A Golfer's Life (41 page)

Unlike our wives, though, Jack and I never became what you might call pals off the golf course. Perhaps our rivalry was indeed too intense and too deep to permit that. Perhaps our personalities just didn’t mesh that way. Whatever it was, he followed his destiny and I faithfully followed mine. But we never failed to enjoy each other’s company in a social setting, like the time I plopped a lady’s wig on his head (or maybe it’s the other way around; the story has been repeated so many
times and so many ways, I’m beginning to forget which way it really happened) and we briefly danced together like a couple of drunken teddy bears at a tournament function, delighting everyone except the poor lady who lost her hairpiece.

The simple truth is, I like Jack and I admire him in more ways than I can probably express. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling a surge of the old competitiveness—or even a stab of jealousy—when one of his companies or course design crew wins a job contract I thought we deserved or whenever our mutual business interests collide and the Umbrella and the Golden Bear find themselves in direct competition for a project, as we occasionally do. That’s just simple human nature, and I know he feels the same kind of competitive fire about me and my organization.

We’re different men with different views, and our differing view of Mark McCormack explains a lot about us.

In July 1970, not long after his father’s death, Jack assembled his own business team and decided it was time to go his own way, amicably terminating his business relationship with Mark and International Management Group. He wanted to determine his own destiny, and in retrospect I think he really needed the new mental stimulation of making his own way in the business world. Jack is, at heart, analytical, a detail man, always taking things apart to see how they run. He’s also a bit of a lone wolf who prefers to do everything himself. You can see it in the way he focuses in on a golf shot, the way he appears to be scrutinizing every blade of grass for a clue when he putts. You can see it in the way he builds a golf course or runs a golf tournament, where he is master of the smallest detail. From what I’ve heard and even from what Jack has admitted to me, that’s exactly how he runs his businesses. I, on the other hand, have always enjoyed having a number of trusted people around me and rely on them to do their jobs without too much interference from the boss. I suppose that,
too, is the Pap in me. Once I trust somebody socially or in business, they have my respect and support until they prove otherwise. Jack navigates more by brain. I go more by heart. Intellect versus instinct. Jack versus Arnie.

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.

I
n 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 businesses, 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.