ARNIE

The 12:10 p.m. tee time for Thursday’s pro-am at Wilshire Country Club included a deeply tanned, silver-haired man in a pink shirt who had people straining against the ropes three-deep to catch a glimpse of him.

It’s pretty clear that Arnold Palmer could draw a crowd changing his shoes, combing his hair or lifting a fork. It probably would be televised too.

Just about anything Palmer does attracts attention, which seems fair, mainly because he’s the most compelling figure in golf since Bobby Jones.

You know what Palmer means to golf?

“He’s our Babe Ruth,” Jim Colbert said.

Maybe that’s why Palmer seemed to go out of his way to make his suddenly intimidated amateur partners comfortable. After one player in his group hooked a drive under some trees, Palmer was sympathetic.

“Howard, I’ve been there. It’s not nice.”

Between conversations with the gallery outside the ropes, Palmer praised another amateur’s iron shot to the green. Then Palmer pulled his scorecard out of his back pocket and asked for a pencil.

“One with an eraser,” he said.

Palmer is 68 now, and the four Masters titles, two British Opens, one U.S. Open and 60 PGA Tour victories are written in ink in the record book and aren’t going anywhere.

Neither is Palmer, maybe. He will play in a dozen Senior PGA Tour events this year, the last being the Ralphs Senior Classic that starts today at Wilshire.

The problem isn’t his age or his physical condition. Palmer said his health is good, more than nine months after surgery for prostate cancer.

Last month, Palmer got another checkup at the Mayo Clinic and was told he didn’t need to come back for a year.

How many times he’s going to come back to Los Angeles, well, that’s not as definite. Palmer was asked how long Arnie’s Army is going to muster.

“That’s a good question,” he said. “I hope it’s a long time. But I do it day by day.

“The fans, their attention, it just doesn’t seem to stop. And that pleases the hell out of me.”

Then there is the state of his golf game. That doesn’t please Palmer at all. He hasn’t finished higher than a tie for 32nd this year in a senior tour event. He hasn’t won a senior tournament in nine years and his last PGA tour victory was the 1973 Bob Hope.

But there was Palmer beating about 300 golf balls on the range Tuesday at the Titleist test center near San Diego. Tinkering with his game is something Palmer loves to do, but his hectic schedule involves much more than swinging a club.

If he’s not playing in an exhibition, making a commercial, playing an event, opening a course, doing charity work or accepting an award, then he’s piloting his own jet to an exhibition, to a commercial shoot, to a tournament . . . and so on.

Palmer’s business interests are varied, but they revolve around his booming course-design partnership with Ed Seay. There are 162 Palmer courses worldwide and 53 more on the way.

Seay, who has worked with Palmer for 27 years, said Palmer is not your normal partner.

“He’s a phenomenal human being,” Seay said. “Every year he continues to amaze me.”

It’s in the locker room where Palmer seems most at home, where he’s just one of the guys. He playfully insults Graham Marsh for winning too much, advises Walter Morgan on how to grow more hair and offers a greeting to Terry Dill: “Hello, Pickle.”

Then Palmer sees Colbert. He walks over to him and gets Colbert in a headlock. They laugh easily. It’s the first time they have seen each other since Colbert had prostate cancer surgery in June.

“There is nobody, nobody like Arnold Palmer,” Colbert said.

Palmer isn’t much for the night life any more. He said by eight o’clock, he’s ready for bed. He’s tired, but he said it’s a good kind of tired.

As for his cancer, Palmer said he simply dealt with it. If it were golf, it would have been a plugged ball in a bunker, a downhill putt on a fast green, a blind tee shot over a lake to a landing area about as wide as a cart path.

“To be perfectly honest with you, I would like to think I just treated it as one of those setbacks life deals you from time to time.

“Some people never have anything go wrong in their life and then they die. Others’ paths are different. For me, it was something I hope I have been able to handle properly.

“If I can get other people to overcome their disappointment and get on with their lives, I’d be very pleased with that.”

Palmer said not a single day passes without people telling him their experiences with cancer or offering him encouragement or advice. Still others have more personal words for him that Palmer says he feels deeply.

“They say ‘I can’t thank you enough . . . you saved my life.’ ”

And so it goes for Palmer, a legend before our very eyes . . . and a pink-shirted, walking, swinging billboard for cancer awareness. That’s not such a bad thing, is it?

“I don’t think my life will ever be the same as it was before,” he said.

As far as goodbyes go, Palmer’s has been a very long one. He began the end close to his Pennsylvania home at Oakmont Country Club, where Palmer made the 1994 U.S. Open his 27th and last one. The scene, soon to be a familiar one, was simple, but touching--Palmer doffing his straw hat as he walked the 18th fairway, fighting back tears, getting a standing ovation.

He also played his final PGA in 1994, at stubbornly hot Southern Hills in Tulsa, Okla., where he had tied for second place behind Dave Stockton in 1970, his last top-10 finish in the PGA.

Palmer went to St. Andrews in 1995 to play his last British Open on the Old Course, which was also the site of his first British Open in 1960. Just as he had 35 years before, Palmer stayed in the same hotel along the 18th fairway.

On the Friday when he would miss the cut, Palmer stopped while playing the 18th hole. He removed his visor and posed for pictures as he stood on the ancient stone bridge that spans the Swilcan Burn. Palmer waved his visor while the people who jammed the windows of the buildings in Old Grey Town cheered and whistled.

Of course, players had fans long before Palmer, but not until Palmer’s emergence in the late 1950s was the scope so grand that it needed a name. Arnie’s Army was born, not surprisingly at about the same time that television discovered the joy of Arnold Palmer.

Donald “Doc” Giffin has worked with Palmer since 1966 and seen the fans’ relationship with Palmer evolve from mere affection to fanaticism and back to affection.

“It’s a phenomenon, no question about that,” Giffin said. “They just sense he loves people, and so they love him back. I always felt like there was a mutual magnetism.”

If only there were more of Palmer to go around. Next year’s calendar is already nearly filled, and it might include fewer tournaments than ever. Palmer said it’s no fun playing poorly and at this stage of his life, he doesn’t want to do things he doesn’t enjoy.

Gary Player, for one, hopes Palmer plays on, and for a long time to come.

“Jack Nicklaus and I, we love golf, but Arnold absolutely adores it,” Player said. “There’s never been such an ambassador for golf as Arnold. He’s a great human being in the greatest country in the world, the United States. I tell you, if I lived in this great country, I’d vote for him for president. Yes, I would. That’s what I’d do.”

When he learned what Player had said, Palmer nearly choked on his orange juice. Don’t nominate him for president, or sainthood or even icon, Palmer said.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’m sure I’ll make a lot more,” Palmer said.

After all, he’s only human. Even though his Army might tell you something different.

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Golf at a Glance

* What: Ralphs Senior Classic.

* Where: Wilshire CC

(6,571 yards, par 71).

* When: Today-Sunday

* Purse: $1 million.

* TV: Channel 9 (Saturday 1-3:30 p.m., Sunday 3-5 p.m.