In the ramshackle school which is popular culture there are those who insist that America has never gotten over the 1950s, that innocent pleasantville of tail fins, baby boomers and high hopes when everything was novel, when Mom and Pop had no problem more acute than big hair, boys were decent jocks and girls were pleat-skirted cheerleaders.

Who can blame them? After the war the world grew old quickly. Grown-up problems ended America's adolescence. Somebody invented race and sexual politics and long-term unemployment and the America which Americans still watched on their new televisions never really existed again.

Arnold Palmer hit the wave at the perfect time. He was US Amateur champion in 1954, turned pro seven months later and in 1958 began a six-year run which brought him seven major titles and occupancy on the leaderboard at almost every event he played. And he did it all just as sport was coming to TV. Arnie's Army, a great and in staid golfing terms vulgar slice of middle America, began annexing golf courses to follow their hero.

Golf took off as the pursuit of the American everyman and Palmer was the emblem. His followers booed his rivals' good shots and once somebody threw a beer bottle at Jack Nicklaus but as they grew older and more dignified they never gave up on Palmer, never felt his charisma abandon them.

Ben Hogan was a better story and perhaps a better golfer but he was older and more reserved and didn't make good television.

Nicklaus, a younger, brutally crew-cut fat man wearing cheap pants, would eclipse Palmer eventually but back then he had a face which kept its own secrets. His threat to Palmer's pre-eminence just made him deeply unpopular.

In between Hogan and Nicklaus, at his prime on prime time, was Arnold Palmer. He was a broad-shouldered, fair-haired, thick-fingered poster boy for the game, playing with such rollercoaster abandon that it was said memorably of his style that "he could get it up and down in two from the deck of a sinking ship."

Even his disasters turned out happy. Once at Pebble Beach he waded out into the Pacific to play a recovery on a wayward shot which had landed on a rock. A photo of Palmer playing his shot with a seal watching was flashed into every newspaper around the world. Good old Arnie.

When he won the US Open on Saturday 18th June 1960 at Cherry Hills, Denver, making birdies on six of the first seven holes in his famous final round charge, he cornered the market in sporting heroics. On a tense afternoon Nicklaus, still an amateur, three-putted from 10 feet at the 14th and Hogan dunked into the water at 17th. The market was duly cornered and Arnold kept it that way.

Within two years Nicklaus had beaten him in a play-off for the US Open at Oakmont. Palmer never won another big test against his young rival who went on to eclipse him on the course but never off it.

Palmer, the King Midas of golf, is 70 later this year. Since the time of his pomp his legend and influence have dimmed only slightly. His mark is everywhere to be found still.

Palmer's name is stamped indelibly on golf - from Trans World International and the Golf Channel (the TV stations which he co-founded) to Tiger Woods, the game's biggest earner (who shares a management group and lives on one of Palmer's "developments"), to the seniors tour (which burgeoned from a twotournament $250,000 sideshow in 1980 when he joined to an 11-event $1.3 million cash cow two years later to a $25 million a year circus now). This, he says, is all serendipitous, the munificent fallout of the American dream. You live good, you practise hard and you stay married to the same woman and good things will happen.

James Dodson's credentials to ghost A Golfer's Life, Palmer's latest autobiography (or my last book as Palmer notes sheepishly) are impeccable. Dodson's previous publication, Final Rounds, caught America in the gut with a sentimental double whammy which even the slickest marketing guru couldn't have thought up. A father and son travelling to Britain for bonding and, well, final rounds.

Bonding, death and golf between two covers. Dodson was a shoo-in for this gig.

And he writes well, catching Palmer's "gee, ain't I lucky" schtick perfectly but struggling to adequately explain the business evolution of sport's first marketing phenomenon. Arnold Palmer, business man and operator, is the weakest most impenetrable part of the story.

When Tiger Woods was still at Stanford University he was suspended for two weeks for accepting luncheon from Arnold Palmer in breach of strict collegiate rules on amateurism. The incident or the $25 cheque which Woods had to send Palmer isn't spoken about in Dodson's book. Nor is it mentioned that Woods ended up as the leading cash cow at International Management Group, the sports agency which has changed the face of sport since it was founded on the basis of a famous handshake between Palmer and Mark McCormack in the late 1950s.

From Palmer to Nicklaus (a Woods idol, who as an amateur approached Palmer in precisely the same way as Woods did) and down to Tiger Woods, golf has been at the cutting edge of sports commerce, growing its own market and then sating it with every gimmick imaginable. Other sports have lolloped along in the game's wake.

It is difficult to calculate or measure McCormack's influence on sport and Palmer and McCormack's influence on each other. This book is an instrument uncalibrated for that job which is a pity because the shots, the breaks and the beginnings have been chronicled before. The unexplored territory is the vision which McCormack and Palmer shared.

Palmer concedes that he used McCormack as the bad guy in the good cop/bad cop routines he pulled on clients but all that comes across of his own input are "business relationships" that are "fruitful and fun" and which bring "untold pleasures" and "proud associations."

Palmer hints at his own considerable drive in these matters when he mentions a file of letters which he retains. Each epistle is an angry note to McCormack or a resignation from IMG sparked at some stage when Palmer felt he wasn't getting enough attention or the right guidance. There is still a barb in the voice too when he talks about his daughter Peg's "fortunately brief" involvement in his business. It "cost me conservatively speaking at least a million dollars."

Palmer's part in the environmental lawsuit surrounding the Isleworth development in Florida (where Tiger Woods now lives) is dealt with in just a half page, the media coverage is dismissed as "mean spirited" although, ahem, "our mistake was a doozie." Similarly with the Bay Hill, Orlando incident when Palmer and associates made an unsuccessful attempt to sell off the Florida course (on which he himself lives) and attached residences to a Japanese consortium. Just a bogey on a par three, boys.

The downside for those sportspeople who have followed on from Palmer in less innocent times has been a more rigorous inspection of the pitchman's credentials and he grants that he had it easy being written about by friends in the pre-tabloid era.

It is tempting to wonder what television would have made of him these days, broad and unkempt, slurping Coke and chainsmoking along the fairways of the great courses. It is too late though for anything to dent the image.

This is the curious thing about Palmer. By being so omnipresent and totemic his life is almost unexamined. He is more enigmatic at the end of the day than a locker room full of taciturn Hogans and quietly driven Nicklauses. By spreading himself all over the place, by becoming a brand, a logo, a symbol, he has effectively buried his personality from public view.

You could scout a library and not find a bad word committed to print about the man. All those who have written most extensively and beautifully about him (Bob Drum, Dan Jenkins, Jim Murray, Herbert Warren Wind) have done so from the vantage point of friendship and admiration. We get the likeable "gee shucks" Arnie, the guy who looked like a cavemen and swung like one too but we never get a good look at the engine.

We never get the steel. Never see the purring brain which along with Mark McCormack pushed back the boundaries of sporting capitalism and created the huge and diverse industry that is Arnold Palmer Enterprises. We don't get the political conservative for whom $1 million was collected in 1960 that he might replace Governor Raymond Shafer in Pennsylvania. We don't get any sense of the mindset that could win a US Open from seven behind after 54 holes (Cherry Hills, 1960) or lose one from seven ahead with nine to play (San Francisco, 1966).

Jim Murray caught it best perhaps with a casual line, "Palmer always played as if he were seven behind." You have to peep between the lines to find that desperate hunger, to sense that he has lived and accumulated in much the same way.

When Mark McCormack urges Palmer to make decisions about his business life we are told "I hated it when Mark got that serious glint in his eye - it always meant I was going to probably have to disappoint somebody - which of course was alien to my nature."

When his first endorsement deal with Wilson ends badly McCormack is secretly pleased because it means Arnie is going to have to "become a millionaire whether he likes it or not."

Palmer is a wonder even to those of us who never saw him in his prime as a player. He has been among the five best-paid corporate pitchmen from sport since the early 1960s, using the everyman image to flog a wider range of products than most malls carry.

Yet he's the embodiment of the everyman ideal and a sportsman about whom people genuinely care. In a 1978 interview Nicklaus expressed wonderment at how Palmer could keep on going, missing cuts week in week out, living a life of professional mediocrity which Nicklaus could never stomach. He concluded that maybe Palmer just enjoyed it. And who knows? The great pitchman may himself be the last of the genuine articles.

That's the problem with image making. When it is done well, relentlessly over the course of a lifetime or a career, it gets so that we can't tell the dancer from the dance. It seems that way with Palmer. Either that or he is just what this book makes him out to be, a nice man who played golf very well.

The 1990s has no room for such uncomplicated creatures but America has never really gotten over the 50s, has it?

(A Golfers Life, Arnold Palmer with James Dodson, published by Century £16.99 stg)