Word: golfed
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Those who think Jokl is talking about playing a few rounds of golf might want to drop in on the 1999 Senior Olympics, formally known as the National Senior Games, scheduled this year from Oct. 19 through 29 in Orlando, Fla. Begun a dozen years ago as a competition among 2,500 older athletes and played every other year since, the Senior Olympics has become a growing showcase for mature athletic talent. This year more than 12,000 men and women ages 50 or older--37 of them in their 90s--will compete in 18 sports from archery to volleyball...
...Moines Country Club had never seen anything like it. For a week in July, more than 250,000 Iowans, including Governor Tom Vilsack, came in droves to applaud, cheer and gawk at the stars. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED called the event, the 20th Senior U.S. Open golf tournament, "the biggest thing to hit the state since Pope John Paul II's visit," which happened 20 years earlier. The mere arrival in town of Arnold Palmer, about to turn 70, made headlines in the statewide newspaper, the Des Moines Register...
This hubbub in the heartland, yet another sign that the sports phenomenon known as the senior tour has become a fixture on the American scene, reflects a larger social trend: the greater acceptance of older people performing well--indeed, excellently--in a variety of pursuits. In golf, and more recently in tennis, players who quickened the pulse of sports fans a few decades ago--Palmer, Nicklaus and Trevino, for example, and Connors, McEnroe and Borg--are back on the courses and courts, and back in the news, striving in spirited competition with their peers...
These are more than just flights of nostalgia. On the Senior PGA Tour this year, prize money totaling more than $53 million--a record sum--will be awarded in 45 separate events. A senior golf-tournament win can bring as much as $347,000; two top performers, Hale Irwin, 54, and Gil Morgan, 53, have each earned more than $2 million a year in the past two years...
...culture that still worships youth, it is noteworthy that corporate America sees so much bounty in backing these events. "Senior tennis and golf are important building tools for the relationships we have with our clients," says Tim Schwertfeger, head of the John Nuveen Co., a financial-management company based in Chicago that helped get the tennis circuit going and invests heavily in both sports. Companies are not only sponsoring the senior tournaments, they are also using several of the grizzled icons to hawk their products. Palmer has appeared in Pennzoil and Cooper Tire commercials, Lee Trevino, 59, and Connors...