Four Lions

by Colin Shindler

  The successful captain of Wolves and England had proved a signal failure as a manager. Ironically, it was a fate that also eventually awaited Bobby Moore. Wright, however, unlike his successor as England captain, was to find his salvation in television.

  The power of live television and its influence on sport was a growing factor in the 1960s. Paul Fox, Bryan Cowgill and Ronnie Noble, along with Peter Dimmock, had created a thriving BBC Sport department in the 1950s, acquiring the rights to the Olympic Games through the European Broadcasting Union, Wimbledon tennis, the Grand National and other horse races, the cricket Test matches, the Boat Race, the Open golf championship, rugby league, and rugby union’s Five Nations championship. However, the best they could do with live football was the FA Cup final and the occasional England match.

  The 1960s saw two major developments in British television – the launch of BBC2 in April 1964 and the arrival of colour transmissions at the end of the decade. Each innovation produced an increase in the number of television sets sold and a consequent boost to the BBC’s income through the licence fee. BBC2 was conceived as a channel that catered for minority interest groups, so – taking its cue from the new UHF transmission on 625 lines – the audience was soon presented with Jazz 625, Theatre 625 and Cinema 625, as well as strands which would became staples of future broadcasting schedules – Call My Bluff, Man Alive, Chronicle, The Old Grey Whistle Test, One Pair of Eyes and The Money Programme. One of the minorities thus catered for was football supporters in a new programme called Match of the Day, which began transmission on the first day of the 1964–5 season with a match between Liverpool and Arsenal at Anfield. The audience was estimated to be around 20,000 viewers, which was roughly half the number of spectators at the ground who had paid to watch the match. Such figures must have come as a great comfort to the wary Alan Hardaker at the Football League, but the audiences soon began to grow. The following season the programme transferred to BBC1, where it has continued to thrive ever since.

  Hardaker was not alone in his suspicions. A large minority of clubs actually voted against renewing the existing deal with the BBC for fear of television’s impact on ground admissions. The BBC, meanwhile, possibly through gritted teeth, accepted that part of its remit was to show matches from outside the First Division and during that inaugural season on BBC2 the audience was treated to edited highlights of the Fourth Division game between Oxford United and Tranmere Rovers.

  As the decade progressed, ITV started to compete with the BBC as a sports broadcaster, but it was a slow process. While the BBC was transmitting the British gold medal successes of Lynn Davies, Mary Rand and Ann Packer from Tokyo in 1964, ITV was transmitting Frank Keating reading the results to camera in the studio from the stop press of the Evening Standard. ITV tried to compete with Grandstand by introducing World of Sport, their Saturday-afternoon magazine of different sports in January 1965, but their trump card was wrestling, which seemed to belong more properly to show business rather than sport. Michael Grade remembers that World of Sport might have been the flagship of ITV Sport but it caused endless factional arguments.

  Sport was networked so the only argument within ITV was about budgets, not about how it was carved up on the network. Most of the arguments were about World of Sport. Every year there was an argument and we all went fifteen rounds over the World of Sport budget. Both BBC and ITV covered the Cup final. We both had full crews and commentators and our own cameras but the pictures were pretty much identical and coverage would start at ten o’clock in the morning. It was always a case of who could get their cameras on the team coach… it was all mad. The BBC maintained its traditional ratings superiority because it had no commercial interruptions. If you’ve got the choice of watching without breaks, even though you wouldn’t cut away from the play, you’ll choose BBC because you couldn’t be sure when there would be an ad break so the BBC tended to win the ratings battle 3:1.

  London Weekend Television did briefly win the right to broadcast the Gillette Cup final between Warwickshire and Sussex from Lord’s in 1968 and transmit it across the ITV network in the face of outrage from the BBC. The one-day competition had captured the public imagination very quickly and the first Saturday in September at Lord’s was to become cricket’s equivalent of the first Saturday in May when the FA Cup final was played at Wembley. In fact, LWT’s association with the Gillette Cup lasted for that one game only. Frost on Saturday went out live on LWT at 6.45 on Saturday evenings and had to be preceded by a commercial break since that was how LWT was funded. In order to fit in the adverts, LWT had to end its transmission of the Gillette Cup final in the last over, before Dennis Amiss and A. C. Smith had scored the runs that won the game for Warwickshire by four wickets. The public was frustrated and the cricket authorities, particularly MCC and the Test and County Cricket Board, were outraged. ITV lost the contract. The fact that the BBC frequently cut away from coverage of Test matches to show horse racing from Sandown Park was for some reason not considered equally reprehensible. Commercial television was simply not welcome in the Long Room at Lord’s. The BBC retained control of nearly all cricket for another twenty years until the arrival of satellite broadcasting.

  The United States set the trend for sports presentation on television. BBC and ITV were public service broadcasters and, although they were both motivated by the need to achieve high ratings, they did not emerge from the same landscape as American broadcasters who were, with the almost irrelevant exception of PBS, commercial organisations. Their job, as ITV soon realised, was to sell products and the programmes they aired were basically the vehicle for the sales drive. The man who realised this as quickly as anyone and thereby solved the equation of sport, broadcasting and commerce was an American lawyer – and pioneering sports agent – called Mark McCormack.

  McCormack graduated from Yale Law School and went to work for the prestigious law firm of Arter, Hadden, Wycoff & Van Duzer in Cleveland. The client who helped him change the world of sports broadcasting was the golfer Arnold Palmer, who had won the Canadian Open in his rookie year of 1955 and his first Masters at Augusta in 1958. After an initial meeting in 1959, during which the two men shared collegiate reminiscences of playing golf in a match between the lawyer’s College of William & Mary in Virginia and the golfer’s college at Wake Forest in North Carolina, McCormack became convinced that his quickest route to the top was via the role of a personal manager. Sam Snead from an earlier generation of golfers had been represented by the Boston sports promoter Fred Corcoran but not to anything like the extent that McCormack envisaged.

  Arnold Palmer’s growing success as a professional golfer soon generated the need for decisions of a financial rather than a strictly sporting nature – there were contracts and commercial endorsements to negotiate, and public appearances to manage. Initially McCormack was content for the firm that employed him to handle everything but Palmer was resolute in his wish for McCormack to handle him exclusively, one on one. In the wake of Palmer’s success on the golf course, all the commercial advantages of sporting prestige soon presented themselves. A first book led to talk of Arnold Palmer golf schools, driving ranges, golf tips in periodicals and a syndicated column. McCormack soon abandoned his other commitments to concentrate exclusively on Palmer. He examined the contract that the sporting goods company Wilson had persuaded Palmer to sign. It paid the golfer a mere $5,000 a year and prevented him from working for anyone else until 1963.

  After Palmer won his second Masters in 1960, the commercial pressures built up but, despite McCormack’s reasonable approach, the irascible Wilson chairman, Judge James Cooney, said he would not renegotiate the terms of the contract while it was still valid, a threat which Wilson maintained until Palmer’s contract expired on 1 November 1963. This response made Palmer and McCormack all the more determined to sell themselves dearly and to exert considerably more control over future agreements. They agreed initially that Palmer would only endorse products he personally used – Coca-Cola, Liggett & Myers (L&
M) cigarettes and Heinz tomato ketchup. Within a few years Palmer would lend his name to ice skating rinks, insurance companies and 110 branches of a dry cleaners. A chain of motels was planned, but – like plans for Arnold Palmer shaving cream, suntan oil, talcum powder and deodorant – it never got off the ground. Nevertheless, Arnold Palmer was the first elite sportsman to become a million-dollar corporation while still in the prime of his playing career.

  McCormack now wanted to spread his own wings, which made Palmer insecure. Nevertheless, the International Management Group (IMG) which he started in Cleveland in 1960 would grow into a global sports and media empire. Out of it emerged Trans World International (TWI), a television company which in 1963 and 1964 made a TV series called Challenge Golf featuring McCormack’s two big clients, Palmer and the South African Gary Player. When McCormack signed the new star Jack Nicklaus he controlled the commercial lives of a trio of golfers who became known collectively as the Big Three. For three seasons in the late 1960s Palmer, Player and Nicklaus made Big Three Golf for the television network NBC. In 1970 Nicklaus left IMG to go his own way, but by then the standard for the commercial exploitation of sports stars had been set. Between 1960 and 1967 those three together won a total of fifteen majors while no other golfer was able to win two.

  Sam Snead and Ben Hogan, the big stars of US golf in the decade after 1945, did not come near to matching Arnold Palmer’s income, popularity and prize-winnings. It was McCormack’s involvement that produced big television purses, big galleries and the idea of golf as a sport with an international audience. Arnold Palmer came from Latrobe, a modest town thirty-five miles east of Pittsburgh, and his small-town origins were the key to understanding his appeal. He was, McCormack insisted, an ordinary man who liked steak dinners and the television series Bonanza. His strict Scots-Irish father had been the golf professional at Latrobe Country Club and the young Palmer grew up very aware of the socially inferior position of the humble golf pro who ate his meals in the club kitchen or at home and never entered the locker room, bar or members’ lounge unless specifically invited by a member. Arnold himself was not allowed to play with the members’ children or to swim in the club pool. His earliest career plan had been to become a businessman because he could not face the prospect of being a servant and second-class citizen.

  McCormack believed that Palmer’s appeal to the common man all over the world lay in five particular assets: first was his relatively modest background (his father had been a greenkeeper before rising to be club professional and Latrobe was a humble club); then there was his good looks, which widened his appeal with women; there was also the way he played golf, taking risks and wearing his emotions on his sleeve; there was his involvement in a string of exciting finishes in early televised tournaments; and, finally, his affability. Taken together, these positive characteristics made Palmer a highly marketable product.

  Palmer had been astonished that Wilson would not do the honourable thing and let him out of a contract that clearly undervalued his new-found star status. At the end of the contract Wilson offered an increased deal but at the price of a ten-year contract which allowed the golfer to make up to $75,000 p.a. Palmer himself valued his relationship with Wilson, so McCormack worked on the best possible deal while staying within the Wilson fold which led to the evolution of the Arnold Palmer Golf Company making its own branded clubs and balls.

  Before the end of the decade American men could shave with Arnold Palmer lather, spray on his deodorant, drink his favourite soft drink, fly his ‘preferred’ airline, buy his approved corporate jet, eat his candy bar, order stock certificates through him and do their DIY around the house with his power tools. When the chain of Arnold Palmer Dry Cleaners became visible all over America, the professional golfer Dave Marr said in a joke that would not be broadcast or printed today, ‘The only pro golfer I would send my laundry to is Chen Ching-po. If you have two new cleaning businesses in town and you don’t know either and one is called Irving Schlepperman and one is called Arnold Palmer, you’re going to go with Palmer.’

  McCormack and Palmer were both visionaries and saw in the Open Championship a way to expand their business beyond the North American continent. The British Open – as American golfers always refer to it – had, since Bobby Jones’s triumph in 1930, declined in status compared with its American equivalent and with the Masters in Augusta. Palmer certainly felt a kinship with the history of golf so that it gave him great pleasure to compete on the great British courses on which the Open was played. However, he like Nicklaus did not much like being referred to as A. Palmer or J. Nicklaus while amateurs were dignified with the title ‘Mr’ before their names. In this respect golf followed the lines of social stratification laid down by cricket. Until 1963, cricket scorecards would present the initials of amateur players before their names (as in P. B. H. May or M. J. K. Smith), and those of the professionals after (as in Washbrook C. and Hutton L.). That in itself was an improvement on the practice of Cricket’s Golden Age which printed scorecards with Mr C. B. Fry the amateur and Hobbs the professional who was deprived of the dignity of any initial.

  When Britain was trying its hardest to persuade the Americans to join in the fight against Hitler in 1940 and 1941, propagandists soon discovered that one of the biggest obstacles to acquiring American sympathy was the strong feeling that Americans were not prepared to send their boys off to die in a foreign war to preserve the British Empire and the British class system. Palmer and Nicklaus retained traces of those feelings and in addition, they did not greatly care for antiquated British plumbing which left locker rooms cold and sometimes without hot running water. Their attitude was shared by other American golfers. Indeed, apart from Sam Snead in 1946 and Ben Hogan at Carnoustie in 1953, the American golfers who dominated the world game in the post-war era could not be bothered to travel all the way to Britain to play in the Open.

  When Arnold Palmer arrived at St Andrews in 1959 it was generally assumed that he would win at the first time of asking as there was no real competition, but it was the Australian Kel Nagle who won by a stroke from the American. However, the Old Course worked its charm on Palmer as it has done over the years on so many other golfers from beyond the British Isles. Palmer returned the following year and won at Royal Birkdale, at the same time winning over the British press and a legion of fans. Palmer was able to hit long, low shots which played well on links courses and, just as importantly, he was a great scrambler. Palmer won again at Troon in 1962, but now he was accompanied by Nicklaus, Gene Littler, Sam Snead and Phil Rodgers. It was the greatest Open field for twenty-five years. Palmer shot successive rounds of 71-69-67-69 and won, to great acclaim, by six strokes. He returned to the UK later in the year for a new tournament founded by Mark McCormack, the World Match Play at Wentworth, winning at the first time of asking. In total, Palmer would play twelve major British-based tournaments in seven years. He achieved something similar in Japan, establishing his status as a world star.

  The relationship between Arnold Palmer and Mark McCormack and their television and commercial ventures is treated in such detail because it set the trend for the way in which sport would develop in the second half of the twentieth century. Television played such a large part in Arnold Palmer’s life that by the mid-1960s he was the best-recognised athlete in the United States, although a case could certainly be made for the boxer Muhammad Ali. Mickey Mantle and Joe Namath, the biggest stars in baseball and American football respectively, were largely unknown outside the United States. The tournaments that established Palmer’s fame were the Masters and US Open of 1960 which were both televised and won by Palmer with sensational finishes in front of audiences of millions.

  It was the success of the Big Three that transformed golf and the earning capacities of professionals on the USPGA golf tour. In 1950, the twenty-fifth leading player on the tour made $5,152 whereas by 1965 the twenty-fifth leading player made $36,692. The trend has continued upwards in recent years but at a much more rapid rate, due pa
rtly to inflation and partly to the recognition that elite sportsmen are valuable commercial assets and need to be rewarded accordingly.

  Palmer’s rapid expansion as a corporate entity was in large part, of course, the result of the burgeoning prosperity of the 1960s. The wages of professional footballers in England also benefited from the expansion of the economy but their wages and their commercial income from endorsements were minuscule compared to their American counterparts in golf and tennis. Team sports in America like football and baseball were far less lucrative, as Jim Bouton’s seminal work Ball Four indicates, but American values had not significantly penetrated British cultural life in the 1960s. If Billy Wright in the 1950s, like every other English professional footballer of the time, had no option but to accept the offerings of the maximum wage, Bobby Moore was part of the post-abolition generation. Six years older than Moore, Armfield might have felt like a millionaire in 1961 at £50 a week but if he never earned more than £55 it suggests that for the final decade of his career, for half of which he remained an England player, his wages rose by no more than £5.

  There were not yet any agents in the English game to take on the clubs for him; in fact the Football League had taken legal measures to prohibit any third-party representation. Moore himself, having experienced the unwelcome realities of footballers’ remuneration at the start of his career in the late 1950s, was to adopt a much more aggressive approach to wage negotiation than many of his contemporaries. His first wage on the West Ham ground staff as a school leaver was £6 15s 0d, which was supplemented by a one pound note if he were chosen to play for the reserves in the Football Combination. Playing away, young players would also receive five shillings for tea money. Moore made careful plans for the distribution of these riches: