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'A Golfer’s Life' by Arnold Palmer

Golf tomes mostly on course

Sunday, April 11, 1999

By Mark S. Murphy, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	A Golfer’s Life By Arnold Palmer Ballantine Books $26.95

Arnold Palmer is one of the most popular sports figures in the 20th century, but nowhere is the tie stronger than around Palmer’s native Latrobe. And nowhere is that claim made so well as in the opening chapters of “A Golfer’s Life.”

If it is possible to render an archetype as a person, then Palmer and his co-author, James Dodson, have done so in this book. Its opening is pure Western Pennsylvania, populated with characters we know well.

There is “Deacon” Palmer — Pap to Arnie — the laborer-turned-greenskeeper who raised a son to appreciate right from wrong. There is Doris Palmer, who made sure that she found a way to have her son play golf on the club’s course, even though he was forbidden as an employee’s child.

There is the young, strong-willed son, who delighted in getting back at the country club members for not letting him and his sister swim in the club’s pool by urinating in the creek that fed the pool.

Perhaps the characters seem so familiar because Palmer and the ubiquitous Mark McCormack — Palmer’s superagent and architect of his business success — have made it their life’s work to make it so. But there is too much that rings true here to make such a cynical interpretation stick.

If the book seems to lack the personal touch as it goes on, it only serves to reflect the nature of Palmer’s life — so full to the brim that he delegates most tasks to people he trusts implicitly.

Unlike Jack Nicklaus, whose grasp of minutiae bogged down his earnest 1997 autobiography, Arnie’s progressively broader brush strokes make for quick if eventually unsatisfying reading.

The thing that remains more than the details of his life is the strength of purpose forged in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains during the Depression.

I wish Arnie had just given a little more to this project but am glad to have received what was given.