“I never reached my playing goals, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
Sam Saunders, the grandson of Arnold Palmer, announced he’s retiring from professional golf after missing the cut this week at the Korn Ferry Tour’s Magnit Championship.
Saunders, 37, who made more than 150 career starts on both the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour, was mired in the worst season of his career. He had made just four cuts this season on the Korn Ferry Tour and missed the cut in nine of his last 10 starts. He ranked 157th in the season-long points standings and had earned only $29,920. He shot 71-75 and missed the cut on Friday.
“I started this career over 15 years ago, and today was my last professional round,” he wrote on X. “It was never easy for me, and I never reached my playing goals, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything…I am excited for the next chapter of my life.”
Saunders played his college golf at Clemson and turned pro in 2009. He lost in a playoff at the Puerto Rico Open in 2015. In 2019, he shot 59 on the Korn Ferry Tour. Last season, he lost in a playoff at the Korn Ferry Tour’s Panama Championship. Saunders qualified for the U.S. Open on three occasions, but he battled a myriad of injuries in recent years.
Sam Saunders holds up a ball inscribed with 59 after a birdie on the ninth green at the Web.com Tour Championship at Atlantic Beach Country Club on Sept. 28, 2017. (Michael Cohen/Getty Images)
Saunders counted his grandfather, who passed away in September 2016, as his swing coach. In recent years, his childhood pal Eric Cole served as a second set of eyes for him.
Saunders didn’t make clear in his social media post what he planned to do next other than to say “he would always be involved in this great game of golf that has given me so much.”
320 @PGATOUR-sanctioned starts, four runner-up finishes, and a lifetime of memories.
Clive Clark believes the power game Palmer used in that 1962 win could be the key.
Clive Clark remembers watching Arnold Palmer with his powerful forearms and lashing swing reaching long par-4s and even par-5s in two shots at Royal Troon, a course where Palmer won the 1962 British Open.
“I remember him ripping irons onto I think the par-5 sixth,” said Clark, at the time still a few years away from joining what was called the English Tour. “Nobody else was getting up with a driver and an iron. He was the big hitter of that era until (Jack) Nicklaus came along.”
Clark, a La Quinta resident and golf course designer, was a long-time player on the DP World Tour and a commentator of golf broadcasts for two decades for the BBC. Clark believes the power game Palmer used in that 1962 win, Palmer’s second consecutive British Open title, could be a key to the British Open played at Troon as the event heads into the weekend.
Gallerites watch Arnold Palmer hit an iron shot on the 11th hole at Troon, Scotland, July 11, 1962, in opening round of the British Open Golf Championship.
“So much depends on which way the wind is blowing,” Clark said. “You can be going out downwind and everything seems to be a drive and a short iron or a wedge, and you come back and the wind is the other way and every hole feels like it is a drive and a 3-iron. The wind plays a big part in the Open. And it can change, both in direction and velocity.”
Clark said for fans not familiar with many of the British Open courses, Troon might look much like the other courses in the rotation.
“With the exceptions of the Old Course (at St. Andrews), they are somewhat similar in respect that they generally start growing the rough as opposed to trimming it down,” Clark said. “It is not like American rough. It is generally fescue.”
There are distinct holes on Troon, Clark added, starting with perhaps the most famous hole on the layout, the par-3 eighth hole known as The Postage Stamp.
“It is an intriguing little hole, just over 120 yards,” Clark said. “But you can play ping-pong between one bunker and the other around the green. It’s a great hole.”
Another key hole will be the 483-yard par-4 11th hole, known as The Railway.
“The 11th can be a frightening hole. People have come to grieve on that,” Clark said. “It has a railway line all the way down the right. It’s a long par-4 with a lot of gorse. Your drive over is quite a carry over the gorse there.”
Troon is hosting its 10th Open Championship this week, the last being in 2010 when Sweden’s Henrik Stenson won a final-round duel with Phil Mickelson. But in the previous six Opens at the course before Stenson’s win, dating back to Palmer’s 1962 victory, Americans were the winner each time.
Golf course designer Clive Clark at the Hideaway in La Quinta, June 30, 2017. (Jay Calderone/USA Today Network)
Clark, whose best finish in the Open Championship came with a tie for third in 1967, said it depends in part on how players adapt to the demanding British Open conditions and course setup.
“I remember one of the first Opens I played in was the 1966 Open that Jack (Nicklaus) won at Muirfield,” Clark smiled. “I remember in his winning speech, I don’t know how the members took it, but Jack said I’d like to thank all of you members for giving up your hayfield for the week.”
When something historic happens in golf, details are etched on a plaque to preserve the story.
Golfers love their history.
So occasionally when something historic happens in a tournament, at some point down the road the details of the event are etched on a plaque, which is then placed in the ground or set into a giant boulder, preserving the story and re-telling it for years to come.
Jack Nicklaus has a few of these commemorative plaques. So does Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan, Bobby Jones and, of course, Tiger Woods, who has one at Torrey Pines among other places. Rory McIlroy has a new one as well in Scotland.
Some plaques pay homage to once-in-a-lifetime shots by golfers who will always be remembered for that one shining moment. Here’s a closer look at a collection of plaques at golf courses around the world.
Two bridges across Rae’s Creek were dedicated in honor of Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson. A young pro named Arnold Palmer won the tournament for the first time.
And Amen Corner was born.
Actually, the famous stretch of holes — Nos. 11, 12 and 13 — had been in existence for 25 years, but a catchy nickname didn’t exist until Sports Illustrated golf writer Herbert Warren Wind came up with the term in 1958.
The three holes where Rae’s Creek meets the National played a vital role in the early years of the Masters.
The Nelson Bridge commemorates Nelson’s charge of a birdie at No. 12 and an eagle at No. 13 to win in 1937. The Hogan Bridge honors Hogan’s score of 274 in 1953, then the lowest 72-hole score in Masters history.
The 1958 tournament proved to be equally important.
The headline of the Augusta Chronicle highlight’s Arnold Palmer’s victory. (USA Today Network)
After playing two balls on the 12th hole amid a rules controversy and making eagle on the par-5 13th during the final round, Palmer claimed the first of four Masters wins by one shot over Doug Ford and Fred Hawkins.
Wind, a veteran golf writer who also was a jazz buff, decided to combine his interests to describe the Sunday action.
Arnold Palmer, center standing, argues a rules point at the 12th hole after his ball became embedded in the mud during final round of the Masters Golf Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in August, Ga., April 6, 1958. The final ruling gave the 28-year-old Palmer, of Latrobe, Pa., a three on the hole and a 73 round for a 284 total.
He took the name from a jazz recording, “Shoutin’ in That Amen Corner.” (Wind wrote that the album was recorded by Milton Mezzrow, but research has shown Mezzrow did not make a record by that name.)
The nickname became part of the tournament’s lore. Wind died in 2005 at age 88, but his lengthy essays and many books are still popular reading for golf fans.
“Herbert Warren Wind was one of the greatest golf writers that ever lived,” former Augusta National and Masters Chairman Hootie Johnson said. “For many years, he wrote wonderful stories about the Masters and the players that competed in the tournament.”
(Editor’s note: This story originally ran on the Augusta Chronicle’s former Masters site.)
The hole claimed another player on Saturday: recent PGA Tour winner Jake Knapp.
The smooth-swinging Knapp stepped to the tee and blasted his first two balls in the water, and his third didn’t find the water but was still too far right and went out of bounds. On his fourth tee shot, he finally put one in play, but it took him three more shots to get on the green.
Jake Knapp’s shot tracer on the par-5 sixth hole at Bay Hill. (Photo: PGA Tour)
Knapp went from even on the day to 7 over in the span of one hole. Fortunately for Knapp, his 12 isn’t even close to the highest score on the hole. John Daly famously had an 18 in 1998.
One year after his U.S. Amateur win, Palmer won his first Tour title and began to usher in golf’s new era.
(Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the May 9, 2014 issue of Golfweek)
ORLANDO – He was a 24-year-old paint salesman living in Cleveland, just seven months removed from a three-year stint in the Coast Guard. This was before his army of adoring fans, before his patented charges, and before he made golf cool.
Arnold Palmer, the son of a greenkeeper, entered the national sporting consciousness at the 1954 U.S. Amateur by defeating Robert Sweeny, 1 up, at the Country Club of Detroit.
Ask him to recount his earliest glory days and Palmer has been known to reach for a black hardcover copy of a 64-page book detailing the significance of this triumph. The cursive lettering of the title, written in gold-leaf, says it all: “The Turning Point.”
“That’s what it was in my life,” Palmer says all these years later seated in his office above the locker room at Bay Hill Club. “It gave me the confidence that I was ready to turn professional and play the PGA Tour.”
One year later, Palmer won the first of his 62 Tour titles and began to usher in golf’s modern era. But at the 54th U.S. Amateur, Palmer, who was as slender as wire and strong as cable, was a dark horse among the 1,278 entries that included Billy Jo Patton, Frank Stranahan, and Harvie Ward. Even that week, Palmer injected excitement into the championship with his high-wire act. Jimmy Gill, Palmer’s 16-year-old caddie, recalled the stir of fascination that Palmer’s go-for-broke style caused.
“If he missed the shot, he knew he would make it up later,” Gill said. “He had something about him. That walk of his, the way he attacked the ball.”
Palmer survived a daunting gantlet of foes on a par-70 course that had been stretched for the competition to 6,875 yards by Robert Trent Jones Sr. Palmer kidded USGA officials that they must have wanted him out of the tournament early. He edged Frank Strafaci, a seven-time Met (N.Y.) amateur champion, and John Veghte, a Florida State golfer, 1 up, in the first two rounds. Then in the fifth round, just to reach the quarterfinals, Palmer faced Stranahan. “Nemesis is a good word to describe our relationship on the course,” Palmer said.
Indeed, Stranahan, 32, had Palmer’s number. Previously, he smoked Palmer 12 and 11, in the 36-hole semifinal at the North and South Amateur and at the 1950 Amateur by a 4- and-3 margin. This time Palmer settled things, 3 and 1. As the golfers walked off the green, Stranahan said to Palmer, “That’s it. I’m turning pro tomorrow.”
Next, Palmer faced Don Cherry, the 1953 Canadian Amateur champ and a crooner, who had performed the night before at the nearby Dakota Inn. As Jimmy Demaret once said to him, “Don, the golfers say you’re a singer and the singers say you’re a golfer. So what the hell are you?” On this occasion, he was another tough out for Palmer. Cherry held a 2-up lead with seven holes to go but lost his rhythm and the match, 1 up. Afterward, Palmer phoned his parents in Latrobe, Pa., to tell them he had reached the 36-hole semifinal. They hopped into their car and drove eight hours to be there.
“That meant more to me than you can imagine,” Palmer said.
Arnold Palmer holds a picture of himself from the 1954 U.S. Amateur. (Photo by Tracy Wilcox/Golfweek)
His parents arrived in time to see the longest semifinal match in the history of the Amateur at the time. Palmer had defeated Ed Meister, a 38-year-old magazine publisher, in the Ohio Amateur just a few weeks earlier. The rematch was a seesaw affair in which Meister and Palmer traded the lead on seven occasions. All square on the 36th hole, Palmer overshot the green and faced looming disaster. Never fear because Palmer floated a sand wedge that halted within 5 feet of the hole. How good was it? The club placed a plaque on the spot where the ball lay buried and Palmer called it “the shot of my tournament.” Still, he crouched over a touchy, downhill slider in his pigeon-toed stance needing to make the putt to force extra holes.
“If I had missed it, I’d be gone,” Palmer said. “Who knows what would have happened in my life? I probably would have continued on playing amateur golf, and then I don’t know.”
But Palmer sank the putt, and the match continued at the first hole, where Meister had a 4-foot putt for victory. Did Palmer think his run was over?
“I never think that way,” Palmer said. “If he had had me, we wouldn’t be talking here now.”
On the third extra hole, Palmer closed out the match, muscling a 300-yard drive, reaching the par 5 in two and making birdie. That set up Palmer against Sweeny, the 1937 British Amateur champion, in the final.
“To look at us side by side,” Palmer wrote in “A Golfer’s Life,” “you might well have thought we hailed from different galaxies.”
Sweeny, 43, was a millionaire investment banker, the quintessential American playboy splitting time between Palm Beach, Florida, New York, and London. As a member at Seminole Golf Club, Sweeny played matches with Ben Hogan each winter as the future Hall of Famer tuned up for the Masters, and famously offered Hogan a stroke per side.
Thanks to a red-hot putter, Sweeny jumped out to an early 3-up lead on Palmer. As they departed the fourth green, Sweeny threw an arm around Palmer’s shoulder and, attempting to lighten the mood, said to him, “You can be sure of one thing: I can’t go on like this much longer.”
Arnold Palmer watches the flight of his tee shot on the first hole at The Country Club during the 1963 U.S. Open. (AP Photo)
Palmer pulled ahead at the 32nd hole, stretched the lead to 2 up a hole later but 3-putted the 35th hole to prolong the match. When Sweeny’s drive at the last disappeared into the trees and thick rough right, he couldn’t recover and conceded the match on the green. Moments later, James D. Standish Jr., the tournament’s general chairman, gave the signal and a 12-piece brass band located on the clubhouse terrace played “Hail to the Chief.”
Tears streamed down the face of Palmer’s mother, Doris, and he hugged her. “Where’s Pap?” Palmer asked. Deacon Palmer was lingering by the scoreboard. Six decades later, Palmer still remembers his father’s long level gaze and the way his voice went soft as he mouthed these words: “You did pretty good, boy.”
Palmer’s victory set a chain of events in motion. Instead of returning to selling paint – “That might have ruined my life if I had been any good at it,” he said – Palmer played the next week in bandleader Fred Waring’s invitational, the Waite Memorial, in Shawnee-on-the-Delaware, Pennsylvania. His boss gave him time off to play the tournament only because he’d won the Amateur. There, Palmer met Winifred Walzer, who would become his wife of 45 years until her death in 1999.
“I thought she was a rich socialite and that if I married her, I’d just be able to play golf all the time. She thought I was a rich, young executive that could give her the lifestyle she wanted. We were both wrong,” Palmer wrote in “The Turning Point.”
Soon, the young couple were engaged. Almost three months after the championship on Nov. 17, 1954, Palmer announced his intentions to turn pro. “I can’t overlook my life ambition to follow in the footsteps of my father,” Palmer wrote to the USGA. “We both have counted on this since I first started playing golf 14 years ago. My good fortune in competition this year indicates it is time to turn to my chosen profession.”
A day later, he signed an endorsement contract with Wilson Sporting Goods for $5,000 plus a $2,000 signing bonus. Palmer heeded the advice of his father. “Go and play the way you know how and you’ll be all right,” he said.
The next spring, Palmer made his debut at the Masters, where soldiers from Fort Gordon in Augusta discovered an American original, and golf would never be the same.
To borrow a phrase from Stuart Scott, Arnold Palmer was cooler than the other side of the pillow.
ORLANDO — To borrow a phrase from the late ESPN host Stuart Scott, Arnold Palmer was cooler than the other side of the pillow. So is the gear on sale at this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational in the merchandise shop as well as the club’s permanent pro shop at Bay Hill Club & Lodge.
Palmer’s multi-color logo is ever-present and used to great effect. Kudos go to Puma, who have delivered another unique line for tournament week, from shirts to hats to shoes.
But there’s a great mix of Ahead and Imperial hats and the pro shop features everything from Peter Millar to Johnny-O and women’s favorite, Ibkul. High marks across the board but nothing tops the head covers in my book. Here’s some of the best stuff available at the API merchandise shop and Bay Hill pro shop.
StrackaLine offers a hole-by-hole course guide to Bay Hill and the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard.
Bay Hill Club & Lodge in Orlando, site of the 2024 Arnold Palmer Invitational Presented by Mastercard on the PGA Tour, opened in 1961 with a design by Dick Wilson. Arnold Palmer took over the property on lease in 1970, bought it in 1975 and made adjustments to the course multiple times over the following decades.
Bay Hill will play to 7,466 yards with a par of 72. The layout is one of the toughest on the PGA Tour each year.
Thanks to yardage books provided by StrackaLine – the maker of detailed yardage books for thousands of courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the pros face this week at Bay Hill.
Harvard-trained architect Brandon Johnson hangs out his own shingle with new design firm.
Golf course architect Brandon Johnson has made it official: After 17 years working for Arnold Palmer Design Company, he is hanging out his own shingle with today’s introduction of Brandon Johnson Golf Course Design.
The Harvard-educated Johnson joined Palmer Design in 2006 when that firm moved to Orlando. Johnson and Thad Layton were the design leads in recent years for Palmer, which wound down operations late in 2023. Layton announced the formation of his own firm in September.
Johnson has worked on several dozen courses around the world for Palmer involving everything from renovations to new courses.
“I’m excited, and as I’ve explained it to people, it feels like I’m graduating college again,” said Johnson, who interned for the PGA Tour as a course designer in the mid-1990s before taking a job out of college with The First Tee. “There are a lot of opportunities, and there’s a lot of excitement.”
Palmer Design built more than 300 courses in 37 states and 27 countries, including many listed on Golfweek’s Best ranking of top modern courses in the U.S. and the state-by-state rankings of public and private layouts. The company really took off in the 1980s and has been one of the most recognized brands in course architecture ever since. But business, especially in constructing new courses, slowed for the company following Palmer’s death in 2016. Layton and Johnson had mostly worked on renovations since.
Brandon Johnson led the renovation to Old Tabby Links in Okatie, S.C., which was originally created by Arnold Palmer Design Company. It was one of many jobs Johnson undertook as one of the lead designers for Palmer Design. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)
“I’m a very seasoned professional, but you know, I’m still young in the business,” said the 50-year-old Johnson, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina who did his undergrad in design at North Carolina State before attending Harvard for graduate school. “I had a professor in my junior year that said it’s going to take you 25 years to master this profession of landscape architecture. I think that we’re always learning and we’re always growing, so now I have this incredible kind of background in my career that I’m able to apply to my own firm.”
Johnson is busy lining up jobs and plans several announcements of renovations and possibly new courses in the coming months. He intends to spend as much time as possible in the field working with course shapers – generally speaking, shapers are the highly skilled heavy equipment operators who turn an architect’s plans into reality.
“It’s interesting, in my early days at the Tour, Pete Dye had a lot of influence,” Johnson said. “He was almost always on-site, and there was always that mentality that even though we might be in the office some, how we thought about projects was the work being done in the field. Even in my time at Palmer, we certainly transitioned when Thad and I were running the company to be much more involved in the field through every step of the process. I think, for me, that’s the way I will be starting out on my own, and it’s always kind of been my mentality.”
Golf has boomed in recent years as more players took up the game during COVID, and there has been a greater interest in course architecture as well. Johnson said it’s a great time to strike out on his own.
“People are seeking out fun, new and interesting architecture,” he said. “To me, what fun means is golf is going to have a lot of variety, and it’s going to allow you to think and maybe execute a shot in several different ways. It’s drawing you in, and it’s going to make you want to get back on the golf course. I think of the feelings that I had as a kid and I just couldn’t wait to get to the golf course. …
“You hope you have the opportunities to show the golfing world what you can do as an architect, and I’m really excited about that opportunity and look forward to working with some really good clients on some unbelievable pieces of property, working with people who are equally as passionate and in love with this game as I am.”
Only one other golfer has won the event three straight years: Arnold Palmer.
SCOTTSDALE Ariz. — Scottie Scheffler won his first PGA Tour stop at the WM Phoenix Open two years ago.
Now he’s in prime position to be the first to win the event three years in a row at TPC Scottsdale.
Scheffler made five straight birdies on Nos. 9 through 13 in the resumption of his third round Sunday morning, the fourth time he’s done that in his career, to zoom up the leaderboard and get to 13 under, one stroke off the lead.
He bogeyed the 14th but then birdied the 16th to stay within a shot of first-round leader Nick Taylor, second-round leader Sahith Theegala and Charley Hoffman.
A few minutes later, he poured in a four-footer for birdie on the driveable par-4 17th to get to 14 under and forge a four-way tie for the lead. But he inexplicably putted off the green from 42 feet and into the bunker at 18 and made bogey to drop two strokes off the lead heading into the final round.
Arnold Palmer turned the hat trick in the ’60s but that was when the tournament was held at Phoenix Country Club.
The final round officially started at 10:15 a.m. local time (12:15 p.m. ET) with the third round still in progress on other parts of the course as tournament organizers decided not to re-order groups for the final round. The last group started their final rounds at about 12:15 p.m. local time.
Play was called due to darkness each of the first three days at 6:07 p.m. local time.
The Super Bowl in Las Vegas kicks off at 4:30 p.m. Arizona time, so the final round is likely to overrun the start of the big game.
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