Arnold Palmer Father Quotations

My grandson Sam Saunders has been playing golf since he could hold a club and I spent a lot of time with him over the years. Like my father taught me, I showed him the fundamentals of the game and helped him make adjustments as he and his game matured over the years.

From the beginning it was drilled into me that a golf course was a place where character fully reveals itself -- both its strengths and its flaws. As a result, I learned early not only to fix my ball marks but also to congratulate an opponent on a good shot, avoid walking ahead of a player preparing to shoot, remain perfectly still when someone else was playing, and a score of other small courtesies that revealed, in my father's mind, one's abiding respect for the game.

I received many years of good advice from my father - how to live, how to play, how to be a gentleman.

That's another thing about my father. He made me very conscious of the fact I wasn't very good and I had to prove to him that I was good. And that hung with me, and I always wanted to play golf with him and show him. He said Never, Never tell anyone how good you are. Show them!

I was born in 1929, that was the depression, so the golf course was manned by my father and two guys, they worked for my dad and they took me with them everywhere they went. And it was fun.

I wanted to emulate my father. I wanted to be as tough as he was. I wanted to do the things that he did. I watched him.

I was playing cowboys and Indians in the trees, and then I started hitting the golf club with clubs father sawed off for me, and I began playing right here with my father.

My father started on this golf course at Latrobe when he was sixteen years old. He was digging ditches when they were building the golf course.