Rory McIlroy made $11.5 million last week, playing 76 holes of golf.
After he packed away his Tour Championship and his FedEx Cup, he learned that the man who built that great big check had just died.
“I know it wouldn’t be possible for me to do what I’ve just achieved,” McIlroy said. He thought for an instant and said, “Or amassed, without him.”
Good correction.
People have won golf tournaments for years. Without Arnold Palmer they wouldn’t be flying their own planes.
They wouldn’t be getting staggering sums to change equipment brands, and they couldn’t afford physiotherapists, psychiatrists, and all sort of business managers.
Palmer was the first golfer to allow an agent, Mark McCormack, to calculate his value and redeem it. The golf ended but the redemption went on. Palmer made $40 million in 2015, 42 years after he won his last PGA Tour event.
Palmer turned 87 on Sept. 10. He had 14 legacies, at least, in his personal bag.
He ventured to the British Open and made it a major league event.
He and his Boswell, a Pittsburgh sportswriter named Bob Drum, came up with the Grand Slam concept. He started The Golf Channel. Without him there probably isn’t a viable Senior Tour. And he shook hands with Mark McCormack, a competitor at William & Mary when Palmer was at Wake Forest, and thus began what became IMG, the most fearsome marketing force in sports history.
From 1958-64 Palmer won seven majors, including four Masters. But he became even more revered, desperately so, in defeat. Jack Nicklaus became a villain because he beat Palmer, with the galleries turning into college basketball-style hecklers. Later, Jack and Arnie became closest friends.
The fans were shocked when Palmer blew a seven-stroke lead in the ’66 U.S. Open to Billy Casper. He never hid the anguish, just as he transmitted the delight. He smoked L&Ms and he shared a wavelength with the fans, especially women, and he never made the game look easy or inaccessible. And he didn’t feel one bit self-conscious about shooting 80-plus at Augusta in the sunset years. He was the King, the most powerful star in sports.
Palmer was the son of a greenskeeper, Deacon. He served in the Coast Guard. He didn’t know where he was headed until he won the 1954 U.S. Amateur, over a 43-year-old aristocrat named Robert Sweeny. He had an earthy sense of humor and regularly saw the other side of midnight. Most of us wanted to play like Nicklaus. We wanted to be Palmer.
McCormack, Palmer and Frank Chirkinian formed a golf triple play. Chirkinian was the CBS producer who fleshed out the Masters.
“I saw this guy on 15 at Augusta and he studies this shot, flips his cigarette, hitches up his trousers and takes this mighty shape and knocks the shot on the green,” Chirkinian once told Golf Magazine. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, who is this guy?’ He had charisma. He dispelled the notion golf was elitist.
“The camera is all-knowing. It either loves you or it doesn’t. It loved Arnold Palmer and it still loves him.”
Palmer made only $1.8 million in official money, even though he won 62 PGA Tour events. The total purse money for the tour in 1960 was $1.33 million, and a tournament winner would normally make $20,000 or so. In 1970, tour purses grew to $6.7 million. That curve never stopped rising, although it spiked noticeably with Tiger Woods.
If there was an event that crowned the King, it was the 1960 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills in Denver. Palmer had already won the Masters. You played the last 36 holes on Saturday in those days, and Palmer was seven strokes down after the third round. At lunch, he told Drum that he’d love to shoot 65 and see where it took him.
“It won’t do you any good,” Drum said.
That irked Palmer, and he steamed his way to the first tee and smoked a driver onto the 345-yard green. The people swarmed him, and Palmer shot 65 that day and won.
When a playoff event returned to Cherry Hills a few years ago, today’s big boppers used a persimmon driver and tried to drive that same par-4. None could.
Golf is treading water these days. Some think it’s an anachronism, like quilting or contract bridge, too difficult and time-consuming .
There’s Footgolf and Top Golf and an emphasis on nine-hole rounds. And it remains too white and too expensive.
What we need, of course, is the one thing he could never give us. Another Arnold Palmer.
Contact the writer: mwhicker@scng.com
