More than 20 years before a swashbuckling Spanish teenager exploded onto the European golf scene he was every bit as flamboyant.
More than forty years before the Tiger brand had American businesses clamouring to be associated with it, his name had every bit as much commercial clout.
No individual has ever been more important to any one sport than Arnold Palmer, who died at the weekend at the age of 87.
Both of the players who would join him to form golf’s ‘big three’ of the sixties and early seventies would surpass his haul of seven major championship wins but neither Gary Player, nor even Jack Nicklaus could match the impact made upon their sport or, for that matter, sport in general, than Arnie.
The formalisation of his business relationship with Mark McCormack which began just as Palmer was reaching the peak of his powers in the late fifties, was to transform the earning potential of all sportspeople with the capacity to draw a following.
Palmer, good looking and dynamic in playing style, had already done the groundwork by himself as the recruiting sergeant for ‘Arnie’s Army’ and his own account of how it was formed is itself an indicator of his importance to the sport when the prized nature of access to the modern-day US Masters is considered.
“I was the defending champion at the Masters and, as he always did in those days, Clifford Roberts – Augusta National’s co-founder along with Bob Jones, used GIs from nearby Camp Gordon, the military installation where Cliff spent two years as a young soldier, to work the scoreboards,” Palmer was subsequently to recount, when promoting the charitable foundation that bears the name ‘Arnie’s Army.’
“Many people don’t realise that the Masters was not a sell-out in those early years. Anybody with five dollars could walk up to the gates and buy a ticket on the day. Elementary schoolteachers had boxes of tickets on their desks with signs reading ‘Masters Tickets: Please Help Support Our Town.’ Cliff wanted as large a gallery as he could get that year since the Masters was being televised for the second time, so he gave free passes to any soldier who showed up in uniform.
“A lot of the soldiers did not necessarily know a lot about golf, but when they found out that I was defending champion they joined my gallery. That prompted one of the GIs working a back-nine scoreboard to announce the arrival of ‘Arnie’s Army,’ which is what it looked like. I can’t remember another time, other than my stint in the Coast Guard, when so many uniformed soldiers surrounded me. A year later, when I won my second Masters title, I thanked the ‘army’ of supporters who came out to follow me.
“Johnny Hendricks, a reporter from The Augusta Chronicle, picked up on the phrase and ran the headline ‘Arnie’s Army’ for the first time. Boy, did it ever stick! Before I finished my playing career I think every newspaper, magazine, or television station that covered golf used the phrase at least once.”
That 1959 US Masters took place just months after he had signed up with McCormack and for all that the godfather of modern sports agents was afterwards to state that his first major client was not particularly interested in business transactions, Palmer’s awareness of his own worth was evident in his insistence on receiving exclusive attention.
It was McCormack, however, who recognised the global potential in his hands and he was influential in the decision to develop an audience outwith the USA, again to much wider commercial advantage. If Palmer’s involvement was central to popularising the youngest of the major championships, he also is considered the saviour of the oldest since the Open Championship was something of an irrelevance, largely ignored by leading American players after Ben Hogan had opted to take part in it just once, to complete his personal ‘Grand Slam’ of majors in 1951.
Had Palmer, like Hogan, won on that first visit to St Andrews, having already won the 1960 US Masters and US Open titles, who knows whether he would been back, but Kel Nagle pipped him by a shot over a rain-soaked Old Course, ensuring his triumphant return the following year at Birkdale.
His reinvigoration of the event was most significantly marked by the field which failed to prevent his successful defence of the title at Troon containing both Hogan’s great contemporary Sam Snead - who had similarly made just a single previous visit when winning in 1946 - and, for the first time, the man who would ultimately eclipse Palmer’s golfing achievements.
Given the adoration that has come Jack Nicklaus's way in the intervening years it is hard to comprehend the abuse levelled at the man who would become ‘the golden bear’, but at that time suffered from not being Arnie. Palmer, it hardly need be said, did absolutely nothing to encourage the hecklers, always carrying himself in the manner befitting ‘the King’ as he would become known to the golfing community.
That his name resonates as it still does more than 50 years after his last major championship win speaks to his significance in the sport and in this week of all weeks it is an astonishing coincidence that the US Masters triumph in question was completed the day before the birth of one Davis Love III.
Since this year’s US Open captain was on the receiving end when in the same post four years ago as, inspired by the spirit of Seve, the European team staged their sporting miracle at Medinah so, as the golfing world mourns the Spaniard’s great forebear, Palmer may have done American golf a huge favour even in the timing of his death.
In his glorious career Palmer’s team appearances represent something of a footnote, yet records show that between 1960 and 1996, in seven involvements in the Ryder Cup, one as playing captain, one as non-playing captain; as a non-playing captain at the Presidents Cup; and, perhaps most remarkably of all given the two-man team format, in the World Cup (then known as the Canada Cup), he was on the winning team all 14 times.
As he seeks to overcome the problems the USA has had in forming team bonds in more recent years Love could have been granted no greater gift when attempting to bring his men together, than the sense of goodwill that will surely wash over the sport on the loss of a man who, before the 52-year-old was born, had made everything possible for subsequent generations of golfers and sportspeople.
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