciates the history of the game, I cannot recommend to you highly enough that you read "Men in Green" by Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger.  As teenager in the 1970's, when the PGA Tour was, and he puts it, in it's "Sansabelt-and-persimmon heyday", Bamberger fell in love with the game. He supported himself through college and in his early sports writing days as a Tour caddy, and went on to write about the game in various newspapers, as a freelancer for golf magazines, and, now, with Sports Illustrated.  He has also written a number of books on the subject.

For "Men in Green", he drew up a list of nine of golf's Living Legends, and nine of what he calls his own Secret Legends.  The Living Legends are whom you would expect - Palmer, Nicklaus, Venturi, Watson etc.  The Secret Legends are some folks you may never have heard of - a couple of caddies, a TV executive, a retired USGA official, an instructor, a sportswriter, and one golfer, Mike Donald.  He then sets out to interview all of these legends to try to find what he calls the soul of golf.  He is accompanied for most of his journey by Secret Legend Mike Donald, who he characterizes as the ultimate Tour grinder.

A word or two about Mike Donald.  Golf nerds will remember Donald as a thirty-five year old guy who came out of nowhere in 1990 to finish in a tie for the lead at the US Open.  He lost in an 18 hole playoff with a 19th sudden death hole to Hale Irwin.  It was the highlight of Donald's career.  In a career that spanned thirty-some years, Donald played in 550 PGA Tour events, made 296 cuts, won once, and earned $1.97 million (or about what Jordan Speith earned in any two given weeks on Tour in 2015).  He played thirty to thirty-five events every year and never finished higher than 22nd on the money list.  As Bamberger put it, while players like Tiger and Phil and Rory can drop in and drop out on tour events as it suits them, it is guys like Donald who are at the very heart and soul of the Tour, and Donald's insights are very much a key part of this book.

Two members of Bamberger's Legends list emerge as the featured players in this book.  One of them, as you might guess, is Arnold Palmer, and the other is Ken Venturi, whose careers managed to intertwine on the twelfth hole of the final round at the 1958 Masters.  Palmer invoked a rule that allowed him to play a second ball when he felt tat he was not granted relief from an embedded ball.  (As is often the case with the sometimes arcane Rules of Golf, the details are too lengthy to go into here, so just trust me on this.) The invocation of this rule, which was ultimately upheld by the Masters Rules officials, allowed Palmer to score a three rather than a five on the hole.  He finished ahead of Venturi by one stroke in winning his first Masters.  Venturi thought that Palmer was wrong and that he, Venturi, got jobbed by the Augusta National officials.

Palmer went on from that first Major Championship win to become, well, Arnold Palmer, and while Venturi went on to have pretty good life (multiple tour wins, a US Open win in 1964, a storied career as broadcaster on CBS, and a spot in the World Golf Hall of Fame), he never had the life that he envisioned for himself, the life that that Masters win would have brought him, and he became a pretty bitter guy over it.  Bamberger interviewed him not long before he died in 2013, and the anger and bitterness towards Palmer and the folks at Augusta National (which stems from something that happened to him at the 1956 Masters, but that is a whole 'nother story, as they say), was with him to the very end.  And that same story ultimately came up with many of the other "legends" that Bamberger encountered in gathering material for the book.  He even spoke to Venturi's first wife, and that was one of the more eye-opening parts of the book.

Another part that I found interesting was Palmer talking about "the edge" that all top level golfers have to have in order to continually succeed on the Tour.  Palmer himself says that winning a US Open was an obsession with him, and that after he won it in 1960, he was never the same. "After you win it, you have to stay aggressive, stay the way you were when you won it.  And it's difficult to do."  In other words, he had lost his "edge".  Strange when you consider that after that 1960 Open, Palmer went on the win dozens of other Tour events, including two British Opens and two more Masters.  However, he never won another Open, although he seriously contended for the Championship five more times over the years, and lost two of them in playoffs.  

In speaking about the hard to define edge, Palmer went on to say "It's so fine.  You have to get in there and you have to stay in there, and once you get out, it's very hard to get back in.  It's happened to every golfer. Hogan, Nicklaus. Every golfer. It's just a question of when."

Interestingly, when Bamberger talked to Jack Nicklaus about that 1960 Open, a tournament that Jack, then a twenty year old amateur, led for a brief point during the final round, Nicklaus said that not winning that Open was the best thing that ever happened to him. He was too young and had he won, he would have felt that his game was ready for anything, when, by not winning, he knew that it was not.  The rest of the Nicklaus Story is history.

Anyway, I would say that this book is 260 pages of must reading for any golf fan.  Really good stuff that I could write on and on about, but read it, because, trust me, Bamberger is a much better writer than I.  However, I will leave you with one more comment about Palmer, this one from the guy who may know him the best, Jack Nicklaus.  Nicklaus, who says that "Arnold is as close a friend as I've got" was making a reference about how good Palmer is in a crowd  and at golf course openings, something with which both of them have spent much of their post-playing days doing.  This is Nickalus' quote:

"I don't want to cut the ribbon or do the cocktail party. Arnold wants to cut the ribbon. He wants to do the cocktail party. We were always different that way. I'd invite Arnold to dinner, but Arnold would rather go to a party with forty people he didn't know than go to dinner with one friend. That's the difference between the two of us. I'm not criticizing Arnold. We're just different."

Terrific book.

Cue the Schmaltzy Music, It's Masters Time

Hello, Friends (as Jim Nantz would say), it is time once again for The Masters.

Before commenting on this year's event, allow me to comment on what I saw while watching the telecast of the traditional Par 3 event, held every Wednesday at Augusta National before the tournament tees off on Thursday.  All players and all past Champions are invited to play in the Par 3 event, and it is usually just a big old laugh fest, fun for fans, er, excuse me, Patrons, and players alike.  In may respects, it is the equivalent of a baseball Old Timers game, and much of the ESPN attention is focused on these said old timers, most specifically the threesome of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player.  No one needs to be told of the greatness of this trio.  The reverence with which all golfers, from the best of the current touring pros right down to the weekend hacker, hold these three guys is understandable and unquestionably deserved.  I myself stand second to no one in my respect and admiration for these guys.

That said, I don't like watching these three guys playing now for the same reason that I don't like watching baseball old timers games.  Palmer is 82, Player is 77, and Nicklaus is 72, and they looked every bit of those years watching them play yesterday.  If you were behind this threesome on a Saturday morning at your local muni and didn't know who they were, you'd be bitching to the marshals to tell those old guys to speed it up or get off the course.  It was almost painful to watch, like watching Willie Mays with the Mets.

I have read for many, many years that Jack Nicklaus has long said that he would never allow himself to become a "ceremonial golfer", and I am betting that he hates going out there year after year and playing in the Masters Par 3.  I suppose that when Augusta calls, you do what they ask because you feel you owe it to them and to the game, but,from what I've read about Nicklaus, I am guessing that he would have rather been in his office in Palm Beach than on that par 3 course yesterday.

Hey, it's great when the Pirates bring Maz out to throw out the occasional first pitch, but I wouldn't want to see him try to go nine innings and try to hit off of Justin Verlander in 2013.  Same with these guys.  It's great to have Arnie, Jack, and Gary hit those "first drives" on Thursday morning, but they should be allowed to actually play golf on their own time these days.

Now, as for the Tournament itself, how can you not pick Tiger Woods to win?  That's my pick. Now settle back, put on your green jacket, smell the magnolias, have a pimento cheese sandwich, and enjoy A Tradition Like No Other.