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.
