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Arnold Palmer has not won a major tournament since 1964, and these days, at 48, he often fails to make the cut. But he goes on, playing 25 tournaments a year. Golfers can survive in competition longer than most professional athletes. Julius Boros, for example, first won the P.G.A. championship at 48. But as Palmer has admitted, few men go on winning past 40, and Palmer's 5 children are in college now. Despite the long I stretches between displays of his old brilliance, a battalion of "Arnie's Army" remains, believing in I him, a little like Lee's Confederates after Appomattox. What the army remembers are the things that made him the first man to turn golf into a truly popular spectator sport: his remarkable assaults upon a golf course, audacious physical attacks that swept his followers with him by the millions. Just this month he was the king of the clubhouse at the Bob Hope Desert Classic, surrounded by what the press tellingly described as "middle-aged groupies."
Age is not always an enemy. Experience can equip an athlete with a savvy to compensate for what he has lost in reflexes. As Ali said in demanding a rematch with Leon Spinks last week: "I may be old, but I'm not dumb." But in physical competition, an old pro's tricks can only postpone retirement.
What is the best time to retire? Jim Brown, the great running back of the Cleveland Browns, quit at the height of his powers, in 1966, before he began having to fight his age. By contrast, Willie Mays went on until he was 42 and found himself stumbling around under fly balls for the New York Mets. There is a natural season, a range of ages, for athletes in most sports. Russia's Olga Korbut, a gold medal gymnast in 1972 at the age of 17, appeared sadly middle-aged four years later. Rumania's Nadia Comaneci, whose gymnastic performance at the 1976 Olympics received perfect scores, seemed almost hefty a year later. Swimmers age more quickly than moths.
Sometimes, when beholding the contractual orgies that professionals indulge in, bidding their prices higher and higher as the years pass, it is possible to suspect that the whole professional sports business artificially prolongs athletes' careers, keeps them slogging along for huge sums of money long after their powers have faded. Occasionally that happens. But men and women in most sports do not even reach athletic maturity until they are well into their 20s, or even later. It was not until she had hit 31 that Virginia Wade won Wimbledon last year.
Housman's familiar poem tells of an athlete dying young:
"Now you will not swell the rout/ Of lads that wore their honours out,/ Runners whom renown outran/ And the name died before the man." Al most as powerful as the drama of athletes aging is that of the golden boy destroyed in his youth.
It is the difference between, say, Lear and Lycidas. Hobey Baker, a masterpiece of athletic talent at Princeton in the years before World War I, died in 1918 when his plane crashed in France. After his graduation, Baker had said sadly: "I realize my life is finished ... I will never equal the excitement of playing on the football field."