A Life Well Played

by Arnold Palmer

  THE ART OF TEA

  ARNOLD PALMER TEA is 100 percent my creation—made up, roughly, of 75 percent tea and 25 percent lemonade … tea has to dominate or it isn’t quite right—but I never called it an Arnold Palmer. In fact, I never really called it anything at all except iced tea and lemonade.

  Let me set the record straight on its origin, as I did in an ESPN 30 for 30 TV feature on the subject. (No, I can’t believe it was worth all that effort, either, but it was very nice all the same.) Here’s the story: I concocted it one afternoon with the help of my wife, Winnie. She had made a lot of iced tea for lunch, and I said, “Hey babe, I’ve got an idea. You make the iced tea in a big pitcher, and we’ll just put a little lemonade in it and see how that works.” I had it for lunch after working on the golf course. I thought, “Boy, this is great. I’m going to take it with me when I play golf.” I did that often, and I made sure that it was available at Latrobe Country Club and Bay Hill Club.

  Not too many years later I was in a Palm Springs restaurant ordering a drink after a long day designing a golf course out there. I told the waitress to mix a drink for me to certain specifications—iced tea with a healthy splash of lemonade. A woman sitting nearby overhead me, and she told the waitress, “I want what he ordered. I want an Arnold Palmer.” Slowly, the name caught on with the popularity of the concoction. But it didn’t occur to us to try to market Arnold Palmer tea for quite some time, even though it was popular in Palm Springs and mostly the West Coast.

  But our first attempt wasn’t successful. Like many business ideas, there are bumps in the road before you can make it work, and in the early 1990s we tried to market and sell the iced tea as a finished product, but the licensee with which we had an agreement couldn’t push it out to market effectively.

  Now fast-forward to 2001, and an Orlando businessman named Chris Byrd, who lived near Bay Hill and had been a fan of mine going back to his teen years, came up with a marketing proposal that he pitched the day after that year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational Presented by MasterCard (then called the Bay Hill Invitational Presented by Cooper Tires). I liked what he had to say, the ideas that he put forth, and then Chris went out and created a management company, Innovative Flavors LLC, with a plan of licensing dairies and tea manufacturers throughout the U.S. to process and package the product under strict quality assurance guidelines.

  Eventually, an agreement was struck with Arizona Beverages to license and manufacture a shelf-stable version sold in a 23-ounce can. Then things really started to take off. Arizona experienced multiple years of 100 percent growth in the Arnold Palmer line of beverages and today we sell over 400 million cans annually.

  I’m often asked what I think when people order an Arnold Palmer in front of me. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed, but I’m happy they’re ordering it. I like to think that maybe I’ve created something that is fun. And it has been fun for me. I have one or two every day. And when I order it, I just say, “I’ll have a Palmer.” I don’t think about it in the first person. Alastair Johnston once said that the Arnold Palmer (the drink) is successful because it’s not a product that I endorse. It’s the actual name of the product. “It’s totally authentic,” Alastair has claimed.

  It should be authentic because that was my approach throughout my career. It sure paid off for me—and for that other Arnold Palmer.

  BAY HILL

  SOMETIMES A BUSINESS deal that comes with its share of bad publicity is a bad deal. So it was with our near sale of Bay Hill Club & Lodge in the mid-1980s. It wasn’t a deal that was going to end up severing my ties with the club; I never would let that happen no matter how much money was involved.

  A group of Japanese businessmen offered an eye-popping amount of money. This, of course, was during a period when Japan’s economy was booming and they were buying up golf courses, including Pebble Beach Golf Links. In the case of Bay Hill, the interested party in question was putting roughly $50 million on the table for the entire 200-plus-acre complex. This was considerably more than the money I paid for it, plus whatever I had poured into it through the years to make the golf course and the lodge top-notch in every way possible.

  I first visited Orlando in 1948 with the Wake Forest golf team to play golf against Rollins College, and I knew then that someday I would be back. I didn’t know to what extent I would be here, but I liked the small-town atmosphere, the orange groves, the pristine lakes, and the surrounding areas.

  My initial encounter with Bay Hill came in 1962 when I was down in Orlando to play in the Citrus Open. It was still raw then, but a few years later, on February 28, 1965, I played in an exhibition match at Bay Hill sponsored by the Orlando Jaycees against local favorite Dave Ragan, Don Cherry, quite a good singer as well as a golfer, and Jack Nicklaus. The golf course, which opened in late November 1961, was tough—no member broke 80 on opening day—but perhaps because my good buddy and rival Mr. Nicklaus was along for the ride, I played rather nicely. I birdied the first, third, and fourth holes and rode that to a 6-under-par 66. None of the other three gentlemen broke par, with Jack finishing second with a 73. Like I said, the course was difficult. But I liked it right away. As I told the media in the immediate aftermath, “It’s a course that makes you hit your shots.” I thought it was an excellent design by Dick Wilson, but I did see ways to improve it, and I enacted those improvements once I acquired the property.

  After the exhibition, I returned to the house we were renting in Coral Gables and said to Winnie, “Babe I’ve just played the best golf course in Florida, and I want to own it.” I suppose you could say that my feelings were somewhat similar to how I felt about Winnie when we first met. I just had a feeling. It was another love-at-first-sight kind of moment for me.

  When she laid eyes on it, Winnie agreed that it was a wonderful place, secluded, plentiful orange groves and wildlife around, and in a part of Florida that was rather undeveloped and laid-back. Four years later, we finalized a five-year lease with an option to buy the club from a group of owners from Nashville and Detroit. And in 1974, through a rather complicated set of transactions, we finally and officially acquired the golf club and surrounding property. Little did we know that things were going to change quickly—and everyone thought that I was very, very intelligent to know that Disney World was going to be built just down the road from Bay Hill. Well, frankly, I think Disney World is great, and I think what has happened is fantastic. On the other hand, I didn’t want that to happen. I was looking for a small golf course in a rural community that would be similar to Latrobe, and Disney ruined that. But it was great for our investment.

  Speaking of Latrobe, three years before we completed the purchase of Bay Hill, Winnie and I became the sole stockholders in Latrobe Country Club. That meant Pap had to work for me, and when I chided him about this little business arrangement, he didn’t find it particularly amusing. But our yearly schedule was set; we would spend winter at Bay Hill and summer and parts of spring and fall in Latrobe. It was perfect.

  So there I was a little more than a decade later, owner of two golf clubs, looking at a $50 million windfall if I sold one of them. But it just wasn’t that easy. And, in fact, it turned into a huge and costly headache. When the news started circulating that we might sell Bay Hill to Japanese investors, we received criticism from just about every corner. And there were sensitivity issues as well; the community in and around Bay Hill was home to a number of World War II veterans who weren’t particularly accepting of the idea of a Japanese group owning Bay Hill.

  But because I had business partners to consider, and because I would continue to run the day-to-day operations and remain tied to the club after handing over the keys, I had to give the offer serious consideration. But a deal too good to be true usually is, and that was the case in this instance. Perhaps because their financial situation wasn’t nearly as solid as we were led to believe, the Japanese group used a loophole in the proposed agreement to back out, forfeiting a substantial nonrefundable deposit.

 
But even if this had not been the case, I was coming around to the realization that the deal just didn’t feel right. I’ve had that feeling before, and most of the time my instincts were pretty good. Not perfect, mind you, but good.

  DESIGN

  AT MY AGE I know I am slowing down physically. Let’s face it, they don’t give you a pacemaker, which I received in 2014, if you’re getting younger. But I don’t feel like I want to slow down in my life. I still have things I want to accomplish.

  One area where I still have a tremendous desire to keep going is in golf course design. A visitor in my office at Bay Hill late in 2015 wanted to know what I was working on with my design team. Of course the most heavily publicized project was the golf course near The Greenbrier in West Virginia that I was designing with my good old friends Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, and Lee Trevino. In fact, I had just come from a meeting among the four of us a few days earlier, and it was quite an experience being with those three guys again. I did a lot of listening, that’s for sure. I could hardly get a word in. But it was all fun.

  The piece of ground on which we are designing the 8,000-yard golf course is one of the most challenging I have ever worked on. It is very dramatic, with strong elevation. Jim Justice, the owner of The Greenbrier, and the developer of this new layout, wants us to build a golf course that could host a U.S. Open championship. We’re going to do our darndest to give him one. Considering that together we have won eight U.S. Opens, I think we know what we are doing.

  It’s funny how my career in golf has segued from playing to course design. My first-grade teacher told me I should be an artist when I grow up. In a way she turned out to be prophetic. I feel like an artist, just not with a canvas and paint. Over the years I have been fortunate enough to design more than 300 courses, many with the late Ed Seay, who was a tremendous architect and was a great friend who complemented me in the field.

  It was around the mid-1980s when I really felt strongly about doing more as a course designer. I told a group of reporters at the time, “Imagine twenty or thirty years ago, all I wanted to do was play. Now, I just want to make the game as fascinating for others as it is for me. I’m really more interested these days in designing than playing. I’ve been to Japan, Thailand, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, Taiwan, and China and the business is growing like mad.” And it was growing, and I can tell you that I enjoyed it immensely, and one of the reasons was I felt like I could really contribute something to the game this way. I had played golf all over the world, and so I thought I had the kind of ideas that translated well to helping other people enjoy the game. Enjoyment of the game was my bottom line, too. I wanted to build courses that were fun and that looked pretty. I tried not to design too many courses that anyone would consider difficult.

  The design business isn’t growing nearly as quickly now, but I’m still quite busy.

  I’ve never told anyone this until now, but I still have a plan to build what I consider the ultimate golf course. I’ve thought about it for a long time. I have a few other interesting ideas I’d want to try out. Now I have to find someone who would want to build this dream course. Like I said, I still have things I want to accomplish.

  DO WHAT YOU LOVE

  IF YOU DON’T LIKE what you’re doing in life, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. From the standpoint of what you do with your life professionally, do your job so that when you walk out at night, you’re proud of what you did that day.

  I’ve always had the advantage of loving what I was doing, and any sacrifices I had to make weren’t as great as the rewards that I was receiving.

  “Well, Arnie,” you might say, “that’s easy for you because you played golf for a living. Who wouldn’t want to do that?”

  Sure, I derived tremendous pleasure and financial gain from playing golf for a living. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. But if golf hadn’t worked out, I’d have found something else just as meaningful to me. It wouldn’t have been selling paint, as I did after leaving the Coast Guard, the job I had when I won the U.S. Amateur in 1954. But I’ve written earlier about the fact that I would have probably become an airline pilot. I loved flying that much. I suppose in one respect I am very lucky that I did two things well that I truly enjoyed.

  But the point is that you can always make a change in your life to do what you want. And what will drive you, what should drive you, is your pride. I’ve never seen anyone be successful who didn’t have pride. Have pride in yourself and set goals that reflect that pride. Do that and you will succeed, whatever it is you choose to do with your professional life.

  INSTINCTS

  ONE OF MY STRONGEST PHILOSOPHIES on business is very basic: an aversion to risk. This probably sounds a little contrary to my nature because of the whole go-for-broke style of golf and the risks that I took on the golf course. But that’s not to say I never took on any risks; I just always made sure to minimize risk wherever possible, and if I couldn’t, then I would walk away, even if it seemed like the payoff might be attractive.

  An exception was the start of Golf Channel. My advisors were against it. Strongly. But Joe Gibbs, a businessman from Birmingham, Alabama, who was the brains behind the idea, was a persuasive man. And he was prepared.

  I had met Joe in 1990 when he hosted me at his home during the PGA Championship at Shoal Creek. Joe was a cable entrepreneur who already had built three successful cable and communication companies and had the experience to launch a network. But his inexperience with golf hampered him in his latest initiative, and he needed someone with knowledge of the game and the people in it to raise the necessary investment funds to get it off the ground.

  I’ll admit, I thought the idea of a twenty-four-hour cable network devoted to golf was a good one, but it also seemed like a stretch. The primary question I had was what we would put on the air for twenty-four hours a day. Well, Joe had the answer. He was very good with his foresight and thinking. My advisors still thought it was too risky, but I was satisfied with everything Joe was telling me. Finally, I had to make a decision. And I just said, “Gentlemen, if I hadn’t tried to hit it through the tree a few times in my life, none of us would be here. Let’s do this.”

  We announced the launch of Golf Channel at the 1993 Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, and we were able to secure some important backing, most notably six of the country’s leading cable operators, which gave us a reliable avenue of distribution. With headquarters in Orlando, not far from Bay Hill Club, we launched on January 17, 1995, with the first fully digital production facility in the United States.

  We had a varied programming schedule, but not a lot of live golf at the time. That changed as we grew and evolved, and today Golf Channel is available in more than 120 million homes in eighty-three countries and is broadcast in twelve languages.

  One of the nicest things that happened to me with respect to Golf Channel occurred on January 29, 2013, when I cut the ribbon at Golf Channel Studios to officially christen Morning Drive’s new set named in my honor as “Studio AP.” In addition to revealing the new state-of-the-art studio, I had a chance to introduce Golf Channel’s new autograph board that is signed by every guest that visits Morning Drive.

  “Arnold Palmer is not only Golf Channel’s co-founder, but also now one of Morning Drive’s most loyal viewers, so we are proud to be naming Morning Drive’s new studio after him,” Golf Channel president Mike McCarley said, offering some nice words at the time. “Morning Drive’s new editorial philosophy is to showcase golf as a lifestyle for a lifetime, just as Mr. Palmer has enjoyed all aspects of the game since first swinging a club at age 3.”

  I think if there is any lesson at all in my involvement with Golf Channel, it’s simply to trust your instincts. And trust your background, too. Move forward if you’re presented with an opportunity that matches up with the things in your life with which you are familiar and which line up with your overall philosophy. Yes, Golf Channel was a big risk, but it was one that I thought I could manage and that I thought had a good chance
of succeeding based on things I knew about the game.

  That’s very important. The risk was still contained within my field of expertise and knowledge. That is an important distinction to make. I’m glad I was proven right.

  A MAN’S WORD

  I’VE ALREADY MENTIONED the epic handshake agreement I shared with Mark McCormack that was our bond of trust throughout our long association. My longtime design associate, the late Ed Seay, also was a wonderful partner with whom I never had a written agreement. We shook hands on collaborative design business in 1970 after working with another designer, Frank Duane, for about five years. A former U.S. Marine, Ed was the one who suggested that we not sign any type of lengthy legal document. Our word was going to be our bond. I knew I had found the perfect partner.

  As I mentioned earlier, when I turned professional in late 1954, I did sign a contract with Wilson Sporting Goods, a basic staff contract that didn’t have many frills beyond their paying me $5,000 annually and providing me with clubs, balls, and a Wilson staff bag with my name on the front of it. I couldn’t have been happier with the deal. I liked everyone at the company and the fact that Fred Bowman, the president of the company, had shaken my hand and told me that if at any time I wanted to sever my relationship with the company, they would honor that request. I took him at his word, and after an initial three-year deal I signed a second one.

  But when Mark came on board and started looking more closely at the deal, it was apparent that it wasn’t quite as good as I was led to believe. For one thing, in 1960, when I thought the deal had come to its conclusion, I learned that there was a tiny clause in the contract that automatically renewed it for another three years, strictly at Wilson’s option. I had just won my second Masters when I learned this. You think they didn’t want to hang on to me? For another, I had no say in the quality or distribution of the equipment that went out under my name. When I tried to get involved, with all the experience I had working with clubs, I was basically told to shove off. Then there was another section that basically prevented me from earning a nickel anywhere in the world without Wilson’s approval. In short, there were a lot of issues with it. Restricted from the ability to market my name and likeness as I saw fit was just the most onerous part of the equation.