I didn’t get a personal, hand-signed Christmas card from John Daly this year — or anything from him, for that matter — but he does have a beautiful and artistic signature, at least when he’s trying hard and his Sharpie is fresh. This specious subject brings to mind a casual comment Lee Trevino made to Tiger Woods on the putting green at the Old Course a couple of summers ago: “Did Santa Claus tee off yet?” Santa Claus (aka John Daly, owner of a prosperous white beard and a belly that is richer yet) was in the group going out ahead of Trevino, Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Rory McIlroy, the whole gang gathered for a four-hole exhibition of Open champions. “No,” Woods said, not skipping a beat. “He’s teeing off now.”
Behind a nearby fence, the R&A had set up an area for kids to collect autographs of their golfing heroes. An autograph request always sounds more charming when it comes from a kid with a Scottish accent. Tiger’s signature is no great thing. You can barely tell it’s his. Trevino’s is fine. Rory’s is all loops and looks more like an Olympic logo than a signature. Big Jack’s is a thing of beauty. It’s perfect. In the history of golf signatures, only one is better. Arnold Palmer’s. The gentle curves. Its straight-line bottom and 100-percent legibility factor. There’s some art in it. The king of all signers.
There’s also this about Arnold: the way he connected with the people for whom he signed. George Clooney, in a profile in The New Yorker, talked about this years ago. He was speaking of his own method but he was describing Arnold. “‘Your job is to find the best way for those people to hold on to their dignity. For a second, they have thrown it out. They got what they came for but then they’re standing there feeling, God, that horrible taste in their mouth: ‘What now, how do I walk away?’” Clooney gives his fans a return ticket to the rest of their lives, but now slightly better. Arnold did the same. Clooney’s signature, by the way, is half a mess, but very much his own.
Warren Wolk is not an expert on movie-star signatures. But he is one on legendary sports figures. There’s no signature he likes more than Arnold Palmer’s. Wolk is the co-owner (with his wife) of All-Stars Sports Cards & Games, “a collector’s paradise since 1988,” per the shop’s business card. It is located on the outskirts of the Oxford Valley Mall, with itself is on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The mall, which opened in 1973, was once a great temple of merchandising but now seniors can do their counting-steps walks there without facing too many human obstacles.
Wolk and Tracy specialize in the Big Four: baseball, football, basketball, hockey. The shop is as mom-and-pop as a store can get, and it exists because Wolk grew up on the Phillies, the Eagles, the Sixers and the Flyers. He came into card collecting the way many sportswriters find their way to their beats, via childhood infatuation. Wolk’s father was one of the mall’s original tenants, the owner of a bookstore called Paperback Booksmith. (Its motto: Dedicated to the fine art of browsing.) The senior Wolk is a reader, a baseball fan and a member of Arnie’s Army. Warren followed suit.
The sports memorabilia business has not enjoyed an exalted reputation in recent decades, as it has morphed from a gentle rite-of-passage kiddie ritual into a semi-big business populated, to some degree, by schemers. Warren Wolk is a reminder of card-collecting from a kinder era. He has to make a living, of course. But his starting point is the joy of sports, and the joy of collecting. Card collecting, he’ll tell you, is a tactile activity in an era dominated by screens.
An older man came into the shop. This was in the run-up to Christmas. Each man recognized the other, from previous visits.
“How you doin’?” Wolk asked the man who was, just then, the lone customer in the shop. It is stuffed with goods, but organized.
“I’m doin’,” the man said.
He was looking for a stocking-stuffer gift for his grandson. He had come to the right place. One staple is a pack of random baseball cards, some of them signed.
High on a sky-blue wall and deep in the store was a framed signed-by-the-subject photograph of John Daly at the top of his backswing. The swing is so long Daly can almost scratch his stomach with his driver head, and this is not sportswriter hyperbole. Beside the Daly snap was a signed photo of Taylor Swift, guitar in hand. Below these two country icons (Teardrops on My Guitar, Hit it Hard) was a signed photograph of Bob Feller, the iconic righthander.
Everything’s for sale at All-Stars Sports Cards & Games. Almost everything. On the wall behind the counter, about as high as an arm can reach, Wolk has a signed photograph of Arnold Palmer, likely from the early 1990s, and it’s not for sale.
“One day a woman called,” Wolk told me. “She knew Arnold, and I think the story was that Arnold had lost his collection of baseball cards and she was trying to find replacement cards.”
This tracked — and didn’t. Palmer was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania, in Latrobe, and grew up rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Well into his 80s, he continued to go to at least one home Pirates game each season. Anybody, of course, could lose a baseball card collection, but Arnold never moved from Latrobe, and his mother was the ultimate pack rat, unwilling to throw out anything, including every pair of golf shoes Arnold ever wore. I once got a tour of this vast collection of Palmer memorabilia, in a giant warehouse, near Arnold’s childhood home. One shelf was crowded with golf shoes, every last pair a tanker: leather uppers and leather soles with steel spikes, all of it held together by made-in-America craftsmanship.
“I struck out on the cards but one day this signed picture arrived,” Wolk said. A little something for the effort. “Pure class.” He believes that the salutation — To Warren, Best Wishes — was handwritten by Palmer and the signature itself was machine-printed on the photo. That sounds right. I was with Arnold, in his offices in both Latrobe and Bay Hill, more than a few times and saw the care with which he went through his morning ritual, signing books, scorecards, photographs and flagstick flags, often aided and abetted by his aide-de-camp, Doc Giffen. Arnold liked signing. Sam Snead had a similar ritual, but he was never happy about it. Snead told me once he spent $10,000 a year on postage, mailing things back to fans.
