A Golfer's Life (42 page)

In some ways, it was simply another of those unfortunate business tales that came out of the late ’80s—one man’s overreaching ambition with not enough monitoring and skepticism on our parts. Suffice it to say, we took control of things ourselves and saved the dealerships. They are once again thriving, but I learned the hard way that there are times when you really shouldn’t mix business and friendships, although, in most other similar instances, I think I’ve fared pretty well. In spite of the problems with Isleworth, O’Neal, and my own health, I’ve come out of it all in pretty good shape, and I continue to believe that friendship is still far more valuable in life than money.

As for Mark, say what you will about the man, but the plain
fact is that working together we both found success beyond our wildest dreams. Through good times and bad, he’s never broken the faith of that long-ago handshake. At the end of the day, if you really know me, that’s what has meant so much to me.

T
here’s no doubt in my mind that if professional golf hadn’t become my way of life, something to do with aviation would have.

I suppose I’ve had this thought a thousand times while standing on a golf course somewhere awaiting my turn to hit, watching as a private jet or commercial airliner passed overhead, landing or taking off.

Fact is, since I was a boy making elaborate balsawood airplanes and flying them on my father’s course at Latrobe, and especially after Tony Arch took me on that harrowing joyride at age twelve when the plane’s tail bumped the golf course, I dreamed of what it would be like to fly my own plane. I could not have even remotely imagined how vital aviation would eventually become to my golf and business careers.

In this respect, the fates have been extremely generous. I’ve been fortunate enough to have owned eight airplanes, beginning with my twin-prop Aero Commander, bought secondhand for $27,000 in 1962, and ending with my latest joy, the Citation X, a $15 million wonder ship that is the fastest private jet of its class in the world.

In between those compass points of my life there have
been a lot of grand adventures in the air, usually with me in the left seat (command position) beside a group of the finest men in private aviation—the chief pilots I’ve employed over the years. Business deals have been made that wouldn’t have happened, I’ve fulfilled playing and charity commitments that I simply couldn’t have otherwise met, and I’ve even experienced a few close calls that probably shouldn’t have happened—but invariably do to any pilot who’s been in the air as long as I have, nearly 20,000 hours of cumulative flying experience, according to my flying logs. All because I love to fly.

The story of how flying and golf became so interwoven in my life really dates from the first golf tournament I flew to as an amateur in 1949 at age twenty. It was a trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a commercial DC-3 that encountered a tenacious thunderstorm that sent a ball of static electricity (known as St. Elmo’s fire) hurtling down the aisle among the terrified passengers, one Arnold Daniel Palmer among them.

Back safely on the ground, I got to thinking about what had happened and realized that flying, like golf in some ways, was a mystery that I simply had to know more about, a technical puzzle to be solved, a science to be mastered, with a history and even an aura of mythology attached to it, as thrilling as it was challenging. Even then it came to me that flying from one tournament site to another might be a great way to play even more golf, but I did not have a clue how many other benefits would eventually come my way as a result of such woolgathering.

My first flying lesson was under the unflustered gaze of Babe Krinock at tiny Latrobe Airport. I went out to the field one day when I was in my late twenties, just after I had begun playing professional golf and could afford Babe’s fee, and asked him to give me flying lessons. We went out and climbed into a single-engine Cessna 172. He took us up and started explaining the proper procedures of flight.

It was almost that simple. But in other ways it was anything but simple for me to finally master the principles of flight. I’m sure I scared the hell out of a number of people at the airport, and probably Winnie as well, as I struggled to learn to fly. Fortunately, I had a gifted instructor at my elbow who not only saw the wisdom in allowing me to make mistakes he knew were survivable, but also had a lot of confidence in my soon-to-be-discovered ability to fly an airplane. That made all the difference, I can tell you.

For example, early on in the training process, we were flying in a Cessna 182, a larger and more powerful plane than the 172, and Babe was in the copilot seat allowing me to land the plane at Latrobe. My approach suddenly got out of hand, and I actually straddled a large hole workmen were digging at the end of the runway. Most instructors would have gone crazy and issued the student a stern lecture for being so reckless. But Babe looked at me calmly and didn’t say a word. He knew I knew I’d made a miscalculation—a potentially deadly one—and he also knew I wouldn’t ever make that mistake again. “That’s all right, Arnie,” he’d say calmly but firmly whenever I screwed up. “Stick with it. You’ll get it.” He made me learn to relax and feel comfortable in the air, but also never to take a single thing for granted. He was a stickler for proper procedures, the most thorough teacher I’ve ever had, but also patient beyond belief at times. I owe him a big debt of gratitude for that.

After I got down the basics, I had the thrill of my first solo flight—a spin over the Allegheny Mountains during which I felt the power of having the controls of the airplane entirely to myself. That solo flight earned me my single-engine pilot’s license, permitting me to fly under what the Federal Aviation Administration calls “Visual Flight Regulations.” I could fly only with clear visibility, circumnavigating “weather” by either
flying below the clouds or in some cases above them. In those early days of my flying career, Babe accompanied me to several tournaments, but it quickly became clear to us both that he had other students to teach.

In late 1958, the year I won my first Masters, I leased a Cessna 175, hired my first copilot, and began flying to tournaments and exhibitions. Occasionally, if the trip could be accomplished in daylight hours, I even flew myself there alone and back, without the benefit of the serious navigational cockpit tools we have today. It was really hands-on flying—and I loved it. I remember once, early on, flying over to Indiana for a scheduled exhibition match, missing the designated airfield (which was little more than a mowed-down cow pasture), nearly flying to Indianapolis before I realized my mistake. Doubling back, I finally found the right airstrip and did the exhibition, but then had trouble finding Latrobe again on the return leg. It made for a long but oddly enjoyable day in the air.

F
or the most part, though, a couple of able local pilots, Harold Overly and Frank Shepherd, accompanied me to tournament sites and on longer business trips. It wasn’t until after my 1960 U.S. Open win at Cherry Hills, though, that Mark McCormack and I both began to seriously discuss the potentially huge impact owning my own airplane could have on our blossoming business opportunities. Corporate executives owned airplanes in those days, but an athlete owning and operating his own aircraft was virtually unheard of.

Shortly after I took possession of my first airplane in early 1961, a twin-engine Aero Commander 500 that had been owned by Commercial Credit Corporation out of Baltimore, I showed up at the FAA inspector’s station at Allegheny
County Airport in Pittsburgh, ready to take what’s called a “check ride” and shoot for my multi-engine private pilot’s license.

It’s an engaging memory.

The inspector was a dour-faced sort who clearly didn’t suffer any fools in the air, and after I completed the oral part of the examination without any hitches, he looked at me and suggested that we go for a ride in my new plane. The actual flying was the really critical part of the test, of course, but unknown to him I was anxious as hell about just getting the engines properly started. We walked out to the plane with me saying a silent prayer that the fickle left engine would start. The problem was a fuel valve that stuck when the engine was cooling off, and—sure enough—I’d no sooner switched on the right engine and gotten it running than the left refused to crank. I was suddenly sweating golf balls.

“I can get this going,” I promised the stone-faced instructor. “Let me do something and I’ll be right back.”

He watched me climb out of the plane and remove the engine cowling on the left wing, whereupon I took a hammer and gave the fuel pump a good sharp whack. I replaced the cowling, hopped back in, and cranked up the engine, revving it good.

“Well, Arnie,” he said with perfect deadpan timing, then smiled at me. “You’ve passed your mechanics exam. Let’s see if you can actually fly this thing.”

Beginning in 1961, I was in the air a lot. The man who played the critical role in helping me be there was Russ Meyer. A Harvard-educated attorney and former U.S. Air Force and Marine reserve pilot who initially worked with Mark McCormack’s Cleveland law firm, Arter, Hadden, Wycoff, and Van Dusen, booking my various exhibitions beginning in late 1960 and early ’61, Russ was the man who engineered that
purchase of the Aero Commander from Commercial Credit. Over the years, through a thousand deals and business transactions, he also became a cherished friend and the man I have turned to for anything having to do with aviation.

Russ was an early partner in the formation of IMG, and I fondly recall that one of his first jobs on my behalf was the ghostwriting he did, first penning a brochure of golf tips for
Newsweek
and then, more ambitiously, producing 260 fifty-second “Arnold Palmer Golf Tips” for radio syndication. My memory of trying to read Russ’s beautifully written scripts and screwing them up is probably at least as amusing as it is painful, a prelude to the screwups Gary Player and I committed in the studio booth while doing voice-overs for the
Challenge Golf
series a few years later. The good news from Russ’s standpoint, I guess, was that he used his part of the $10,000 fee to pay off his Harvard Law School loans.

A few years after Russ negotiated the purchase of my first plane, with an ever-growing interest in private aviation, he took a leave of absence from the Cleveland law firm to run a small aviation company called American Aviation Corp. I was flattered when he asked me to come on board as vice president of public affairs—though my role really didn’t involve a lot more than consulting on a new single-engine airplane the company planned to produce called the American Yankee, and meeting with salespeople and members of the company’s board of directors. I loved talking airplanes, and these were my kind of fellows.

American thrived under Russ’s leadership, developing a second popular four-seater plane called the Traveler. Eventually American acquired the assets of Gulfstream Aviation, in a reverse merger deal, becoming Grumman-American Aviation in 1972. It was a good move and paid off for all parties concerned.

The jet age was dawning fast for private and corporate aviation, and Russ’s talents didn’t go unnoticed by industry leader Cessna Aviation, in Wichita, Kansas. Cessna convinced Russ to become executive vice president of operations in 1974 at a critical moment in the growth of the private-jet industry. Cessna was a fifty-year-old company that had had only two chairmen in its illustrious history and was the world leader in the manufacture of single-engine airplanes, producing more small aircraft than every other company combined, more than six thousand planes a year.

The problem was, lawyers and insurance companies had driven the product-liability costs of producing and selling single-engine airplanes so high that the market was rapidly dwindling—just as the jet age was coming on. Part of Russ’s mandate was to take Cessna into the next phase of its business life, which he did in spectacular fashion after being named the company’s third chairman and CEO in 1975.

That same year, he made available the company’s first private jet, the Citation I. I’m proud to say I was one of the new craft’s first owners. At that time, his planes were the new kid on the block, but within five years the company had abandoned single-engine airplanes entirely and was rapidly becoming the major design and engineering force in private jet aviation. Today, almost twenty-five years later, Cessna is the dominant player in the thriving private-jet industry, with something like 60 percent of the market share. Better yet, Russ and I are closer friends than ever. He’s still my number-one man in aviation, the guy I consult about anything that has to do with flying, and I guess I must be considered one of his best-paying customers, since I’ve owned six different Cessna Citation jets.

More on them in a bit, though.

*  *  *

I
n 1963, I purchased my second airplane, a Rockwell Aero Commander 560F. It was brand new, more powerful, and roomier, than the 500. It had a cruising range that would enable us to make it to Palm Springs from Latrobe with just one stop, cruising at 240 nautical miles per hour. One of the simple joys of owning that plane, I realize when I think back, was taking Winnie and the girls up in it for Sunday-afternoon spins, or “training” flights, as we called them. Winnie loved flying, but the girls, I’m afraid, weren’t terribly impressed. They were far more interested in the dolls they were playing with in the rear seats.

I, on the other hand, found that piloting an airplane did something very special for me, especially after I acquired my instrument and multi-engine ratings, which enabled me to fly through all kinds of weather, in and out of small airports—really anywhere I wanted. Above all, the speed and convenience of air travel was infinitely preferable to the old way touring pros got around the circuit; as I said to a reporter about that time, “I loathe driving a couple hundred miles every Monday.” I literally and figuratively had put that old trailer home as far behind me as possible, and I liked it that way.