NEWTOWN SQUARE — It is 3:56 p.m. on a misty, humid fall afternoon in this lush, well-manored suburb.
Three golf carts charge up the 18th hole fairway at Aronimink Golf Club, a fivesome, their shots scattered all over. A slightly stooped form exits one of the carts. He walks to the only ball in the middle of the fairway.
It is Gary Player, the Black Knight as always dressed in darkness, from hat to glove to white-and-black shoes. His swing remains balanced, slightly violent, and, with a helping wind, his ball climbs the hill and trickles onto the front right of the green. He’s 50 feet away. He blows his first putt 10 feet past. His grandson, Alex Hall, an 18-year-old senior at Perkiomen Valley High who won the individual Pioneer Athletic Conference title on Monday, jars his 12-footer for par, but, moment’s later, grandpa’s putt lips out.
He looks to the heavens, accusingly.
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Player won nine majors, 24 PGA Tour events, and at least 118 international tournaments. He was the second of only six career grand-slam winners, but in that moment he was all of us: just a guy trying to bring it home on a hard par-4.
Player did just that, and did it on that same green, the 72nd hole of the 1962 PGA Championship. The scene was striking: Player, at 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds, led former Illinois quarterback Bob Goalby by one stroke as they settled over their birdie putts. Player lagged his 40-footer two feet past the pin. Goalby charged his try high and long. Player tapped in to and claimed the third leg of his career grand slam.
He seemed to freeze as he bent over to get the ball out of the hole. He wasn’t frozen. He was praying.
“This is exactly what I said: ‘I thank you, dear Lord, for this wonderful victory, this wonderful and greatest country in the world. I want you to know that I’m very, very thankful. Thank you,’” Player said.
The PGA Championship returns to Aronimink from May 14-17. Player will act as an unofficial host. He’s up to it.
Player turns 90 in November. Thanks to a strict diet and rigorous exercise routine, he still has the energy of a 20-year-old, body of a 30-year-old, the face of a 50-year-old, and nearly a century of memories that has curated a world view rivaled by few people of the 20th-century.
From Adolf Hitler to John Lennon to Eldrick “Tiger” Woods, Player not only has seen it all, he’s been almost everywhere. He has, after all, logged more than 15 million air miles. In fact, it can be argued that Player — Hall of Fame golfer, philanthropist, environmentalist, and reformed apartheid devotee turned human-rights champion — is the most interesting public figure on the planet.
That’s the man to whom a space at Aronimink was dedicated Thursday evening, the Gary Player Lounge, an oaken-floored, leather-chaired clubhouse pub with a fireplace, photos of Player’s finest moments, and a pair of autographed, black-and-white saddle shoes in a glass case on the corner of the bar. The ceremony, conducted by members with Aronimink crests on their blue blazers (it’s that kind of place) happened, of course, after Player completed his latest round there. He’s a fixture.
Player’s daughter, Amanda-Leigh Player Hall, lives about 15 miles north of the club. That’s where Player and his wife Vivienne rode out the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. She died in 2021, of cancer, which makes his visits to the Philadelphia area these days even more precious.
Player loves his family, but he also adores the local courses. He considers Pine Valley, the New Jersey gem, the best in America, though he’s also fond of Whitemarsh Valley, where he held the course record of 63 for several years after finishing second in the IVB-Philadelphia Golf Classic in 1963. Sure, he’s got deep roots in South Africa, and yes, he owns a lovely place in the golf haven of Jupiter, Fla., but when Player touches down at Philadelphia International Airport, he feels like he’s home.
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Honorary Philadelphian
“When I land, you know, I feel something,” he said. “Maybe it’s my daughter living here, or winning the PGA here, or playing here and around here every year. I don’t know — Rocky, you know? — there’s just so much about this place that just has been an integral part of my life.”
Player said he feels kinship with the scrappy, underdog ethos of Philadelphia. He was no child of great privilege.
He lost his mother to cancer at age 9. His first trip to the United States was as a professional, after winning the 1956 South African Open and finishing fourth at the British Open. It was a trip made possible when his father, Harry Player, a middle-class gold miner, wrote to Augusta National founder Bobby Jones from Johannesburg and asked for an invitation to the Masters. Jones agreed. Harry raised money from his golf buddies friends to send Gary to Augusta National. He finished 24th. Five years later, he won it.
The next year, he won at Aronimink, a culmination of happenstance. The week before he’d missed the cut by one stroke trying to defend his British Open title at Royal Troon, when he hit a shot just inches too far and it rolled out of bounds. That sent to him to Aronimink two days earlier than he’d planned, and in a foul mood.
When Player turned off Saint Davids Rd. onto Aronimink’s long driveway, he fell in love.
“I love nature, because it’s been an integral part of my life,” Player said, gesturing at the rolling hills beyond the windows. “I love birds, I love trees, I love water. I’ve got a great affinity with nature, so I come here and, man, I feel at home, because of the way this place presents itself.”
Legacy
Player is very conscious of his evolution in the life he’s led. He advocated for apartheid in his 1966 memoir, Grand Slam Golf, but five years later he’d helped Black golfer Lee Elder enter the South African Open, the first integrated sporting event during apartheid. Within a decade, he’d begun changing with the times. By the mid-1980s, he railed against the policy, and, through the Gary and Vivien Player Foundation, has since raised millions of dollars of charity to causes that benefit Black youth all over the world, none more so than the Blair Atholl Pre-Primary School near his hometown of Johannesburg.
Golf and racism (as well as sexism) has endured a slow and complicated detangling. After all, Aronimink lost the 1993 PGA Championship because it had no Black members and refused to allow any applicant to cut ahead of its lengthy waiting list.
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Player eagerly cites examples of his campaigning for Black golfers to join his ranks. He says he once played in a charity event near Cleveland, where Charlie Sifford lived, to fund Sifford’s first season on the PGA Tour, when the tour dropped its “Caucasian-only” policy in 1961.
That’s why, of all his achievements, Player is immensely proud to have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which, for him, is the manifestation of a life well lived both in terms of accomplishment and humanism.
He also anticipates with great relish the opportunity to speak at the White House next week, recounting the rounds of golf he has played in various United States presidents.
Like many athletes, especially golfers, Player respects the office of the Presidency, if not always the man in it. He recently posted this on Facebook:
“I have a deep-rooted love for America and will always respect the person who holds the top office in the world.”
Make of that what you will. In the final analysis, Players has done far more good on this Earth than harm.
For that, Aronimink immortalized him.
