A Life Well Played

by Arnold Palmer

  I don’t mean to make this sound like a marketing pitch right here. It’s about quality and the image I wanted to project, which also was about being the best. That was important to my own brand, to use a marketing term. Being an ambassador for Rolex or a spokesman or having a long-standing relationship with the likes of MasterCard, as I do today, are part of my overall business philosophy of joining forces with quality names and products. But I felt the same way about Pennzoil and Hertz and so many other companies with which I had a business relationship. If the company made a good product, and I genuinely liked what they were doing, then that was good enough for me.

  I think that approach has been a great thing for me. And it’s worked for my partners, too.

  NO MEANS …

  THE ABILITY TO LEARN how to say no forcefully or graciously or with conviction is an indispensable attribute for someone as busy as I have been through the years. Many of the best business decisions came from respectfully declining. Some of my worst, too. But the bottom line is that I am terrible at letting the words pass my lips.

  Even when Mark McCormack took over this unpleasant chore on some occasions, it didn’t really insulate me from the responsibility, since, ultimately, I was the one who had to make up his mind on whether or not I was going to do something.

  My aversion to the word “no” sometimes gave McCormack fits. He joked that, “In twenty-seven languages Arnold Palmer couldn’t say no.”

  A favorite story of his entails my handling of a request from Bob Hope to appear in his movie Call Me Bwana. The executive producer of the movie, Harry Saltzman, had called Mark asking if I would do the movie. At the same time, Hope was calling me asking me to do it. I sort of agreed, but then I realized all that would be involved in what was really a cameo appearance. It was going to be shot in Kenya, for starters, and there were other complications that didn’t make me too eager to do it.

  Mark and I looked at the schedule, and it appeared it was going to be very difficult for me to get it done. When Saltzman called again, Mark gave him the bad news: the schedule wouldn’t allow a film appearance. But then Hope calls me again, and says, “Come on, Arnie, we really need you and it will be great fun.” Well, how can I say no to Bob Hope?

  Another round of phone calls produced the same results. Mark said no to Saltzman, but I hemmed and hawed and stammered when Hope called me yet again. Instead of saying no, I told Mark to adjust my schedule. But that took a lot of saying no to other people to get the schedule straightened out. Mark could only throw up his hands and laugh when it was all said and done, but it worked out because we shot the scene in England instead, and it didn’t take nearly as long as we thought it might. The film was released in 1963.

  It did not necessarily earn rave reviews. The New York Times was rather harsh in its July 4 critique of the film. The first sentence of the review, written by A. H. Weiler, began, “Bob Hope, one of the world’s most celebrated traveling men, undoubtedly took the wrong turn when he hit the trail toward Africa for ‘Call Me Bwana.’”

  Luckily, he was a bit kinder to yours truly. Sort of. Weiler wrote, “Arnold Palmer, portraying himself with surprising ease, turns up for no reason at all, of course, to play a few screwball shots with Mr. Hope to prove that they both know what to do with a golf club even under these improbable circumstances.”

  Nice to know I was good at being myself.

  Throughout my career I had these back-and-forth struggles within myself about when to say no to people. Or if I should say no. And how to say no. While it’s easier to say no from the standpoint of simplifying your life—saying no means you don’t have to do anything further—I never liked the idea of disappointing people, especially when it came to things like charity golf events and other meaningful endeavors. I was most guilty when my peers called to ask if I could play in their fund-raising golf events. This was especially tough when I had my own events and requested the presence of my golfing friends.

  But I have said no plenty of times in my life. I had to just to keep my sanity and have time to eat and sleep, not to mention spend time with my family and keep my golf game in relatively good shape. As I have gotten older and slowed down, I’ve had to invoke the use of the word even more frequently, but I still do so only after going through a painful exercise of weighing the pros and cons of any request or proposition or call for help that crosses my desk. I can tell you this much is true: I have seldom liked it.

  THE TRACTOR

  THANKS TO MARK MCCORMACK I already was a fairly successful corporate pitchman by the time I signed on as a spokesman for Pennzoil. Founded in western Pennsylvania, Pennzoil seemed like a natural business association for a native son of the same region. I don’t know why it took so long to have a business relationship with such a recognizable company that hailed from the same neck of the woods as yours truly. Especially when my father used Pennzoil in the equipment at Latrobe Country Club and I had even stayed with the regional vice president of Pennzoil, Ed Douglas, and his wife, Rita, in San Francisco when the U.S. Open was played at Olympic Club in 1955.

  I thought I understood a fair amount about advertising and television promotion, but I learned a few new things when Alastair Johnston, who was looking over my affairs on behalf of IMG, and I met with Pennzoil representatives about finalizing a sponsorship deal. During the meeting I mentioned how Pap used Pennzoil, and almost as an aside I told the folks at Pennzoil how well the 1947 Toro tractor my father used at the club was still running.

  Suddenly, the eyes of the Pennzoil people lit up and they were clearly excited by this bit of news, which I didn’t think was very significant in the overall scheme of what we’d been talking about. But they started peppering me with more questions about this tractor. What did it look like? Where did Pap keep it?

  Now, I didn’t say as much, but deep down I harbored a sort of love-hate relationship with tractors. Let me explain.

  Those machines had a very definite impact on the type of person I became growing up, because having to work on them taught me to be humble and to know where I came from. I think about my father and the things that he told me when I was driving a tractor. There was one type that I had to drive, a 1922 Fordson with steel wheels and spikes on it. If you didn’t keep those wheels flat on the ground, and caught the edge of a hill or had too much weight on the back, the wheels would spin and tear up the golf course. And that got my attention, because the old man was about to kick my rear end all the way around that golf course if I didn’t learn how to drive that tractor properly. It was like playing golf: he expected me to do what he told me to do, and I did it. Pap drove the old Toro tractor around the course every day. I think it was almost a source of comfort for club members to see him on it because that meant Deacon Palmer was watching over things.

  I worked with both those tractors, and I didn’t much care for them only because they kept me from what I’d rather be doing, which was hitting balls or putting or playing a few holes. But because they didn’t have power steering, they really helped me build my upper body strength when I was younger. That came in handy down the road.

  Anyway, I could only laugh when one of the Pennzoil reps asked if I thought it could be used in a commercial. I said, “You better have a look at it first.” I knew it still ran, but it was old, and it was a bit beat up after Pap used it for hauling sod and dragging gang mowers and aerating fairways for nearly thirty years. I had a hard time believing that this idea had much merit, that there really was a use for this old tractor.

  But there was, and we shot the first commercial using the tractor in the summer of 1979, and it aired for almost a year. Before I knew it, people were asking about the tractor at almost every stop I made on tour. In the 1983 L.A. Open I played with a young rookie named Payne Stewart, and he just marveled at the number of people who were shouting to me about how they used Pennzoil and they loved that tractor. It was really something, and the ad campaign was so successful that Pennzoil started carting the tractor around to trade shows, and
execs even parked it in the lobby of Pennzoil’s corporate headquarters.

  It was a hit. Artists have painted pictures of it, and it’s been photographed more times than I can count. More than 25,000 miniature replicas of it have been sold since Dick Westman, an advertising agency executive for Pennzoil, got the bright idea to license plastic models. In 2005 PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem presented me with a custom-made tractor similar to Pap’s model.

  One afternoon I was sitting in the dining room at the Beverly Hills Hotel when Bob Hope approached my table and said, “Hey, I knew you were here. I saw your tractor double-parked out front.” Johnny Carson once joked on his show that I had such devoted fans that they probably could be seen walking around the golf course with quarts of Pennzoil in their pockets.

  Over the years the tractor has come to be known as Arnie’s Tractor—which is how Pennzoil marketed the miniature version—so my affection for the old girl changed quite a bit. It will always be Pap’s tractor to me, though.

  If there was a moment when I really warmed up to the thing, it was probably in 1986. I was asked to serve as grand marshal for the Latrobe Fourth of July parade, and I really made an impression when I made my entrance by flying my Hughes helicopter over the parade route before landing at Latrobe’s Legion-Keener ball fields. From there I joined the parade, and the hometown folks greeted me enthusiastically—probably because I was driving a certain well-known tractor.

  No matter how long you have been doing something, you can always learn something new. I sure did when it came to advertising and a beat-up old tractor, and I have to think Pap would have enjoyed watching that whole spectacle unfold with a combination of pride and bewilderment.

  SENIOR MOMENTS

  FOLKS WANT TO CREDIT ME with getting the Champions Tour on firm ground, and while that’s a nice sentiment, I don’t feel that it’s accurate.

  It took more people than me to make what at the start was known as the Senior PGA Tour successful. Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Raymond Floyd, Hale Irwin, Tom Watson, and all the other players who have come after needed to buy into the idea of senior golf and support it. Their picking up the baton was as crucial as my involvement after Sam Snead, Gardner Dickinson, Peter Thomson, and others blazed the trail with the highly successful Legends of Golf in 1978.

  And I have to be honest, too; whatever I did on behalf of the senior tour was partly selfish, because I enjoyed playing golf too much when I turned fifty. It wasn’t like it was something I didn’t want to do or something I felt I had to do. I wanted to play senior golf, and to still try to win championships. I can tell you that winning the U.S. Senior Open in 1981 at Oakland Hills Country Club—near Detroit, a town with which I’ll always feel strong emotional ties—felt every bit as good as winning the U.S. Open in 1960. Winning never gets old, as they say.

  In 1980, when the Senior PGA Tour was birthed with four events, I won the PGA Seniors’ Championship at Turnberry Isle Country Club in North Miami Beach, Florida, and that’s a tournament that has been around since 1937 when Jock Hutchinson won it at Augusta National Golf Club. (Augusta, in fact, hosted the first two editions of the Senior PGA.) By 1983 we had sixteen tournaments, and senior golf had a solid foothold in the sports landscape.

  Aside from the enjoyment I got out of continuing my competitive golf career, there was a clear business purpose for playing senior golf. It was far secondary to the lure of tournament golf, but it made good business sense to still put myself out there, to be on television in what was my long-established environment. I believe it allowed me to remain a viable corporate spokesman, and it sure didn’t hurt my design business either.

  The Champions Tour has been a tremendous success, and to a lesser degree than the regular tour, some players out there need to remember how things developed. The seniors, too, need to try harder to keep what they have. Did I put time into promoting senior golf? You bet I did. It was worth every minute of it, because I enjoyed myself immensely and found it rewarding to keep trying to play golf at a high level.

  A LIFE’S WORK

  I HAVE TO BE BUSY. It would never do for me to stop working. I will work until the very end. I don’t believe that you ever stop thinking and striving to make something of your day. It’s what I love. What is that law of physics about a body in motion staying in motion? Boy, that’s me.

  I don’t keep up with everything that I used to. I’m not unaware of the fact that I have slowed down. But I have good people around me, which has always been essential in my business life. Early on it was Winnie. Then Mark McCormack. Doc Giffin has been not only a great executive assistant, but also a trusted friend for fifty years. These days I lean on Alastair Johnston and Cori Britt and a lot of other wonderful people. I also have my daughter Amy and her husband, Roy Saunders, but in the end, it is still up to me. I have to make the important decisions. And I still very much enjoy going through the process of doing that.

  From a very early age watching my father I learned the value of a good day’s work. It wasn’t all about earning a living either. There is something satisfying about accomplishing, something in a day, building toward something, creating something, or just putting your mind through some exercises of improving on a project or task. I still get that satisfaction.

  I remember drawing the ire of Joe Torre’s wife in 2004 when I talked Joe, then the New York Yankees manager, out of retiring, and he signed a new contract that year with the team. I was in Maui for the Champion Skins Game and Joe and I happened to be on the same whale-watching expedition when I invited him to play golf with me at Bay Hill. Joe said, “After this year, I may be able to take you up on that.” I was a bit startled by the meaning of that comment so I asked him what he was talking about. He said, “This is the last year of my contract and I’m going to be sixty-four.” I just gave him a look and told him that age has nothing to do with his thinking that he should retire. I was seventy-four at the time and I told him that I was never going to retire. Joe signed a two-year contract extension for $13 million. I didn’t get a commission.

  Oh, I’ve often thought about just riding off into the sunset. But my thinking has always been that if I stop being active I wouldn’t last very long. I think that would be the end of me. I can honestly say that my work ethic has been one key to living a long and happy life.

  THE FINAL LESSON

  I WANT TO LEAVE YOU with this thought, a confession, if you will: I never cared for the nickname “the King.” At times, it has made me uncomfortable and even a bit irritated to be referred to that way. I know it was meant to be flattering, but there is no king of golf. There never has been, and there never will be.

  Golf is the most democratic game on earth, a pastime of the people that grants no special privileges and pays no mind to whether a man is a hotel doorman or a corporate CEO. It punishes and exalts us all with splendid but uncompromising equal opportunity.

  I’m the son of a hard-nosed golf course caretaker who had large hands and an even larger heart. He was intelligent, and he was thoughtful, but most of all, he was a man who knew the importance of priorities and respect for people and the game. He drilled into me the importance of always leaving the golf course better than I found it. I feel we have to be more vigilant than ever to make certain the things that make golf such a great game remain the same and are protected and nurtured and preserved for the next folks coming along.

  I do like being called an ambassador of the game. It is a role I take very seriously, whether in my work with the USGA or with my own tournament or building a golf course or supporting the game in whatever capacity I choose to take on whenever I am in the public eye. And I hope I have set an example for everyone who loves the game to be an ambassador of sorts, too. Because we all have a responsibility to make sure this great game remains great.

  Furthermore, I’ve always tried to be a role model, to set a good example, and sometimes I’ve wondered if I did a good enough job in that regard.

  Mostly, however, I’ve simply wan
ted to be a golfer. And an incident that happened to me in 1991 at my own tournament at Bay Hill, then called the Nestle Invitational, reaffirmed that I was still thought of as a golfer by my fellow PGA Tour competitors. I had made the cut that year at the age of sixty-one, and unbeknownst to me, Peter Jacobsen, a good friend, decided that he was going to buy me a cake to commemorate the feat, though making the cut wasn’t something I considered a feat. Peter went to a local Winn-Dixie and asked for a sheet cake for about 200 people, he told the manager, and he convinced the fellow to bake the cake that night so they could present it to me sometime that weekend.

  I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when the guys put that cake in front of me. As luck would have it—if you can call it that—we had a rain delay on Saturday of the tournament and just about every player who made the cut was in the locker room. Ray Floyd, Greg Norman, Jeff Sluman, Paul Azinger, Rocco Mediate, and Tom Kite were among the players who gathered around. It was a wonderful surprise. And not a bad cake, I might add.

  I cut a piece for every player who was there. It was a fun afternoon, to say the least, and quite meaningful to me not just because Peter and the others went to the trouble to do that, but because I thought it said something. In my mind, it said that the guys still thought of me as one of them, that I still had a place in their world, and that they cared about what I thought and what I said.

  I never wanted to be on any kind of pedestal; I never thought of myself that way, and this was an occasion when I was just one of the guys.

  I have been asked about what my legacy might be, and, honestly, I’ve never really given it much thought. I can’t put into words what the game has meant to me. And I can’t tell you how great people have been to me over the years. So, if I enhanced the game and people’s enjoyment of the game, I would feel like I have accomplished something.