A Golfer's Life (38 page)

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.

T
he 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.

C
ontrary 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 advertising-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.

At one point we even entertained visions of ourselves becoming dry-cleaning moguls. I must confess I didn’t originally see the point in creating a chain of Arnold Palmer Dry Cleaning Centers. I mean, I relied heavily on superior dry-cleaning services myself, but I suppose part of me secretly feared that I might be accosted at tournaments by unhappy customers whose pants had been improperly ironed or whose best shirt had been inadvertently ruined.

Within a few years, though, we had a franchise chain of something like 110 Arnold Palmer Dry Cleaning Centers (with countermen dressed in grass-colored green jackets, no less) scattered around the United States, prompting my old buddy Dave Marr to quip, “If I’m going to take my laundry to a golf pro, it’s going to be Chen Ching-po.”

There was also talk of Arnold Palmer soap and Arnold Palmer Christmas trees being sold exclusively through JCPenney. Consider this somewhat embarrassing paragraph from a little
Golf Digest
bio of the time, published in 1967: “Arnie can supply you with a complete golf outfit from clubs
to socks, dry clean your clothes, put an ice skating rink in your backyard, steer you to the right place to get stock certificates printed, and, if you are bothered by a hook or slice, his ‘Palmer’ method of golf instruction will attempt to straighten you out in one of his indoor schools he is franchising around the country. If you want some insurance, one of his companies can oblige. And someday soon you might be able to stay in an Arnold Palmer motel …”

Well, the motel thing never really worked out. In fact, some of the duds were at least as interesting as our successes in the sports marketing realm. For example, we once foolishly allowed my name to be associated with a “revolutionary” backyard driving net and showed up on the practice tee at Doral with several press photographers on hand to capture my first ceremonial shot into the new net. Unfortunately, I hit the ball so hard it flew through the net and nearly crowned Bill Casper, who was practicing at the opposite end of the range. The Arnold Palmer “foot detergent” was also something less than a roaring success, and near endorsements for shaving cream, suntan oil, talcum powder, and a deodorant in plastic containers molded into my likeness fortunately never really got off the ground.

I was once asked to try to drive a golf ball through a television screen to prove it wouldn’t break—I did; happily it didn’t. Among other offers I politely declined were a line of houseboats, a revolutionary manure dispenser, a golfer’s vacation club, countless children’s toys, a brand of walking sticks, an endless procession of personal exercise gizmos, several brands of liquor, French cologne, more offshore golf resorts than I care to remember, fallout shelters, orange groves, an African safari, apartment houses, and a one-act play that hoped to make it to Broadway called
What Is the Verdict?

The real verdict, as I often and loudly complained to Mark, was that it sometimes felt like we were in danger of killing
the goose that laid the golden egg—namely me, stretching me so thin to accommodate so many product endorsement deals. Not only would that diminish my value as an endorser, it would take even more of a toll on my golf game.

I’ve described how I complained to the press that my expanding business interests took an increasingly larger bite out of my days and perhaps were a contributing factor to the decline of my play. That much is true—though to what extent it was true still somewhat eludes me. In fairness to Mark, he didn’t arrange any business deal I didn’t ultimately have veto power over, and as Mark and anybody else around me from the beginning knew, I was fanatical about fulfilling commitments and given to saying yes to things before I had taken the proper time to think about the potential impact on my life and schedule.

More often than not, he faithfully protected what precious time I did have for family and practice by saying no up front in situations where I never could or would have. In essence, he played a very necessary “bad cop” to my “good cop,” and I once confided to close friends that it was good to have all my business interests to publicly complain about, as Pap did after my majorless 1963 season, because at least it offered some kind of explanation for the decline in my performances.

In that regard I suppose I contributed to a widespread belief with the press and to some extent in the public that the evil, hard-driving Mark McCormack was “wearing out the greatest player of his generation” (to quote one prominent columnist from that time). By allowing that notion to take hold, I was sowing the seeds, in effect, of a phenomenon that developed when Mark, with my reluctant agreement, moved on to establish International Management Group and represent selected other golf stars and eventually a broad range of top sports and celebrity figures.

Years later, whenever I heard a prominent player complaining
that he was being “IMG-ed to death”—in other words, run by Mark and his associates around the world in order to exploit the player’s marketability—I was sorely tempted to, and on selected occasions did, offer my own seasoned opinion on this subject. As far as I knew, Mark never put a gun to a player’s head to do something he didn’t want to do, and ironically, at least in my view, most of the real complaints stemmed from the fact that the star player in question—and I include myself in this category, which I’ll talk about shortly—either felt he wasn’t being given the attention from the boss that his stardom merited or else nursed some belief that his “fame” wasn’t being marketed properly and failed to yield the big paydays he’d expected.

We humans are funny critters, even the famous ones—and maybe especially the famous ones. Over the decades I’ve watched some great professional golfers come and go through the portals of IMG, an “A” list that includes Jack Nicklaus, Raymond Floyd, and Greg Norman. For one reason or another, some very legitimate ones and, in my view, some that had far less to do with profits than personalities, these men and a number of lesser luminaries decided Mark and company weren’t their cup of tea. As Mark would tell you flatly, that was fine, a reasonable and honorable enough reason to strike out on one’s own.

But, for all of my own considerable differences with Mr. McCormack, the truth is I never heard a player who was loyal to him complain that Mark wasn’t loyal in return many times over. I know of many private acts of generosity and personal charity he will simply never speak of—things he did for this player or that one at a critical or difficult moment of their lives that helped to ease their burden. At the end of the day—and most telling, in my estimation—the list of players who have remained with Mark and loyal to IMG through the
ups and downs of their careers dwarfs the list of those who grew disgruntled and left.