Arnold Palmer
Arnold Daniel Palmer (10 September 1929 -- 25 September 2016) was an American professional golfer who is generally regarded as one of the greatest and most charismatic players in the sport's history. Dating back to 1955, he won numerous events on both the PGA Tour and the circuit now known as PGA Tour Champions. Nicknamed The King, he was one of golf's most popular stars and its most important trailblazer, the first superstar of the sport's television age, which began in the 1950s.
Palmer's social impact on behalf of golf was perhaps unrivaled among fellow professionals; his humble background and plain-spoken popularity helped change the perception of golf from an elite, upper-class pastime (private clubs) to a more populist sport accessible to middle and working classes (public courses). Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player were "The Big Three" in golf during the 1960s; they are widely credited with popularizing and commercializing the sport around the world.
In a career that spanned more than six decades, he won 62 PGA Tour titles from 1955 to 1973, placing him at that time behind only Sam Snead and Ben Hogan, and still fifth on the Tour's all-time victory list. He collected seven major titles in a six-plus-year domination, from the 1958 Masters to the 1964 Masters. He also won the PGA Tour Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, and in 1974 was one of the 13 original inductees into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Palmer died at the age of 87 while awaiting heart surgery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, having been admitted 3 days earlier for testing. After his funeral, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered in his hometown of Latrobe, PA at the Latrobe Country Club.
(So Arnold was golfing at the fifth hole of the Dave White Municipal Golf Course here in little Casa Grande. I mean, his ghost was. At least he said he was the ghost of Arnold Palmer. It's hard to be sure. Anyway, he was on the fairway (at the posted coordinates) when he lost control of his swing, poltergeists being somewhat unstable in our plane of existence, and he hit the ball rather hard. His club was clocked at 88.5m/s on the downswing, and the ball was launched at an angle of 37.15° above the horizon. Since Palmer's ghost was leaking ethereal syrup (his words, not mine) from his alternate plane of existence into ours, the collision between the club and the ball was an elastic impact (meaning that the kinetic energy of the ball and club were conserved, as were their momentum, and also as if both were perfectly rigid and underwent no pesky -- and difficult to calculate -- deformations), and the ball was imparted with the quasi-magical property of being immune to air resistance, wind, and any nasty implications of spin on the ball. That's right, Palmer's world is a lot more "ideal" than ours is. Anyway, if the mass of the club head was 0.25kg, and the mass of the golf ball was 0.045kg, and the direction of the ball's launch was 1.637° north of direct east, when launched from the published coordinates, the ball would have landed some distance away. Find the final coordinates and you will be close to finding his ball and can add a smiley to your day.)
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| Figure 1. Top view |
Figure 2. Side view |
