The Great Arnold Palmer Dies

Arnold Palmer died today. I agree with this paragraph in the New York times by Dave Anderson:

But it was more than his scoring and shotmaking that captivated the sports world. It was how he played. He did not so much navigate a course as attack it. If his swing was not classic, it was ferocious: He seemed to throw all 185 pounds of his muscular 5-foot-10 body at the ball. If he did not win, he at least lost with flair.

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,” Ira Berkow wrote in The New York Times.

And the television cameras followed along. As Woods would do more than 30 years later, Palmer, a son of a golf pro at Latrobe Country Club in the steel town of Latrobe, Pa., almost single-handedly stimulated TV coverage of golf, widening the game’s popularity among a postwar generation of World War II veterans enjoying economic boom times and a sprawling green suburbia.

…Hitching up his pants as he marched down the fairways or before lining up a crucial putt, Palmer put the word “charge” into golf’s vocabulary in 1960. In the final round of that year’s Masters, he birdied the 17th and 18th holes to win by one stroke. Two months later, in the United States Open at Cherry Hills, near Denver, he shot a final-round 65 to win by two over Nicklaus.

I was following him very closely, just a few yards behind him in Fort Worth when he did this:

If he hit a wayward tee shot to an awkward spot, he usually went for the green, rather than chip the ball safely back to the fairway as other golfers would have done.

Yes, I was a member of “Arnie’s Army.”

“I feel the strength of the gallery, especially on a critical shot,” he said in his prime. “Silence is louder than any noise on a golf course — the deathly silence that I sometimes feel and hear when I’m out there. That will tell you how powerful the galleries really are. They have an appreciation of what you’re going through, of what’s happening, and they understand.”

Read more here, even if it is the New York Times.