Life as a professional Golfer
When Palmer turned pro, the appeal of the game was largely restricted to an elite few and Golf had a small following.
"Golf was coming on, it wasn't anywhere near the magnitude that it is today. Of course I was a very enthusiastic young man looking for a way of life that I felt was coming on," Palmer said in an interview with CNN's Shane O'Donoghue.
He used the aforementioned fame and his passion for the game to curate a new exciting image of what it meant to be a star athlete.
"Arnold was the first millionaire on the tour. He was the first to buy an airplane and fly it. He was the man who basically invented the concept of sports representation in the media and made a fortune doing it," Dodson said.
Following his stellar campaign that consisted of victories at the US Open and the Masters, Golf has enjoyed half a century of ground-breaking growth.
"Every tour player needs to kiss the ground he walked on because he made them all wealthy beyond their wildest dreams."
Arnie's Army
Arnie's stint of three years in the Coast Guard as a military person meant he became all the more captivating to his fans, known as “Arnie's Army”.However, his following in the military was partly to do with the Masters. The event did not see the turnout of large galleries like we see today back in those days.
As a promotional offer, Augusta National's co-founder Clifford Roberts intoduced a scheme wherein soldiers could attend the event for free and he started using soldiers from nearby camps as volunteers at the Masters.
The soldiers cheered him on during his triumph at Augusta in 1960 and followed him to the US Open where he also got the job done."When I was a boy learning to play golf in my hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, I never could have imagined that one day I'd have an 'Army' of fans or that people would call me 'The King' of the sport I love," Palmer said.
