Arnold Palmer has a hard time realizing how far his tournament has come. Talking it up with the the Golf Channel commentators yesterday, discussing toughening up an already hard Bay Hill course and also how well his personal invitee, Rocco Mediate (one of my favorites on tour as well) was doing, Arnie was in his element.

Tanned and relaxed, he stared out at some four dozen people, most of them media, a bank of cameras at the back of the room. To his side was the new trophy with a statue of Palmer lashing away with his driver.

The winner also will get $990,000, about half as much as Palmer made in his 50 years on the PGA Tour.

The name of the tournament has a nice ring: The Arnold Palmer Invitational.

“My daughters are responsible for that,” Palmer said. “While I was playing, I would have never allowed it. That was first stipulation for not making any name change. I liked the Bay Hill Invitational logo. But when I stopped playing, that sort of opened the door for the possible name change.”

He remembers being asked to host the tournament at Bay Hill in 1979, and “it’s worked out pretty well.”

“The first tournament was $100,000, and that was about the average on tour in those days,” he said. Of course, this year we’re $5.5 million. That’s reasonable progress in 29 years.”

There has been progress all around him.

Palmer hails from Latrobe, Pa., and he used to travel to south Florida to practice in the winter when he first turned professional. But the Miami area was too crowded for his tastes, so he began scouting areas up and down the coasts of Florida.

Listen to Arnold Palmer’s Tournament Attracts All of the Top PGA Players

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 1:24 pm and is filed under News, Tournaments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.