Dan:
Hanse's 16,000+ sf putting green behind Golf House will be opened in September.
It was a wonderful evening yesterday at Golf House and today up there and there's a ton of great stuff to the new Palmer Center.
The Palmer Center opening ceremony this afternoon was terrific with a number of heart-felt speeches but none topped Arnie when he got up and gave his at the end. His speech was so...well, just so Arnie---down to earth. He said it pretty much tops all the awards and things done for him in his life and career and in the end you could see he was struggling to keep it together. Really touching stuff.
The Museum is excellent and Rand was explaining that the theme of the museum has shifted from basically being about the history of golf's balls and implements (The old "collectibles") to being much more about the people themselves who have made up the history of American golf.
But the thing that really blew all of us away was this artist rendering of Arnold Palmer as soon as you enter the first room on the right once you come in the door of Golf House (I guess its the Arnie room).
The rendering of Palmer when you first look at it appears to be a black ink on white depiction of Arnie from about shoulder up with that sort of determined, pensive look on his face perhaps in the heat of competition we all recognize so well as "Arnie".
When I first saw it Rand Jerris himself was explaining it to a group of visitors. Below it is an interactive sound and touch-screen mechanism to bring up the rendering on the wall above it, and enlarge it and manipulate it around any way you want to.
It took me maybe five minute to actually figure out what it really was. And just as I was figuring it out the artist and his wife showed up---James Garrett Chase---a communications professor in Northern California, who is some kinda nice man who always just loved Arnold Palmer.
At first glance, what it looks like it's vaguely fuzzy black ink lines, thousands of them depicting his face, shirt, hair etc. But when you touch the screen that depicts it below the art work and you really enlarge it you realize the lines that make up the depiction are actually miniscule text that essentially tracks Arnold Palmer's entire life----all the way from things he remembered that his mother told him to all the memorable things from golf and throughout his entire life, even including some scoring totals.
Apparently the idea to do this in this way hit artist James Chase in the middle of the night fifteen years ago and it took him fourteen years to do this piece of art. He even explained how he had to arrange the various text in ways that played into the tonality of the expression, facial lines and even Arnie's hair. The entire thing is made up of text so small the naked eye can't possiblly make it out---eg to read it you have to massively enlarge it on the interactive mechanism below it.
James Chase even explained that to do text that small he had to train himself to just lightly touch the paper with ink with the narrowest pen in existence BETWEEN heartbeats.
I bet even with this explanation you still can't figure out what it really is. James Chase said when he presented the whole idea to Palmer about fourteen years ago with the idea of the artistic facial and such lines being miniscule text it took Arnie maybe and hour to figure out what it was going to be and when he finally did figure it out Arnie said: "That just may be the most remarkable thing I've ever heard of in my life."
It just might be.