Palmer remains the face of golf

The golden-tanned older man with the forearms of a blacksmith gives his pants a little tug and walks to the tee box Monday morning at Wilshire Country Club. He is surrounded by an army of well-wishers.

Not long ago, the par-three No. 10 at Wilshire would have been a pitching wedge or soft nine-iron for him. But now, a quick look at the pin 147 yards away, the green slightly elevated and surrounded by traps, narrows his decision to a six- or seven-iron.

He jokes that he is as nervous as if he were teeing off in a PGA tournament, and you nod, knowing the competitive fires still burn deeply in 77-year-old Arnold Palmer.

How quickly time has passed for a man to whom golf owes a debt it can never repay.

He is here to hit the ceremonial first tee shot at the Golf Digest Celebrity Invitational charity event. In attendance are Kenny G, Johnny Mathis, Tom Dreesen and Engelbert Humperdinck, among others.

But when Palmer is at a golf event, he is the only real celebrity. Like Pele and Oprah and a few others, his first name is a universal identifier. And neither Pele nor Oprah are recognized a million times a day in restaurants when the waitress asks what you’d like to drink.

Palmer says he is slowing down, that he does fewer appearances now. Then, before you know it, he will be off, in his super-fast Citation X jet. He will identify a cause, show up as if he is just another guy, win friends and influence people to make donations. This event raises money for fighting prostate cancer, a disease Palmer battled and beat, much like he has thousands of golf courses for nearly 70 years.

It was just over three weeks ago that Palmer gave in to the reality that he would no longer walk up the 18th fairway of a pro golf tournament with a Sunday lead and an adoring throng of people walking with him. Understandably, when you have experienced that as often as Palmer, it is hard to stop wanting it one more time.

But on Friday, Oct. 13, in the first round of the Administaff Small Business Classic on the Champions Tour, he hit two balls into the water on the fourth hole and told his playing partners, John Mahaffey and Lee Trevino, that it was time for his Roberto Duran. No mas, he said. After 54 years of doing so, he had played his last hole of tournament golf.

“I didn’t know when I went out there,” Palmer says now. “I told myself I was never going to say it was over. Guys used to ask me in the locker room all the time if I was going to retire. I told them I would never retire. I’d just fade away.”

On that Friday in the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas, he knew that the physical demands of his sport had become too much for a 77-year-old, and that “it just wasn’t fun anymore.”

Once he made his decision, he did something that was totally characteristic and predictable. Palmer didn’t keep score anymore, but he kept playing.

Paul Lester, a veteran golf photographer, who was there that day in Houston and also at Wilshire on Monday morning, says Palmer never considered shortchanging fans who had paid to see him play.

“The thought never occurred to him to just walk off,” Lester says.

Nor has the thought occurred to him to stop his involvement with the sport that, by the strength of his charisma, he made mainstream when 1950s television discovered him and, shortly, so did huge audiences. The thought of Palmer “just fading away” is laughable.

He says he is still going to play in the Senior Skins Game this winter. “I can do that because it is a team thing,” he says. “My partner is Peter Jacobsen, and he can carry me.”

He says he will also play in a father-son event with his 19-year-old grandson, Sam Saunders, who, Palmer says, “Can hit the ball so far I can’t see it.”

He still designs golf courses, owns a piece of the Pebble Beach complex with Peter Ueberroth and Clint Eastwood, makes dozens of appearances for various causes and is eager to talk about his sport to anyone with a microphone or pad and pencil.

With wife Kit, whom he married 18 months ago, he moves between homes in the Palm Springs area; Orlando, Fla., and his Bay Hill course; and Latrobe, Pa., where he was born and raised.

Asked for his fondest memory in golf, he says it is having his father take him aside, back at the old Latrobe Country Club, when he was barely old enough to swing a club, and teach him the right way to do it.

“That’s a better memory than winning a Master,” he says, “because what he taught me was why I won the Masters.”

Had the day at Wilshire not been warm, bright, upbeat, Palmer’s appearance would have made it so. He posed for hundreds of pictures, smiled and patted others on the back and through it all, somehow seemed genuinely amazed at the effect he has had on people.

One man approached him shyly and said, “I had to meet you and tell you that, back in 1965, in a restaurant in San Diego, my father bought you a drink and had it sent over to your table. You came over to talk to him. He never forgot that.”

When it is time for his ceremonial swing, it gets quiet. You fear a shank or dub. You hope for a Picasso brush stroke, a Koufax fastball, a Streisand high note.

You get a six-iron, right at the flag, that just catches the top edge of the trap and falls in, 25 feet from the pin.

“Needed one more club,” Palmer says, slowly joining the ranks of the millions of golfing mortals who, for years, have watched him hit it to five feet.

And who, now that he can’t, love him no less.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. For previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com./dwyre.