Arnold Palmer

As I have said before, I love watching professional golf on TV. This weekend I watched the Arnold Palmer Invitational, a yearly event. This year was different in that Palmer passed away last year.

Palmer was a fine player, one of the greats and certainly was a charismatic athlete. He was one of the first athletes, in any sport, to realize how much could be made by marketing himself as a pitchman for products, and Arnie pushed a plethora of products. Okay, nothing wrong with making money and all modern athletes owe him thanks for opening those doors.

By all accounts, he was a great guy, always ready to shake hands and talk with fans and even to write countless letters to those fans. He is to congratulated for that. He was reasonably generous with charities, especially with time given to them. All in all, a good guy. He is gone and is missed, to a degree.

However, the display of outright maudlin sentimentality shown on NBC and the Golf Channel this weekend was absurd. The tournament was great, close and exciting, and would have been even more so had it not been interrupted every few minutes by some weepy overly sentimental tribute to Arnie. By the end of the weekend, I thought he was going to be canonized, declared St. Arnie of the Fairways. A tribute, short and tasteful, is fine, but this was almost constant and far from tasteful.

I am not an overly sentimental person. Okay, that's me and I know everybody is different, but I do not understand this over-the-top obsession folks have with dead celebrities. I miss family members who have passed on, but I have a difficult time understanding how people can get so mournful over someone they didn't know.

Or, maybe I have this wrong. Maybe, a lot of people who were watching, like I was, were equally put off by the endless tribute paid to a guy who, in the long run, was just a damn fine golfer. Maybe, the Network executives and the PGA were just hoping to pull in some viewers by telling them that they should be part of the reverence paid to Palmer. I wonder what he would have thought of the whole ridiculous, sorry spectacle.