The King for Eternity

He looked like an athlete, a prizefighter, a middleweight. He opened golf’s windows and let in some air. He lifted a country club game, balanced it on his shoulders, carried it to the people, and made it a sport. He won big. He lost big. People who didn’t follow golf followed him. People who hated golf loved him. He was photogenic in the old newspapers. He was telegenic in the new medium. He was the most asked question called into the night desks on weekends: “What did Palmer do today?”  He was a Pittsburgher, like Billy Conn, Mike Ditka, Honus Wagner and Johnny Unitas. The Mellons and the Carnegies and the Rooneys and Gene Kelly and David McCullough and Sean Thornton.  He was loamy meadows and smoky skies, river valleys and steel mills, like the plant where his father, Milfred, sometimes worked (“Steel, Michaeleen, steel in pig-iron furnaces so hot a man forgets his fear of hell”) until just in front of the Depression, Milfred took a job as greenkeeper and pro (mostly greenkeeper) at Latrobe Country Club. Nobody addressed him as Milfred, except Doris when she was of a fanciful mind. To most, he was Deacon. A few said Deke. Arnold called him Pap.

- Tom Callahan

From Pap, Arnie learned many important things, like how to grip a golf club and integrity. But Doris’ contribution was what made all the difference. She was as light and delicate as a scarf, but ready company and a natural communicator. She liked people, and they liked her. Deacon was always prodding his son to be tougher and try harder and succeed more. But whatever the boy did pleased his mother, provided he was kind.

Nobody had to teach him to love golf. As Peter Dobereiner wrote, “Arnold did not catch the golf bug; he was born with it like a hereditary disease.”

He started to play at the age of 3 and turned pro at 7 when Latrobe member Helen Fritz offered him a nickel to hit her drive over a ditch. After adjusting the cap pistol strapped to his hip, he took a whirling cut that brought to mind a finish-line flagman or a revolving lawn sprinkler. Mrs. Fritz’s ball floated down like a paratrooper onto the fairway. Every Ladies’ Day thereafter, he was available to bash dowagers’ drives for five cents. “Some of them,” he said, “were slow pay.”

He had a second love as well: airplanes. Whenever he could, he ran down the country club road to Latrobe’s tiny airport with its grass runway, no control tower, no instrument landing, no radio direction. He passed his hands over the few biplanes parked there and imagined himself an aviator like Wiley Post. He sat in the flight room by a pot-bellied stove and listened to the pilots’ “by-gosh and by-God” adventures.