If Gary Moranthought he was sitting on a nice little nest egg he was in for a rude awakening when he made inquiries about his Arnold Palmer double vinyl LP
BACK IN the early 1980s, the father of the club champion at my local course stopped me in the driveway one day and said that he had a gift for me. Perhaps he thought I needed a helping hand if I was ever to match the ability of his own son for the present turned out to be a double vinyl LP entitled Personal Golf Instructions from Driver thru Putter by Arnold Palmer and it came with a 24-page booklet illustrating the points which Palmer made on the record.
I had never before come across golf instruction on an LP and of course it is hopeless compared to the video analysis available to improve one's game today. Still, in my youthful enthusiasm I thought that it might turn me into a major champion let alone a club champion and gave it a spin on my old record player which was itself a hand-down from my grandmother's house.
If I have cast aside my major ambitions in the intervening years, I have at least kept the Palmer LP although not the means to play it. I ticked myself off for not getting Palmer to sign it during one of his visits to The K Club around the Ryder Cup but given that it dates from 1962, I still expected it to be worth something when I asked a sports expert from Christie's about it.
"It's worth nothing", he said.
"And if I had got it signed by Palmer?" "Still nothing, he signed almost everything." Well, it turns out that golf LPs in general are well down the price list when it comes to golf memorabilia. A quick check on eBay last week showed five for sale including two copies of the Palmer. The top price being sought was just $27 for Sam Snead's Shooting Par Golf. Nonetheless a few collectors do go out of their way to gather LPs which feature golf on the cover, even if they're not about golf at all. "My advice to anyone thinking of starting a collection is 'Don't!'" says Ian MacCrimmon, a Scot who emigrated to Canada nearly 40 ago.
"It's an addiction and almost overpowering. I have collected everything from stamps to hockey cards and even dental instruments!"
The dental instruments came in the line of work and thankfully he has sold off most of them but he still hoards golf LPs thanks to his twin passions of golf and rock 'n' roll. "If there's a golf cover that I don't have then I don't know about it," he claims without a hint of arrogance and there are probably less than 50 different covers worldwide although MacCrimmon does trade duplicates.
His first acquisition was Palmer's 1959 release Easy Golf with your Pro, which was cut on green, see-through vinyl and made a great display item. Other notable pros to record instructional albums include Snead, Peter Thomson, Bob Rosburg and Tommy Armour.
MacCrimmon loves telling people that he attended the first Rolling Stones tour when he paid 17/6 (17 shillings and sixpence) to see them in a Glasgow theatre. The cover of the Japanese version, and only the Japanese version, of the Stones' Between the Buttons album features the band members with golf clubs and is one of MacCrimmon's favourites.
The Beatles got in on the act, too, with an EP released in France featuring four songs from the movie Help! and the four lads holding clubs on the cover.
Nat King Cole, Perry Como and predictably enough Bing Crosby are other famous artists to have used golf-themed covers.
In the mid-80s, PGA Tour player Peter Jacobsen formed the band Jake Trout and the Flounders. Jacobsen, a guitar enthusiast, was also the lead vocalist with backing from Payne Stewart and Mark Lye. They played golf-themed take-offs of classic rock songs, mostly songs written by pro-am partners like Alice Cooper (I'm On 18), Glenn Frey (Strugglers Blues), and Stephen Stills Graham Nash (Love The One You Whiff) and their best efforts were released on the album I Love To Play.
Golf albums are unlikely to make you rich but according to Bob Labbance of the Golf Collectors Society they make "perfect display items for golf rooms, library rooms and family rooms being colourful, durable and reminiscent of days gone by". And surely there is some value in that.
This column welcomes e-mails from readers concerning golf memorabilia and collectibles but cannot guarantee to provide valuations. If you have an interesting story or item: e-mail collectgolf@gmail.com
