Burning Question: Do golfers actually drink Arnold Palmers?

The answer is yes. And with that, I can shut down the computer and get an early start on happy…Oh, yeah. Evidence.

“Absolutely—I had one yesterday,” says Adam Heieck, an avid golfer who also happens to run the Youth On Course program based at Poppy Hills Golf Course in Pebble Beach. And Ricardo Mirelles at Point Pinos Grill reports that the restaurant at Pacific Grove Golf Links has to have the iced tea and lemonade combination in stock because golfers ask for it all the time.

“Oh, yeah—Arnold Palmers are a big one,” adds Matt Pennington, who manages both Laguna Seca Golf Ranch and Pacific Grove Golf Links.

And if that’s not concrete enough, the Chicago-based market research firm IRI reports that Arizona Beverages sold 500 million 24-ounce cans of their Arnold Palmer Half & Half in 2018. 

But there’s another matter. From the first time a frustrated Scotsman—or ancient Roman, depending upon which golf historian you ask—took a whack at a wad of leather on some windswept moor until now, golf has been a pastime. Something like 24 million Americans play the game. Yet somehow, in its long history, only one golfer earned naming rights to a famous drink.

Tiger Milk is not named for Tiger Woods. (Gross.) There’s no slipping anyone a Mickelson. Well...there is the John Daly, but that doesn’t really count.

And Palmer didn’t even give the blend its name. The story he used to tell involved him asking for iced tea with some lemonade added while at a restaurant. A woman sitting at a nearby table overheard, flagged down a server and pointed, saying she wanted what Arnold Palmer was drinking. It just grew from there.

He may not have even invented the Arnold Palmer. People have been squirting lemon into tea—hot or cold—for quite some time. But it was an idea he never considered until the day in the 1960s when his wife stirred up a large pitcher of tea. In an ESPN 30 for 30 episode, Palmer claimed the notion struck him suddenly. And when they arrived at the ideal ratio of two parts tea to one of lemonade, he said “I’m going to take it when I play golf.”

Before the golf legend could even begin to blend the drink that made him famous, there first had to be tea. And lemonade.

We know that American colonists developed a preference for tea early on, sometimes brewing it by the harborful. But if early recipes are to be believed, cold tea was meant only for punch, and punches of the day all involved alcohol. So maybe the drink should rightfully be called a John Daly.

Iced tea—and sweet tea in the South—became more common with the invention of iceboxes and then refrigerators. An 1879 recipe from a cookbook with the odd title of Housekeeping in Old Virginia involved a green tea brew and plenty of time to allow it to cool. From there, the recipe advised, “Fill the goblets with ice, put two teaspoonfuls granulated sugar in each, and pour the tea over ice and sugar.”

The kicker: “A squeeze of lemon will make this delicious and healthful, as it will correct the astringent tendency.”

A recipe involving black tea appeared in 1884’s best-selling (probably) Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book: What to Do and What Not to Do in Cooking. Mrs. Lincoln (no, not that Mrs. Lincoln) called for tea, sugar cubes and a wedge of lemon.

Of course, Palmer’s twist (get it?) involved lemonade. In a piece for History Channel, Kathleen Williams notes that a version of lemonade first appears in the work of Nasir-I-Khusraw, a Persian poet. He died around 1088, so there’s no way of checking the recipe. But there are recipes for a lemon syrup drink dating back to the 1200s.

The evil—that’s an opinion based upon the following—first lady Lucy Hayes (of Rutherford B. Hayes fame) banned alcohol from the White House, serving lemonade instead.

So it appears that while Palmer may—or may not—have been the first to find the right ratio of tea and lemon at two to one...Damn it! It seems like sometimes he went for three to one. And Arizona Beverage pegs it at one to one.

Never mind. The question of invention—really there’s no need to answer it.

One final thing to ask, though. How did Arnold Palmer order an Arnold Palmer? Did he just say “I’ll have a me”?

He passed not long ago. Fortunately the intrepid investigative reporters at the Washington Post thought to ask.

“I was embarrassed to ask for an Arnold Palmer,” he told the Post. “I’d always say, ‘Can I have an iced tea and put about a third of it in lemonade. They said, ‘Oh, you want an Arnold Palmer!’”