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Less than 24 hours after Donald Trump went on a bizarre rant about golf legend Arnold Palmer, the athlete’s oldest daughter dismissed the former president’s vulgar comments about the size of her father’s penis.
“I thought it was an unfortunate way to remember my dad,” Peggy Palmer told The Independent.
At a Saturday campaign rally at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — Palmer’s birthplace — the former president spent the first 12 minutes of his speech relaying a crude anecdote about the exalted athlete.
“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said. “He took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it.”
On Sunday, Peggy, 68, said Trump “appropriating my dad in this situation... seems inappropriate.” Still, she added, she’s not spending a lot of time thinking about it or letting it get under her skin.
“My father was very modest,” Peggy continued. “We’ve lost our sense of outrage in this country over just about everything, and I’m not sure that’s OK… There are other things about my dad that would be better to focus on.”
Palmer transcended the game and took the sport itself to a higher level, fellow icon Jack Nicklaus said after “The King” died in September 2016.
He answered every piece of fan mail he received, spending upward of $100,000 a year on return postage, and built the first golf course in modern China. His childhood was decidedly blue-collar, and he took up golf at the local course where his father, who had survived polio as a boy, worked as a groundskeeper.
Deacon Palmer instilled a set of values in his son that ran counter to those Trump displays; in 2018, Peggy Palmer told The Sporting News that her dad, shortly before his death, had been “appalled” by Trump’s behavior during his 2016 presidential run.
“My dad didn’t like people who act like they’re better than other people,” she said. "He didn’t like it when people were nasty and rude. He didn’t like it when someone was disrespectful to someone else. My dad had no patience for people who demean other people in public. He had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”
Palmer was “as extraordinary on the links as he was generous to others,” said then-President Barack Obama. Writer James Dodson, who co-authored Palmer’s 2000 memoir, A Golfer’s Life, recalled him as a cherished figure who “represented everything that is great about golf.”
By contrast, Trump has 34 felony convictions.
Palmer’s daughter criticized Trump’s habit of name-checking admirable people as “a way of attaching those qualities to [himself].”
“Anybody who doesn’t see past that, I’m concerned about them,” Peggy Palmer told The Independent.
And she wasn’t about to fact check Trump’s claims about her dad, either. “I never saw him naked, actually. It’s just not something he ever… I mean, yeah. I have no idea,” she said.
Cori Britt, a former vice-president of Arnold Palmer Enterprises who first met the fabled golfer when he was 12, said on Sunday that Palmer had been “like a father to me.” He also said Trump hadn’t come up with anything particularly original onstage in Latrobe.
“The only thing I can say is that I’ve heard that same story told before,” Britt told The Independent. “Whether it’s fact or fiction, that’s not a new story. Equally, it’s not appropriate.”
