When it comes to marketable names, Arnold Palmer was Michael Jordan long before Michael Jordan. But the fabled golfer and business dynamo has hit one notable clunker–with golf clubs.
June 12 Fortune inspects wicked competition in the high-end, roughly $3-billion-a-year golf-equipment industry in “Can Big Bertha Stay in the Driver’s Seat?”
The story is mostly about Ely Callaway, 79, a former Fortune 500 corporate chief who became a golf entrepreneur and has hit gold with the Big Bertha, an oversize metal driver. His firm’s sales rose 77 percent last year, to $449 million, with profits up 89 percent, to $78 million.
Along the way, many long-famous golf firms, including Wilson and MacGregor, have stumbled badly. Further, there’s been the conspicuous failure of Palmer, otherwise one of sports’ greatest commercial successes.
In 1972, Palmer lent his name to a company that would ultimately be renamed ProGroup. But it was not well-managed, failed to pick up on various technological breakthroughs and, in 1992, was taken over by Wall Street broker Arthur Becker.
Becker tried to reposition all the company’s brands and failed. He and the chief financial officer feuded and wound up in court. With the firm tottering, it was temporarily bailed out recently by Jack Lupton of Chattanooga, whose family made $1.4 billion by selling its Coca-Cola bottling business to Coke (is this a great country or what?).
Palmer put in $400,000 himself, but debt remains heavy and they just sold their apparel business to raise cash. Concludes Fortune: “Lupton may yet turn ProGroup around, but so far Arnie has been a loser every round.”
Quickly: The summer On the Issues–The Progressive Woman’s Quarterly checks out nothing less than “The Future of Love,” finding that despite the pressure for monogamous pairings inspired by fear of AIDS,
youthful marriage hasn’t made any big comeback. It also finds tremendous unease about marriages among the older women who serve as a new generation’s role models, having been through feminist and social upheavals of recent decades. ($3.95 via Choices Women’s Medical Center Inc., 97-77 Queens Blvd., Flushing, N.Y., 11374-3317). . . . June 5 People’s “Fallen From Grace” is a portrait of deathly self-doubt, inspecting the sad death of Alexander Godunov, the great Soviet dancer who defected to the U.S. in 1979 and was the longtime lover of Jacqueline Bisset. “He was a magnificent dancer but who knows what went on in his soul?” asks a former Bolshoi colleague of a man found dead in his Los Angeles apartment, apparently of the effects of acute alcoholism. . . . Arcane spat of the week is in June Chronicles, a high-brow cultural and political monthly from the Rockford Institute. Wall Street Journal reporter Tim Ferguson discerns a touch of xenophobia as he disputes a reviewer’s claim in an earlier issue of a link between proliferation of liquor stores owned by Korean immigrants in South-Central Los Angeles and a booze problem in the area. . . . June Yankee, a generally genteel look at New England life, captures the snootiness of the social pecking order on Martha’s Vineyard by inspecting the obstacles faced by Ernie Boch, a prodigiously successful and populist Massachussetts auto dealer with an estimated personal fortune of $100 million. An island resident with a $10 million, 15,000-square-foot mansion, Boch’s being rebuffed by the old money crowd, which hates him as he tries to get permits to build nothing more than a 100-car valet parking lot
. . . . May-June North American Review , a bimonthly bastion of fiction via the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, includes an editor’s note deriding both wacko right wingers’ conspiracy-filled criticisms of government in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and a seeming increase in simply insane acts.
It then drolly notes that the issue’s fiction includes an accidental killing during a police drug raid, a harrowing miscarriage, a meat-cleaver murder on a barren island and a tour of a Cambodian death camp. “Does art follow life, or what?” the note asks. . . . And June Fitness has “Love Among the Exercycles.” It’s a funny tale of the gym becoming Romance Central, profiling a Chicago couple who met at the East Bank Club and then married, as well as passing along confessions of a personal trainer who broke the big unwritten rule by having a crush on a client and trying to act on it (he failed ignominiously).
