Arnold Palmer piloted a Boeing 747 on a test flight over Seattle and once hosted "The Tonight Show," interviewing Vice President Spiro Agnew and tennis ace Rod Laver. The winner of 62 tournaments on the PGA TOUR and seven majors, Palmer was such a polymath that it’s hard to pin him down even now, nearly a decade after his passing in 2016.

But in strictly golf terms, this week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard has clearly taken on the personality of the icon himself. Much of that is intentional, for while Palmer did not design Bay Hill Club & Lodge (Dick Wilson, 1961), he made renovations starting in ’69 and continuing at irregular intervals thereafter.

“This year, as advised, we have allowed the rough to get a little stronger,” Palmer said in 2015, “and I think you'll find that the guys will have a little playing to do to get out of the rough.”

Of course, Palmer himself did a little playing, with 92 professional victories. (He also designed more than 300 courses worldwide.) His tournament and Bay Hill reflect his roll-up-your-sleeves, hitch-up-your-trousers ethos encapsulated by the aphorism It’s not how, but how many. Think working-class Palmer, the son of a greenskeeper, beating Oxford-educated Robert Sweeny, the son of a banker, in the 1954 U.S. Amateur final.

Utilitarian. Crafty. Unfancy (but plenty stylish).

Which players fit the mold at his namesake tournament? The best players. Tiger Woods is an eight-time winner at Bay Hill. World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, who in the tradition of Palmer swings his own swing, made a career-best eight straight one-putts in shooting 66 to win last year.

Hey, whatever it takes.

“Got to stay patient and grind out a lot of pars,” said Scheffler, whose 15-under total yielded his second victory there in three years, by five over Wyndham Clark.

Bay Hill’s penal rough, slick greens, copious water (it comes into play on nine holes, including the last three) and ever-present breezes make patience and pars equally valuable, especially in the baked-out weekend rounds. Crusty is a word you hear a lot.

To be sure, this Signature Event is a distillation of another Palmer quote: “Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.” Bay Hill’s manifold challenges force players to find a way, as the winning scores have been single digits under par in three of the last five years, with Scheffler’s 5-under 283 good enough to win the red cardigan in 2022.

Last year, Scheffler was just the second winner in the last six years to shoot in the 60s in the final round (Francesco Molinari, 2019). Not only is the course plenty long, 7,466 yards last year, but it also presents forced carries over water with long irons. And over the last five seasons, there have been more double bogeys or worse on the last hole (116) than any other course besides the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass (136). The result: drama at Bay Hill.

Kurt Kitayama hooked his tee shot out of bounds and triple-bogeyed the ninth hole in 2023. He was finished, right? Nope. He birdied the long par-3 17th hole, made a two-putt par from nearly 50 feet at the last and shot 72. Just one of the top seven finishers broke 70. Winner and red cardigan-wearer: Kitayama. “The pulse is going pretty good still,” he said afterward.

Palmer, who in the 1960s was golf’s pulse, would have loved it.

World No. 2 Xander Schauffele has broken 70 just once in 12 tries at Bay Hill, where in three starts he has never finished better than T24 in 2020. That’s when the winning score was 4-under 284 (Tyrrell Hatton) and the 74.11 scoring average was the toughest on the PGA TOUR all season. Schauffele would call the tournament “good prep for a major.” The two-time major winner will make his return from injury at Bay Hill next week.

Much of the difficulty, he added, can be found in the rough, which he noted a few years ago seemed to be mowed from the greens backward toward the tees.

“It makes it so difficult,” Schauffele said. “Every time you miss the fairway, you’re sitting underground or trying to like, find a bunker you can hit your next ball into, or if you can cover a hundred yards over a hazard, or you name it.”

The solution: accuracy off the tee. Palmer said, “What other people may find in poetry, I find in the flight of a good drive.” Sometimes that can mean just one thing: finding the short grass.

“There's a premium on driving the golf ball in the fairway,” said Patrick Cantlay, whose best at Bay Hill is a T4 in 2023, “and I think you have to play really smart around this place.”

Play smart? Yep, Palmer talked about that, too:

“Success in this game depends less on strength of body than strength of mind and character,” he said.

Of course, it never hurts to have both, as Rory McIlroy did in winning in 2018, when his 18-under 270 total was the second-lowest of the last 10 years (Matt Every, 269, 2015).

“I see it as more like a U.S. Open,” McIlroy said in 2023. “I think that's sort of how it feels with the thick rough and the firm greens and just the real sort of tricky conditions. … The greens got baked out. They get crusty. They just get faster as the day goes on.

“Nothing new here,” he added. “It's been that way for the last few years, and you just know that you make the weekend at Bay Hill you're just going to have to hang on a little bit.”

Will Zalatoris said of Bay Hill last year, when he finished T4: “Normally it's green on Thursday and brown by Sunday.” In other words, wind plus sunshine equals complications.

“It's a beast of a golf course,” Zalatoris added.

And it keeps rewarding the game’s best. Scheffler, who this week will go for his third red cardigan in four years, was the only player to go bogey-free in the final round last year.

“Just get out of there with pars and be happy,” Zalatoris continued. “We joke about how the week gets harder and harder, and by Sunday Arnie's smiling from heaven watching the carnage.”