On the road outside the Saint Vincent Archabbey Basilica, the monasterial quiet of an autumn morning was being shattered every few minutes by the roar of a private and/or corporate jet landing at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport.
For a day that started in such aural dichotomy, the people who had come to say farewell to the King would remember the soulful clarity of the way this elegant memorial service made them feel, but I’ll remember it for the way it sounded.
I’ll remember Vince Gill, the great country singer who more than two hours deep in an emotional wind tunnel, managed to get through James Taylor’s “You’ve Got A Friend,” which he selected and presented so carefully, in all its lyrical delicacy, even coaxing the Basilica audience to sing some of it with him.
It’s exceedingly difficult for someone to hit any kind of vocal stride with Vince Gill and Sweet Baby James; it’s practically impossible with a lump in your throat.
“They’ll take your soul if you let them, aw but don’t youuu let them.”
I’ll remember the way they quaked that out.
I’ll further remember Aaron Copeland’s soaring fanfare for what was so obviously on this day a most uncommon man.
The perfect live orchestral ensemble and the harmonically magnificent choir were perhaps the only people in the building’s enormous nave that seemed to carry the burden of Arnold Palmer’s legacy with relative ease.
The distinguished speakers I’ll remember less well, although each hit all the right notes despite their pain, still fresh and hot. But by Tuesday the words had been coming for more than week. The verbal sentiments had just about all been delivered. It was the sound of loss and heartache that hung thick in the air.
“There’s a saying that there are no irreplaceable people,” Charlie Mechem said, “but whoever came up with that line never knew Arnold Palmer.’
It was Mechem, a past commissioner of the LPGA and one of the game’s leading diplomats, who played master of ceremony for this memorial, who tried to convince the assemblage that Palmer would want the coming hours to be upbeat, that the King’s famous upturned thumb should be the image to sustain them.
They nodded knowingly, in full agreement, but their hearts outweighed the suggestion.
Jack Nicklaus could barely get through his shift near the altar, his voice cracking multiple times as he tried to line up life’s ironies like an 8-foot putt. He recalled the first time he had ever seen Palmer, the man who was to be both his fiercest rival and perhaps greatest friend, and he recalled the exact date, “Sept. 25, 1958.” Fifty-eight years to the day later, the King was dead.
“At times he played like no one else before him or since,” said Nicklaus, whom Palmer helped drive to sporting accomplishments beyond even his own, “and at times he played like everybody else who ever gripped a club.”
This enduring mix of everyman commonality and cultural royalty had long been Palmer’s trademark, but on balance it was not the King’s dossier of accomplishments in golf, aviation, philanthropy and sports marketing that dominated the spoken sentiment. It was his touch.
“He had an incredible ability to make you feel good about yourself,” said Tim Finchem, commissioner of the PGA Tour. “When you saw him play, it was the same thing as meeting him.”
Palmer’s grandson, pro golfer Sam Saunders, struggled in his grief like many of the speakers, but still managed to deconstruct the ways in which someone who meant so much to the world could mean even more to his family.
“So now I’m going to try and follow the best advice he ever gave me,” Saunders said. “Talk less. Listen more.”
My best memories of Palmer are ancient, from the time when his telegenic magnetism essentially forced golf onto television. There he was, with Nicklaus and Gary Player, making the game look so attractive. But it was Palmer the kids wanted to be.
“Men wanted to be him, women adored him, and children looked up to him,’’ said Annika Sorenstam, the great pro whose son was born prematurely at Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children in Orlando, Fla., and whose story of how the care she got from the medical professionals there rivaled the support she got from the King himself again moved the audience to tears.
Sorenstam knows, as we all do on some level, that it’s in this way we should most wish to be like Arnold Palmer. At the end of all our days, it will not be about who we knew or what we owned or even what we accomplished. All that any of us will have is the way we treated people.
The choir waded into “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” their voices simply unforgettable.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: October 5, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
