Yeah, we love Pennsylvania. That’s our very special hello to Latrobe. Oh, I love Latrobe. You know why? The home of Arnold Palmer. This is the home of my friend Arnold Palmer. And he loved Latrobe. You know, he turned out to be one of the greatest golfers in the world. He started off very, very poor. He had no money, just had a lot of talent and a lot of muscle. He was a strong guy.
[Roughly ten minutes of “weaving” about Arnold Palmer’s youth, Arnold Palmer’s father, golf, “stiff shafted golf clubs,” the candidate’s golf courses, building villas, and the entertainment agency IGM.]
He was an incredible man, he was an incredible champion, and he came from Latrobe. And so when I said a couple of days, and I said, “Where are we going to be today?”
They said, “Sir, we’re going to be in Latrobe."
I said, “Do you know what that means?”
“No, sir, what does that mean?”
I said, “That means Arnold Palmer,” because Arnold told me he could be, and I knew he could be. They wanted him everywhere. Just like I wanted to name a villa after him. Everybody wanted him. He could have been any place he wanted. He said, “No, this is where I’m going. This is the place I love.”
So you know, I’ve been here before, and I told the story before—not in this kind of detail. Because, you know, you have these teleprompters. If I would read it off a teleprompter, it wouldn’t be so good, right? And it would be a lot shorter. It wouldn’t be as good. And I didn’t want to do that. I said, “When I come here, I’m going to tell them the real story of Arnold.”
Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that with all due respect to women—and I LOVE women. But this guy, this guy—this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough, and I refused to say it, but when 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. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold and say, “Man.” But he was really something special. Arnold was something special.
So I just want to tell you you’re very lucky, the people that live in Latrobe, and it’s an honor for me to be here because of him, and he was, actually, he was a great man, and I don’t think there would be golf to this to the extent that you have it today, it probably wouldn’t be that way without the great Arnold Palmer. So enjoy it, everybody, enjoy. And I had to tell you the shower part of it because it’s true, what can I tell you? We want to be honest, we want to be upfront, it’s true.
Watch a video of the author performing a monologue of this speech.