A Golfer's Life (37 page)

We didn’t meet again until that November. This time the setting was a motel room in Atlanta, where Dow Finsterwald and I went to speak to Mark and Dick Taylor about the possibility of their formally representing us with their new enterprise called National Sports Management, Inc. We listened to what Mark had to say, and learned they were already booking exhibitions for guys like Gene Littler, Doug Ford, and Toski. Dow and I agreed to see what they could do for us. A few decent exhibition fees came out of that agreement, mostly in the $300-to-$500 range, and that was extra income we were both really glad to get.

By then it was becoming ever clearer to me that, due to my sudden success playing professional golf, I was going to be presented greater opportunities in the golf world (and possibly outside it) than extra Monday golf exhibitions. I wasn’t entirely sure how to capitalize on such potential or even how to proceed from an organizational standpoint. Winnie was soldiering along bravely as our team accountant, travel planner, and general business manager, but with people suddenly approaching us asking for pieces of my time for everything from
exhibitions to commercial endorsements, I knew we were rapidly entering a new league and needed professional business help.

I told Mark bluntly that I wanted him to manage these opportunities. Moreover I wanted his help
exclusively
. As surprising as it may sound, this wasn’t the easiest decision for Mark to make. NSM was a new but prospering concern by then, and he and Taylor had recently snared Bill Casper and Art Wall as clients as well. He explained to me that his specialty was negotiating contracts and that there were many areas in which he was totally ignorant, a better reason, he argued, to have the full services of an organization like National Sports Management rather than one man handling his affairs.

It was a logical argument (Mark is nothing if not persuasive), but I was adamant that I needed
one
man to handle my business affairs and one man alone. Sometimes you have a gut instinct and intellect about these things, and my gut told me Mark McCormack was the man for me. Mark’s sophistication impressed me. He is a man of letters and a voracious reader who also is tough, is possessed of fierce integrity, intuitively knows the value of things, and knows how to say no—something I’m still learning how to do.

In many ways I was still a bashful, backward kid, and I suppose because I’d grown up in the Great Depression I got easily excited when people mentioned things they wanted me to do, or talked about business opportunities and so forth. Central to my constitution was a determination never to disappoint anybody, but I had no way of appreciating the kind of personal commitment involved—or its potential toll on my practice time and my game.

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.

B
eginning 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 restrictions 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.