Courtesy of the Gleason family

Arnold Palmer was one of Jackie Gleason's many golf buddies.

By 1960, Arnold Palmer was accustomed to being the most famous man on every golf course he played. Along with the young President John F. Kennedy, Palmer helped define a new vigorous ideal of masculinity for American men. He'd won the Masters twice and the U.S. Open once and even made the cover of Time Magazine, about as potent an emblem of mainstream success in 1961 as you could find. At age 30, Palmer was at the height of his fame and powers, but on a fall day in 1960, Palmer wasn't the most famous guy at Shawnee Country Club in northeastern Pennsylvania, not by a long shot. The big star was his opponent, the large and larger-than-life Jackie Gleason, who by virtue of his oversized appetites and reputation as a raconteur was as Dickensian as his most beloved television characters.

Gleason was 45 and a show-business legend. A novice to golf—in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was raised the games were turnstile jumping and hustling pool—Gleason had hosted one of the most successful TV variety shows in the 1950s, and during one magical year in 1956 filmed all 39 episodes of The Honeymooners. These were the early days of television, before UHF, cable, DVDs and DVRs, and The Jackie Gleason Show averaged a Nielsen rating of 42.4 for the 1954-55 season, which meant that 42.4 percent of the nation's households with television sets were tuned to Gleason's show. For perspective, the 2009 Super Bowl received a 42.0 Nielsen rating.

During that Honeymooners season, Gleason was learning to play golf, which led to the classic "The Golfer" episode, where Gleason's Ralph Kramden, the volatile-yet-lovable, hard-luck bus driver tries to learn golf to impress his boss and get the promotion and raise that would never come.

Gleason as Kramden enters the sparsely furnished Kramden apartment—the closest American television has ever come to showing an unsentimental working class, paycheck-to-paycheck life—and starts making comically awkward, lurching swings with a golf club. He's dressed in flamboyant golf attire (plaid plus-fours, argyle sweater, tam-o'-shanter), which clashes even in black-and-white. Art Carney as sewer worker Ed Norton, Kramden's good-hearted if slow-witted pal, enters the apartment with a golf book to help his friend.

That's where Jackie Gleason the golfer was in 1956, so to be playing with Arnold Palmer in 1960 was pretty good. CBS filmed the match for a special called "Sunday Sports Spectacular: Jackie Gleason with Putter and Cue," where Gleason played golf against Palmer and pool against Willie Mosconi. Gleason grew to love golf so much that he eventually moved his entire show to Florida to play year-round. He even hosted a PGA Tour event there (the Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic, which is now the Honda Classic), but his skill at pool, honed in the Brooklyn pool halls of his youth, was always his pride. In Gleason's acclaimed film turn as Minnesota Fats in The Hustler (1961), Gleason not only insisted on doing all his shots, he also claimed that he, and not the film's technical adviser Mosconi, taught Paul Newman how to play like a shark. Almost every visitor to Gleason's Inverrary, Fla., mansion remarked on how his pool table sunk into the floor like a gladiator pit with benches for spectators above it. They also usually commented on the nightclub-sized island bar, behind which the former CBS announcer Ben Wright remembers a mechanical gorilla pouring scotch.

The producer of the CBS special was Frank Chirkinian, who virtually created televised golf in his almost 40 years covering the Masters for CBS Sports, and who remained a Gleason friend for life. Gleason had as much bravado as Ralph Kramden ever did; he and Chirkinian got the idea for "Sunday Sports Spectacular" when Gleason told Chirkinian that he could beat anybody in golf if he got a stroke a hole. As the reigning U.S. Open and Masters champion, Palmer was a natural pick for Gleason's opponent.

"Jackie and I were friends, and we had played golf before and shot pool," Palmer said. "CBS wanted to get us together for the show since I had done some work for his show and they knew I was a Pennsylvania guy [because the match was at Shawnee]. I was a fan of Jackie's show, and we had a lot of fun together."

Palmer was no slouch in the raconteur business either, and he and Gleason would have more fun together when Gleason moved to Florida in 1964. "We got together quite a lot when he was in Fort Lauderdale, and there was never a lack of food or drink," Palmer said. "He was so full of life on the course, always coming up with one-liners. He was just a special person, he had me laughing all the time. His stuff wasn't always stuff you'd want everyone to hear, but he was funny all the time. And he loved to play golf."

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