I must confess, though, at the time it happened I was pretty ambivalent about Jack’s decision to leave Mark, and I told him so. Part of me thought it was a foolish mistake on his part, proof of his hardheaded German determination to always do things his own way. But as I like to say, “Jack is Jack,” and part of me was also glad to see him go, because I hated not having Mark’s full and complete attention.
In retrospect, I see that it was clearly the right decision for him to make, and I think we’ve finally come full circle on that issue and others. We’re closer now, in some respects, than we have ever been. We share a golden history and a thousand memories of laughter and tears. I’d feel remiss if I didn’t say that. On the larger issues facing the game, for example, questions like the dominant role the equipment revolution is playing in altering the face of the game or the development of new competing tours and the formation of players’ unions, it should surprise nobody that we come down in complete agreement on the side of protecting the integrity of the game, preserving the traditional values and qualities that have always made golf the most splendid and democratic pastime on earth.
Competitive golf has been the center of both our lives, and yet the differences between us—the factors that made us such intense and faithful competitors, I believe—are still as apparent as ever to anyone who wishes to take the time to look. Jack likes golf, but I don’t think he actually loves and needs the game the way I still do. I try to play every day, and when I don’t play—if you’ll pardon the expression—I feel like a bear with a sore tail because of it.
Jack plays because he must play, and, not surprising to me, he is still capable of summoning that legendary ability to concentrate and perform that will have historians talking about his game two hundred years from now. His family and his business command more of Jack’s attention than anything—and that’s just the way he wants it.
My family and my business mean everything to me, too, but the third component of the mix is my need to still be out there chasing after Old Man Par, trying to make cuts and please the galleries.
Bottom line: Jack is still Jack.
And Arnie is still Arnie.
In the mid 1970s, my own relationship with McCormack and International Management Group underwent what I think of as a major shift, if not a sea change, with the arrival of Alastair Johnston on the scene at IMG. A tall, angular son of Glasgow with a dry wit and reserved manner befitting his training as an Arthur Anderson accountant, Alastair was hand-picked by Mark to do a special job—namely, look after me on virtually an exclusive basis and become, if you will, my “new” Clifford Roberts while Mark continued building IMG into the giant of entertainment representation it has become.
Once again, I had great ambivalence about the change. I was frustrated that Mark seemed to have less and less time to personally handle the affairs of his number-one client. The last thing I wanted was to have to get used to a new man. However, I did want someone who really was solely focused on my concerns and needs—as Mark had long ago promised he would be but never quite accomplished, in my book.
A personal trait of mine is that I take my time sizing up people whom circumstance has placed close to me. I think I’m a pretty good judge of character, and I always notice small things about how someone handles himself—the way he dresses, treats people, pays attention to small details, and so forth. It goes back to that need I described earlier to be able to trust those closest to me—so I can give them the freedom to do what they do best and not have to peer over their shoulders, wasting their time and mine in the process. From the beginning, Alastair Johnston earned high marks in these respects, but I was naturally resistant to having the head man of an organization I essentially helped found hand me off to a protégé, even one as debonairly polished as Alastair Johnston.
The turning point for us both, I think, came at a business meeting at Los Angeles Country Club in 1978 when Alastair helped engineer and essentially designed, in concert with my longtime friend Ed Douglas, my commercial affiliation with Pennzoil, an enduring business relationship that has brought me untold pleasures over the past two decades and, as I write this—amid a twentieth-anniversary celebration—has just been extended to the year 2005.
That was the beginning of a fruitful and fun period of my business life, new commercial representations for me that included my longtime affiliations with Cadillac and Rolex Watches and slightly shorter but no less fulfilling relationships with GTE, Lanier Business Machines, Rayovac Batteries, PaineWebber, and Hertz Car Rentals. In the past few years, Alastair has been the point man and main driving force behind the scenes of my proud associations with Lexington Furniture (a Palmer Home Collection array of furnishings that Winnie has enjoyed having a strong hand in designing), Cooper Tires, and Office Depot.
To say I’ve come to trust and rely on Alastair’s judgment and instinct for arranging and monitoring my business affairs would be a tremendous understatement. I’m sure I’ve also driven him crazy on more occasions than he’d prefer to think about. Especially since I still pick up the phone from time to time and shout at him that he’s running me ragged and probably ruining my golf game with all the deals and commitments he makes for us.
In other words, the more things change, the more things stay the same. That’s just the way I like it.
Alastair listens with his irritatingly calm, calculating Scottish patience and then reminds me, as his predecessor used to do, that we never do anything I don’t really want to do, which at the end of the day is really true. The difference between Mark and Alastair is that Mark usually states his opinion and leaves it at that. Alastair can seemingly talk nonstop for hours on the subject at hand, sketching out pros and cons, weighing this or that—a tactic, I sometimes think, he uses simply to wear down my resistance. When I hang up the phone, I usually feel better for having gotten something off my chest, but little else has usually changed.
Though he drives me crazy at times, I’m extremely fond of Alastair and trust his judgment in most matters. Several times over the past twenty-odd years I’ve suggested to Alastair that he leave IMG and come work for me exclusively, but every time I make the proposition he logically counters that he can be far more effective serving the interests of Arnold Palmer Enterprises and its affiliated companies by remaining on the inside of the largest sports marketing firm in the world. That’s a tough argument to top.
If that implies that Mark McCormack and I have grown somewhat apart over those same twenty years, I suppose that’s accurate. Mark would tell you exactly the same thing. He has his busy life and I have mine, and it’s probably fortunate that Alastair is there to serve as the link between us.
I could show you something I call the “X file,” a file folder full of angry letters I wrote Mark over the years but for one reason or another never mailed to him. There is no sugar-coating what those letters really are: they’re resignation letters, terminating my relationship with IMG. A few I might have even actually sent, fired off at a moment when I felt he was failing to live up to his end of the bargain sealed by that long-ago handshake.
In truth, I’ve never left IMG and I’ve never left Mark. There are a number of powerful reasons for that, my abiding sense of personal loyalty and trust being chief among them. For his part, for all our differences of opinion on a range of subjects and the increasing physical distance that separates us, Mark’s business savvy has made us both materially successful beyond our wildest dreams.
At least as important to me, he has never failed to be there in the good times nor flinched from his duty in standing shoulder to shoulder with me through the hard times. Like a marriage that endures the challenge of decades, takes the good with the bad, survives the gravest threats and somehow grows stronger because of them, our union may seem a bit perplexing to some on the outside looking in.
But to us, it’s as real and lasting and simple as the famous handshake that created it.
I cite, for example, the extremely trying times that befell my busines
ses, and therefore me, beginning in 1987 and lasting into the early nineties. Two protracted and expensive controversies—actually three if you care to count an aborted sale of Bay Hill to a Japanese holding group and the public relations disaster that grew out of that affair, which I’ll discuss in another chapter—happening almost simultaneously, threatened to destroy a lot of what Mark and Alastair and I had spent many years creating. That’s not even taking into consideration the number it did on my psyche owing to the hits my personal reputation took in the press. Some of the criticism was warranted—we made honest mistakes in judgment, and we paid dearly for those errors in terms of lawsuit settlements and the collapse of a personal dream of mine called Isleworth. But some of it was also mean-spirited and just plain inaccurate reporting, intensely personal attacks on Mark and IMG and ultimately me that reflect, I fear, the nature of the times we live in.
In 1987, a group of residents living adjacent to a pristine lake bordering a new upscale Orlando golf community called Isleworth filed suit over environmental concerns stemming from runoff water from the golf course I built there. Our engineering people on the project repeatedly assured us there was no basis for concern about contamination of the lake as described by the lawsuit. A mountain of legal, engineering, and environmental studies grew over the next three years, until an Orlando court awarded the residents a $6.6 million judgment against the development. Thanks to Mark and Alastair, my own financial exposure was fairly limited. I designed the golf course and the clubhouse, and Winnie and I owned a couple of lots in the development and were planning to build a home there.
Isleworth was a dream of mine, a golf club and residential community I hoped would be the crowning touch of my career as a course designer. It was a dream that quickly turned into a nightmare.
The upshot is that when the unexpected judgment came down hard against the development’s major partners, the banks withdrew their support and the project slipped into receivership, prompting a flurry of additional lawsuits and a bunch of headlines that made IMG and me appear to be dangerously uninformed, if not outright heavies. There’s a grain of truth in the accusation that we didn’t pay close enough attention to the details. Owing to a complex financial arrangement involving foreign capital and separate partners developing the real-estate end of the project, our fate wasn’t entirely in our own hands. In retrospect, our mistake—and it was a doozie—was failing to gain proper control of the project from the beginning, thus being able to monitor what was really happening on several different fronts and perhaps sparing ourselves a lot of anguish and no small expense in legal fees and fines. The settlement was ultimately reduced and all parties came to an agreement to end the dispute. I’m happy to say that the project eventually got back on track. A new owner was found and today Tiger Woods, Mark O’Meara, Mark McCormack, and quite a few other prominent people own homes at Isleworth. The development has become all of what some, including I, originally envisioned. Yet the memory of that failure still bothers me.
Frankly, the episode that hurt much more, financially and otherwise, came out of a troubled episode involving my automotive dealerships and the demise of a trusted friendship with a man named Jim O’Neal. Over a four- or five-year period of time during the late ’80s and early ’90s, as widely reported in the Wall Street Journal and other places, O’Neal, whom I met at Bay Hill in about 1976, directed the creation of my chain of six automobile dealerships that ultimately got into trouble and cost McCormack and me $14 million apiece to get squared away.
In some ways, it was simply another of those unfortunate business tales that came out of the late ’80s—one man’s overreaching ambition with not enough monitoring and skepticism on our parts. Suffice it to say, we took control of things ourselves and saved the dealerships. They are once again thriving, but I learned the hard way that there are times when you really shouldn’t mix business and friendships, although, in most other similar instances, I think I’ve fared pretty well. In spite of the problems with Isleworth, O’Neal, and my own health, I’ve come out of it all in pretty good shape, and I continue to believe that friendship is still far more valuable in life than money.
As for Mark, say what you will about the man, but the plain fact is that working together we both found success beyond our wildest dreams. Through good times and bad, he’s never broken the faith of that long-ago handshake. At the end of the day, if you really know me, that’s what has meant so much to me.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Left Seat
There’s no doubt in my mind that if professional golf hadn’t become my way of life, something to do with aviation would have.
I suppose I’ve had this thought a thousand times while standing on a golf course somewhere awaiting my turn to hit, watching as a private jet or commercial airliner passed overhead, landing or taking off.
Fact is, since I was a boy making elaborate balsawood airplanes and flying them on my father’s course at Latrobe, and especially after Tony Arch took me on that harrowing joyride at age twelve when the plane’s tail bumped the golf course, I dreamed of what it would be like to fly my own plane. I could not have even remotely imagined how vital aviation would eventually become to my golf and business careers.
In this respect, the fates have been extremely generous. I’ve been fortunate enough to have owned eight airplanes, beginning with my twin-prop Aero Commander, bought secondhand for $27,000 in 1962, and ending with my latest joy, the Citation X, a $15 million wonder ship that is the fastest private jet of its class in the world.
In between those compass points of my life there have been a lot of grand adventures in the air, usually with me in the left seat (command position) beside a group of the finest men in private aviation—the chief pilots I’ve employed over the years. Business deals have been made that wouldn’t have happened, I’ve fulfilled playing and charity commitments that I simply couldn’t have otherwise met, and I’ve even experienced a few close calls that probably shouldn’t have happened—but invariably do to any pilot who’s been in the air as long as I have, nearly 20,000 hours of cumulative flying experience, according to my flying logs. All because I love to fly.
The story of how flying and golf became so interwoven in my life really dates from the first golf tournament I flew to as an amateur in 1949 at age twenty. It was a trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a commercial DC-3 that encountered a tenacious thunderstorm that sent a ball of static electricity (known as St. Elmo’s fire) hurtling down the aisle among the terrified passengers, one Arnold Daniel Palmer among them.
Back safely on the ground, I got to thinking about what had happened and realized that flying, like golf in some ways, was a mystery that I simply had to know more about, a technical puzzle to be solved, a science to be mastered, with a history and even an aura of mythology attached to it, as thrilling as it was challenging. Even then it came to me that flying from one tournament site to another might be a great way to play even more golf, but I did not have a clue how many other benefits would eventually come my way as a result of such woolgathering.
My first flying lesson was under the unflustered gaze of Babe Krinock at tiny Latrobe Airport. I went out to the field one day when I was in my late twenties, just after I had begun playing professional golf and could afford Babe’s fee, and asked him to give me flying lessons. We went out and climbed into a single-engine Cessna 172. He took us up and started explaining the proper procedures of flight.
It was almost that simple. But in other ways it was anything but simple for me to finally master the principles of flight. I’m sure I scared the hell out of a number of people at the airport, and probably Winnie as well, as I struggled to learn to fly. Fortunately, I had a gifted instructor at my elbow who not only saw the wisdom in allowing me to make mistakes he knew were survivable, but also had a lot of confidence in my soon-to-be-discovered ability to fly an airplane. That made all the difference, I can tell you.
For example, early on in the training process, we were flying in a Cessn
a 182, a larger and more powerful plane than the 172, and Babe was in the copilot seat allowing me to land the plane at Latrobe. My approach suddenly got out of hand, and I actually straddled a large hole workmen were digging at the end of the runway. Most instructors would have gone crazy and issued the student a stern lecture for being so reckless. But Babe looked at me calmly and didn’t say a word. He knew I knew I’d made a miscalculation—a potentially deadly one—and he also knew I wouldn’t ever make that mistake again. “That’s all right, Arnie,” he’d say calmly but firmly whenever I screwed up. “Stick with it. You’ll get it.” He made me learn to relax and feel comfortable in the air, but also never to take a single thing for granted. He was a stickler for proper procedures, the most thorough teacher I’ve ever had, but also patient beyond belief at times. I owe him a big debt of gratitude for that.
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