A Golfer's Life (39 page)

Me included. But more on that touchy subject in a bit. First, a few more thoughts on the life of Arnold Palmer the pitchman.

To me, perhaps the most enjoyable of those early business relationships were the clothing deals we had with Munsingwear, Sunstate Slacks, and, a little further on and more enduringly, Robert Bruce Clothing. The licensing of the latter company was handled brilliantly by Jules Rosenthal, a New York clothing-industry man Mark hired specifically to oversee the manufacturing and distribution of Arnold Palmer logo clothing and sports attire.

Additionally, thanks to Harold Neuman at Robert Bruce—as gracious and astute a businessman as I ever met—I was given a strong hand in the design of the Robert Bruce golf attire line. I remain proud of the style, high quality, and functionality that came out of the Arnold Palmer clothing of that era. Every now and then someone will pull me aside and show me their treasured Robert Bruce golf sweater, and I always feel a kick of pleasure at that, because I still own half a closet full of Arnold Palmer alpaca cardigan sweaters myself! Wouldn’t sell them for anything, either.

The first such sweater we brought out cost $18.95, and when we stopped making them fifteen years later, the going price was more than $150, owing to the steeply rising cost of top-grade alpaca wool. What a shame. I still feel these were the best golf sweaters ever made, and a number of other people apparently think so, too, because I still get letters from people wondering where they can purchase them.

I loved those clothes, but, in retrospect, making the print and television ads for them, which happened over something like a twenty-year period, was sometimes more pain than
pleasure. Posing with fashion models for hours at a time was a hell of a lot harder than I imagined it would be. The good news was that many of the models were gorgeous young women or celebrities in their own right and we did have more than a few laughs before and after the productions were over … with Mrs. Palmer’s complete and amused consent, of course.

As I remember, the television spots we filmed at Latrobe and sent to Japan were particularly effective. So much so that after Laura Baugh of the LPGA and I were depicted cutting up as we rode together down a fairway in a golf cart—this was sometime in the early 1970s—millions in Japan speculated that I’d ditched Winnie and that Laura was my new (and very young) wife!

N
ot too many years ago, I was checking into a Hong Kong hotel and signed my name. The clerk looked at it and beamed widely at me and said, “Ah, you bring more Arno Par-mare shirts!” For a moment I was confused, and then it came to me. He had no clue that I was the real Arnold Palmer—no idea, it quickly became clear, in fact, who or what Arnold Palmer did to have his name on the shirts. But thanks to Renown of Japan, our hugely successful clothing licensee in the Far East since the early days of the clothing enterprise, he knew Arnold Palmer clothing very well indeed. For many years running, our signature line was the top-selling brand of all clothing lines in Japan, and the hotel clerk merely thought I was a salesman bringing the latest Palmer shirts to Hong Kong—proof that the brand name had developed a life of its own that exceeded that of the man himself.

One of the more amusing print ads from that faraway time is one for Ajay Industries in which, of all things, Jack Nicklaus and
I are depicted walking together on a fairway, chatting pleasantly and towing our bags on pull carts. There’s a bit of history behind how that ad came to be.

Sometime in late 1960, Jack approached me in the locker room at a tournament site and told me he was thinking of turning professional. He wondered if I could help him out by introducing him to Mark McCormack. I told him I would be happy to do that, and pleased to help him out in any way that I could.

As I’ve said, I liked Jack from the very beginning. The extraordinary quality of his game spoke for itself, but he was also extremely courteous and mindful, thanks to his father’s strong influence, of the greater traditions of the game. I really was happy to help him figure out the best way to turn professional. And as much as I didn’t like the idea of “sharing” McCormack with anybody, I’d already hooked Gary Player up with Mark, to great effect. It seemed only fair that a kid of Nicklaus’s obvious ability and unlimited potential should speak with somebody who could give him an idea of what to do with himself. As I suspected would happen, Jack soon became a McCormack client.

A few years along, some of the first great things to come out of this unique alliance were the television programs our company, Trans World International, produced, which would eventually involve Jack, Gary, and me. The first series was called
Challenge Golf
and ran for thirteen weeks spanning 1963 and 1964. That series was produced by Jay Michaels (father of Al Michaels of
Monday Night Football
fame), who originally wanted to call the show “Arnold Palmer Against the World,” until I pointed out to him that if somebody beat me in a golf match we would have to change the show’s name—that could get costly and confuse viewers.

In settling on
Challenge Golf
, it was decided that Gary Player and I would compete against top twosomes in a
best-ball format, at famous venues like Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, Pauma Valley, and Pebble Beach. I can think of few other players I’d rather have had on my side in any match than Gary.

Gary’s surname suits him perfectly, for I don’t know if there has ever been a more dedicated player than he. The diminutive son of a South African mine worker, Gary came to the game with a strong grip, a flat swing, and a confident bearing that many early on mistook for simple arrogance. After his first trip to try to make it on the British tour resulted in disappointment in the 1950s, he was advised by some to go home to South Africa and find a good club job. Instead, he worked on refining his game as few ever have and transformed himself into a golfing dynamo. Not only did he capture three British Opens (1959, 1968, and 1974), but while playing a limited schedule in the United States between 1958 and 1979, he won twenty-one events, including three Masters (1961, 1974, and 1978), two PGA Championships (1962 and 1972), and one U.S. Open (1965). In the process, he became one of only four men in history (Sarazen, Hogan, and Nicklaus were the others) to win all four major championships. With a practice work ethic that was unmatched except perhaps by Hogan’s, and an ever-sunny, always-upbeat attitude that was very genuine and receptive to the press—which masked, I think, a deep worry about not being accepted—Gary went on to collect something like 120 tournament wins worldwide in his regular playing career and became the greatest foreign player ever on the American tour.

No player I can think of made more of his gifts than Gary, and I think there was something to Billy Maxwell’s remark that among the Big Three Gary was perhaps the greatest competitor—simply because if he hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have been among the Big Three. Relatively short off the tee,
he made himself one of the premier sand players and clutch putters of all time. Beneath the trademark black clothes and movie-matinee-idol good looks, the fad diets and ridiculously intense exercise regimens, is a man who loves his family and his native South Africa to pieces. He is also one helluva nice guy.

Gary and I had tremendous social chemistry. Our games fit hand-and-glove and we were always able at a critical moment to make each other smile or laugh to relieve the tension—especially, as I said earlier, when we were forced to sit in a studio booth and record voice-overs for those
Challenge Golf
matches. Being a far poorer sand player and script reader than Gary, I’d goof up something in the script and he would make a wisecrack and all hell would break loose between us. The studio engineers would shake their heads in dismay as we clowned around and they rewound the tape for yet another take. Those were some of the best laughs I ever had.

I’m proud of what we did together on the golf course, too. We took those matches very seriously and always tried our best to win. In the two years and twenty-six matches that
Challenge Golf
aired on ABC, I’m happy to say, Gary and I lost only eight times, including twice to Julius Boros and George Bayer, twice to Sam Snead and Ted Kroll, twice to Tommy Jacobs and Mason Rudolph, once to Joe Campbell and Dave Ragan, and once to Ken Venturi and Byron Nelson. The ratings were always high, and most of all we truly enjoyed making the shows.

It was about the same time that Bob Hope asked me to make a cameo appearance in his movie
Call Me Bwana
. As I recall, Mark and I had recently come back from our first trip to see Gary at home in Africa, a trip that amazed us in so many ways. The beauty and sweeping grandeur of South Africa and neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) were breathtaking, and it was easy enough to see why little Gary
was so keen on his big native land. People were unfailingly kind to us everywhere we went. During a stop for a match in Johannesburg, Gary’s hometown, his father took Mark and me six thousand feet down into a gold mine, a thrilling experience that darkened later when we learned that a tragic cave-in not far away that same day killed more than a hundred workers. The scale of such human tragedy was almost unimaginable, but it reminded me of some of the coal-mining tragedies I’d heard about while growing up in Pennsylvania.

On a brighter note, as Mark recounts in his tale of the visit, there was an old South African legend that if a man could lift two of the gold ingots poured in the mine and walk away with them, he could keep them. I decided to give the tale a test and managed to get my large hands around two gold bars. I hoisted them and started for the door—visibly surprising the mining people, I guess, by either my physical strength or my nerve. They politely asked me to put the gold bars back, and I was happy to oblige them. They laughed with great relief—like men who’d just gotten many thousands of dollars back.

On that same memorable road trip, we hopped to Zambia aboard Central African Airways, and I was invited up to the cockpit of the airplane to visit with the pilots, as often happened whenever I flew on commercial aircraft (United Airlines, which I once represented, even gave me my very own cockpit “pass”), leaving Mark to sit in white-knuckle terror and Gary to drolly remark that if I didn’t find a different hobby he would have to find a different airline.

A few days later, we flew to Zululand, where Gary’s brother, Ian, was a top game preserve ranger, actually having to buzz the landing strip in a single-engine plane to chase off a herd of rhinoceroses. What a thrilling sight that was! We toured the preserve by jeep en route to the golf course, where the tees were built on hills built by giant ants once reputed
to be maneaters. We saw prides of lions and heard Ian’s terrifying tale of nearly dying from the bite of a black mamba snake. I remember his pointing out a deadly gaboon viper in the bush, and all I could think about as we played the course a little while later was that if I hit my usual number of balls into the rough, Africa could simply keep them.

That night in the little town of Kitwe, in a modern hotel with all of the expected Western-style amenities, yet surrounded by the vast dark African continent, I guess our nerves were still keyed up from our close encounters with lions and snakes. Mark and I were sharing a room and talking, just before turning out the lights, about how strange and truly far away we felt from home. All of a sudden Mark let out a terrified yell. I turned and saw a frightening face pressed against our room’s window! Mark wheeled for the door and I hit the floor, fearing I don’t know what. An attack by unfriendly natives? One of those sudden violent revolutions that seemed to be always in the evening news?

It turned out to be our little host Gary Player making scary faces at us. He’d climbed out his bedroom window and inched along the hotel ledge just to see how badly he could frighten us. He later told us that he laughed so hard at the way he worked us up he nearly fell backward off the ledge, and at that moment neither of us would have cared if he had.

I’d like to say that the South African trip was beneficial research for my big-screen debut, but that would be less than truthful. As a result of my “work” in
Call Me Bwana
, nobody from Hollywood phoned to suggest I give up my day job. I must confess that Jay Michaels and I once seriously discussed the possibility of producing a feature film in which You Know Who would get to fulfill his childhood ambition to play the good guy in the white hat who rides up to save the day and vanquish the bad guys with his six-guns blazing.

I don’t recall how Mark felt about that possibility, whether he was fer it or agin it, but Jay and I at least were pretty serious at one point about exploring the project’s possibility. Unfortunately, it always seemed to get shoved aside for something else, and then, in the early 1980s, Jay Michaels unexpectedly passed away, a real jolt to us all. Jay was a fine man and an exceptionally gifted producer who left us all far too soon.

If I did entertain movie hopes, that’s perhaps because making my little part of
Call Me Bwana
was so easy and such fun. We shot my segment over a couple of hours in a studio west of London, a scene in which I suddenly walk through a tent flap looking for my stray ball, which Bob Hope’s character, having breakfast, mistakes for an egg. Bob offers his usual droll banter, and I mostly had to be myself.

Much harder, in some ways, given my wariness of prepared scripts, were my appearances on Bob’s television shows over the years. Bob knew I was a far better ad-libber than reader, but the timing of our comedy routines was such that I had to memorize my lines and hope like the dickens I saw the proper cue cards when the moment arrived. The gag was almost always the same: Bob would fish for compliments about his game and I would put him down with crisp one-liners.