His first day on the job eight years ago, Drew Donovan met Arnold Palmer and knew he was working for someone special.
Now Donovan is in his first year as the tournament director of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and it’s clear he is also in charge of something special.
Something very special.
“The energy at this place is amazing today,” Donovan said as the final round commenced on Sunday.
No doubt about it, The Arnie has done it yet again.
Incredible course.
Elite field.
Amazing Sunday drama.
With all due respect to The Players Championship, it was The Arnie that felt more like a fifth major this weekend.
Five players were tied for the lead with three holes left and six different golfers were atop the leaderboard on the final day, including three former major winners (Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth) and three former API champions (Scheffler, McIlroy and Tyrrell Hatton). And in the end, it was a fairytale finish by Kurt Kitayama, who overcame a triple bogey on No. 9 and then outplayed the best golfers in the world to record his first PGA Tour victory.
“What a great back nine; you could just feel it [the drama] out on the golf course,” McIlroy said.
You could not only feel it, you could see it, hear it, taste it and smell it on a scintillating Sunday when the weather was sunny, the crowds were huge, the hospitality suites were packed and golf shirts and hats were flying off the shelves at the merchandise tents.
Arnie’s Army?
This was more like Arnie’s Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard combined into one. Everybody who was anybody, it seems, was at the King’s tournament this weekend. The crowds were a melting pot, sort of like the tournament director himself. Donovan grew up a Florida Gators fan in Crystal River, he attended Florida State as an undergrad and earned his master’s in sports management from UCF.
Likewise, at The Arnie, you see Gators, Seminoles and Knights and fans from all different rooting sections coming together for an afternoon of sun and fun at Orlando’s premier sporting event. There were even some Gator fans out on the course Sunday cheering for Kitayama, whose swing coach J.C. Deacon coaches the UF golf team.
Don’t get me wrong, we have some really cool sporting events in town every single year. March Madness — the first and second rounds of the NCAA men’s tournament — will be at the Amway Center next week. We have become a destination city for international soccer friendlies. We are about to have a Power 5 football program (UCF) in our city and we annually host three college football bowl games. And, of course, Orlando Magic and Orlando City games are always fun to watch.
But there is no event in Orlando proper that annually brings the best athletes in its sport together for a four-day extravaganza like The Arnie does. Every year, tens of thousands of fans come together for this golf festival where you not only get to watch the best of the best go head to head, but you can also pay homage to the history and heritage of Arnold Palmer himself.
One minute, you can watch Spieth make his charge up the leaderboard; the next minute you can have your picture taken in front of the 13-foot bronze statue of Arnie. One minute, you can watch Spieth falling back down the leaderboard; the next minute you can enter the “Legacy Room” and go into a simulator and swing one of the clubs Arnie used to win the 1960 U.S. Open.
And the most beautiful thing about The Arnold Palmer Invitational is that it keeps getting better and better every year. It used to be The Arnie had competition from other tournaments on the Florida swing in trying to attract the game’s top players. That’s no longer the case.
In 2016, the PGA Tour moved its World Golf Championship event away from Donald Trump’s Doral Resort in Miami. The Honda Classic in Fort Lauderdale and the Valspar Championship in Tampa have been weakened by the PGA Tour schedule.
Meanwhile, The Arnie has been made one of the Tour’s 13 “designated” events by increasing the purse this year from $12 million to $20 million and pretty much requiring the top players in the world to be here. If not for the designated-event status, it’s doubtful that one of the Tour’s main attractions — Spieth — would have been playing this week. Spieth has only played The Arnie one other time in his career and that was in 2021 when he was in a major slump and trying to find his way out of the wilderness.
“The commitment of the PGA Tour’s to Mr. Palmer’s legacy feeds into the commitment of the players as well,” Donovan says. “We work very hard to keep growing this event, but we want to keep the same vibe that Mr. Palmer would have wanted.”
If the King were still alive today, he would have given the dramatic final round on Sunday his trademark thumbs-up sign.
Take a bow, Mr. Donovan, your staff, the volunteers, the PGA Tour and mostly the players themselves.
The Arnie has done it again.
