Christilaw: Arnold Palmer brought golf to the masses
The disco era was brief, but not as brief as the leisure suit era. And the Pet Rock era skipped off to that giant lake in the sky and was over in the blink of an eye.
But there are special periods that last so long that you hardly remember there was a time when they didn’t exist. One of them came to an end over the weekend.
You know that funky blend of iced tea and lemonade they have on the drink aisle at the local grocery? It’s called an Arnold Palmer.
There are whole generations who likely believe that drink, and maybe the commercials for a blood clot medication, were the major reasons to remember Arnold Palmer.
They would be wrong.
The ESPN promo of Arnie going through the drink line in the company cafeteria, filling his glass half lemonade and half iced tea, was brilliant. Yes, indeed. But he was already a legend for several generations by the time the promo hit the air.
Arnold Palmer was the guy who put golf on the map – a charismatic, people’s champion who put a recognizable face on the sport.
Before Arnie, fans read about golf in the paper on their way to the baseball box scores and the horse racing handicapper’s column. After Arnie, they tuned in to watch tournaments on television in glorious black and white.
Ben Hogan was a tremendous champion and Bobby Jones gave the sport its most iconic event when he founded Augusta National Golf Course and invented the Masters. Golfers love them both.
But it was Arnold Palmer who brought people to the game who had never picked up a putter and who wouldn’t know a sand wedge from a sandwich.
Arnold Palmer did for cardigan sweaters what Michael Jordan did for the Nike swoosh.
Arnold Palmer’s following was so large it had its own name: Arnie’s Army. And for decades, right in the middle of that army, was Arnie’s mom, following her son around the course.
Arnie was approachable and I would happily wager that he signed more autographs, posed for more photos and shook more hands than any professional athlete in history.
“There are two things that made golf appealing to the average man,” Bob Hope once joked. “Arnold Palmer and the invention of the mulligan.”
Arnie and Bob Hope were longtime friends. Same with President Dwight Eisenhower and all the duffers who followed him into the White House.
And he was as at home telling stories on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson as he was on the 18th green at St. Andrews.
Arnold Palmer was the common man’s golfer. His father, Deke, worked at the Latrobe Country Club in Pennsylvania and he grew up on that course. And while he traveled the world as golf’s most popular ambassador, he never left that small town. And the small-town values he learned from his father never left him.
I was too young to have seen his dramatic finish at the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills in 1960, but his legendary charge from seven strokes back is part of the sport’s firmament.
He didn’t have the beautiful swing. It was a little hitchy, but was perfectly in line with his common-man persona.
If you followed Arnold Palmer, you learned to never give up. Instead, you did like he did – hitched up those Sansabelts and made a charge. Win or lose, you give it everything you have.
Arnold Palmer taught us how to stage a rivalry the right way.
Arnie was already a household name when a youngster named Jack Nicklaus came along. Their head-to-head battles defined the sport and defined the athletes.
Palmer and Nicklaus were appointment viewing long before Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and as great as they were individually, they were even better together. They knew it and they each embraced the magic.
And along the way they became lifelong friends.
The sport of professional golf is what it is today because of Arnold Palmer. And that’s not me saying that. No less a legend than Gary Player said it.
It says a great deal about the man, the myth and the legend that none of the three dimmed with the passage of time.
That he was able to spawn a drink craze and headline drug commercials in his 70s and 80s is a testament to how deeply embedded he was in the American psyche.
When March rolls around again and the Masters tees off once again, Arnie, for the first time in my lifetime, will not be part of the party.
And I will miss that more than even I realize today.
Steve Christilaw can be reached at steve. christilaw@gmail.com.