A Golfer's Life (50 page)

As I finished writing this memoir, for example, we were at an interesting moment in history that says something disturbing, I think, about our troubled national identity, a willingness to ignore rules of basic conduct and courtesy in the interest of self. For only the second time in our nation’s history, a president of the United States had been impeached by the House of Representatives for alleged high crimes and misdemeanors. Almost simultaneously, the National Basketball Association was hours away from canceling its entire playing season for the first time ever due to stubborn players and unyielding owners, both of whom, polls showed, the overwhelming majority of fans believed were simply spoiled multimillionares who had made Mr. Naismith’s game a hostage of their own greed.

Believe me, as someone who had a hand in creating the concept of sports marketing, I’m all for athletes getting handsomely paid for what they are worth, but as these two events, juxtaposed against each other in the evening news, indicated, nobody is above the rules of game. Not NBA All-Stars. Not sitting presidents. And certainly not Arnold Palmer.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, something I’ve admitted to a handful of folks. I never cared for the nickname “The King.” At times, it makes me uncomfortable and even a bit irritated to be referred to that way. There is no king of golf. Never has been, never will be. Golf is the most democratic game on earth, a pastime of the people that grants no special privileges and pays no mind to whether a man is a hotel doorman or a corporate CEO. It punishes and exalts us all with splendid equal opportunity. And when and if we begin to think the game belongs to one group of people or class of individuals the way certain NBA, NHL, or major-league baseball stars of a few years back seemed to believe of their respective games, our traditional and honorable game will decline so fast it will, as my father used to say, make our heads spin.

I’m the son of a hard-nosed caretaker who had large hands and an even larger heart, but a man who drilled into me the importance of always leaving the golf course better than I found it. Today, in a time when there is talk of multiple global tours, and sums of money that would have once been unimaginable are flowing into and around golf, I feel we have to be more vigilant than ever to make certain the things that make golf such a great game remain the same, are protected and nurtured and preserved for the next people coming along. We don’t need to tear down in order to build up.

Now that I’ve grumped a bit, as my grandchildren like to say, permit me to say a few positive things about the state of the game—as well as say a lot of thank-yous.

I do like being seen and called an ambassador of the game. It is a role I take very seriously in my work with the USGA and whenever I am in the public eye. But I suppose at the end of the day what I really am, inescapably—and how I prefer to be thought of in terms of my legacy—is a caretaker of the game just the way my father was before me.

My early playing days were driven by a passionate desire
to see what I could accomplish and do for people, initially my father and mother, then Winnie and the girls, finally friends and my fans. Now I see my primary role as someone who feels a moral obligation to take care of the game that enriched his own life so profoundly, to fuss a little bit when I feel it’s necessary, to do whatever it takes to make sure I pass along a game that is in even better shape than I found it.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that we need to be constantly challenged to examine ourselves and see what we can give back to this life. Several years ago, for instance, my friend and neighbor Dr. Tom Moran, former chief of surgery at Latrobe Hospital, challenged me to come up with a way to assist the hospital where I was born. The hospital was in the midst of a critical expansion of much-needed services and facilities. What I proposed and carried out, with the help of a few insiders, especially my sister Cheech, and the support of many generous people in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere, was an event we dubbed our “golf gala.”

We created a one-day affair with a four-man skins game along with a lavish dinner and amateur scramble. All I had to do, it seemed, was ask my Tour buddies, several of the top players, and they said they would be happy to help out. We did this for six years running, alternating between Latrobe and Laurel Valley, and cleared more than $3.5 million for the hospital, putting it in the hands of a newly formed foundation headed by Dr. Bob Mazero.

To give you an idea of why we had no trouble drawing a crowd for the skins game, here’s who we had each year: 1992—Curtis Strange, Chi Chi Rodriguez, and Dow Finsterwald; 1993—Greg Norman, Dave Marr, and Rocco Mediate (who, by the way, grew up and played his golf at nearby Greensburg Country Club); 1994—Jack Nicklaus, Jay Haas, and Peter Jacobsen, my regular playing pal in the Fred Meyer Challenge and the Shark Shootout; 1995—Lee Trevino,
Gary Player, and Fuzzy Zoeller; 1996—Nick Price, Raymond Floyd, and Fred Couples; and 1997—Tiger Woods, Tom Lehman, and Davis Love III. They not only came as a favor to me, but, under the most gentle of prodding, turned their winnings over to the hospital as well.

That’s how professional golf gives back to the lives of people, and I’m very proud to be a caretaker or an ambassador in that process.

While I’m on the subject of charities, let me mention something about Greg Norman. Several years ago he inspired an important fund-raiser for my hospital in Orlando when he was living at Bay Hill. He and I played with a couple of other pros in an annual exhibition he called the Shark Shootout. It has since evolved into the aforementioned pro-amateur event at Bay Hill that we renamed Champions for Children. Through the efforts of a number of people, but most particularly Tommy Scarbrough, a hard-working Bay Hill member and past chairman of the Bay Hill Invitational, most of the many Tour pros who live in the Orlando area participate in the annual fall event.

I have been associated with and worked for quite a few other charitable organizations and causes over the years, the most extensive connection being with another charity that focuses on children in need. That was my twenty-year tenure as Honorary National Chairman of the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. I still get emotional when I look at campaign promotional photos taken with bright, brave youngsters each year back in the 1970s and 1980s who, I know from letters I receive, have gone on to have successful and productive lives. I’m pleased to have made whatever contribution I made, and it was great to work with such devoted March of Dimes people as Arthur Gallway, Ed Fike, Jean Wilson, and a marvelous photographer, John Blecha.

Now to a few of those thank-yous.

I sometimes think you can best judge a man by the people he most closely associates himself with. In that respect, I’ve been exceedingly fortunate to have a special group of people close to me. For years, I’ve had the benefit of an informal advisory group of friends and top businessmen off whom I could bounce the many ideas and proposals that come my way. I can also seek counsel from them to address the problems and dilemmas that cross my desk from time to time. This inner circle of trusted friends includes Russ Meyer, Johnny Harris, and Dick Ferris, the former chairman of United Airlines, who, among other things, heads the policy board of the PGA Tour. Lately, I’ve also been fortunate to be able to tap the outstanding business acumen of Charlie Mechem, the Ohio broadcasting executive who served the Ladies Professional Golf Association as its commissioner with great distinction in the mid-1990s, before semiretiring. Admiring so much what Charlie had done with the LPGA, I asked him if he would be willing to act as consultant on some of my business activities. He readily accepted, to my delight. Charlie has provided wise counsel on a number of occasions and has been particularly helpful with the Arnold Palmer Golf Company, helping guide it through the turbulent days the golf equipment industry has been experiencing of late. Among other contributions, he played an important role in bringing LPGA Hall of Famer Nancy Lopez aboard with the creation of a new line of women’s clubs bearing her name now on the market. Charlie and his lovely wife, Marilyn, have a winter home at Bay Hill, so we get to see a lot of each other.

I
can just see and—worse—hear Pap, at this point, if he were reading this memoir.

“For Pete’s sake, Arnie,” he’d growl. “Just say thank you and get
on
with it so we can play golf!”

He’s probably right. I’ll get on with it. But there are so many other people who deserve heartfelt thank-yous from me, I suppose I really could go on for many more pages.

The list begins of course with my own parents and extends through the many casual and close friends I’ve had over the decades, to the group of hearty fans who recently turned up unexpectedly on the tee in the chilly desert dawn at the Hope tournament to watch me tee off. As I joked with them, I was so far out of contention I was having to tee off in the dark, but there they were, a faithful knot of Palmer loyalists true to the bitter end, dressed hilariously in their pajamas and bathrobes and holding little signs proclaiming their enduring membership in Arnie’s Army.

I can’t tell you what that little gesture meant to me.

Yet again unable to speak, all I could do was take off my hat to them and mutter thank you.

It’s been a great life. Rich with unexpected rewards and people—just like those loyal fans—at every turn in the road. I want everyone who reads this to know that. Allow me to take my hat off to you all. Thank you for letting Arnold Palmer be Arnold Palmer.

You’ll never know how deeply grateful I really am.

T
houghts like these and others crowded my head that recent autumn morning, when I finally got out of the office and over to the course to try out my newly made set of clubs.

By the turn at the tenth hole, I realized the clubs weren’t quite as magical as I’d hoped they might be. I wasn’t playing particularly well. But, on the other hand, it felt good to play along at a leisurely pace, looking closely at the golf course and thinking about the changes I planned to make over the winter. Like my father before me, I’m forever fussing with the golf course, changing this or adding that to try to make
it an even more special golfing experience for those who play it.

At one point I briefly left the golf course and walked over to admire the big red barn we recently finished restoring just off the 14th hole. It looked like something from a Currier and Ives postcard and is Winnie’s pride and joy, fitting beautifully into the landscape with the three red covered bridges Pap added to the golf course when he built the new nine in 1963.

As I stated at the outset of this reflection, autumn’s arrival in western Pennsylvania always fills me with a bittersweet pleasure; it means we’ll soon be headed to the warmth of Bay Hill, but it also announces that another golf season back home has come and gone.

Lacking the gift of prophecy, I can’t tell you how many more times I’ll get to go around that old golf course before I join my parents on the hilltop near the 18th green. But I can promise you that going around it never fails to delight and surprise me, and on this particular Indian summer day, our first day back since the start of Winnie’s medical treatment, I was walking up the 18th fairway when I saw him.

He was standing just off the fairway about three hundred yards out from the tee, where only a few weeks before a tall and regal pine tree had stood. That tree was very special to me. I can remember as if it was yesterday the day my father and I planted it. I was about six years old and was allowed to ride on the root ball of the young tree as we hauled it to the freshly dug hole beside the 18th fairway in back of our old Ford truck.

The tree, which was roughly the same age as me, had grown nearly seventy-five feet tall and lived a good life. But now it had died a natural death of old age, and I hated to say goodbye to it. In fact, I commented to my brother, Jerry, that I wished we could find some fitting way to memorialize it—
maybe carve a statue out of its stump or something. A few days later, Jerry found a talented wood carver who worked with chainsaws, and the result of his artistry was now standing ten feet high on the side of the fairway with his hands on his hips, staring up the hill at the 18th green.

It was unmistakably Pap, keeping a sharp eye out for anybody who was foolish enough not to fix his divot or properly repair his ballmark on the green.

I stood there looking up at him for the longest time, deeply moved to have him back, pleasantly lost in my own thoughts, vaguely aware of the high-school band practicing for the big homecoming game that weekend just across the valley from the golf course, wondering what my Pap would make of this golfer’s life.

Some things never change. I still hope he’d be pleased.