A Golfer's Life (46 page)

I’m not being flip. I’m dead serious. That is to say, every golf course is going to be great to somebody for some reason or another, and what you think is important in a golf course may not be what I think is important or a particularly notable feature—and vice versa. Who’s right, who’s wrong? No one. That’s why, to be honest, I hate lists and rankings of the “world’s best golf courses.” They make me very uncomfortable. Golf courses are just about the most purely subjective things on earth—subject to a thousand variables in the mind of the person beholding them. Some people like links; some prefer gentle parkland courses. You like big greens with minimal breaks; I prefer small greens with plenty of elevations. What Ed and I work hard to do is always keep in mind our vision of a “natural” design whose hallmarks are playability and versatility. And I think, given our record of achievement, the proof is in the pudding.

If I may crow a bit, I’ll say that you’d be hard-pressed to find a busier bunch than the twenty-five designers, draftsmen, secretaries, and the big bald-headed guy who heads up the crew employed at 572 Ponte Vedra Boulevard. I’m proud of Palmer Course Design and the work they do. Not long ago, I was notified by the American Society of Golf Course Architects that I’d been selected to receive the Donald Ross Award for 1999, a coveted prize given to architects who have made a strong contribution to golf course design. As honored as I am to personally accept the award, it’s really a tribute to Ed Seay and all of the talented folks he has gathered around him.

T
he first time I laid eyes on the Bay Hill Club and Lodge, during a winter exhibition in early 1965, not long after we opened the new nine at Latrobe, the place was little more than a still-raw golf course with a tiny pro shop, a small guest lodge, and a few modest bungalows carved out of the orange groves and desolate razor brush of central Florida. It was a true wilderness area, home to a few pristine freshwater lakes filled with waterfowl, snakes, and gators.

In other words, it was nearly perfect. A golfer’s paradise, in my book.

For years, Winnie and I had discussed how great it would be to have a quiet little out-of-the-way place in Florida we could go to every winter where I could retreat to work on my game and the girls could relax in the warmth. We’d looked around a lot, but it wasn’t until I played Bay Hill, another fine design of Dick Wilson, that I went back to the house we were renting that winter in Coral Gables and said to Winnie, “Babe, I’ve just played the best golf course in Florida, and I want to own it.”

By then she was accustomed to my sudden bursts of inspiration,
but after viewing the property herself she agreed with me that Bay Hill was something special. With its splendid isolation and Eden-like abundance of wildlife, it really was a little bit of paradise on earth. We envisioned ourselves being happy there for a very long time, building a second home where we could go to relax before beginning the madness of another Tour season, where I could practice to my heart’s content, with only a few club members and their guests around to interrupt my concentration. Best of all, we could adopt a slower pace of life—something that we greatly needed at this point in our hectic lives.

At my request, Mark McCormack and Russ Meyer went to work trying to put together a deal that would allow Arnold Palmer Enterprises to purchase the club and all of its assets—a job easier said than done, as it turned out. Bay Hill had been built as a getaway club by several prominent businessmen from Nashville and Detroit, and negotiations with those owners, a collection of almost a dozen men, became a lengthy ordeal that took almost the next five years to put together.

At last, in 1969, we finalized and signed a five-year lease with an option to buy the club. We immediately set about making improvements to the course and to the lodge, figuring we would own the whole shooting match outright by the end of the lease.

However, almost a year to the day after we signed the agreement, disaster struck—at least to my mind.

I happened to read one morning in the
Orlando Sentinel
that the Disney Corporation had just announced its purchase of twenty-seven thousand acres near us at Bay Hill. The entertainment behemoth was planning to begin immediate construction of its grandest family theme park ever, a vision called Walt Disney World.

Friends immediately called to congratulate me on my incredible business savvy. With Disney in the neighborhood
and the land rush of commercial development that was bound to follow, property values were expected to soar out of sight. Contrary to their belief, I was really depressed as blazes by the news, heartsick that I would soon have Disney as a neighbor. Gone forever would be my quiet little corner of Florida, my private practice Eden of birds and birdies.

Eventually, though, I calmed down. I even was among the first to go out and take a ride on our new neighbor’s impressive monorail system when it became fully operational. I met Disney officials and looked over the ambitious blueprints for the immense theme park. The people at Disney couldn’t have been more gracious, and the experience brought home to me what an unprecedented impact the park’s presence was going to have on Orlando and the surrounding environment. I suppose I still privately despaired a bit for little Bay Hill. On the other hand, nature herself had given us an ace of sorts. Thanks to those freshwater lakes to the west and north, access to our little sanctuary would remain fairly limited. With no through traffic and only small residential streets connecting something like six hundred residential lots, I figured that with luck we would become an oasis of calm in the midst of it all.

I’m happy to say that’s exactly the picture that evolved; however, Bay Hill almost slipped through our fingers because of circumstances beyond our control. By 1974, owing to some business setbacks of our own, Arnold Palmer Enterprises was just about to ask Bay Hill’s owners for an extension of our lease-option agreement when we were thunderstruck to learn that they’d made their own deal to sell Bay Hill to somebody else—in fact, it was pretty much a done deal. The new owner was George Powell, president and CEO of Yellow Freight transport lines out of Kansas City, a man who turned out to be a real gentleman. When I approached George, he graciously agreed to renegotiate our deal, and we eventually purchased
the golf club and course from him. The final price we paid was a bit higher than we had hoped it would be, but at least Bay Hill was finally ours.

P
ap loved Bay Hill dearly. He could come there and do the things he loved most: play golf with friends, see his grandchildren, and enjoy a few adult beverages in the locker room after a round of golf. For a while, until I talked him out of it, he was even dead set on purchasing one of the club’s original cottages, which, as I recall, was up for sale for $17,000. After a life of hard work and taking care of everybody else’s needs, Pap was about to officially “retire” (although he never really retired), and I for one was pleased that he would finally be able to enjoy some of life’s finer things, which Bay Hill offered in spades. On the other hand, my mother, already beginning to show the effects of the crippling rheumatoid arthritis that she dealt with bravely until her death, wasn’t terribly fond of Florida. She always found her time there a little boring, to say the least. I suspect she needed the unfolding drama of the northern seasons, the comfort of her Latrobe friends, and the social traditions of western Pennsylvania to keep her happy. At any rate, they didn’t purchase the bungalow—which, incidentally, recently sold for about a quarter of a million dollars. So much for my real-estate business savvy.

It is a bit ironic that Pap was so keen about Bay Hill—on our owning and operating the club and lodge, I mean to say.

A few years before, he had nearly lost his mind when I informed him that I was thinking about purchasing Latrobe Country Club. I’ll never forget the look he gave me.

“Are you crazy? Why on
earth
do you want to do that, Arn?” he growled.

“Well, Pap,” I reasoned, “you’ve been here your whole life. That’s a good enough reason for me.”

I waited a second or two before adding, “Besides, it means you’d have to work for me.”

He didn’t find that particularly amusing. But the deal was all but signed and sealed at that point. The fact is, owing to cheap imports and the steep decline in the high-grade specialty steel market, Latrobe’s economy was suffering, the effects of which were visible even at the club. The watering system was antiquated, greens and fairways sorely needed rebuilding, and the clubhouse and pool area could have done with a serious face-lift.

This was exactly Pap’s logic for
not
buying the country club. He knew what it took to run the place, what a drain on capital resources owning the club outright would be. The figures simply didn’t add up in his mind.

As I presented it to Pap, though, it not only seemed an opportune moment for me to step in and spruce up the place—but also, given our family’s long identification with the place, it was the right thing to do. Harry Saxman had first raised the intriguing possibility with me. With Harry’s help, over a series of months, we tracked down and purchased all of the outstanding shares of stock in Latrobe Country Club. That proved to be a bit of a paper chase in and of itself that I do not wish to repeat anytime soon, because, since the club was founded in the 1920s, much of the stock was scattered far and wide, squirreled away in people’s strong boxes and attics. Some of the certificates ultimately had to be revised before they could be sold.

But, eventually, Latrobe was ours. Winnie and I became the sole stockholders in September of 1971. The club became, in effect, a true mom-and-pop operation. Over the years, we rebuilt the course and upgraded the club’s amenities, adding a new cart barn, halfway house, and tennis courts. We refurbished the locker rooms and the pool area and expanded the clubhouse to include a new grill and dining facility,
which opened in the nick of time for the wedding of a close friend’s daughter. A few years later, we built a special covered patio off the club ballroom facing the 18th green, and we named it “Peggy’s Porch,” inaugurating it at my eldest daughter’s wedding to Doug Reintgen in June 1978.

For the record, I tried to convince Peggy that she and Doug were far too young to get married, but Peg is a strong-willed lass who takes after her mother and completely shrugged off my concerns in this regard. I liked Doug quite a lot. He was a local boy from a good family and he used to caddie at the club. At that time Doug was still in medical school but clearly had a promising future. Peg was undecided about her career and unsure of what she really wanted to do with her life, save marry Doug. My principal fear, however, was that their lives were just too unsettled to jump into a lifetime commitment. In this respect, I guess, my concerns did prove a bit prophetic, because a few years later they separated and eventually divorced. All families have their ups and downs, but I am pleased to say we all remain good friends with Doug and his family, and true to form Doug has gone on to become one of the country’s top cancer surgeons, based in nearby Tampa, Florida.

Back to the country club. Following his stint in the U.S. Air Force, my younger brother, Jerry, returned to Latrobe and tried his hand at inside jobs for a few years, until he decided it was more fun to be outside working on the grounds as Pap’s assistant. He completed agronomy studies at Penn State and was a logical successor to the club’s superintendent job, which I gave him when Pap passed away in 1976. A decade after that we named him general manager of the club, the title he holds today. It pleases me no end that his son Deken attended Wake Forest University and has gone on to work for the USGA in Colorado Springs, and that his daughter Amanda is studying agronomy at Penn State and is seriously
considering either following her old man into the golf course business or maybe even joining her uncle Arnie in the course design field.

Whatever happens in the future, and with all due respect to Pap, I feel confident in saying that buying the club from the members twenty years ago is one of the smartest moves I ever made. It enabled me to preserve a facility I care deeply about and to give something back to the people of Latrobe. It pleases me in ways you can’t imagine when members stop me to say how fine the golf course looks or how terrific the food in the dining room has been these past few years. It seems like almost every Saturday afternoon when I’m at the club during the summer months, a big wedding reception or anniversary party is going on in the ballroom or out on Peggy’s Porch—a sight that never fails to make me a bit reflective. While much has changed around here, the spirit of the place, the most important part, remains the same.

In a word, I couldn’t be happier with the way things have turned out in Latrobe. And I’ll wager, wherever he is looking on from (though you can sure bet he won’t admit it), so is Pap.

S
omeone asked me a surprising question the other day.

Was I afraid of dying?

I suppose my answer might have surprised him a bit. No, I replied. I’m not particularly afraid of dying—as long as I go the way my father did.

In February of 1976, Winnie and I flew back to the West Coast from Hawaii and said goodbye to each other and headed our separate ways. She went on home to Bay Hill, where Pap and Doc Giffin had just arrived for their winter golf getaway, and I flew on with great anticipation to the Bob Hope Desert Classic in Palm Springs. The Hope, simply put,
was one of my favorite tournaments, and the week it was held was one of the finest of the year. That’s due in part, I’m sure, to my long and close friendship with the host, Bwana Bob, but also because I always seemed to find my game there and won the tournament a record five times. The expanded five-day format, the colorful mingling of entertainment-industry folk and golf pros, the large and responsive galleries, the relaxed atmosphere, and the opportunity to catch up with old friends and fans—all of it combined to make the Hope tournament a very special event in my heart, despite what I would have to inevitably think of every time the calendar turned to February.