This is likely to be Wink’s only blog about golf.
September 26, 2016 by Jamie Johnson
Does playing golf enhance your career in the financial industry? It certainly can be effective for networking; how may other chances do we get to build relationships and allot time for a four hour meeting?!
This is likely to be Wink’s only blog about golf. While we do have a couple of deft golfers who are more than willing to take up on your networking offer, the rest us would rather take you for an invigorating run, have a meeting of minds over a meal of scrumptious tacos, stroll along with our dogs frolicking around at the dog park… and other experiences that would not involve a tee time. I regress… the game of golf isn’t the point.
Arnold Palmer had said that the game of golf is at least 80% mental, right? A sharp mind is something we all pursue (especially as we age!) and golf can help spur ideas out on the course or back in the boardroom.
Arnold Palmer’s influence reached far beyond the golf course; we believe the below New York Times article aptly describes Palmer as “the magnetic face of golf” and we too wanted to take a moment to remember the deserving, “most celebrated and charismatic athletes of the 20th century.”
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Arnold Palmer, the Magnetic Face of Golf in the ’60s, Dies at 87
Arnold Palmer, the champion golfer whose full-bore style of play, thrilling tournament victories and magnetic personality inspired an American golf boom, attracted a following known as Arnie’s Army and made him one of the most popular athletes in the world, died on Sunday evening in Pittsburgh. He was 87.
Doc Giffin, a spokesman for Palmer’s business interests, said the cause was complications of heart problems. Paul Wood, a spokesman for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said Palmer died at UPMC Shadyside Hospital, about 40 miles from Palmer’s home in Latrobe, Pa.
From 1958 through 1964, Palmer was the charismatic face of professional golf and one of its dominant players. In those seven seasons, he won seven major titles: four Masters, one United States Open and two British Opens. With 62 victories on the PGA Tour, he ranks fifth, behind Sam Snead, Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan. He won 93 tournaments worldwide, including the 1954 United States Amateur.
But it was more than his scoring and shot-making that captivated the sports world. It was how he played. He did not so much navigate a course as attack it. If his swing was not classic, it was ferocious: He seemed to throw all 185 pounds of his muscular 5-foot-10 body at the ball. If he did not win, he at least lost with flair.
Handsome and charming, his sandy hair falling across his forehead, his shirttail flapping, a cigarette sometimes dangling from his lips, Palmer would stride down a fairway acknowledging his army of fans with a sunny smile and a raised club, “like Sir Lancelot amid the multitude in Camelot,” Ira Berkow wrote in The New York Times.
And the television cameras followed along. As Woods would do more than 30 years later, Palmer, a son of a golf pro at his hometown Latrobe Country Club, almost single-handedly stimulated TV coverage of golf, widening the game’s popularity among a postwar generation of World War II veterans enjoying economic boom times and a sprawling green suburbia.
His celebrated rivalry with Nicklaus and another champion, the South African Gary Player — they became known as the Big Three — only added to Palmer’s appeal, and more often than not, he, not the others, had the galleries on his side.
“Arnold popularized the game,” Nicklaus said. “He gave it a shot in the arm when the game needed it.”
Click HERE to view the full story at The New York Times.
