Although I had seven tournament victories in twenty starts that year, I failed to win any of the majors. A few people were saying that I was “washed up,” perhaps ailing, undoubtedly an elder statesman of the Tour at the grand old age of thirty-four. Some said that I no longer had the incentive to play like the Palmer of yesterday, and it didn’t help my mood a bit that Bob Jones, when asked by a reporter to comment on my “major” drought, said that the so-called Palmer Era could be over—if it ever existed anyway. Jones wasn’t trying to be unkind; he was merely describing what he thought he saw. So was Pap when he sharply observed to a reporter who had asked more or less the same question as the one posed to Mr. Jones, “There’s nothing wrong with Arnie’s game—he just has too many irons in the fire. He’s got to decide whether he wants to play golf or make television films with Bob Hope. With this boy Nicklaus coming along the way he is, Arnie can’t do both.”
The truth is, of course, at first I thought I could do all those things—but I was slowly beginning to realize that maybe I couldn’t. My back ached a bit, but my playing skills from tee to green were essentially fine, as strong as they’d ever been. For whatever reasons anybody cared to name, though (and everyone had a theory), my powers of concentration on the golf course had obviously suffered a fall-off, and so had my putting touch. Frankly, it was nice just to climb up on that bulldozer and shove dirt around on those new holes at Latrobe without having to figure out whether my golf career was coming or going. In retrospect, seven victories in twenty starts isn’t such a bad year, but major championship victories are the standard by which careers have always been judged. And rightly so, I might add.
Designing and owning my own golf course had been part of my game plan as far back as I could remember, and by 1964, if you counted the golf courses Buddy Worsham and my other teammates and I built at Wake Forest plus the between-the-runways course I hacked out of a field for the U.S. Coast Guard, I’d acquired a fair bit of experience in building one. As early as November of 1957, George Love, a former chairman of Chrysler, had invited me to take over the creation of Laurel Valley Golf Club, build it, run it, do whatever I needed to do to make it a world-class golf club. But I’d tactfully declined such full involvement, citing my desire to instead play the Tour full time. (A wise decision, since my first Masters win came the next spring.) Instead I opted to become the club’s touring professional. Architect Dick Wilson ably built a fine golf course for the Laurel Valley members, with some minor input from me, and many years later, after my own course design firm was in full operation, I updated the course.
My first substantial experience designing a golf course from start to finish, though, came at Somerset, Pennsylvania, at a resort area in the mountains about forty miles east of Latrobe, a place called Indian Lake, which I did virtually on my own with only a crew of day laborers supplied to me by the project’s owner, developer Jim McIntire. I cleared the land and drew up the course plans in my head. The original concept was a somewhat novel scheme: building houses people would use principally as vacation and second homes connected to an airstrip. So theoretically you could fly your plane to Indian Lake, pull up to your front door, go inside, put on your golf spikes, then head out the back door to the course, or something like that.
The reality was that McIntire had only enough capital to build the first nine holes, which I proceeded to do, creating a layout with tight fairways and small push-up greens that, thirty years later, some say is still one of the best tests of golf in western Pennsylvania. On one hole, players have to go under the runway to get to the next tee. Ironically, I never got paid for my work there, though I was given two house lots, which I still own.
After the Indian Lake and Latrobe projects, word began to get around that Arnold Palmer was interested in taking on course designing jobs and the offers began to come my way—slowly at first, but with increasing frequency. When the Cleveland gang got into this, Mark suggested the best thing to do was to associate ourselves with a professional architect. That man turned out to be Frank Duane, a former president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects and a highly respected course designer. Mark arranged a meeting, and we quickly came to terms.
As a result of an unfortunate infection, Frank’s mobility was severely limited. An insect bite in the tropics had led to an illness that left him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. But that proved to be not a serious obstacle to our success. As the collaboration evolved, I became the field work supervisor and on-site consultant for the team. I was often up in the bulldozer, doing the work hands-on, just as Pap had shown me. I loved moving earth to shape the golf course. Frank was a superb architect who, like me, drew inspiration from the classic courses of America’s golden era of course design—the works of Tillinghast and Ross, Raynor, Thomas, and Dr. Mackenzie. The Winged Foots, Merions, Oakmonts, and Brooklines—these were the Holy Grails of our design thinking. They were the kind of beautiful, honest, classically shaped layouts golfers of every skill level could appreciate and enjoy playing.
And, I must say, Frank and I were a pretty effective team. One of our first collaborations was Myrtle Beach National, followed shortly thereafter by the Bay Course at Kapalua, in Hawaii. The high visibility of those courses created even more demand for our services, and that, combined with my burgeoning business interests and commitment to the Tour, created some tense “educational” moments in our evolving professional relationship.
For instance, the phone rang once with Jim Deane on the other end of the line. Jim owned the new Half Moon Bay club south of San Francisco, where Frank and I had just completed work on a championship golf course. Because of my extremely busy schedule that summer, Frank had done the lion’s share of the work. The final grading had been done and the course was almost ready for grassing, but Jim was spitting mad, issuing not a few choice expletives. To mercifully summarize, he was upset that I’d been too busy to oversee the final contouring of the greens, and he advised me in no uncertain terms that if I intended to become a major-league course designer, using my name to sell a signature golf course concept, I’d better make absolutely certain I was on hand to properly oversee every phase of the construction. Especially the greens.
He had a point. He knew it and he knew I knew it.
Embarrassed, I got straight on my plane and went to see Jim. I got on the bulldozer and personally reshaped all eighteen greens at Half Moon Bay, which today, I’m proud to say, is one of the premier clubs in the Bay Area. I learned a painful but valuable lesson from the experience—that I couldn’t send someone else to complete a job my name was on. That’s been a guiding tenet of our design work ever since.
My collaboration with Frank Duane lasted about five years, during which time we built ten or twelve excellent courses, all of which I remain very proud of. But as our workload continued to increase, Frank’s health took a sudden decline, and it became obvious to both of us that the demands for our services were exceeding our capacity to provide the kind of attention Jim Deane had rightfully demanded.
About 1970, I began looking around for another full-time course design partner, and one day while playing an exhibition match at the new Bermuda Run Country Club in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with three younger Tour players who’d all been Worsham scholarship players at Wake Forest (a golf scholarship I established in Bud Worsham’s memory), I happened to glance over and see this freckle-faced, bald-headed, ugly son of a gun inspecting the greens.
“Who’s that guy?” I asked one of my playing partners.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s Ed Seay. He and Ellis Maples designed the course.”
I asked him to invite Ed over, and he did. Ed and I shook hands, and I told him I liked what I saw at Bermuda Run. He thanked me. Then I gave it to him straight: would he be interested in working with me on a few golf course projects? Ed is a big excitable sort, a bullnecked U.S. Marine Corps veteran who probably took a few too many shots to the head (as I like to kid him) when he played for the corps football team in t
he middle sixties. Anyway, Ed grinned and said he would love that opportunity, and I told him I would be in touch after we checked out his credentials.
A few weeks later, I knew I had found someone special in Ed Seay. After getting out of the U.S. Marines in 1965, he’d gone to work as a junior design partner for Ellis Maples, the dean of southern architects, who many feel is as fine a course designer as the Carolinas ever produced. As the handsome layout at Bermuda Run proved, Ed had obviously learned his lessons well at Ellis’s elbow. Timing is everything in life and in golf. Shortly before Ed and I met, Ellis informed Ed that he was anxious to slow down a bit and suggested to Ed, in the nicest possible way, that he venture out on his own.
Six days after that first meeting in the fairway we had worked out an agreement. Being a big old country boy with a heart of gold but a mouth as big as a Florida gator, Ed flatly told Mark McCormack he wasn’t interested in signing a lengthy legal contract. A handshake, he said, was as good as his word, and his word ought to be good enough for anybody.
That was a sentiment I could fully appreciate, since it was pretty much my own arrangement with Mark. So we all shook hands and got down to work.
Our first job was in Tokyo.
“You mean Tokyo, Georgia?” Ed drawled.
“No, Ed. I mean the real Tokyo. Tokyo, Japan. Do you have a passport?”
“No, sir.”
“Then I recommend you get one, Ed. Fast.”
The trip, to consult with developers and plan three different golf course projects, had more than a few amusing moments with my new partner in tow. Apparently, Ed had never strayed too far from his native Florida, including his time in the military, so the customs, rituals, and finer points of Japanese business protocol left him, shall we say, a little confused. At one point, I remember, after a seemingly endless series of meetings with the clients and their lawyers and corporate subordinates, during which vast quantities of tea were served and consumed, poor Ed gave a look of grave dismay and blurted out to one of our very proper hosts, “Well, we’re gonna actually need to see some damn ground before we can talk any more about this thing.”
The comment threw the Japanese contingent into a major panic. They exchanged worried glances as the interpreter conveyed Ed’s blunt assessment to them. At that point they began profusely apologizing and explaining that the course site was at least 150 miles from Toyko and it would be simply impossible to see the actual proposed site for at least a day or two.
All Ed meant, of course, was that he needed to see the site before he could make any more suggestions about the design. His eyeballs seemed to be floating from all that green tea, and I knew, even if they didn’t, that he was dying to get outside, see some land, get his hands dirty, and get down to work. Ed Seay is nothing if not a worker.
I smiled and explained to the interpreter that my partner hadn’t meant he wanted to see the land that very minute but that further discussions would be helpful after he’d finally been able to view the property.
Whew. You could feel the tension leaking out of the room. There were relieved smiles all around the table.
This was the first time Ed’s brand of blunt southern charm had startled a prospective client—but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. In fact, Ed’s nickname for himself is the “Tactful Sledgehammer,” and I suspect others have less flattering names for him. But I have to say, in his defense, that his plain-spoken good-ole-boy way of cutting through the baloney, combined with an agile intelligence and frat-brother humor, has defused many ticklish situations when the negotiations were stalled and seemed at the point of going off the rails or at least getting bogged down in legalese.
Shortly after that, we started work together on the third course at the Broadmoor in Colorado and the new Ironwood course at Palm Desert. A few years later, after a host of successful collaborations, I invited Ed to work with me exclusively and we officially formed the Palmer Course Design Company, with offices at Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
Since then, we’ve gone on to handle more than 250 projects around the world, ranging from simple low-cost municipal courses to high-end private clubs, each one different and special in its own way.
You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t call any of our designs personal favorites. As Ed would say, that’s the ultimate designer no-no. Like your own children, every project has its own special quality. When you add to that a set of construction challenges, cost factors, geographic eccentricities, and endless other variables, trying to compare your creations is really like comparing apples to oranges. What I will say is that whether you are constructing something as no-frills as Birkdale, the fine municipal course we built in 1997 for Johnny Harris and his partners for less than $4 million in Charlotte, North Carolina, or something as exclusive as the Old Tabby Links at Spring Island in South Carolina, with its subtropical grandeur and four-hundred-foot-wide playing corridors where almost all the holes are isolated from one another, the objective is always the same: to give as much value to the client for his dollars as is humanly and creatively possible, to make the course beautiful and challenging to golfers of all skill levels, and most of all, to make the experience of playing a Palmer Design course one that will make the first-time player walk off and say, regardless of his or her score, “Wow. I want to go back and play that sucker again.” (Pardon me for sounding a bit like Ed there, but that is what I get from hanging around him for the past thirty years.)
Having said that, I should offer another observation. I’m often asked by prospective clients, fans, even other Tour players what qualities or factors, in my opinion, make a golf course great. My response is always the same: because it is a golf course.
I’m not being flip. I’m dead serious. That is to say, every golf course is going to be great to somebody for some reason or another, and what you think is important in a golf course may not be what I think is important or a particularly notable feature—and vice versa. Who’s right, who’s wrong? No one. That’s why, to be honest, I hate lists and rankings of the “world’s best golf courses.” They make me very uncomfortable. Golf courses are just about the most purely subjective things on earth—subject to a thousand variables in the mind of the person beholding them. Some people like links; some prefer gentle parkland courses. You like big greens with minimal breaks; I prefer small greens with plenty of elevations. What Ed and I work hard to do is always keep in mind our vision of a “natural” design whose hallmarks are playability and versatility. And I think, given our record of achievement, the proof is in the pudding.
If I may crow a bit, I’ll say that you’d be hard-pressed to find a busier bunch than the twenty-five designers, draftsmen, secretaries, and the big bald-headed guy who heads up the crew employed at 572 Ponte Vedra Boulevard. I’m proud of Palmer Course Design and the work they do. Not long ago, I was notified by the American Society of Golf Course Architects that I’d been selected to receive the Donald Ross Award for 1999, a coveted prize given to architects who have made a strong contribution to golf course design. As honored as I am to personally accept the award, it’s really a tribute to Ed Seay and all of the talented folks he has gathered around him.
The first time I laid eyes on the Bay Hill Club and Lodge, during a winter exhibition in early 1965, not long after we opened the new nine at Latrobe, the place was little more than a still-raw golf course with a tiny pro shop, a small guest lodge, and a few modest bungalows carved out of the orange groves and desolate razor brush of central Florida. It was a true wilderness area, home to a few pristine freshwater lakes filled with waterfowl, snakes, and gators.
In other words, it was nearly perfect. A golfer’s paradise, in my book.
For years, Winnie and I had discussed how great it would be to have a quiet little out-of-the-way place in Florida we could go to every winter where I could retreat to work on my game and the girls could relax in the warmth. We’d looked around a lot, but it wasn’t until I played Bay Hill, another fine design of Dick Wilson, that I went bac
k to the house we were renting that winter in Coral Gables and said to Winnie, “Babe, I’ve just played the best golf course in Florida, and I want to own it.”
By then she was accustomed to my sudden bursts of inspiration, but after viewing the property herself she agreed with me that Bay Hill was something special. With its splendid isolation and Eden-like abundance of wildlife, it really was a little bit of paradise on earth. We envisioned ourselves being happy there for a very long time, building a second home where we could go to relax before beginning the madness of another Tour season, where I could practice to my heart’s content, with only a few club members and their guests around to interrupt my concentration. Best of all, we could adopt a slower pace of life—something that we greatly needed at this point in our hectic lives.
At my request, Mark McCormack and Russ Meyer went to work trying to put together a deal that would allow Arnold Palmer Enterprises to purchase the club and all of its assets—a job easier said than done, as it turned out. Bay Hill had been built as a getaway club by several prominent businessmen from Nashville and Detroit, and negotiations with those owners, a collection of almost a dozen men, became a lengthy ordeal that took almost the next five years to put together.
At last, in 1969, we finalized and signed a five-year lease with an option to buy the club. We immediately set about making improvements to the course and to the lodge, figuring we would own the whole shooting match outright by the end of the lease.
However, almost a year to the day after we signed the agreement, disaster struck—at least to my mind.
I happened to read one morning in the Orlando Sentinel that the Disney Corporation had just announced its purchase of twenty-seven thousand acres near us at Bay Hill. The entertainment behemoth was planning to begin immediate construction of its grandest family theme park ever, a vision called Walt Disney World.
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