A Golfer's Life

by Arnold Palmer

  For example, as early as 1956, Munsingwear and Haggar offered Dow and me and a few others on tour money to wear and promote their golf apparel. The deals were hashed out independently—handled more like friendly clubhouse conversations after a golf round than business negotiations—so I had no grasp of the complexities of my real worth and whether or not I was selling myself short or asking too much. About that same time, I also did my first book, Hit It Hard, with Bob Drum, a modestly successful how-to book that opened a host of new opportunities in publishing and instruction. Almost overnight there was talk of Arnold Palmer golf schools, driving ranges, regular golf “tips” in periodicals, as well my writing a syndicated column.

  Basically I needed somebody like Mark who could sort all of this out, separate the good opportunities from the bad, and help protect, buffer, and ensure the quality of life I was building back home in Latrobe with Winnie and, soon thereafter, our children. I needed somebody who knew when to say yes but wouldn’t hesitate to say no.

  That’s a tall order. Especially at a time when nobody was doing that sort of business advocacy work for professional golfers. I did see a relationship that I thought might work, to some extent, as a model—the manner in which Clifford Roberts worked on behalf of Augusta National and President Eisenhower. I knew—or at least had heard such was true—that Mr. Roberts handled most of President Eisenhower’s business and investment affairs and was the man President Eisenhower turned to whenever he had a question about anything from a stock tip to a matter of national security. Clifford Roberts was the ultimate inner-circle man, adviser and protector, friend and counselor, through good times and bad, thick and thin, and President Eisenhower trusted him implicitly. In a nutshell, I told Mark I wanted him to become my Clifford Roberts.

  Mark took a few days to think it over and we met again.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be your Clifford Roberts.”

  With that, we shook hands. The deal was consumated that simply. Mark agreed to give up National Sports Management with the understanding that I would be the sole focus of his attention and expertise—my Eisenhower to his Roberts, so to speak—though at some point down the line he could consider taking on a few special additional clients. I agreed to listen to and heed his advice—especially when he said no to something. There was no written contract between us, because Mark knew my word was my bond and there would be no turning back on my part. The same was true of him, I knew, and those stories that you’ve heard about us never formalizing our business relationship in printed legalese are true. As life went along, eventually a host of formal legal documents linking us and our business interests would be hammered out and signed—for that’s the way, alas, of the modern world. A world that, at times, seems to be run by lawyers.

  But that handshake was the beginning of our relationship and pretty much all the contract either of us required in order to get down to business.

  Beginning in late 1959, one of the first things Mark closely examined was my business relationship with the Wilson Sporting Goods Company. My first professional endorsement deal was with Wilson, begun the moment I signed a contract giving up my amateur status several weeks after winning the National Amateur in 1954, a standard $5,400-per-year agreement with a few incentive clauses written into it that was pretty much identical to the contracts of every other player on the Wilson staff. It called for me to play Wilson clubs and use Wilson balls, and though I wasn’t particularly fond of their equipment—and less fond of the quality of their golf balls—I was nevertheless proud to represent the same company Sam Snead, Cary Middlecoff, and Lloyd Mangrum spoke so highly of. I also immensely liked and trusted the folks at Wilson, especially player rep Joe Wolfe, Charlie Hare, Plug Osborne, regional sales manager for the Southeast, and Fred Bowman, the company’s president. They treated me very well and had every reason to expect, as I did, that the marriage would be a long and prosperous one.

  Mark eventually had another opinion, however. In going over my original contract with the company, he learned I was prohibited from doing virtually anything to commercially capitalize on my success that didn’t have Wilson’s approval and/or name on it. If I endorsed cornflakes, for example, I would have to say I started my day each morning with a bowl of cornflakes … and be sure to mention something about Wilson golf equipment. The agreement I’d signed, in fact, though I’d failed to realize it at the time, contractually locked me up as a commercial entity until 1963. To be perfectly frank about it, I didn’t feel it was either smart or appropriate, as Mark counseled, to try to alter the agreement via new negotiations.

  Mark pointed out that I was being severely restricted from marketing my name and services, and he worked on me at every turn to change my mind on this subject, but I held fast. As I repeatedly pointed out to him, loyalty was a big deal with me, and I trusted the people at Wilson to do the right thing. Looking back, it’s fitting that the absence of loyalty on Wilson’s part was ultimately what changed my thinking and drove me from that great sporting house.

  After my second Masters win in 1960 the business environment around me changed at a pace that almost took my breath away. Mark was fielding commercial offers and endorsement deals from all directions, some of them truly eye-opening, everything from television specials to hair tonic ads, trying his best to accommodate my wishes and abide by the rules set down by the folks at Wilson, but working his tail off trying to figure out a way to achieve more financial autonomy and control of my own fate.

  In my view, the real beginning of the end of my association with Wilson—and thus the beginning of Arnold Palmer Enterprises—came just after that post-Masters frenzy when I was approached by a man named Jack Harkins.

  I knew about Jack Harkins, and a lot of other people around the Tour did, too—not all of it particularly flattering. Harkins was a loud, profane, cigar-chewing club maker and big-talking high roller who was known to drop an occasional bundle at the craps tables in Vegas. But he also owned the First Flight Golf Equipment Company out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which made some pretty decent professional-quality golf clubs, in my estimation, and was the first man, as far as I know, to innovate the concept of swing-weighting individual golf clubs. He was also highly personable and, as I quickly found out, a man of surprising integrity and vision despite his bluster.

  Jack wanted me to leave Wilson, come on board at First Flight, and design a set of the highest-professional-quality golf clubs under the Arnold Palmer signature. I was flattered by his suggestion, and I was also deeply intrigued. Since I was the son of a club professional, building and rebuilding golf clubs was not only a hobby and avocation of mine, it was also one of my genuine passions. For years, I’d lobbied Plug Osborne and the others at Wilson to improve the quality of the irons they put out under my name, but that had never come to pass.

  On the other hand, I was reluctant to do anything to upset the apple cart at Wilson. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, I held Harkins off while I put Mark on the case to see if he could figure out a way for us to fulfill our agreements with Wilson and possibly start our own lines of high-quality golf clubs. At the time this was all developing, however, I was operating under the impression that my contract with Wilson was at an end and up for renegotiation in 1960. In fact, as I’ve said, Mark quickly put me straight on the fact that we wouldn’t legally be free of my obligations to Wilson until 1963.

  So something had to give. We asked for and were granted a big meeting to discuss our concerns with the management at Wilson Sporting Goods.

  Right after the Tournament of Champions, Mark, Winnie, and I flew to Chicago for a conference with Wilson executives at their factory in nearby River Grove. We were taken straight to the offices of the company’s new president, Bill Holmes. Joe Wolfe was there, but gone were my friends Plug Osborne and Fred Bowman. The conversations dragged on through lunch and the afternoon, and all that was really accomplished was that all sides agreed to see what could be worked out by the lawyers to liberate us a bit from the res
trictions imposed by my existing contract—and, to Wilson’s way of thinking, end once and for all any danger of my abandoning ship to go over to Harkins at First Flight.

  A few weeks later, I won the U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, and as Mark engagingly put it in his own account of the moment, “Instead of a mere hot commodity, you became an immortal in alligator shoes.”

  Mark was constantly agitating through the end of summer and autumn to have a “serious” discussion with me about my future, but I delayed him, pending final word from Wilson on the new contract, until a snowy night in December, when he finally cornered me at the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan and gave it to me straight. He said that I had to make some major decisions about the direction my business and personal life were going to take. I hated it when Mark got that serious glint in his eye—it always meant I was going to probably have to disappoint somebody, which of course was alien to my nature.

  I remember sipping my whiskey and listening to him advance the idea that we were at a major crossroads, that I had an opportunity to become a very wealthy man, and one way or another I probably wouldn’t do badly if I decided to stay put with the offer we assumed Wilson was preparing in good faith at the time. On the other hand, as he laid it out, if I freed myself from the Wilson contract and together we explored the many opportunities suddenly flying my way, well, who knew what the limits could be?

  I heard what he was telling me, and I thought hard about it. The snow was falling outside and I was anxious to get home to Winnie and my family. Nothing had ever prepared me to make such momentous business decisions, but I loathed conflict of any kind and knew in my heart that my conservative nature demanded that I give Wilson the full benefit of the doubt. We had to take things to the bitter end. I told Mark that we owed Wilson that much, to see what kind of deal they came up with, and Mark did his best imitation of a lawyer who’s been given the opposite verdict than the one he’d expected or sought. Despite his efforts at hiding it, I could tell he was surprised, angry, and disappointed. But I also knew he’d do his best for me.

  Mark worked hard over the next few weeks to hammer out guarantees of more freedom over our own commercial endorsements and a new deferred-income provision, as well as a split-dollar insurance program that would ease my worries about my family’s future if something should happen to me. I was encouraged when the new Wilson execs all agreed to the changes and said that a mere formality remained before we put ink to paper on the matter. The final draft of the new ten-year agreement had to go to Wilson’s legendary chairman, Judge James Cooney, for his approval. No one anticipated any problem.

  I didn’t know much about Judge Cooney, but I understood he was a tough old bird who once fired hundreds of striking meatpackers at the height of a bitter labor strike (Wilson and Company was a giant in the meatpacking business long before they began using gut to make tennis strings and hides to make footballs). I remember how everyone trooped into his office all smiles and took a seat around the judge’s desk, ready to sign the revised contract after months of hard work on both sides.

  The judge held my future in his hands, and I watched him as he read over the agreement. I knew we were in big trouble when his face contorted and he looked as if he had personally been insulted. He tossed aside the contract and made a harsh little speech to a stunned Mark and me about how he couldn’t possibly grant such “liberal” terms to me when nobody else in his employment had the same kind of deal. Furthermore, he wondered, or words to this effect, who the hell was Arnold Palmer to be dictating terms when he already had Sam Snead and Patty Berg under contract.

  I was devastated, and mad as hell. So mad I could scarcely speak. Mark kept his usual poker face, though I figured he was mentally turning cartwheels of joy at the unexpected development—already planning the brave new future for us. This embarrassing tantrum on the judge’s part meant, as Mark, with no small portion of irony, told someone, that I “was going to have to become a millionaire whether he [I] liked it or not.”

  In the busy months that followed, we reached an agreement with Harkins and a number of Chattanooga business interests establishing what was to be known as the Arnold Palmer Golf Company, makers and distributors of top-quality professional-grade golf clubs. We even hired away a few of Wilson’s top management people and tried to buy out the remaining portion of my contract with Wilson, offering exceedingly generous terms. The judge would have none of it. In fact, he basically ignored our every approach and forced us to wait out to the last second the expiration of my contract in 1963.

  I’m happy to say we made up lost ground pretty rapidly. Within a year, the Arnold Palmer Golf Company was selling about a hundred thousand sets of clubs a year, and Mark’s vision of an ever-expanding empire of Arnold Palmer business interests was dramatically coming into focus.

  The other part of Mark’s overall business strategy that emerged from that wintry powwow in Manhattan was to establish, in 1961, Arnold Palmer Enterprises, a corporate signature for a host of business ventures gathered beneath one umbrella.

  The tale of how the multicolored umbrella became our corporate logo is a rather interesting one. One day not long after APE was formed, a group of us were sitting around a conference table at the Holiday Inn in Ligonier attempting to brainstorm some kind of signature logo we could use on clothing, business stationery, golf clubs, and so forth. In the preceding days we’d come up with a number of promising ideas ranging from crossed golf clubs to laurel leaves, but upon deeper investigation found these symbols were either too commonplace to have any real meaning to anybody or else were already copyrighted by someone else.

  The frustration level was rising pretty quickly when an idea popped into my head.

  “What about an umbrella?” I said.

  Nobody seemed particularly wowed by the suggestion.

  “What kind of umbrella?” somebody asked.

  “I dunno. What about a multicolored golf umbrella?”

  A few heads bobbed slightly, but nobody thought it was as close to as good an idea as I did. Someone commented that I shouldn’t get my hopes too high because it would be a miracle if Travelers Insurance hadn’t already trademarked an umbrella as a corporate logo. Even so, it was decided that the lawyers would investigate the symbol and get back to us. A couple weeks later, we were surprised and pleased to learn that nobody worldwide had copyrighted the umbrella symbol. We suddenly had our new company logo, an open golf umbrella done in four colors—red, green, yellow, and white—to signify the varied components of our new enterprises.

  Contrary to what some people think, Arnold Palmer and Mark McCormack didn’t invent the concept of sports marketing in golf. During the early days of the century, Harry Vardon pitched any number of products, including cigarettes and liquor, as did Walter Hagen and even Bob Jones. Gene Sarazen may have been the king of golf’s early pitchmen, however, promoting everything from lawn sprinklers to shotgun shells at the height of his public appeal.

  The selling of products based on the appeal of famous athletes was a well-established practice in American advertising. But as I made clear to Mark from the beginning, I didn’t feel comfortable pitching a product or service I wouldn’t use or didn’t think was very good. That just seemed dishonest to me, and I was pretty sure the public would see right through it. Mark agreed with me and even suggested that such criteria should be the basis for picking and choosing what we would endorse. If at all possible, they had to be products Arnold Palmer would personally use. As an operating credo that sounds pretty simple, right?

  Well, down the line, as I’ll explain in a moment, we ran into a few situations that had almost comic consequences. We’ll call these mistakes our marketing “duds.”

  Two of my early deals were with makers of products I had no problem whatsoever endorsing—Coca-Cola and L&M cigarettes. I’ve already spoken about my addiction to cigarettes. If you’ve ever seen any of a number of print and television ads for L&M cigarettes from the early sixties, some of which won top adver
tising-industry awards, you know there’s no ambiguity whatsoever about my affection for the product in hand. Likewise, if you happened to be following me during the Open at Cherry Hills or any number of other Masters tournaments where my nerve endings were being frayed by the tension of the chase, you undoubtedly saw me gulping down Cokes at an alarming rate. I suppose I thought that sugar in the blood might help to keep me calm. The simple fact is, I also happened to love the taste of Coca-Cola and found it comforting. Another early product endorsement was Heinz catsup. I appeared in Heinz ads in Sports Illustrated and Life magazine about that time.

  A brilliant part of Mark’s marketing strategy was never to tie my endorsement of a product to how I was faring on the golf course. No congratulations or acknowledgment of a tournament won ever appeared in an ad or commercial I was part of. Mark’s reasoning was simple but effective: “win ads,” as they were popularly called in the industry, were about winning or losing, and his aim was not to position me as a “winner” because there always comes a day when a winner no longer wins—and his appeal, accordingly, dramatically dims.

  The purchasing public’s attention span, as any Madison Avenue marketer can tell you, is remarkably fickle. This year’s big sports winner can easily become next year’s forgotten gridiron hero. Mark’s creative solution to this problem was to market my image in a far more “timeless” way—that is to say, in terms of values closer to my own heart, to the qualities I admired both in the products I used and what other people supposedly admired most in me: character and endurance, reliability and integrity.

  That was the philosophical base of his thinking, and in advertising circles it quickly proved to be a pioneering strategy, as offers to represent everything from toothpaste to underwear, snow tires to farm machinery, made their way to the offices of Arnold Palmer Enterprises. Some companies we felt comfortable making deals with; many we didn’t. In addition to an array of golf-related products and services ranging from indoor putting greens to franchised driving ranges and instruction academies, we soon entered into broader clothing and apparel contracts, a deal with Lincoln Mercury, various kinds of household and hardware products, and other merchandise we deemed fit nicely beneath the APE umbrella.