By Reade Tilley
Indeed, for Palmer the work is just beginning. 2007 will bring numerous activities with a tournament bearing his name, his new Palmer Premier series of golf courses coming on line and plenty of other bits to keep him busy. Chief among those is his increased role as a golf course designer, effective immediately.
“I’ve really virtually stopped playing any tournament golf,” he says. “I have enjoyed doing design work for years and wanted to get into it more personally.”
Palmer’s commitment to his increased focus on design was underlined when he moved his renamed Arnold Palmer Design Company from its Ponte Vedra, Florida, location to his Orlando home at The Bay Hill Club & Lodge. With the design offices just a short walk from his main office, he’s able to work with his team on a day-to-day basis. Of course, he’ll be traveling further than just across the club.
“I’ll be doing more personal on-site appearances, and doing the golf courses myself as far as design is concerned,” he says. “And I’ve put together a fantastic team of designers, architects and people who I work with. I think they’re the best team in the business.”
They’d better be, given what Palmer has planned. His new Premier series of courses is set to be the best of the best, and Arnie’s not taking any chances.
“I decided that I wanted to do golf courses where I would be more involved, down to the full-bore operation, from the design of the golf course to the operation and management of the club and how it would be done, the maintenance of the golf course — all of the things that make a first -class operation, and that’s where we’re going,” says Palmer. How good will Palmer Premier be? Palmer says there are excellent golf course operations in the country now, “but I’m not sure that they’re in the same ballpark as what we’re talking about.”
While his design team moves forward with new projects, they’re also celebrating the success of existing Palmer courses. Most notably, they’re smiling over their course at The K Club in Ireland, the setting perhaps the most storied golf event of 2006: the Ryder Cup.
“I enjoyed the visit very much,” says Arnie of his time at the event – his first trip to a Ryder Cup since captaining the American team in 1975 at Laurel Valley Golf Club, Pennsylvania. “I thought that the Irish were great and that the entire program was very well done, extremely well done.”
The Palmer Course at The K Club was a major fact or in the Ryder Cup’s excitement, off ering a stiff challenge to both teams. “The golf course really did itself proud and it has so many strong holes,” says Palmer, who had suggested to its owner Dr. Michael Smurfit that it should one day stage the Ryder Cup when it originally opened back in 1991. “And bearing in mind the fact that the weather was less than we would have liked to have seen it for the Ryder Cup, I thought it held up very well.”
In fact , Arnie says he wouldn’t have changed a thing, despite a second successive heavy defeat for the U.S. team. “I think the way they played the matches, the re-routing of the holes, was very good. I think 16, 17 and 18 were just what they wanted them to be, and they represented the golf course and The K Club very well.”
Flushed with such success despite an almost total lack of co-operation from the elements, Palmer says he’s set to make more than a few visits to the Emerald Isle over the next few years. He’s working on two Palmer courses (one signature, one Premier) on the Milverton estate just north of Dublin, and is unequivocal about his love of the country and its people. “I like Ireland. I built two [courses] at The K Club, and I built Tralee, and I enjoy the Irish and the atmosphere there very much — and my wife’s Irish!”
Another tournament that is destined to be influenced by Palmer’s design philosophies is the upcoming 2007 U.S. Open. Set to be played at Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania, the event holds more than just a little interest for Arnie.
“I was of course raised in Latrobe, and through the years I spent a lot of time at Oakmont playing golf and I witnessed a lot of golf tournaments there,” he says. “I’ve seen it with trees, I’ve seen it without trees. I’ve seen it go from a links course to less than a links course, back to a links course — and that has all happened in my lifetime! Yet another upcoming event in which Palmer has significant and obvious interest is The Arnold Palmer Invitational Presented by MasterCard. Formerly known as the Bay Hill Invitational Presented by MasterCard, the tournament was renamed by Palmer’s family “as a tribute to his dedication and contributions to the game of golf, the tournament and the PGA TOUR, throughout his career,” according to the tournament’s official website.
Set to be played March 12-18, Palmer says it’s already shaping up well. “Thus far it looks like it’s going to be very good,” he says. “We can only hope that we get a good field, which I feel confident we will. Everything right now looks pretty good.”
Palmer is happy with the rest of the 2007 PGA Tour schedule as well, offering that “it gives the players pretty much an opportunity to do as they wish as far as playing is concerned. It gives them an opportunity to be free to do what they want after the official Tour is ended.
"I suppose there are some advantages. I think the thing that they will look at, and very seriously, is the sponsors and their opinions. That’s a whole different ball game.”
Success is the ultimate recipe for relaxation, and there can be few better examples of this truism than Arnold Palmer.
As anyone who knows Arnie knows, there’s more than golf to his life. Flying is a big part of who he is, as is his family, as are his other businesses. In recent years, those businesses have included the official line of Arnold Palmer furniture, manufactured by Lexington.
“Every year we do sort of a revamping; we make modest changes,” he says. “I think it’s a good line. I give them my ideas on what I think would be popular, and they put it into the furniture. I think it’s going to be very popular again this year.”
In addition, there’s talk of building another Arnold Palmer restaurant, like the popular one in La Quinta, California. “We’re talking to people about it,” he says. “There’s a lot of people interested in doing restaurants of that style, but whether that will happen or not I don’t know.”
With so much going on it seems like it would be easy to get lost, but Palmer knows who he is — just as he always has. Regarding an article that appeared more than 20 years ago outlining the King’s “favorite things,” Palmer today says he wouldn’t change a thing.
“Glenn Miller is still one of my favorites, Rolling Rock is still a favorite, movies… Still like the same ones; 007, we can always add that.”
At the time of our interview, he was just looking forward to heading to his new home in Latrobe for some quality family time and a good Christmas, like when he was a kid.
“We used to spend a lot of time outside at Christmas, skiing, ice skating, tobogganing — my family have done that for years.”
The last time he went skiing was during Christmas, at Snowmass. And though he’s incredibly busy, he acknowledges that while “I haven’t [skied] very much lately, I am thinking about it again…”
Just when he’ll have time is another question.
Palmer’s team is working on at least two courses in North Carolina; at least one in South Carolina; projects in Oregon and Ireland; a course north of Los Angeles; at least one in Texas; and several in the Caribbean and in Mexico.
With commitments to these and to his many tournament visits, his vast legion of friends and his almost incalculable other projects, 2007 is already shaping up to be a very busy year.
When I asked him if he ever got a quiet moment to himself, he didn’t say anything. He just smiled and went right back to work at his desk.