PHOTOS SECTION

Arnie in grade school. He attended a two-room schoolhouse in Youngstown, Pennsylvania, where he did most of his adolescent carousing. A two-fisted boy, he had his share of fights. Truth be told, he enjoyed them.

Arnie’s mom, Doris, was as gentle as Pap was tough. “She was a salvation,” Palmer said. “I was always afraid to lose because of my father’s reaction, but I never felt that way about my mother.”

THE ARNOLD PALMER COLLECTION

Arnold met Winnie on a Tuesday and asked her to marry him that Saturday. They eloped. (“I took her out the window, as a matter of fact.”) “A golf wife,” she said, “can pick her husband up when he’s down.”

THE ARNOLD PALMER COLLECTION

First daughter Peggy getting a lesson from Arnie as Winnie looks on. “[Peggy and Amy] don’t agree with their father about a single thing,” Winnie said, “except the things that truly matter.”

Deacon (far left) and Doris (two places to his right) on the Augusta lawn between the clubhouse and the course around 1959. “Why do I want to win the Masters?” Palmer said. “Why do I want to breathe?”

HARRY FRYE

Arnie was always the most colorful golfer, even when it came to clothing. At a Masters, Phil Mickelson elected a salmon shirt, saying, “It doesn’t look good on me, but Arnold Palmer likes to wear this color.”

GOLF DIGEST

Most of the good pros before Palmer were purposely stoic. They wanted to hide their feelings. Arnie threw his out there for everybody to see. “He showed up different,” Tommy Bolt said.

The left seat for 25,000 hours. “I used to think of myself as a realist as a golfer and a romantic as a pilot,” Palmer said. “I don’t know when I became a romantic as a golfer and a realist as a pilot.”

THE ARNOLD PALMER COLLECTION

Walking through a funnel of flowers from the sixth tee to the par 3 green below: 50 Masters exactly, four victories. “Everything about Augusta turned me on,” Palmer said. He always knew it would be his home.

DOM FURORE, GOLF DIGEST

Palmer and his assistant, Doc Giffin, in Arnold’s office workshop at Latrobe, stocked with some 2,000 old putters. “Maybe Doc’s real title should be ‘friend,’” Arnold said, “or ‘everlasting friend.’”

Golf’s Big Three—Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Arnold Palmer. “At the end of the day,” Player said, “the three of us played not for money, not for trophies, not for history, but for each other.”

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Palmer and his dog, Mulligan. In the end, Arnie didn’t walk Mulligan so much as they walked each other, both allowing for his friend’s diminishing capacity. “We’ll be old one of these days,” Arnie said.

THE ARNOLD PALMER COLLECTION

On a September day in 2016, at Latrobe Country Club and, 10 miles away, over the Palmer statue at Laurel Valley Golf Course in Ligonier, a rainbow appeared. The Arnold Palmer rainbow, Pennsylvanians called it.

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