Harry Frye followed a legend from childhood through to some of his greatest triumphs; a local lens on an epic journey with a global phenomenon

Photographer Harry Frye was born four years before Arnold Palmer, in 1925. As the sports snapper for the Latrobe Bulletin, the local paper in Palmer’s Pennsylvania hometown, Harry shot the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates through some great years, and he also captured the young golf phenom on his way up. “I’d be out there at 6:30 or 7 o’clock in the morning, and sometimes he was right there and sometimes I had to wait a few minutes,” Frye told Kingdom in 2013, recounting mornings during which the late photog shot a young Palmer practicing golf before school. “His mother had coffee ready for me; she was a great person.”

Unlike many small-town papers, the Bulletin had access to an airplane, and that meant Harry could travel to the Masters and to other events to document the local hero’s rise right alongside photogs from Sports Illustrated, the Associated Press and others. With a local’s eye, Harry captured Palmer in ways others might have missed, and here, in this exclusive feature, Kingdom shares a selection of shots from Augusta National.