Arnie

by Tom Callahan

  “But we heard you just shot your age [64] at Shady Oaks,” someone said.

  “Ah, well,” he mumbled.

  Someone else wanted to know, “Have you ever had a perfect round of golf?”

  “No,” he said, “but I almost dreamt it once. I made seventeen straight holes in one and lipped out at the eighteenth. I was mad as hell.”

  Kindred and I came to Fort Worth from Scotland, where we played Carnoustie. The highlights of Hogan’s victory there (in his only Open Championship appearance) were four 4s he made at the par-5 sixth, known as “Hogan’s Alley,” one of many holes at Riviera, Colonial, and other places so designated. Even for me, I played woefully at Carnoustie, but I had an eight-footer at the sixth for eagle. Missed it, of course.

  “Tom nearly made a three at the sixth hole,” Kindred told Hogan, who said, “I can’t remember individual holes anymore.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Hogan,” I said, “they all remember you.”

  In 1997, when 21-year-old Tiger Woods was running away with the Masters, Kindred, Jenkins, and a bunch of us wrote down our top ten golfers of all time and threw the lists unsigned into the center of the table. Dan might as well have signed his:

  Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Doak Walker.

  Before 1958 ended, the reigning Masters champion, Palmer, and the recent PGA champion, Finsterwald, came together at storied Athens Country Club in southeastern Ohio for “Dow Finsterwald Day.” Arnie’s old friend had won his major just weeks before by two strokes over Billy Casper in the first PGA since the format was switched from match play to medal. (In 1957, Dow had lost the last match of the match-play era to Lionel Hebert.) Two amateurs were along in Athens: 37-year-old Ohio State Hall of Famer Howard Baker Saunders, and 18-year-old Jack Nicklaus.

  “Jack was included,” Dow said, “because he had won the Ohio Open at Marietta and, not just throughout the state but all across the country, was sort of recognized as the coming guy. There wasn’t any doubt about this kid’s talent. The only question was: What did he have between his ears and inside his chest? Well, we found out, didn’t we? I can’t say I knew then the historic significance of Jack’s and Arnie’s first round of golf together, but time did kind of stop there for a second when they shook hands. I can still see them.”

  A nine-hole course with two sets of tees, Athens Country Club was designed in 1921 by Scioto pro George Sargent, then renovated in 1928 by the saintly Scottish architect Donald Ross. “Someone proposed a driving contest,” Dow said, at the 338-yard par-4 first hole. “Arnold led off, knocking it right on the green. Then Jack stepped up on those tree trunks of his and drove his ball thirty yards over the green. It’s true the ground dropped off pretty steeply back there, but still.”

  Jack made four, Arnie three. Nicklaus went out in 35, Palmer 30. Thinking back, Arnold said, “I shot sixty-two that day, and I tried to shoot sixty-two [to sixty-eight for Jack]. I wanted to impress him. I was certainly impressed by him. I never was surprised by anything Jack did, only in some cases by how soon he did it.”

  By the way, the date was September 25.

  7

  1959

  WINNER:

  Thunderbird Invitational

  Oklahoma City Open

  West Palm Beach Open

  “Agent of the big shoulders.”

  PALMER AND MARK MCCORMACK first crossed paths in 1950, in Raleigh, North Carolina, at a collegiate golf match where Arnold was playing number two for Wake Forest (behind Bud Worsham) and Mark number five for William & Mary. They literally crossed paths, as McCormack saw Doug Weiland, Bill & Mary’s number two, walking alongside “this tan, well-built guy hitching at his pants.” Mark signaled to Doug, How’s it going? Weiland responded by dragging an expressive forefinger across his throat.

  They didn’t actually meet until six years later, and didn’t have their initial conversation until two years after that. In 1959, with a handshake, Palmer and McCormack combined forces to start making conglomerates of each other.

  Mark was a Chicagoan, godson to the poet Carl Sandburg (“Hog Butcher for the World . . . Stormy, husky, brawling”), with whom he played more than a few rounds of golf. McCormack was competent enough to compete in four U.S. and three British Amateur championships. In 1958 he was a regional medalist while qualifying for his only U.S. Open, the Tommy Bolt Open in Tulsa, where Mark missed the cut.

  “I was good, but I wasn’t good enough,” he said. “If you want to beat Bobby Fischer, don’t play him at chess.” When he came out of Yale Law School, he went to work for a firm in Cleveland. “But I had my own game,” he said, and his own game plan.

  “Mark and another guy started a little agency,” Palmer said, “booking exhibitions for golfers. Dow Finsterwald and I signed up along with just a few others. Gene Littler. Bob Toski. You know, modest payoffs, two-hundred-fifty-, three-hundred-dollar outings—spendable money, as I liked to call it. But pretty soon I knew my man and went to him with a proposal. I needed a full-time business manager to handle everything I had been piling on poor Winnie: taxes, travel, accounting, fielding the extraneous offers that had started coming in. Seeing what was appropriate to do and what wasn’t.” The door was left open for McCormack to add other clients later, but, for the time being, Palmer wanted him exclusively. They shook on it. Through the years McCormack and Palmer signed and cosigned a thousand contracts, but they never had one of their own. “Just that handshake,” Arnold said. It was enough.

  McCormack’s immediate chore was to extricate Palmer from bad deals he had made on the fly in that era when golfers gratefully signed away their images for free balls and shirts. Arnold fought him all the way. “You put everything on a dollars-and-cents basis,” he said to Mark. “I can’t do that. I like these people. Improve the terms if you can, but let’s not lose them. They’re my friends.”

  Among the friendliest was the Wilson Sporting Goods Company’s glad-handing player rep, Joe Wolfe—or, as McCormack referred to him sarcastically, “good old Joe Wolfe.” Studying the Wilson paperwork, Mark was flabbergasted to find that his client, the 1958 Masters champion, had re-upped through 1960 under pretty much the same pauper’s terms as the original three-year agreement of 1954.

  And it was a “worldwide” deal, meaning Palmer couldn’t make a nickel anywhere at anything without Wilson’s involvement and consent. In even smaller print, a rider actually tied Palmer down, at the company’s option, until 1963. “Of course, nothing tied them to him if they wanted out,” McCormack said. “What a contract.”

  Hamstrung by the value Palmer placed on friendship and trust (“Wait and see, Mark, these are nice people; in the end I’m sure they’ll do what’s fair”), McCormack under protest hammered out the long-term agreement Arnold thought he wanted. After Mark insisted on several minor clauses involving increased royalties, deferred income, and insurance, the tentative agreement was sent to James D. Cooney, Wilson’s elderly chairman (a former district judge from Iowa) for his signature.

  Wilson had been a meatpacking company originally, and still was, primarily. The relatively small sporting goods offshoot came about when somebody wondered if any money could be made from the other parts of the animals—goods like baseball gloves, footballs, and tennis racket strings. Canny in most things, but knowing little about sports (let alone golf), Judge Cooney didn’t recognize a sweetheart deal when it was handed to him. “‘Deferred income’?” he exclaimed. “‘Split-dollar insurance’? Don’t we already have a contract with this Palmer fellow?”

  Cooney’s loud “No!” hurt Arnold and wised him up, but Mark was beyond ecstatic. “Palmer’s going to have to become a millionaire,” he said, “whether he likes it or not.” On November 1, 1963, the Wilson contract expired and the world changed. The first set of new clubs (serial number 00001) rolled off the production line of the Arnold Palmer Golf Company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and went directly to Pap, who told Arnie, “I guess this m
akes up for all the clubs I gave you when you were a kid.”

  From then on, McCormack’s basic function was saying “Hell no” for a man who couldn’t even say “Heck no.” Mark knew he had a terrific product to sell, a bold style coupled with a natural warmth. Not just a greatness—a goodness, too. With Arnold Palmer’s name on your laundry, you knew it would come back clean. Together, they rethought the business of sports.

  McCormack’s archetypal golfing hero was Frank Stranahan, of all people, the fitness enthusiast with the barbells in his suitcase who was Palmer’s fifth-round victim at the 1954 U.S. Amateur. “I’ll never forget,” Mark said, “in the forties my dad and I went to a Kansas City Open at the Hillcrest Country Club. There was this player doing well, Frank Stranahan. I was just a kid, but he was only eight or ten years older. I had my Brownie camera. Walking from the putting green to the tee, he saw me and stopped, smiled, and let me take his picture. I never forgot that. He had a red shirt on, and I never forgot that shirt, either. My goal was to get one of those red shirts.”

  On the other hand, there was Henry Picard, who refused Mark’s request for an autograph. “You know, I never liked Picard after that,” he said, “and actually rooted against him. You hear things about kids and autographs and the way players treat the public. They’re true.”

  McCormack had a sensational long game. With amazing vision and foresight, he could see all the way to Australia and Japan. He pictured Arnold Palmer teashops on the Ginza, and made plans for the private airplane he knew was coming before Arnold did (the one with the initials AP on the fuselage), not to mention the streams of jets that followed. Then, with Palmer’s permission, he brought Player and Nicklaus into the fold, if not technically creating “the Big Three” (and a TV show of the same name), then promoting them to a tee.

  “He was a genius,” Player said. “After us, the pope. It was Twiggy. It was Pelé. It was everything and everybody. When I went to see him the first time, he had this little apartment in Cleveland, and the kids are on the table and the wife is changing the diapers, and he ends up building an empire, an empire.”

  Golf Digest named McCormack the most powerful man in golf. Tennis magazine named him the most powerful man in tennis. Sports Illustrated named him the most powerful man in sports. His International Management Group stretched out into 80-some offices in 30-some countries, but Palmer stayed the primary client, even after Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev came aboard. In his mid-80s, without hitting a single golf shot that counted, Arnold was still earning $40 million a year under his perfect logo, an umbrella.

  McCormack and I were sitting outdoors in the strawberries-and-cream section at Wimbledon. He had just signed on as the pope’s flack for a papal tour of Europe (“Give us this day our daily Wonderbread,” prayed one of London’s fishier fish wraps), and though he wanted to talk about the ball-kid costumes he had personally designed for the tournament, I kept steering the conversation back to the pontiff.

  “So what’ll it be,” I asked him, “Cinzano on the altar cloth and Amana on the miter?”

  “Strictly piety items,” he said humorlessly. Mark said a lot of funny things without knowing it.

  He complained about the column I wrote, taking particular offense at the headline “A Pope and a Smile.” “Well, you know, Mark,” I said, “I don’t write the headlines, but I wish I’d written that one.”

  We weren’t pals. He was a chilly character, and I guess I enjoyed winding him up too much.

  “You’re more than entitled to your cut from the dresses and shoes,” I’d say, “but where do you get off taking fifteen percent of Chris Evert’s winnings on the court? I’ve never seen you out there with her.”

  “We [meaning IMG] give her peace of mind so she can concentrate on her game,” he said.

  McCormack had contracts down cold, emphasis on the word cold. In his first attempt at recruiting Muhammad Ali—whom he came to represent eventually—he asked, “How much does Rahman get?” (Rahman was Muhammad’s little brother.) “Fifty grand,” the champ said, “which isn’t bad for drivin’ and jivin’.” “And what does Bundini do exactly?” “Mostly he holds the spit bucket.” “You’re going to have to get rid of all of these guys, Muhammad.” For the time being, Ali got rid of McCormack instead.

  Mark couldn’t fathom why Spanish golfer José María Olazábal refused to ditch hometown manager Sergio Gomez, a “small-timer” in McCormack’s estimation, in favor of big-time IMG. “Strange guy, Ollie,” McCormack said. “I don’t understand him at all. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit interested in all the money he could be making.” One year, Olazábal returned his stipend from Titleist with a note that read, “I haven’t played all season long [due to a foot injury] and I cannot accept your money when I haven’t earned it.” What about that couldn’t McCormack understand?

  In the middle week of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Time managing editor Ray Cave, the author of that Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year piece on Palmer in 1960, called from New York to sound me out on a cover idea. “What would you think of Zola Budd?” he asked. Ray, who was a great guy, knew a lot about sports, but he didn’t know Zola Budd, the barefoot South African runner, from Billy Budd. I thought to myself, McCormack.

  I talked Ray out of Zola, who clipped heels with Mary Decker a week later. Decker fell like Phaintin’ Phil Scott. As it turned out, Budd would have been a hell of a prescient Time cover, proving I wasn’t always right about McCormack.

  Mark kept score by dollar signs. The worst insult he could impart about anyone was “I feel kind of sorry for [so-and-so]. He’s had a difficult career, which is waning. He’s a very bright guy who has just not been very successful in life.”

  But give McCormack this: as devoutly as he cherished cash, he loved Palmer, too. There’s no doubt about that. You could hear it in his voice. His favorite description of Arnold was a scene he witnessed on the golf course in 1962 and retold constantly.

  “It was at Colonial,” he said. “Arnold was in a playoff with Johnny Pott and was looking at a delicate little chip from just off the green. Behind him, a small boy was chattering to his mother. Arnold turned around with a scowl but then, looking at the kid, laughed. The gallery laughed, too. All of the tension in the atmosphere drained away. As Arnold retook his stance, the boy started to cry. His mother was beside herself with embarrassment. Arnold turned again and laughed again. In the next instant he heard a muffled sound and stopped a third time. She had a hand over her son’s mouth now and the child was turning blue. Arnold knelt down and took the kid in his arms. ‘Hey, don’t choke him,’ he told her. ‘This is just a golf tournament. It’s not that important.’ Almost holing the chip, he won the playoff.”

  There were many similar stories. A 10-year-old boy named Roger panicked when he became separated from his parents in the multitudes following Palmer at Pebble Beach. Arnold went into the gallery, reassured him, took him by the hand, and walked him down the middle of the fairway, knowing Roger’s parents would see him there. Sure enough, a mother’s voice immediately called out, “Roger!” Roger Maltbie went on to win back-to-back tournaments his rookie year on the PGA Tour, finish fourth at a Masters, lead an Open Championship after 36 holes, beat Hale Irwin in a playoff at Nicklaus’s inaugural Memorial Tournament, and make a long living on television walking fairways beside players.

  “The greatest thing about Palmer,” McCormack said, “is that his instinct for kindness, even at the most critical moments, overtakes his tremendous desire to win. I’ve been around a lot of great athletes, and I believe he’s the only great athlete who ever lived whom you can say that about.”

  No lawyer/agent ever worked harder or longer than McCormack. In 1994, via cruise ship, he set a record for working vacations that will never be broken. “It was for eleven weeks,” he said. “I started out in Buenos Aires in January and ended up in Japan in April. I went around Cape Horn up to Chile and across to Easter Island and the Pitcairn Islands, Tahiti, then down to Auckland
, Christchurch, Dunedin, then over to Tasmania, up to Sydney, then up to Cairns, and around the corner to Bali, Singapore, and Thailand and then to Hong Kong and Shanghai and Kobe, where I got off. [So, when I had asked him, “Where do you get off . . . ?” it turned out the answer was Kobe.] I visited eight of our offices during the trip. I had a penthouse suite for [wife] Betsy and myself. I had two outside double cabins for family and business associates and friends. And I had a single cabin for secretaries. We would work in the mornings.”

  Betsy Nagelsen, the former touring tennis pro and client, was his second wife, 26 years his junior. “I’m going to die first, probably,” he said. “To find the ideal age for a man and woman, someone said you should divide the man’s age by two and add seven. So when you’re forty, she should be twenty-seven. We would be just about right according to that formula.”

  They had a daughter in 1997. The day before Maggie was born, Mark referred to himself as “a youngish sixty-seven” but aspired to be younger still. McCormack died in 2003, of vanity. He went in for a face-lift and didn’t come out, leaving an estate said to be upwards of $750 million.

  “After I won the Open Championship in nineteen sixty-nine,” said Englishman Tony Jacklin, who also won the U.S. Open in 1970, “I signed with McCormack. That day I turned into a kind of hamster, stepping into a cage, running my ass off for the next fifteen years. The animal I least associate myself with is a bloody hamster.

  “When Mark said things like ‘Tony, I think you ought to go to Nigeria to do this exhibition match, then stop off in Paris to play the European Tour, then hop the red-eye to America to catch up with the U.S. Tour,’ well, you tend to do it, don’t you? At least I did. I shouldn’t have. Chasing every dollar was a disastrous thing to do, for me. And, I think, for Arnie, too. McCormack ran him ragged as well. Him most of all.”

  Arnie and Tony were friendly rivals through the years. “He beat me in a Ryder Cup singles,” Jacklin said. “In a UBS singles, I got my revenge. We had some lovely times. The fans didn’t know the golfer, don’t know the golfer, as well as they knew and know the man. I’m talking about on the course. He was a tough guy on the course, an unbelievable competitor. Gave no quarter. Just as selfish as golfers are selfish. The ill will he had for your shots radiated off of him like squiggly lines. You could feel it. Don’t get me wrong, he was the first one to shake your hand when the game was over, to look you in the eye and say, ‘Well played.’ But, until then, he was the last one to do anything of the kind. There were no mid-round compliments from Palmer, just as it should be.”