Arnold Palmer - An Appreciation

The world—not merely golf and not merely sports—lost Arnold Palmer today at the age of 87.  Other golfers have won more major championships and more money, and others have also been respected on the course.  Arnold Palmer was not the greatest, richest

But I suspect few other golfers or athletes were truly loved and dearly appreciated as is and was Arnold Palmer.

As an erstwhile golf writer, I could list his accomplishments on the course, which are dominated by seven professional major championship victories and the 1954 U.S. Amateur Championship.  The man won at least one tournament every year between 1955 and 1971. He has hosted one of the most popular non-major-championship events in all of professional golf.  He earned enormous amounts of money and donated large portions of that to charitable organizations and helped build important hospitals and medical treatment facilities.

But as a fan of golf architecture, what will stay with me is how he has left the game with so many great golf courses that are open to the public.

Most of golf's most famous and highest-paid architects typically design courses for private country clubs and exclusive resorts.  Tom Fazio, Jack Nicklaus, Robert Trent Jones, Jr., Rees Jones, Pete Dye, and others have been paid large sums of money to design courses that few of us will ever have any chance to play.  And Mr. Palmer was among them; he and his firm designed at least 300 courses worldwide.  But unlike the others, Palmer and his staff designed many, many great courses that actually allow public play.

After the flood of the Red River of the North devastated Grand Forks, North Dakota and East Grand Forks, Minnesota in April of 1997, there is no way that Fazio, Nicklaus, Dye, or any other high-dollar architect was ever going to throw a bone to a community like Grand Forks.

But Mr. Palmer and his architecture firm did.

Within five years after the city lost half of Lincoln Park Golf Course in the flood, Mr. Palmer had his design team move over 650,000 cubic yards of earth to create a blend of prairie and heathland style golf on a parcel of land on the southwest side of the city.  Kings Walk Golf Course debuted in 2002 and is still one of the very best courses in the upper Midwestern United States, not merely one of the top five in the golf-crazy state of North Dakota.

And Kings Walk is a truly public course, owned and operated by the Grand Forks Park District.  I would be allowed to play it, and you would, too.  And the cost is affordable, too.  There are previous few other great courses designed by Fazio, Nicklaus, Dye, et al where you and I could play... and none that are as affordable.

Kings Walk and other public-access courses, including Lonnie Poole GC at North Carolina State University, arguably serve as evidence that Arnold Palmer rightfully earned a reputation of treating people the way he would want to be treated.

"I admire men of character and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates. And that, to me, is where you find out what the character of a man is."
— Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army (Ret.) (1934-2012)

Arnold Palmer proved that he was a gentleman of strong character.  And as with my own father and three grandfathers, this writer will always think of Arnold Palmer with grateful remembrance.

Some times in life, we sorrow over the loss of a truly great and wonderful person at an early age; my father is an example of that.  But in this case, I am grateful to Almighty God for allowing us to have Arnold Palmer for so many decades and providing a fine blend of greatness, humility, generosity, and accessibility all at once.

Arnold Daniel Palmer (September 10, 1929 – September 25, 2016)

(Image via Wikipedia)