Of all the questions about Arnold Palmer, the one that comes up far more often than all the others put together is this: How do Arnie and Jack really get along?
One is generally recognized as the greatest player in the game and the other as the greatest player for the game. The Jack and Arnie Show offered a distinct contrast of styles on the course and off. Even after the 20 years in which they directly competed on the course, the two legends continued to duel in the areas of course design and corporate stumping, the difference in styles still apparent.
The public’s fascination with Nicklaus the golfer was steeped more in respect and awe, much the same as one marvels at the repeating perfection of a buttonhole machine. His game was the work of the gods, not something you and I could hope to emulate. Jack’s persona has always been civil and respectful but rarely warm. His air of superiority built a small but undeniable bridge between himself and the masses.
Arnie has been a hero even the great unwashed could embrace. His slash of a swing was not all that different from the same desperate lurch you and I employ on Saturday mornings. Jack, with his yardage book and painstaking perfection, was the anti-Arnie.
Once asked in the early 1960s what he thought of Jack, Arnie responded: “I think he should play faster.”
How do Arnie and Jack really get along? In public, famously. Both are to be commended for keeping a civil, even friendly face on their duel. In private, they weren’t so chummy for a long period of time, stretching from shortly after Nicklaus split off from Palmer-dominated International Management Group and its chairman Mark McCormack to the very recent times when the years finally mellowed their relationship.
“We’re friends,” Arnie said early this year, “but we are competitive, and we will always be that. As the years go by and we become less and less factors in tournament play, whatever else we do we’ll still compete. I think we like that and want it to be that way.”
Arnie’s view of why Jack broke off from IMG?
“I think it started out as a bit of a thing that he wasn’t getting the attention from Mark that he felt he should get. He may have been right. Then, I think in Jack’s mind, that grew into, `Well, I want to run my own business, anyway.’ “
Typically, the abrasive McCormack is not as charitable in discussing Jack’s departure.
“Jealousy,” McCormack said bluntly. “Jack was jealous. If I had not decided to do IMG and had personally decided to represent Arnold, Gary and Jack and become Colonel Tom Parker, if you will, Jack would never have left. But because we signed Rod Laver in ’68 and Jean-Claude Killy in ’69, and Jackie Stewart and we’re off and running trying to do what we’ve done, I had to delegate Jack to somebody else, and that didn’t work.
“Combine that with the fact when Jack first came out he was fat and a kid with a golden spoon in his mouth, as opposed to being a son of a greenskeeper and the American dream. The public didn’t accept Jack then. They still loved Arnold. So Jack felt Arnold getting all this adulation and him getting short shrift.”
There is an oft-told story that Nicklaus’ departure was hastened by his request in the early ’60s for money out of his IMG account to build a house. So the story goes, he was shocked to discover he had no money in his account and angrily demanded to know what happened to his winnings.
“It never happened,” McCormack recently snapped, shifting to the offensive. “Arnold’s the kind of guy that deals in cash, doesn’t believe in mortgages. He used to use the phrase that, `If everything goes wrong, I can dig ditches.’ Jack was the leverage king. Borrow this, borrow that. The reason Jack had no money is he spent it all, buying planes and houses and borrowings and all that stuff.”
Arnie repeatedly exercised a private ritual infinitely telling of the attitude he held toward Nicklaus until the most recent times. On the road, he typically begins the morning by having breakfast in the hotel coffee shop with friends and associates. After plans for the day are reviewed and the stock quotations are checked, Arnie excuses himself for his morning constitutional.
If the group is confined to particularly close associates, Arnie would announce his departure with a flourish, rattling the morning paper back together as he rose and declared through an impish grin: “Well, time for me to go take my Nicklaus.”
There is a select cadre of people who have worked closely with both Jack and Arnie on many ventures and thus are armed with the unique perspective of observing the rivalry as “insiders” of both camps. One of those said he has heard both men use the “go take my Nicklaus/Palmer” crack on separate occasions several years apart. “Except that Arnie seemed to be saying it more in jest,” said the man, who asked to remain anonymous because he remains a cog on the Nicklaus team.
The same man said Nicklaus is paranoid about the cadre of lieutenants constantly surrounding Arnie and typically avoids using products or people associated with Arnie.
Privately, Arnie criticizes Jack’s courses as unplayable and poorly designed in terms of maintenance costs. Privately, Jack likes to sneer that Arnie doesn’t even know he’s designing a course in, say, Gulf Shores-doesn’t even know where it is.
For more than a decade, Jack had dealt almost exclusively with Toro-mowing equipment, irrigation systems, everything that Toro does. Toro had reciprocated by pouring sponsorship money and other resources into various Nicklaus tournaments and projects. Toro even provided materials at cost for Muirfield and Glen Abbey, Jack’s prized course creations.
However, the very day Arnie signed an exclusive endorsement package with Toro, the edict came from Nicklaus’ Golden Bear headquarters that Toro products were off limits. The next day, Nicklaus made new agreements with Textron, Jacobsen and Rainbird.
“Jack even went so far,” said a Nicklaus camper, “that one of the golf courses we were building had nine holes of Toro irrigation in the ground. He had them rip it out replace it.”
Like Toro, golf-course builder Dave Harman was another victim of the rivalry-dumped by Nicklaus in 1980 after taking too much work from Arnie.
Harman, whose primary client during the 1970s was Nicklaus, has built some 74 courses for Palmer. He views the Nicklaus-Palmer relationship as a three-tiered situation.
“First, on the surface, they do what they have to do in public to keep up appearances. Then, in anything that has to do with business, it totally falls apart. On that level, they’re at each other’s throats, which I think is promoted more by their underlings. But then, on the third level, I have also been in the position to see Jack and Arnold sit down together, one-on-one, and have some laughs, talk over old times and truly enjoy one another. The business side is what gets in the way.”
Whatever acrimony remained between Jack and Arnie was mostly dissolved in 1992 when a truce was forged. The first olive branch was offered by Nicklaus, who nourishes a tradition at his annual Memorial Tournament in Ohio of honoring some past giant of the game. At each Memorial, Jack convenes his selection committee to choose the honoree of the next year. Typically, the honoree is a former player. But realizing that a certain obvious candidate will play until a tractor drags him off the course, Nicklaus and his Captain’s Club committee voted to make Arnie the 1993 honoree.
Nicklaus reciprocated by playing in Arnie’s tournament at Bay Hill for the first time in nine years and the two have become friends again, sharing dinner and practice rounds.
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Sunday: The good, bad and ugly of building an endorsement empire.
