Arnold Palmer lit it up at Senior PGA Tour events

Golf’s Senior PGA Tour enjoyed a bit of a “golden era” from 1980-87, when Arnold Palmer won 11 senior tournaments between the ages of 50-57.

 

Palmer was still a fierce competitor in 1987, when he signed a three-year agreement to serve the corporate spokesperson for GTE (formerly General Telephone and Electronics Company), while participating in various GTE-sponsored Senior Golf tournaments across the country.

At the time, GTE was organized by geographic territories. Within GTE South was Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.

However, there were no Senior Tour events scheduled in 1987 within the GTE South boundaries. Word came down from GTE South headquarters in Durham, N.C., that Palmer’s contract contained language to the effect of “use him or lose him.”

After a lot of head scratching, a plan was formulated, and Oct. 27, 1987, was established as “Arnold Palmer Day for the Wiregrass United Way” at the Dothan (Ala.) Country Club.

He would fly his private airplane into Dothan Regional Airport and arrive bright and early to play a friendly 18 holes of golf and then address a luncheon gathering at the country club to endorse the six-county regional United Way organization.

 

Eight business leaders each pledged $1,000 to have the opportunity to play nine holes alongside Palmer. Members of the Dothan High School varsity golf team served as caddies.

To generate interest, GTE South’s public relations officer based in Dothan put out the word. He wrote about how the 25-year-old Palmer had burst on the scene in 1955, winning his first pro tournament as a tour rookie.

“Palmer is clearly acknowledged as being responsible for the growth and success of professional golf,” the publicist said. “Palmer’s slashing, charging style captured the imagination of the sports world, producing golf tournament heroics and drama never-before seen on national television.”

Spectators were invited to contribute $15 apiece to the United Way…and that included the luncheon ticket. Everyone who attended received a GTE pin-on button featuring Arnold Palmer’s signature as a keepsake.

One impressive sight was the parade of private golf carts by the club members, reenacting “Arnie’s Army” as they meandered along the winding cart paths.

The Dothan Country Club course is par 71, with a distance of about 6,400 yards.

Palmer was even par for his round that day, but his shot-making skills from tee to green were impeccable. However, his putter was icy cold. Nothing would drop. He said he feared that this was becoming a characteristic of his game.

Undaunted, Palmer proceeded to deliver an emotional, heart-felt appeal on behalf of the United Way, one that brought tears to those assembled. He was that kind of a gentle human being.

In no hurry to leave, Palmer stuck around the golf club as long as anyone wanted to chat.

GTE South definitely got its money’s worth on the day that Arnold Palmer came to Dothan.

Palmer continued playing Senior Golf long after 1987. He abruptly retired in 2006 while playing in an event at Augusta Pines Golf Club in Spring, Texas (near Houston), at age 77.

He was experiencing back pain but tried to gut it out. He proceeded to plunk two shots into the drink on the fourth hole. Then and there, he decided he could “no longer give the public the performance they deserved.”

 

Palmer technically withdrew, but he didn’t just quit and walk away. He continued to play alongside partners Lee Trevino and John Mahaffey, hobbling and shuffling along, but not keeping score.

Palmer finished the round to avoid “disappointing the spectators.” What a guy!

 

The Dothan Country Club is host to the Press Thornton Future Masters Golf Tournament, one of the most traditionally rich junior boys tournaments in the world.  

Four age groupings are open to competitors between the ages of 10 and 18. 

The Future Masters has become a proving ground for golf's brightest junior stars, but it is not, nor has it ever been, only about golf. It is about the spirit of competition, friendships made, sportsmanship on the course, and the challenge of preserving 76 years of growing golf.

Two prominent Future Masters alumni who have won the coveted green jacket. They are:

Scottie Scheffler, who won the 2006 Future Masters and claimed the Masters Tournament titles in 2022 and 2024.

Bubba Watson, who won the Future Masters in 1996 and earned Masters victories in 2012 and 2014.

Other Masters champions who competed in the Future Masters include Trevor Immelman, who won at Augusta in 2008, and Larry Mize, who won the Masters Tournament in 1987.

Other golfing greats who played in the Future Masters are: past U.S. Open champions Hubert Green and Jerry Pate; PGA champions Bob Tway, Mark Brooks and Shawn Micheel; and (British) Open winner Ben Curtis. 

 

Arnold Palmer earned the title of ‘King of Golf’

Fellow pro golfers referred to the legendary Arnold Palmer as the true “King of Golf.”

 

“Arnold Palmer, television and golf. It was a mix made in heaven,” said Nick Price (shown below), one of the top players from South Africa.

 

“Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus obviously did a lot,” Price said, “but it was Arnold who had the magnetism that brought everyone together.”

 

Sportswriter Scott Michaux of The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle (shown below) said: “Palmer connected with the golfing public like no player ever had. You were simply drawn to his energy and charisma and bravado. He was a pin-up idol in a buttoned-up sport.” 

“His charisma came through on camera,” so everyone could see and identify with “Arnie’s Army” that was cheering his every shot.

Two-time U.S. Open champion Andy North said Arnie was “the man who put us on the map. We said for every dollar we make, we should give 25 cents to Arnold.”

 

Michaux asserted that Palmer won seven Majors, fewer than “his Big Three mates” Jack Nicklaus (18) and Gary Player (9), “but he won more hearts than any golfer who’s ever lived.”

 

Arnold Palmer died in 2016 at the age of 87 “from complications with heart problems.”

Ian Hardie, a golf coach and author from New Zealand, wrote: “Arnold Palmer was a true legend in the game of golf. To suggest that he was one of the greatest golfers to ever walk the fairways of the world would be an understatement. He was a shining example to us all about how to live our lives.”

 

“Arnold Palmer won a PGA Tour event every year from 1955 to 1971,” Hardie said. In all, Palmer won 62 times on the tour, which ranks fifth all-time. 

(Sam Snead and Tiger Woods are tied for first with 82 victories apiece. Jack Nicklaus is next with 73 titles, while Ben Hogan won 64 tournaments during his career.

Palmer’s last tour championship came at the 1973 Bob Hope Desert Classic in Palm Springs, Calif. Palmer, at age 43, finished two strokes ahead of Nicklaus and Johnny Miller.

About six years later, pro golfer Bob Goalby and small group of other old-timers approached PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman in 1979 about creating a separate tour for players age 50 and older. Goalby had an “ace in the hole,” tucked into his back pocket.

Goalby told Beman that he had a “firm commitment” from golfing superstar Arnold Palmer to fully endorse the effort and be an active participant.

“At age 50, I wasn’t sitting around thinking what a great time I could have playing ‘senior’ golf,” Palmer wrote.

Although he said he had some “unfinished business” on the PGA Tour, Palmer acknowledged that his game – “strong as ever on some days’ – lacked the consistency to win.

Palmer said, after a six-year drought, that he liked the prospect of being competitive again. His loyal fans, known as “Arnie’s Army,” were eager to recharge their batteries as well.

Beman didn’t hesitate. He officially launched the Senior PGA Tour in 1980. 

He envisioned “a long trip down memory lane” and wagered that fans would turn out to watch “yesterday’s stars” go at it.

Palmer pledged to promote the Senior Tour any way he could. He did just that, in a big way, by winning the PGA’s 1980 Seniors’ Championship in Miami, Fla., defeating Paul Harney in a sudden-death playoff on the first extra hole.

 

Golf writer Bill Fields said that early on “Palmer carried the senior circuit on his back. Other larger-than-life players followed as their birth certificates allowed.”

Guys like Chi-Chi Rodríguez, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino and Hale Irwin.

Here comes the command for ‘Arnie’s Army’ to ‘charge!’

Former Wake Forest (N.C.) College golfer Arnold Palmer had a whole brigade of dedicated golf fans who mobilized whenever he played a professional tournament. They were known as “Arnie’s Army.”

 

A native of Latrobe, Pa., Palmer arrived on Wake’s “Old Campus” in the Wake Forest community in 1948. He came on a golf scholarship awarded by Jim Weaver, athletic director and golf coach.

 

Demon Deacon Arnold Palmer won back-to-back Southern Conference individual titles (1948-1949) and consecutive NCAA individual championships (1949-1950). 

His athletic career at Wake Forest was interrupted by a hitch in the U.S. Coast Guard (1951-54), but after his discharge, he returned to campus to resume his studies in business administration…and to play more collegiate golf.

Palmer responded by winning the inaugural Atlantic Coast Conference Championship in 1954.

Then, in August 1954, Palmer won the U.S. Amateur Golf Championship, a grueling “match play” event played over six days in Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich. Although just a few classes shy of completing his degree requirements at Wake Forest, Palmer opted to leave school, turn pro and seek his fortune playing golf on the PGA Tour.

 

He said: “What other people find in poetry, I find in the flight of a good drive.”

Pro golfer Gene Littler predicted that Palmer “was going to be a great player someday,” saying “when Arnie hits the ball, the earth shakes.”

During his rookie pro season, Palmer claimed his first title, winning the Canadian Open in Toronto, Ontario, on Aug. 20, 1955. He defeated runner-up Jackie Burke Jr. by four strokes and pocketed the winner’s check of $2,400 for his efforts.

 

Palmer won seven more tournaments leading up to the 1958 Masters Tournament at Augusta, Ga., one of golf’s major Grand Slam tournaments. The formation of “Arnie’s Army” occurred at that event.

Golf writer Roderick Easdale (shown below)said: “The original members of Arnie’s Army were quite literally in the U.S. Army.”

 

They were soldiers who made the 20-minute trek from the Army’s Camp Gordon in Augusta to the famed Augusta National Golf Club.

Clifford Roberts, co-founder of The Masters, had made it a tradition to supply free passes to soldiers in uniform to attend. 

It was both a patriotic and promotional gesture – designed to help swell the gallery of patrons for the benefit of the television cameras.

Additionally, other GIs from Camp Gordon volunteered to man the massive leaderboards on the course. One of those Army scorekeepers is credited with coining the term “Arnie’s Army,” and The Augusta Chronicle newspaper ran with it.

 

During the 1958 edition of The Masters, Palmer’s style of play was on full display. Palmer was “bold, adventurous, risk-taking,” Easdale wrote. “People found it, and him, compulsive viewing. Palmer had a go-for-broke style. He could charge up through a leaderboard, he could win from an unpromising situation.”

“But he could also go broke on the course,” Easdale said. “And people would celebrate that almost as much,” because they loved the gutsy and daring way he played each round of golf.

Surely, Arnie’s Army goes down in history as “one of the greatest groups of fans in the history of sports,” Easdale commented.

So, Arnold Palmer won his first Masters green jacket in 1958, at age 28. Doug Ford and Fred Hawkins were each a stroke behind. 

(Ford had won the championship in 1957, so as defending champion, he had “the honors” of presenting Palmer with the fabled sports coat.)

 

Arnold Palmer would win three more times at Augusta – in 1960, 1962 and 1964. 

Palmer’s tally of four Masters' victories ranks third all-time. 

Jack Nicklaus has six; Tiger Woods has five.

Here are more ‘commencement’ address ‘pearls of wisdom’

Sometimes it rains during commencement ceremonies. 

Not to worry, no big deal, said Dr. Alison Morrison-Shetlar, president of the University of Lynchburg (Va.).

 

“In Scotland, we call this ‘liquid sunshine,’” she told 345 students assembled on the university’s outdoor soccer field to receive their undergraduate degrees earlier this spring.

A Scottish native from the Isle of Bute in the Firth of Clyde, Dr. Morrison-Shetlar grew up in a place where it rains more than half the time – about 190 days out of the year.

 

Her remarks to the graduates and their families were quite compelling, as the university’s Marketing and Communications office reported online. Here are excerpts:

President Morrison-Shetlar, who will be retiring in June, told the graduates: “You are, without question, awesome. And it has been the honor of my life to be your president.”

 

“Today is my last commencement as your president. After six years at the helm of this incredible institution (2020-26), I am stepping into my own next chapter, right alongside you. We are both walking off a stage we know well and stepping into a future that isn’t entirely written yet.”

Dr. Morrison-Shetlar told the graduates she wanted to share some of the lessons she had learned “not just as your president, but as a human being who’s spent a lifetime navigating a world that rarely goes according to plan.”

 

“You can transform anything, if you have the courage to face change.”

 She recalled the events and challenges the students had lived through in the past few years – the aftermath of a pandemic, global economic uncertainty and a rapidly changing world. But the people who transform the world are those who “looked at an uncertain moment and said, ‘I will figure this out.’”

“You have been learning to do exactly that. You were never just memorizing facts. You were learning how to think, to ask better questions and sit with a problem until it gives way. You’ve been learning to collaborate with people who see the world differently than you do.”

 

“That, dear graduates, is what makes your degree from the University of Lynchburg something more than a credential. It is a toolkit. It has equipped you for a world that will ask you to change direction, sometimes without much warning. And you are ready.”

She also encouraged them to “carry your values like armor,” saying that the world “needs you.”

 

“It needs your authenticity in a world that is becoming increasingly synthetic. It needs your human judgment in a world that is increasingly automated. It needs your courage in a world that sometimes feels short on it. You are not walking out of here underprepared.”

 

Dr. Morrison-Shetlar was trained as a scientist at Dundee (Scotland) Institute of Technology (now Abertay University). She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry and a doctorate in biomedical science. She began her career as a research scientist in England and later became an academician in Germany.

She and her husband relocated to the United States in 1993. Dr. Morrison-Shetlar has North Carolina connections. She served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Elon University from 2010-14. After that, she spent six years at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee as Provost and Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs as well as Professor of Biology.

During the recessional to close out the 2026 graduation event at the University of Lynchburg, alumnus James Robertson, the university’s official bagpiper, played “Scotland the Brave,” the country’s traditional anthem, to honor the legacy of Dr. Morrison-Shetlar.

Lyrics include: “Yearning to feel the Kiss / Of sweet Scottish rain.”