PRPG:

The Most Cleverly Celebrity-Namesake Cocktails of All Time

April 27, 2018

True fame isn’t getting your name in lights or your handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—it’s having a drink named in your honor.

Arnold Palmer

Arnold Palmer has two legacies: The late golfer is one of the greatest to ever play the game, with a remarkable 95 professional tournament wins, including the Masters four times. He also has a popular beverage named after him. According to golf (and drink) lore, Palmer was at the 1960 U.S. Open, and went up to the bar and asked for a drink he made for himself at home: an unnamed mixture of iced tea and lemonade. The popularity of the drink (and its name) spread from there. Flash forward about 40 years, and another golfer is tearing up the PGA Tour: John Daly, known as much for his hard drinking and hard-partying ways as he is for his game. (Perhaps more so.) If you go up to most any golf country club bar and order a John Daly, you’ll get an Arnold Palmer…with vodka in it. It’s a drink invented by none other than John Daly.

Shirley Temple

Perhaps during a special night at a fancy restaurant with your parents, you were allowed to order a Shirley Temple from the bar. An alcohol-free drink for kids, it’s named for probably the most popular and famous kid actor of all time: Shirley Temple. That “mocktail” generally consists of ginger ale or 7-Up, grenadine, and a maraschino cherry. But as Shirley Temple grew up, got married, and became Shirley Temple Black, there’s also a drink called the Shirley Temple Black. There are many variations, but it’s basically a Shirley Temple with the addition of things like cranberry juice, as well as vodka, rum, and various liqueurs.

Ginger Rogers

The great screen dancer Ginger Rogers (one half of a legendary duo with Fred Astaire) had a drink invented in her honor during her heyday of the 1930s (which also happened to be the time of Prohibition). It’s a cocktail as much about wordplay as it is taste. It’s a mixture of gin, ginger ale, fresh ginger, as well as mint and lemon juice.