He was, by any strict measure, not the best ever to play his game. That would be Jack Nicklaus or, maybe, Tiger Woods. Perhaps Ben Hogan. Or Bobby Jones. But you could certainly make the argument that Arnold Palmer was the greatest ever for the game. And it isn’t even close. No other golfer has ever been so widely known or well loved. None has done more to bring fans—and money—into golf, nor paid it back so handsomely. This is the case made by Tom Callahan in Arnie.
The book is, mercifully, not a conventional, detailed biography of Arnold Palmer. It is, rather, a narrative that strings together anecdotes and vignettes that are “about” both Palmer the man and the game that he played. It is a book, then, about golf in the Age of Palmer. So there are a lot of good stories about other golfers, most of whom were (like Gary Player) both rivals and friends. Palmer was liked, almost universally, by the people he competed with—the conspicuous exception being Ben Hogan, who was, arguably, the best in the game when Palmer came on the scene. Hogan was also Palmer’s antithesis in personality: proud, aloof, arrogant to the point of rudeness. He was to golf what Ted Williams was to baseball, and he seemed to resent Palmer and would go out of his way to let him know that he held his game in contempt.
At a dinner with several other players, Palmer was in the middle of saying something about the golf swing when Hogan interrupted: “What do you know about the goddamned golf swing,” he said, “with that swing you’ve got?” The Palmer swing was, admittedly, no thing of beauty. It was quick and almost violent and, in the follow-through, he seemed almost to be hanging on for dear life. But Palmer used it to take over the world of golf and to expand it beyond its traditional, country club borders.
It helped that he was the son of a groundskeeper and teaching pro at a club in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. As a boy, he was allowed to play the course only in the early morning before the members arrived, or late in the evening, after they had gone home. He would eventually buy the course, which was apt: He’d come from the working class and now he had taken over the game. There was something authentic and purely American about his rise, and people who had never played golf or had any interest in the game began to follow it because of Arnold Palmer, whose name Ben Hogan could not bring himself to speak.
Some of this was timing: Palmer came along at the moment when the marriage between television and sports was on the way to being sanctified. And like John F. Kennedy, who was ascending in politics, he was perfect for television. The medium suited him and it, in turn, fed off both his personality and style of play. That style was aggressive—not a word one attached to the game of golf in those days. It was never Palmer’s style to lay up on an approach or to lag a putt, and his legion of fans—known as Arnie’s Army—loved him for it.
And hated the man who came along and became his rival, and then left him behind. The foot soldiers in Arnie’s Army would call out to Jack Nicklaus—who might charitably have been described, in those days, as burly—“Hey, fat guts, hit it over here!” Palmer was the other thing. He was generous to Nicklaus when he was coming up, and later when Nicklaus began to dominate, there was friction—how could there not have been?—but in time they became friends. It was a relationship, Callahan writes, founded on “mutual jealousy. Grace came easily to Palmer; golf came easily to Nicklaus.”
Palmer’s skills at golf made him a friend of presidents. Also millions of both dollars and fans. He was the face of the game long after he won his great charge at Cherry Hills in 1960, coming from seven shots down and tied for 15th to win the U. S. Open in the last round. Or when he arrived at the turn on the last round of the U.S. Open in 1966, leading by seven strokes. Somehow he lost all seven of those strokes in eight holes and had to par the last to force a playoff the next day with Billy Casper—which he lost with a kind of epic inevitability. He brought drama to golf and would always “go for it,” like the Roy McAvoy character in Tin Cup.
That was the golfer Palmer, and his on-course career would have made a nice book. What made Palmer into Arnie was the man and the man makes Callahan’s book a delightful read. There are many stories of his generosity and exuberance for people—not just friends or fans—and among the best that Callahan tells here is one about a letter Palmer received from a couple of troops in Vietnam. They amused themselves, they wrote, by practicing sand shots out of a “bunker” in an environment where that word had some sinister meanings. Palmer answered:
Palmer added that the men could expect to receive two Arnold Palmer sand wedges from the company that manufactured his signature clubs. And he closed his letter with the hope that “you won’t be hitting too many shots out of bounds. Take care of yourselves and I’ll look forward to seeing you in Chicago sometime.” When they were both safely home, one of the two went to a tournament where Palmer was playing: “I walked up to him and told him, ‘I’m one of the guys you sent sand wedges in Vietnam.’ He said, ‘Are you Jeff or Wally?’ Can you believe it? He remembered our names.”
It is a good story in a good book about a good guy who did a lot of good things, and also played a real good game of golf.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
