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.