Brad Brewer - Mentored by the King: Arnold Palmers Success Lessons for Golf, Business, and Life

MENTORED

by the

KING

A RNOLD P ALMERS
S UCCESS L ESSONS FOR
G OLF, B USINESS, AND L IFE

Brad Brewer

with Paul J. Batura

This book is dedicated to my children
Kenna, Carli, Tori, and Bradley.
Inspired with you in my thoughts,
I share what I was so privileged to experience from a great mentor.

Golf is deceptively simple, endlessly complicated.

It frustrates the intellect and satisfies the soul.

The greatest game that mankind ever created.

ARNOLD PALMER

T HE BEST THINGS IN LIFE are often simple on the surface but quite complex underneath. Think about it: the laugh and giggle of a child, the smell of a rose, the sight of a sunset along the surf or coast. Taken as a single snapshot, each of these joys is savored but rarely studied. Rare is the parent who considers the intricate and miraculous neurological system that cultivates and produces a laughor who really knows why a flower is so fragrantor why a sky at twilight produces colors that even the worlds best artist couldnt replicate.

So it goes with the great game of golf. On the surface, it strikes the casual observer as such an easy game. A club and a ball and some grass in between. What could possibly be so difficult?

But look beneath the surface and youll soon begin to see what Arnold Palmer has been preaching about his entire life. Golf, though just a sport, has a streak of mystery to it. What you see is not all there is.

A RNOLD P ALMER S OFFICE IS a choked-down lob wedge away from his residence and sits directly across the road from the Latrobe Country Club in Pennsylvanias leafy-green Laurel Highlands. Situated just east of the old steel mills of Pittsburgh, it seems an unlikely headquarters for the worlds most accomplished and famous golfer. A man of means and influence, Palmer could have chosen to live anywhere, but theres no place he would rather call home than right here.

At eighty-one years old, the white-haired legend has traveled, played, and won titles and championships around the world. Hes been a friend to presidents and heads of state, and you would be hard-pressed to find any award in sports or business that he was eligible for but hasnt yet received. In spite of all this, however, the trappings of celebrity havent fazed or changed him. He still keeps his circle of friends smallall trusted people with whom he goes back decades. Its true that success has brought him fame and fortune, access and opportunity, but after every trip to victory or honor, all roads continue to bring him home, back to where it all began, back to the lush green hills of Latrobe, Pennsylvania.

Arnold Palmer was born here just a few weeks prior to the great stock market crash on a late summer day, September 10, 1929. His parents, Doris and Milfred Deacon Palmer, lived beside the sixth tee of the Latrobe Country Club, in a small and simple but cozy house. So young Arnie has never been far from the game, nor has the game ever been very far from him. He still remembers leaning against a tree in that green backyard, a holster hugging his hip, and aiming his toy cap gun at a sand ditch in the distance. It was Ladies Day at the club. Even back then, you can be sure he hit the target.

His father, affectionately nicknamed Deacon, was the clubs head groundskeeper and later golf pro and course superintendent. The elder Palmers tenure at Latrobe stretched a remarkable span of fifty-five years, running until his death in 1976. Throughout his long run, Deacon had a knack for keeping things sharp and crisp, but the greatest testimony of his work was to be found in the form and success of his son.

My psychologist was my father, Arnold once mused, and he never went to college. Of course, his dad offered more than just advice. He first gave him clubs, an old cut-down set, at the tender age of four. There is nothing to suggest the boy was a prodigy, but he began to swing early and swing often. By all accounts, he was good, a natural talent. By the age of eleven, he was caddying. And playing. And watching. And learning and asking questions. By the time he left on September 7, 1947,

When Arnold looks out the windows of his house or office or walks the course at Latrobe, he cant help but remember the times he spent on the greens with his father. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, he spent a day with a reporter from USA Today. His memory was razor sharp, right down to recalling the exact spot of a lesson borne of a fallen oak tree. Pointing to its location, a picturesque slice of earth on the edge of a green hill, Palmer began to tell the story:

The trunk was rottenIll never forget this. A bunch of honeybees had moved in. Have you ever seen a honeycomb? Well, this one was full of honey. I mean, absolutely like that! [He spread his great hands like an exaggerating fisherman.] And my dad says, Now, Arnie, were going to take this honey home and give it to your mother, and were going to eat it. But he says, Weve got to get two five-pound bags of sugar. When we take the honey out, were going to put those two bags of sugar right there, so the bees can have their food I was about seven or eight years old.

To know Arnold Palmer is to know a man who took his late fathers lesson of that memorable day to heart. He is a man who gives back, a generous soul eager and inclined to give away far more than he receives. As the reporter who walked the course with him on that day concluded, by his advice and actions with those bees seven decades ago, Deacon Palmer taught his son a simple but wonderfully practical lesson: When you take the honey out, put some sugar back in.

Happy is the person, a wise man once wrote, who still loves as an adult something he loved in childhood; time has not torn him in two. The same might be said of my good friend. Sitting and talking with Arnold Palmer in his home office, watching him swivel and rock gingerly in the tall chair behind an eight-foot-long antique wooden desk, is to watch a man very much at peace with himself and comfortable with the many loves of his life. It is an unusual thing, isnt it, to have accomplished so much, to have gone so far, and yet to return and be content spending the twilight of your career only steps from where you were born. Where others might be struck with wanderlust, thinking the next stop of the journey will be better than the last, Palmer is satisfied to stay close to home.

Visit Arnold Palmers hometown and talk with its residents, and it quickly becomes clear that the local boy who made good set down roots that ran deep. He watered them daily and invested heartily in his hometown friends and neighbors. The legend looks beyond just the geographical boundaries, however, when assessing the tug toward home. Your hometown is not where youre from, hes said. Its who you are. As Arnold Palmer enters his ninth decade of life, his prayers have been answered. This favorite son of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, is happy to be home.