Arnold Palmer’s daughter reacts to Donald Trump’s references to her father

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — One of the late golf legend Arnold Palmer’s daughters calls Donald Trump’s references to her father’s genitalia “a poor choice of approaches” to honoring his memory, adding that she wasn’t upset by the remarks.

“There’s nothing much to say. I’m not really upset,” Peg Palmer Wears, 68, told The Associated Press in an interview on Sunday. “I think it was a poor choice of approaches to remembering my father, but what are you going to do?” On Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania — the city where Palmer was born in 1929 and learned to golf from his father — Trump kicked off his rally in the campaign’s closing weeks with a detailed, 12-minute story about Palmer that included an anecdote about what Palmer looked like in the showers.

“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.” Wears said that she had only had passing encounters with Trump at functions decades ago but that her father and the GOP presidential nominee, an avid golfer who owns courses around the world, primarily shared a kinship over “an interest in golf and a love of golf.” Emotional at times as she recalled conversations with her father, who died in 2016 at 87, Wears said her father “believed in the Republican Party.”