Living Under the Palmer Umbrella : The Easiest Part of the Week Is Spent Playing Golf

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, May 12, Capt. Arnold Palmer, flying a Cessna Citation III twin-engine jet, No. 1NAP, landed softly at Orlando International Airport and taxied toward a hangar on the far edge of the field.

“Stay here, I want you to see this,” Palmer told a passenger who had come forward at his invitation to observe the landing.

As the jet neared the hangar, Palmer pushed one of the hundred or so switches in the cockpit and the hangar doors slid open, allowing him to taxi inside without stopping. Closing the hangar doors with another push of the switch, Palmer parked the eight-passenger jet beside his four-seat Hughes helicopter.

Lee Lauderback, Palmer’s chief pilot, climbed out of the plane, looked it over and needled his boss. “You parked it a couple of inches short,” he said.

Another hangar door was raised and Winnie Palmer drove the family Cadillac up to the jet and greeted her husband. She had brought the drinks he had ordered by phone from Baton Rouge, La., earlier in the evening. Palmer poured one, raised his glass to his wife and said, “This is my first one today.”

Only after escorting two of his passengers to their hotel did Palmer finally go home after 12 days on the road. By then it was after midnight and he had missed another Mother’s Day with Winnie.

Winnie Palmer is used to being alone. Her famous husband misses a lot of days at home, including holidays. In his extraordinary life as a golfing celebrity, pilot and one-man conglomerate who owns a dozen or so companies and employs thousands, the president of Arnold Palmer Enterprises travels 150,000 to 175,000 miles a year in this country alone. He also travels frequently to Europe and Asia.

At 55, Arnold Daniel Palmer spends about as much time today in an office or boardroom as on a golf course. He holds a briefcase or telephone in his hand as often as a driver or putter and flies a jet more than some airline pilots.

Tanned, trim and muscular, he looks today as fit as a halfback or boxer. His staff, managers and business partners, who are mostly younger than he is, have to run to keep up with him and, in fact, he seems to be picking up speed in his old age rather than slowing down. His mind-boggling pace slows to merely a run only when he takes time to play in a tournament, although he really never stops working even then. He seldom takes a day off and a vacation to him is a couple of hours on the beach in Hawaii.

“Vacation? What’s that,” he replied when he was asked the other day if he ever took one. “My staff takes vacations, I work.” His first and last vacation, he said, was a skiing outing during the Christmas season 18 months ago. “I stayed off the phone for five days, I guess.”

To get an idea of how Palmer combines his golf and business careers and copes with a schedule busier than a diplomatic courier’s, a reporter got permission to follow him around for a few days. In 120 hours, Palmer led the reporter from San Antonio to Baton Rouge, Orlando, Latrobe, Pa., New York and Philadelphia.

Palmer travels in a hurry and in style. To get 30 extra minutes on the phone in his Orlando office, he flew to the airport in his helicopter while his staff went in vans. To travel into Manhattan from a New Jersey airport for business conferences and lunch, he rented a limousine for $361. To reach a charity reception in Philadelphia on time, he chartered a helicopter.

To Palmer, a private plane is not an impractical opulence. Without one he couldn’t function in the manner to which he has become accustomed and, in fact, if he didn’t have one, he said, he would quit. If he traveled, say, to Jackson, Miss., for an exhibition, he would blow an extra day. Using his own plane, he easily makes it in one.

“I learned long ago that one thing I didn’t like about playing golf was airline schedules,” he said. He first used a private plane to fly to exhibitions in the late 1950s and bought his first jet in the early 1960s.

To Palmer, flying is therapy, an antidote for the frustration that comes when his golf game goes sour, as it often does today. When he’s aboard his “One Alpha Poppa,” he does all the flying. “I don’t get to touch it,” said Lauderback who, at 33, has been with Palmer 12 years. “Arnie is rated the captain of the plane and he’s the most natural pilot I ever saw.” Lauderback pilots their helicopter but Palmer is learning to fly it, too.

May 12 was the last day of a trip that began April 30 when Palmer left home to play in a tournament at the La Costa Country Club near San Diego.

“This will be only an average day, not a hectic one,” Ed Seay, vice president and chief architect of the Palmer Course Design Co., advised the reporter at 8 a.m. that Sunday in San Antonio. But then the balding, irrepressible architect added, “I hope you brought your track shoes.”

Palmer drove himself to the golf course at 8:15. At 10 a.m. he teed off in the final round of a PGA senior tournament and finished play at 2:30. By 3 p.m., after autographing his way off the course, he was driving to the airport, and at 3:30, an hour after he had missed a two-foot birdie putt on the last hole, he lifted his jet off for the flight to Baton Rouge. Aboard were Lauderback, Seay, Ed Bignon, director of operations for the Arnold Palmer Golf Management Co.; Eric Wilcox of San Antonio, Palmer’s partner in a new golf course project in Orlando, and the reporter.

Landing at Baton Rouge at 4:30, Palmer was driven to a hotel where he showered and relaxed for an hour. “To have that much time is unheard of,” Seay said. “Usually we have about 15 minutes.”

At 7 p.m. he went to a reception given in his honor by the developers of a real-estate project where he is building a golf course. “I want to get out of here by 9 p.m.,” Palmer said.

Palmer played his public relations role for the developers as enthusiastically as a politician. From 7:15 to 8:30 he mingled with the guests, posed for pictures and was interviewed for television. At 8:30, he spoke smoothly and off the cuff to the 400 potential property owners, and from 8:45 to 9:15 he shook more hands, posed for more pictures and signed more autographs. “I knew we wouldn’t get out of here by 9 o’clock,” Lauderback said, speaking from experience.

Finally, at 9:15, the staff got him in an elevator and on the way to the airport. He took off at 9:30 for the 1-hour 15-minute flight to Orlando, flying into town over his Bay Hill Country Club and Lodge.

If that was only an average day, what’s a hectic one like? “The Boss and I once visited five courses in one day--in Denver and Phoenix,” Seay said.

The Boss is the staff’s affectionate name for Palmer. The Legend is another.

Palmer did not eat at the reception, so Seay, anticipating his boss’ bad habit, put a care package of sandwiches aboard the plane. Palmer, in fact, often does not take time to eat between breakfast and dinner.

Palmer and his staff have an uncommon employer-employee relationship. While Palmer is clearly the boss, he is a playful fellow who is fast with the needle.

He gets a lot of good-natured abuse in return. Seay and Lauderback warn, “If you are thin-skinned, you will not survive in this group.”

When the reporter missed two meetings in Orlando, Palmer chided him. “Where have you been, taking it easy?” he asked.

“One thing about my staff, there are no duplicates,” Palmer said. “You find those on the regular tour. Mine are individualists. . . . With this gang you hear a lot of snide remarks. Most of it is BS, but sometimes some smart things are said.”

Golf still keeps Palmer busier than anything else he does. “I still enjoy playing,” he said on the way to the San Antonio airport. “But when I can’t make it happen--as I couldn’t today--it bugs me. I get frustrated more than anything else.”

The senior tour has complicated his life, keeping him twice as busy, he said. “I wouldn’t be doing some of this stuff (business) if I had known the seniors tour would become so important. I thought at this point in my life, I’d be playing only a few tournaments a year and spending most of my time operating my business.” Instead, he is playing in 20 to 25 tournaments a year, including about 15 on the senior tour.

Travel is not the problem; he doesn’t mind that. “It’s the packing and unpacking I don’t like,” he said. “And I miss Winnie and the kids--and the grandchildren. They are at the cute age now and you like to have them around.” The Palmers have two married daughters and three granddaughters, ages 7 months, 2 and 4 1/2.

The 12-day trip, Palmer said, will be the longest he’ll make this year. “It’s ridiculous to be gone that long. I don’t enjoy being away from home.”

Palmer is the main reason the senior tour is so popular. “All the players will tell you that Palmer is the most popular player,” said Ric Clarson, the tour’s media director. “He is the catalyst for the tour’s popularity.”

In Baton Rouge, Harold Leone, a real-estate developer, was asked why he chose Palmer to design his course. “His person ality fits our development,” Leone said. “Jack Nicklaus’ club here is too snobbish. We’re trying to build a good course for an affordable price and Arnie’s philosophy is to stay within a budget. He worries about maintenance costs.”

Palmer’s company was one of six Leone approached. “He liked the land and we wanted his name,” Leone said. “The magic of his name is a big factor. He provides credibility. People love him.”

Palmer explains it to his guests this way: “I’m not trying to build a monument to Arnold Palmer when I build a golf course. I build it to satisfy myself and if I do that, I know you will be satisfied.”

There was a touch of Palmer humor. Recalling that he won tournaments in Baton Rouge in 1959 and 1960, he said, “The little purses ($2,000) then are the reason I’m working so hard today.” And, on the two-foot putt he missed: “I wasn’t angry but they can’t find that putter.”

Monday, May 13--Despite his late Sunday arrival, Palmer was jogging on his Bay Hill course at 7 a.m. accompanied by Winnie, on a bicycle, and his golden retriever, Riley. Palmer runs two or three miles. He used to run three to six miles but then, when he played 18 holes the same day, he’d get tired. “I need my energy now,” he said.

At 9 a.m. he was busy on the phone in his office on the second floor of the Bay Hill Country Club and Lodge, which he bought in 1976. At 10:30 he got behind the wheel of his four-wheel-drive van and went to inspect Isleworth, a new course he is building near Bay Hill. Wilcox is his partner in the 1,600-acre, $120-to-$150 million project. Of the 53 courses Palmer is building around the world today, Isleworth understandably is his favorite. It is the first course he has designed and built for himself with his own company.

As Palmer drove his passengers over the course hole by hole his hyperbole became excessive. “This is the premiere site for a golf course,” he said. “There is no place like it in the world. It’s magnificent.”

Stopping frequently to look at the view, he would exclaim, “Look at that view. It’s fantastic!” He and Winnie have selected a choice lot on a lake for a new home.

In truth, it is a splendid piece of real estate. Florida is mostly flat and boring; the terrain at Isleworth, a former orange grove, is neither.

“My imagination runs away with me every time I come out here,” he said at one stop. “Sometimes I’m tempted to shuck everything and stay here and see that it gets done right.”

He fights hard to keep all the trees. Spotting some pine trees that had been scorched by workers burning brush, he stopped and told David Harman of Palm Desert, a giant of a man who builds Palmer’s courses, “I don’t want these trees damaged.”

Back in the van, Palmer said: “I sounded rough because I wanted to make a point.”

On another hole, trees narrowed the opening from the tee. “There’s no way I’m going to let them take out those trees,” Palmer said. “This hole will be controversial forever--and I love it.”

After two hours at Isleworth, Palmer returned to Bay Hill for a photo session. Then, after a fast lunch, there was another photo session and a meeting with partner Jim Oneal on automobile and aviation business. Palmer has three auto dealerships and two aviation companies. At 4 p.m. he made another tour of Isleworth.

Tuesday, May 14--At 8:30 a.m. Palmer held a staff meeting in his crowded office. His secretary, Nan Halley, sat on the floor packing color photos in a box for her boss to take with him and autograph. He signs about 200 a week, she said.

Next to Palmer’s two-room office are the headquarters for his auto dealerships, real-estate business and his golf tournament, the Bay Hill Classic. Son-in-law Roy Saunders runs the real-estate business.

The offices also became the staging area for Palmer’s flight to his summer home and office in Latrobe. Departure was set for noon. As Palmer arrived at his hangar by helicopter, Seay said, “He not only saved 30 minutes, he didn’t have to wrestle with the luggage.”

The private hangar can be identified easily from a distance by a large and colorful golf umbrella, Palmer’s business trademark, painted on the building. The hangar has an air-conditioned lounge, office, kitchen and bath. “I’m thinking about putting in a bed,” Palmer said.

Two new passengers, Winnie and Riley, joined Palmer for the flight to Latrobe. Riley is a veteran air traveler. Flight time was 1 hour 52 minutes, with Palmer blowing two minutes showing the reporter his home and the Latrobe Country Club.

Until he disqualified himself by purchasing his own fixed-base operation--the Arnold Palmer Air Service--Palmer was a member of the Latrobe Airport Authority. He bought the facility May 1 and today took his first tour of it before driving the mile to his office. Paper work awaited him.

His office, which is across the street from his home on the Latrobe golf course, is paneled in dark wood and is filled with memories. There are photos of former President Dwight Eisenhower and scattered around are a batch of trophies, putters and model airplanes. Based in the Latrobe offices are Palmer’s long-time administrative assistant, Doc Giffin, two secretaries and the Palmer Air Service.

A few steps down the hall from Palmer’s office is the famous shop where he pounds, drills, bends and grinds his clubs. There are hundreds of them stacked along the walls and benches and stuffed into barrels and trash baskets. Dozens of old photos adorn the walls.

The shop is Palmer’s favorite haven. “When my nerves get rattled, I come here,” he said. On a quick visit, he noticed one of his tools had been bent and told Giffin he wanted it fixed.

“No matter how the staff prepares for his arrival here in the spring, he’ll notice something wrong,” Giffin said. “He keeps us on our toes; that’s why he’s successful.”

In mid-afternoon, Palmer left with Seay and Bignon for the Laurel Valley Country Club in nearby Ligonier. Palmer, a member there, is redesigning the course. So far, nobody had eaten lunch.

Wednesday, May 15--Palmer arrived at his office at 7:10 a.m. for more paper work. Later he went to his shop to swing a few clubs. The bent tool had been fixed. Suddenly he asks, “What am I forgetting?”

At 8 a.m. his entourage left for the airport for a flight to New York, leaving Seay and Riley behind. In the next 36 hours Seay would go to Pittsburgh, Phoenix and back to his office in Jacksonville, Fla. And then, he said, “I’m going to get a bottle of rum and sit by my pool for three days.”

Pilot Palmer wore a dark suit, white shirt and red tie, an appropriate uniform for meetings that day with executives of ITT and PaineWebber. Landing at the Teterboro, N. J., airport at 9:30, Palmer was met by an ESPN crew filming him for a senior tour story.

En route to Manhattan in his rented limousine, he suddenly looked up from the Wall Street Journal he was reading and said, “You know, if everybody in this country wanted to work, unemployment would be down to 1%.”

It scares him, he said, “When the government raises unemployment benefits and discourages a person’s incentive to get a job.”

It’s similar to another comment Palmer made not long ago: “Anybody with modest intelligence who works hard and doesn’t worry about when they are going to take a vacation or when they are going to get their next beer, can be successful.”

Palmer seems to be a fellow who believes he has achieved success the old-fashioned way: by working for it.

“I am very conservative, a Republican and a Reagan-Bush backer,” he said. “My dad was a Democrat, a Roosevelt supporter, and if I had been from that era, I probably would have been, too.”

Deke and Doris Palmer, by most accounts, were stern, honest and well-disciplined parents, and they probably shaped their son’s work habits and helped instill in him whatever it is that drives him so passionately today.

Palmer grew up in Latrobe about 150 yards from where he lives today. He tore down the old family home, rejecting the idea of turning it into some kind of museum for his trophies. He owns other homes in Palm Springs and Charlotte, N. C., besides the one at Bay Hill.

“I grew up in poverty on the edge of a golf course,” he said, as the limousine moved slowly through traffic on the dirty streets of Manhattan. “I saw how people lived on the other side of the tracks, the upper crust and the WASPs at the country club. We had chickens and pigs in our yard. We butchered every year. I’ll never forget those things.”

His dad was the course superintendent and golf pro at the club, and a young Arnold Palmer caddied there. “I didn’t get to play golf when I wanted to,” he said. “I played with the caddies. I swam in a stream, not the club pool. These things make an impression on you.”

Today, Arnold Palmer is Latrobe’s most famous citizen. Some of the kids from wealthy families he went to school with are now his friends and neighbors.

He has owned their country club since 1971.

Palmer reached the St. Regis Hotel at 10 a.m. to meet with the ITT executives who want him as a partner in a Florida real-estate project. He was joined by Bignon and Alastair Johnston of Cleveland, the senior vice president for Arnold Palmer Enterprises. The ITT project is on hold.

Next, Palmer had lunch with PaineWebber’s top executives in their new corporate offices on the Avenue of Americas. He has signed to be their corporate spokesman on television. On a tour of the offices after lunch, Palmer virtually halted business on the floors where buy and sell orders for stocks and bonds were being placed. “Well, Arnold,” Chairman of the Board Donald Marron said, “you probably cost us thousands of dollars with that tour.”

Returning to the limo at 2:30, Palmer decided to visit his office in the International Management Group’s new headquarters on Madison Ave. although he was already running late for a 5 p.m. players’ meeting at Philadelphia. “Winnie, I can’t be late for that meeting,” he said.

Stuck in traffic en route to the Teterboro airport after looking at his unfinished office, he sighed and said, “For the first time in five days I’m a little bit flustered. I’m going to be late for that meeting.”

He was, too. He had his jet airborne at 4:15 and landed in Philadelphia at 4:45, switching airports at the last minute to save time. However, his car was at another airport. His request for transportation got lost and he arrived at his hotel and the meeting about an hour late.

En route to the hotel, Palmer had stopped at the golf course where he would play in another senior tournament the next day. Winnie watched him and said, “I’m wiped out. I don’t know how he does it. I try to be protective to get him some more time, but he doesn’t want the protection. Look, here he is an hour late for that meeting and he’s talking to some jogger.”

Thursday, May 16--At breakfast Palmer confided that the pace slows down during tournaments. He had a 1:30 tee-off time and apparently had nothing to do before then. He had not hit a golf ball since Sunday.

Palmer’s breakfast every day includes a grapefruit, 36 ounces of water and one aspirin. Winnie, alluding to his eating habits, said, “I think if you ate something during the day, it would keep you from running out of gas.”

He became defensive. “When did I run out of gas?” he asked. Winnie is an unofficial member of the Palmer staff. He needles her a lot, as he does all his associates, but he holds her hand a lot, too. They met on a Tuesday in 1954 at Fred Waring’s golf tournament and he proposed on Saturday.

“There are two places I don’t get involved, the men’s locker room and the golf shop,” she said. “But I stick my nose in other places.”

In the limousine that afternoon, for example, she had told him she didn’t think his newest television commercial for the U.S. Golf Assn. was up to par. “OK, let’s pull it off and I’ll do it again,” he said. “I did it in a half-hour and I haven’t even seen it yet.”

In Orlando, Palmer got frustrated when he couldn’t find his car keys, which he had left in the trunk. “Calm down,” Winnie told him. “Count to 10.” Palmer smiled and said, “You’re right.”

The late tee-off time posed a problem for Palmer, who was due at the Merion Country Club at 7 p.m. for a reception for the March of Dimes, a charity he has headed as national honorary chairman for the past 13 years. A chartered helicopter solved the problem. He returned from the golf course at 6:25, boarded the helicopter at 6:45, and at 7 o’clock the helicopter landed on the first fairway at Merion.

After photo sessions with the area’s poster child, a little girl on crutches named Karin, Palmer spoke to the 150 or so guests and seemed to hold their attention. His father, he told them, had been a polio victim.

The helicopter returned at 9 p.m. to collect the Palmers. “How was my speech?” he wanted to know. “Fine,” Winnie said. The reception had been sponsored by Merrill Lynch and Palmer said, “I wonder what they’ll think when they hear I signed with PaineWebber.”

It was after 10 p.m. on just another average day before the Palmers finished dinner at their hotel. Facing an early tee-off time the next morning, Palmer went to bed early.

The reporter had run out of gas and left Palmer in Philadelphia. There had been too many average days. Palmer still had a tournament to finish before driving to Wilmington, Del., on Monday for a dental appointment and a charity exhibition. Following the match--”We should be finished by 5 o’clock,” he told Winnie--the Palmers would fly back to Orlando to christen their new hangar Tuesday, then return to Latrobe Thursday. Later he would fly to Toronto for four hours to make a commercial. Then he would return to Bay Hill to try to qualify for the U.S. Open.

Palmer is a most uncommon athlete, one of a kind, really. In an era when men who play games make almost as much money as rock singers and movie celebrities, he is, as an authentic multimillionaire, the richest of the lot. While baseball and basketball stars buy luxury automobiles, he buys $5-million airplanes--he has a new one on order--and $400,000 helicopters.

Wealth aside, what really sets Palmer apart from other athletes is his style. He is a rare individual. In modern times, no athlete has been able to match his combination of skill, flamboyance, popularity and business acumen.

To his fans, he seems just an average guy, a symbol of the American dream they can aspire to. Yet, touring the PaineWebber offices with a half-dozen of the company’s chief executives, he looked more like the chairman of the board or the president than they did. He has a genuine affection for his sport and his fans, and he has earned the respect of the media, not an easy thing to do today. He is as recognizable in Japan and some other countries as he is in the United States.

He has been married to the same woman 30 years, hugs his grandchildren, fights to save trees and smiles at his fans and says to them, “Hello, how are you.” He personally autographs every picture he sends them. With all his wealth, he has lived in the same house in Latrobe since the 1950s. His tastes are conservative.

So what are his flaws? Well, his hearing in one ear has slipped along with his putting stroke, he needs glasses to read, wears contact lenses, and he has so many things on his mind, they often race ahead of him or wander off line. And what is one to think of a health nut who jogs and eats a grapefruit, takes an aspirin and drinks six or seven glasses of water every morning but eats chocolate ice cream on cherry pie for dinner?

What’s more, he has made his life so busy and complicated that he can no longer play golf in the manner to which he became accustomed decades ago. But he knows that. It was evident that he is saddened by this fact when he said wistfully, “The pressure I put on my game with business doesn’t help it. But I made a commitment to it (business) and I can’t quit. Maybe one day I can drop some of it and play more golf.”

Wouldn’t that be the day? Sports today can use all the style it can get.