80 Things About Arnie
September 9, 2009 /
- Palmer has flown with the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy’s highperformance jet squadron, several times.
- He was the first person to reach $1 million in career earnings on the PGA Tour.
- On his 70th birthday, Sept. 10, 1999, Latrobe (Pa.) Airport was renamed the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport.
- Last year, he earned more than $30 million to rank No. 5 in the Golf Digest 50, a list of the top earners on and off the course.
- During Palmer’s five decades of playing in the Masters Tournament, he took 11,248 shots in 150 rounds and played 2,718 holes.
- He quit his job as a paint salesman in Cleveland after winning the U.S. Amateur Championship in 1954.
- As one of the most trusted pitchmen in America, he has endorsed snowmobiles, body shampoo and the Vigor Whirl, a home workout device.
- By the time he graduated from high school in Latrobe, he was headed for the national professional golf circuit.
- He regularly attended state dinners at the White House throughout his career.
- In 1951, Palmer joined the U.S. Coast Guard.
- He’s played golf with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and almost all his successors.
- He was invited to speak, along with Winston S. Churchill and Walter Cronkite, at a joint session of Congress on the 100th anniversary of Eisenhower’s birth.
- In 1976, he set a world record by circumnavigating the globe in a Learjet 36 in less than 58 hours.
- In 1974, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
- Palmer was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his distinguished service in the golf world.
- His golf course in southern China, built in the 1980s, was the first new golf course built in the country in more than half a century, and its opening touched off China’s continuing golf boom.
- He helped land a military jet on the aircraft carrier “Eisenhower.”
- He is chairman of the Latrobe Area Hospital Charitable Foundation.
- He founded the Arnold Palmer Pavilion at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
- Palmer receives at least 40 fan-mail letters or requests for autographs daily.
- He’s a charter member of the World Golf Hall of Fame in Pinehurst, N.C.
- He’s scored 17 holes-in-one during his career.
- He signed his first staff contract with Wilson Sporting Goods in 1954. They paid him $5,000 a year.
- He earned an estimated $500 for his first Heinz Ketchup commercial.
- After winning his second Masters title, Palmer thanked his “army” of supporters. The next day, The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle coined the phrase “Arnie’s Army.”
- In 1988, Golf Digest ran a tongue-in-cheek button campaign, suggesting that he was running for president.
- He’s been on more than 100 magazine covers, including those of Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest, Time and Newsweek.
- He helped establish the Golf Channel in 1962.
- The famous multicolored umbrella logo that symbolizes Arnold Palmer Enterprises was just an idea he “came up with late one afternoon,” so he “could hurry a meeting along.”
- Arnold Palmer Enterprises ventures have included dry cleaning, insurance, ice skating rinks and clothing lines.
- Every guest at his home or any of his offices receives an umbrella pin. Employees are given special pins with gemstone inlays to reflect their years of tenured service.
- FTD branded the Arnold Palmer floral bouquet.
- A company once branded Arnold Palmer Christmas trees.
- His face and name have appeared on everything from watches to wheelchairs to bars of soap.
- He sold an Arnold Palmer line of jewelry in Japan, although he says the jewelry was too gaudy for him to wear.
- He owns Pebble Beach golf course with partner Clint Eastwood.
- He appeared on “The Bob Hope Show” several times.
- He played golf with Dean Martin and appeared on his show.
- He launched Arnold Palmer Cleaning Centers and at one point had more than 100 dry cleaning centers across the country. All employees wore green sports coats.
- Norman Rockwell painted a portrait of Palmer in 1972 as part of an advertising campaign for the Robert Bruce clothing company.
- If he hadn’t been able to make a living playing golf, he’d be a commercial pilot.
- The first plane he owned was a twin-engine Aero Commander 500, which he bought in 1961 for about $20,000.
- His most unusual trophy? A rocking chair from the Marlboro Classic in Massachusetts.
- He scored two consecutive aces on the same hole during the Chrysler Cup in 1986.
- Palmer has pitched horseshoes with President George W. Bush in Kennebunkport.
- He was presented the National Sports Award by President Bill Clinton, who said, “Presenting Arnold Palmer with this award is one of my biggest perks as president.”
- Action figures created in his likeness “sold like hotcakes when they first hit the market,” according to a media report.
- In 1999, he was featured on the Wheaties box as part of a program to raise awareness of prostate cancer.
- He reads and responds in some fashion to all the mail that he receives.
- In 1976, Palmer bought the Bay Hill Club & Lodge in Orlando.
- In 1953, as a 23-year-old Coast Guardsman stationed in Cleveland, he beat 63 other competitors at the 47th Ohio Amateur Golf tournament and won a new wrist watch.
- When asked to speculate about his appeal among the fans in 1959, he says, “Maybe it’s because I’m in the rough so much that I get to know them all personally.”
- He stood in for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” in 1970.
- In 1970, the Ladies Professional Golfers Association named him the organization’s favorite male athlete.
- In 1975, The Washington (D.C.) Star asked Palmer what kept him going, to which he replied, “People say to me, ‘You’ve made all the money you can possibly make. Why don’t you just enjoy it?’ Well, that wouldn’t be me.”
- In 1986, he served as grand marshal for the Latrobe Fourth of July parade. He made a grand entrance by flying his Hughes helicopter over the parade route.
- He played his final round of the USGA Senior Open in 1989.
- In 1987, Golf World reported that “… Palmer’s the man who changed the face of golf.”
- In 1988, The Greensburg (Pa.) Tribune-Review wrote that the Arnold Palmer Automotive Group was expected to break $1 billion in sales for the first time.
- In 1993, Palmer and NBA great Michael Jordan played a pro-am round at the Ameritech Senior Open before a crowd of 17,500.
- In 2003, Golf Digest revealed that he “enjoys a regular manicure, pedicure and haircut at the Bay Hill Salon.”
- In 2006, Sports Illustrated listed him as a “heavy hitter” who had the highest off-course income among former PGA Tour pros.
- He is a member of the Westmoreland County Airport Authority in Pennsylvania.
- He has received virtually every national award in golf.
- Palmer is a charter member of the World Golf Hall of Fame and a member of the American Golf Hall of Fame at Foxburg, Pa., and the PGA Hall of Fame in Palm Beach Gardens.
- He served as honorary national chairman of the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation for 20 years.
- He is a longtime member of the board of directors of Latrobe Area Hospital.
- He abhors his nickname “The King.”
- He was PGA Player of the Year in 1960 and 1962.
- Palmer owns The Kingdom, a magazine provided to all members of courses he has designed across the United States.
- His late wife, Winnie, worked hard to save a particular 26-acre tract of land in Latrobe from development. It is now called the Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve.
- He has two daughters, Peggy and Amy.
- Today, he has logged more than 18,000 hours of flying.
- He has manned the controls of a U.S. Air Force Thunderbird F-16.
- Palmer was invited by the chairman of Boeing to test fly a 747.
- His springboard to professional fame and fortune was his victory in the U.S. Amateur Championship in 1954. He turned professional a few months later.
- The hottest period in his golf career was a stretch from 1960 to 1963, when he landed 29 of his titles and collected almost $400,000.
- His father, Deacon, was the golf course professional at the nine-hole Latrobe Country Club, and the Palmers lived on the golf course.
- He was named “Athlete of the Decade” for the 1960s in a national Associated Press poll.
- Palmer swung his first set of golf clubs at age 4.
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