A few years after golf legend Arnold Palmer died in 2016, Louise Bellisimo was chatting with her friend Kit, Palmer’s second wife.
Bellisimo lives in Newport Beach, California, and remembered that Kit had a house at the famed Tradition Golf Club in La Quinta, a course in that state’s Coachella Valley designed by Arnold himself. “I said, ‘The next time you’re down in the desert, let me know and I’ll drive over,’” Bellisimo says. (The course is about 40 minutes from Palm Springs International Airport.) But, she recalls, her friend said that “nobody’s using it” and that Palmer’s daughters intended to sell the house. “I’d already stayed here with them, and I knew how charming it was,” Bellisimo says. “And I said, ‘Well, I’d like to buy it.’”
