Did The King sell out to sweetness?

Arizona responsible for Arnold Palmer's ruin

Bartender: What can I get you Arnie?

Arnold Palmer: "Iced tea ... But why don't you sweeten it up a bit with some lemonade this time. Just go ahead and make it 50-50, lemonade and iced tea."

Bar patron: "Hmmm ... That's sounds refreshing. I'll have what Arnie is having."

Bartender: "So two ... umm ... Arnold Palmers coming right up."

The scenario above outlines an account of how the Arnold Palmer drink was created. You take an unsweetened drink, combine it with something sweet (in this case lemonade) and you come out with a tasty yet still thirst quenching drink.

Those days are long gone.

When most people think of an Arnold Palmer now, they picture a plastic bottle -- the upper half resembling a golf ball and the lower half containing Arnie's ugly mug. That product is different entirely. It's two sweet drinks combined, the end product having little to do with the original drink idea of sweetening a sugarless drink.

With the nation buzzed on high fructose corn syrup, Arizona wasn't about to keep the drink under the parameter in which it was created. What they did instead is the drink equivalent of deep frying a piece of celery in chocolate sauce before spreading it with peanut butter.

Arizona simply took their own high fructose tea recipe and combined it with their high fructose lemonade recipe destroying the hydration benefits by weighing the entire drink down with sugar.

So was Arnie involved in Arizona's discussion of how the drink with be created? Was he told that they would need to compromise his ingenuity to appeal to the boneheaded masses? Few know for sure, but if the question was posed to Arnie, he would probably say ... "What the hell is this idiot talking about."