Farewell to 3 Icons: Palmer, Fernandez, Zydeco

In times where there are few bridges over troubled water, sports and music serve us well to get us across the river. The runners, the athletes, the big hitters and base path speedsters and jump shooters and wide receivers and goalies allow us to share in their peak achievements, while music makers — singers, players, songwriters — inspire us into both peace and vibrancy, listening and dancing to a tune or two, alone or with others. When we lose them to time and time out, we mourn and celebrate their lives, because it’s only fair.

**Arnold Palmer, 87**

Arnold Palmer put the razzmatazz into golf, a sport that is hugely popular because people who are not golfers nevertheless play the game. A round of golf can be all things to all men: a board meeting, a social gathering, good clean fun and a chance to be outdoors and tan (or an invitation to madness and frustration).

Palmer made it look like fun, like a movie, like a wow thing, because Palmer, the son of a groundskeeper in Altoona, Pennsylvania, played the game loudly — not because he made a lot of noise, but because he attacked golf courses as if they offended him and played the game better than anyone else most of the time.

Before Palmer — big guy, broad, open face like a movie star — the game was gentlemanly, reported in the sports pages sedately and attended by spectators who never made a peep.

We remember Palmer, who died Sept. 25 while awaiting heart surgery, because he had burly grace, a sense of style, a big smile and, at the top of his game, thought nothing was impossible. He helped make the game a television sport that people watched by the millions, especially the majors (you can’t beat the Masters with its sporty green jackets). He won a bunch of those majors: seven of them in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

When a guy named Jack Nicklaus came along, they began a no-mercy duel at the U.S. Open in 1962. Over time they became friends, and walked golf courses like two giants among lesser folks.

Palmer was bigger than life off the course — at charity benefits, as a brand, in commercials (most recently a Xarelto spot with former SNL star Kevin Nealon). He had honors by the bucket, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by George W. Bush in 2004.

**Jose Fernandez, 24**

Jose Fernandez was more than a comer; he was a comet, an established star, a young kid with a story, a Cuban defector who made the journey to America the hard way. He died at the apex, in a gruesome boating accident on Sept. 25 that also killed two others.

He was a right-handed pitcher for the Miami Marlins, but that doesn’t begin to describe his skill. Most recently, Washington Nationals batters were left astonished and almost hitless, though Fernandez had won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 2013, when his fastball was probably a little faster. Young as he was, he was an icon in Miami, whose residents, many of them Cubans, appreciated his backstory as much as the speed with which he threw the ball.

He tried several times to escape to not-so-far-away America, spent time in a Cuban prison and finally made it in a boat, but not before he rescued his mom from the water.

He was so good, according to reports, that his pitching starts were deemed “Jose Day.” He was, by all accounts, the owner of an infectious, exuberant personality, which, in a state known for its sunlight and beaches, was as bright as all that.

**Buckwheat Zydeco (Stanley Dural Jr.), 68**

Stanley Dural Jr., better known as Buckwheat Zydeco, didn’t invent the musical form of zydeco. There was a guy named Clifton Chenier, a friend of Dural’s father, who was called the King of Zyedco. By that time, Dural was already going by Buckwheat. He played the piano and had a band named Buckwheat and the Hitchhikers.

His encounter with Chenier and zydeco changed him, and he took up the accordion, an instrument he had no liking for previously. In brief, zydeco is about rhythm and adaptation. It incorporates Cajun styles, moves and sounds, with that peculiarly French lilt to lyrics, and easily attaches itself to pretty much any genre, from jazz to blues to rock to folk to country. It came, basically, out of New Orleans, and, to quote an old member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band about the band’s music, “when we gets their feets to tappin’, we knows we gots ’em.”

Buckwheat thumped on the piano. A few years back, we saw and heard him at the DC Jazz Festival when it celebrated the New Orleans sound. He was outdoors on the Mall. Couples were dancing and he played with Pacuito D’Rivera, who wrote an autobiography called “My Sax Life” and who showed that zydeco was right at home with Latin-flavored jazz.

They called zydeco music stompin’ swamp music. He gots our feet to tappin, that sunny Sunday on the Mall. Buckhweat Zydeco died Sept. 24 of lung cancer.