Aviation is not such a long shot for these professionals in the golf world.
More than any other athletes, golfers have always been associated with the jet set. Whether it’s PGA Tour players hopping from one tournament to another or a group of executives flying off to a far-flung golf destination, private aviation is synonymous with the game.
And no one is more representative of this privileged means of travel than the “King” of golf himself, Arnold Palmer.
Palmer first flew solo in a Cessna 172 50 years ago and holds the distinction of becoming the first athlete in the world to buy his own jet aircraft when he acquired a Rockwell Jet Commander in 1966. To this day Palmer, 77, still pilots his Citation X and maintains all the appropriate ratings and certifications.
Influenced by Palmer’s affection for aviation, fellow Hall of Fame golfer Jack Nicklaus logged about 800 hours in the cockpit in the early 1960s, but he never acquired a license. Nicklaus purchased his first plane, a twin-engine Aero Commander 680FL, in the summer of ’64. Three years later the Golden Bear traded in his Aero Commander and leased a Lear Model 24 twin-engine jet. Nicklaus, who now jets around in a Gulfstream IV affectionately known as Air Bear, has often said that his most essential business tool has been the series of airplanes he has owned.
Nowadays nearly every top professional golfer owns an airplane, not only for convenience and comfort, but also for security. Many others regularly charter private jets. Like Palmer, there have been a number of other golfer-turned-pilots, including Johnny Bulla from the game’s Golden Era and modern-day players such as Greg Norman, Phil Mickelson, Bobby Clampett, Scott McCarron, Bill Glasson, and Mike McCullough to name a few.
“I am truly not aware of what other players own or have,” Nicklaus recently said. “You don’t hear other players talk about what you might consider ‘toys.’ But I don’t view an airplane as a toy. You might call a boat a toy, but I consider an airplane a business tool. Just look at how many players have an airplane or some affiliation with a jet service. There might be a hundred or so players who fit into that category,” Nicklaus estimates. “My airplane is perhaps the best business tool I have. I probably save about a month or so a year in travel time by owning my own airplane.”
In the following pages you will read about how private aviation plays into the lives of a foursome of golf figures.
Gary Player
Many people know golf great Gary Player as the Black Knight—a reference to his penchant for wearing black attire. What many golf fans might not know is Player’s other trademarked nickname: The World’s Most Traveled Athlete.
Player earned that nickname for traveling more than 14 million miles over a golf career that started in 1952 as an amateur in his native country of South Africa. More than 160 career victories later, including 18 major championships, the high-flying Hall of Fame golfer is still going strong, albeit mostly as the chairman of Florida-based Gary Player Group Inc. “There’s no question that I’ve traveled more than any human being who ever lived,” claims Player, one of only five players to win golf’s career Grand Slam (Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods are the others). “I turned pro in ’53, but I started traveling in ’52 because I played in a lot of amateur tournaments. If a pilot travels for 25—let’s say 30—years, it’s a long time. You might have a pilot who flies for 35 years, and you might even have a guy who represents the airline for 30 years and then goes another 10 years private for 40 years, but nobody flies a plane for 55 years.”
Granted, Player doesn’t pilot himself, but the mileage he’s registered over the past six decades is still quite a feat. One reason Player is still spending so much time in the air is the growing nature of his Gary Player Design business. Since he established it in the early 1980s, the golf course design firm has been associated with 230 courses worldwide in 14 countries, including such faraway places as China, Bulgaria and the Middle East. Recently, Player spent 23 days on the road, visiting Pebble Beach, London, India, Hong Kong, Indonesia, China, Japan, and Canada before wrapping up the journey with a round-trip from his homes in Florida and South Africa.
“This is what I’ve been doing for 54 years—traveling around the world,” notes Player, whose design group currently has 40 projects on the drawing board. “If a businessman represents a company for 25 years flying, it’s exceptional. If he does 30 years, it’s unheard of. If he does 35 years, well I’ve never heard of that. I mean I’m just continuously flying. There’s no way anybody else could have flown anywhere near the miles I’ve flown.”
Over the years, Player has used a variety of jets and jet services. During a two-year period in the early ’90s he traveled in his own 800 Hawker Sidley. The high cost of having his own jet and a dream to own a sprawling ranch in South Africa forced Player to go back to flying commercial and chartering his own flights, but he still has fond memories of his Hawker jet. “It was very good—a wonderful plane,” recalls Player, who recently turned 71. “In those days I flew to the British Open and did a few international flights. But it just got so expensive with what I am trying to do. I’m building a new ranch, and I was buying the ranch next door to me. Then I wanted to buy a lot of sheep and a lot of horses and cattle, and I said hang on—this flying with my own plane will be over, and I’ll never have anything to show for it. Whereas if I buy this ranch and I buy the things I want to have there, it’ll be there forever.”
With commercial airlines becoming so much more time-consuming in the post-9/11 world, Player decided to go back to private jets, and for the past two years he’s been a member of Flexjet. “We’re designing a lot of golf courses, and for me to get to where I’m going, the jet makes a big difference,” emphasizes Player, who was named golf’s Global Ambassador by the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2001. “I can sometimes do two site visits in a day, whereas commercially you cannot do that.”
Clearly though Player’s decision to invest back into a private jet has been fueled by the increasingly inconvenient nature of today’s commercial airline industry. “It’s such a pain in the butt now going to the airport and taking your belt off and your shoes off [and dealing with] your suitcases,” Player points out, “and you got to get there an hour and a half before, and then most flights are never on time—very few are.
“There are two groups of people who got you where they want you,” Player continues. One is the “builders who build houses because they always tell you it’ll be done the 10th of January and they finish on the 10th of July and there’s nothing you can do about it. The other is the airlines—they take off an hour and a half late . . . I mean that’s just unforgivable. If I arrive on the first tee late, I’m disqualified. Or if I have a business appointment and I don’t make it, they don’t do business with me. So the builders and airline people have got you by the nuts. “I got so tired of airplanes being late and the big inconvenience of going through airports now and having to get there early and missing appointments. [Fractional jet ownership] makes such a difference for me. The nice thing about it is it’s deductible and you don’t have the headaches,” Palmer adds. “It’s still a luxury whichever way you look at it, but you know after traveling for 56 years I think I’m entitled to a luxury.”
Entitled indeed—especially when you’re the ultimate frequent flyer.
Arnold Palmer
For decades, Arnold Palmer’s charming personality, good looks, and go-for-broke golfing style appealed to a legion of fans. The loyal following was commonly referred to as Arnie’s Army, but it could just as easily been called Arnie’s Air Force considering Palmer’s longtime passion as a pilot.
In a recent interview with Private Air just a couple weeks after he formally retired from competitive golf, Palmer, 77, recalled that he was always fascinated with airplanes and aviation as a youngster growing up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a small industrial town east of Pittsburgh. Like so many other boys of his era, he built and crashed his fair share of balsa wood models, but playing with planes went far beyond the usual kid pursuits for Palmer, thanks to a nice little airport barely a mile from his home on the perimeter of Latrobe Country Club. When he was old enough and had the opportunities he spent time at the airport’s old terminal building listening to pilots trade stories about their planes and their adventures in the sky.
“Early on a friend of a friend of my family who was an Army pilot took me for a ride in a Piper Cub,” Palmer remembers. “He did some things he probably shouldn’t have done and really gave me a scare. Even though it shook me, it also gave me the resolve that, just as soon as I could afford it, I would take lessons and become a flier. Little did I realize what an important part of my life—athletic, business, and family—aviation would become in the years ahead.” Indeed, some 50 years after he first trained and flew solo in a Cessna 172, Palmer and planes have become as synonymous as Palmer and golf. He started to really get serious about flying in 1949 when a DC-3 he was taking to a tournament in Chattanooga, Tennessee, gave him his first glimpse of the electrical phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s Fire. After witnessing a ball of fire roll down the middle of the aisle, Palmer thought “he was a goner” not knowing what was happening. From that moment on he decided as soon as he had the money he was going to start flying lessons and learn everything he could about airplanes.
Palmer purchased his first plane in 1961, an Aero Commander 500, to use as his primary means of travel on the golf circuit. He moved up to a 560F Commander two years later and became so busy that he hired a part-time pilot to accompany him. Jets entered Palmer’s picture in 1966, when the golf trailblazer bought a Rockwell Jet Commander, becoming the first athlete in the world to buy his own jet aircraft. He learned to fly the jet under the tutelage of Darrel Brown, one of Rockwell’s top pilots, and he ended up persuading Brown to join him after the training period. Brown ultimately worked for Palmer for seven years, including Palmer’s switch to a Lear Jet in 1968.
Later Palmer flew with Vietnam War-era Air Force pilot Charlie Johnson for a while, and then Lee Lauderback, who flew under Johnson as Palmer’s aviation activities and operations expanded, took over as chief pilot in l975. The following year Palmer purchased his first of seven Cessna Citation jets, a 500 model, and replaced it with a faster Citation II in l978. Palmer upgraded again in l983, taking delivery of the first Citation III off the company’s Wichita, Kansas, assembly line. Many considered this bigger, faster, longer-range, nine-passenger aircraft the cream of this level of business jets. Two years later Palmer got into an improved Citation III and moved up again in ’92 with a Citation VII.
Ten years ago Palmer acquired the first production model of the new Citation X, which has the intercontinental range, speed, and high-altitude capabilities to make it the fastest business jet in its class in the world. “I picked up my seventh Citation—an upgraded version of the Citation X—in early 2002,” Palmer adds. “With the Citation Xs, I have been able to fly the Latrobe-Orlando trip between my two main bases in little more than 90 minutes. The range and speed of the Citation X has been particularly valuable to me in my vast golf course design business in the United States and abroad.” Palmer reports that he logs something like 25 hours a month in the air, and over the years since l966 that computes to more than 5.5 million statute miles in the jets and more than 18,000 hours in his logbook.
“Aside from the decisions to marry and become a professional golfer, the ones that ultimately took me into private aviation were no doubt the smartest that I have ever made,” Palmer recently said from his office overlooking Bay Hill Club and Lodge that he owns in Orlando. “To put it quite simply I could never have accomplished even half as much as I have in my golf and business careers over the last four decades without having my own airplanes, especially the business jets since 1966, and an excellent airport so close to home.”
That airport, known for many years as Westmoreland County Airport until it was appropriately renamed Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in 1999, has undergone valuable expansion and modernization over the years, including a $5.3-million renovation project that doubled the size and upgraded the terminal. Among other improvements it now has a 7,000-foot concrete runway and an excellent control tower, boasts Palmer, who proudly serves as a member of the Airport Authority.
When asked about his recent decision to finally retire from golf, Palmer seemed content. “For me it’s a sad one but on the other side of that, my game is not . . . you know you have to be good to be on the Tour and play the game, and there just comes a time when that isn’t the case,” he explains. “So I’ve reached that period, and you know I’m happy I had the opportunity that I did. And it’s over. It’s like a guy playing professional football, baseball, or any other game—there comes a time when you got to stop.”
So for now Arnie’s Army has been grounded. But rest assured that Arnie’s Air Force will keep flying high.
Tom Fazio When you are one of the most sought-after architects in the golf course business, jetting around is a prerequisite for conducting business. But golf course designer Tom Fazio, who owned a Gulfstream Turbo Commander for 20 years, will tell you that for him private aviation was always a function of personal needs rather than professional ones.
“We moved to western Carolina to raise our children, and the airplane allowed me to do that,” explains Fazio, who lived in Jupiter, Florida, prior to relocating his family and Fazio Golf Course Designers Inc. business to Hendersonville, North Carolina, in the early 1980s. “I could’ve moved to Atlanta or another city and been next to a commercial airport, but where I chose to live [Hendersonville] we always had to go make connections.
“I used to commute to my Jupiter office, and the airplane allowed me to get home and spend time with my kids,” Fazio recalls. “For example, I’d go down on a Monday morning and come back on Tuesday by 5 or 6 o’clock because one of my kids had a ball game or a piano recital. So initially having a plane was totally personal use because I wanted to get back home and get maximum time with my family. It was a family deal.”
For Fazio, the devoted father of six children and a dedicated supporter of the Boys and Girls Club, family was so paramount that it precluded the 61-year-old designer from doing many lucrative overseas jobs during much of his 35-year solo career. Instead Fazio contently focused on the States and did rare projects in Barbados and Los Cabos, Mexico, using his Turbo Commander and charter flights to get in and out of projects. As it turns out his decision to put family first worked out just fine as he carved out a portfolio of more than 120 courses, more than a dozen of which are ranked among America’s top 100 courses—the most by any one architect. And while he was designing new courses Fazio was also aligning himself as a consulting architect for numerous historic clubs such as Pine Valley, Augusta National, Oakmont, Winged Foot, and Riviera.
The Turbo Commander “was absolutely the best material thing that I’ve ever had in my life because it gave me freedom and access to do my business and not to let business interfere with my personal life,” emphasizes Fazio, who began his career in the 1960s working for uncle George Fazio in suburban Philadelphia. “I would’ve changed professions if it affected my family. Of course some people say love your job, love your profession, but my family always came way over my profession. The airplane allowed me to keep my profession, so that was the best part of it. Those were the best memories I have [of flying].”
Now, with the children all grown up and out of the house, Fazio and his wife, Sue, have an opportunity to create new memories by traveling the world in their Lear 45 as a member of Bombardier’s Flexjet. Flexjet also gives Fazio the “freedom and convenience” of making last-minute cross-country client visits to any number of his projects, whether it’s the new Pronghorn club in Bend, Oregon, or courses in nearby Couer d’Alene, Idaho, or San Antonio.
“Now I go farther distances or I don’t come home every night because my wife will either go with me at times or she’s some other place,” continues Fazio, who sold his Turbo Commander two years ago after joining Flexjet. “My wife’s an artist, and she takes a couple trips a year. She just got back from a hiking trip to the Swiss Alps, and she’s going to Greece for a couple weeks. Our needs have changed so [Flexjet] is perfect. The airplane for me is both necessary and provides a lifestyle that keeps me working.”
Fazio’s airplane also still keeps that all-important family unit intact. He recently sent his plane to Fort Lauderdale to pick up his three daughters and three grandchildren for a weekend visit to the homestead in Hendersonville. For a modest man like Fazio, it’s a lifestyle that certainly is a “luxury and privilege,” as he puts it. In many respects he is starting to live the life of many of his wealthy clients who can afford to pay his industry-leading seven-digit design fees. “Yeah, it sounds like my clients,” Fazio agrees with a smile. “But it’s the first time I’ve ever really done that because I didn’t grow up that way. You know, the way I look at it, Wayne Huizenga gave me one of the best lines of all time. Wayne of course is the ultimate man for airplanes,” explains Fazio. “He has a 737 Boeing business jet—I guess that’s what it’s called. He has helicopters . . . and one of his mantras in life is life is about QTR: quality time remaining. When you get to a certain age, QTR becomes very important.”
So Fazio is as passionate about owning a Flexjet share as he was flying around in his Turbo Commander. “I can live without them, but I don’t want to!” he emphasizes
Steve Hankin When Steven Hankin moved to North Carolina in his mid-30s, he did what everybody else does in the Carolinas and started playing golf. Hankin ended up getting hooked on the game, but 10 years later the CEO of Sentient Jet Membership reports that he is a “struggling mediocre golfer” at best.
That should begin to change though, thanks to Sentient’s ever-growing list of golf connections. What started with an exclusive private jet partnership with the PGA Tour last January has since grown into quite a portfolio of golf partners, including official marketing ties to Pebble Beach Resorts, the David Leadbetter Golf Academy, custom club fitter Hot Stix, and most recently top private club owner/operator ClubCorp and famed Pinehurst Resort.
“I’m an aspiring golfer like everybody,” says a smiling Hankin, who has run the Weymouth, Massachusetts-based, company for nearly three years. “You would think with all these relationships that I would actually be a good player. Sooner or later I’m going to leverage these partners, and I’m going to learn how to play well. It’s a real passion—I love golf, and like many of our members I love to go to different courses and enjoy the experience.”
For members of Sentient that golf experience can mean of variety of things. Want to get take some personal lessons from one of golf’s preeminent instructors? Hop on one of Sentient’s lighter Citation, Learjet, or Beechjet planes and head to Leadbetter’s headquarters at ChampionsGate Resort near Orlando, Florida, where numerous PGA Tour players practice. Or if you’re in the market for a new set of custom-fitted clubs, fill up one of the heavier Challenger, Falcon 900, or Gulfstream IV-SPs with some golfing buddies and head to Phoenix for world-class golf and an appointment with Hot Stix, one of the emerging club-fitting brands for top amateur and professional golfers.
If playing some of the finest golf destinations is paramount in your mind, Pebble Beach and Pinehurst offer a multitude of preferred privileges to Sentient Jet members. But that’s just a start: Sentient’s hallmark flexibility can make for memorable experiences anywhere around the globe. For instance, at last year’s Senior British Open golfer Fuzzy Zoeller helped fill two 757s for a 10-day sojourn to Scotland to watch the tournament, interact with players, and play a number of classic courses.
“There’s just an endless number of unique relationship and unique experiences we have with people that are building over time,” explains Hankin, who came to Sentient after working for Starwood Hotels. “It’s the type of event you can only do with private aviation.” Indeed, and with Sentient’s flexible program that doesn’t require members to commit to a certain number of hours per year and a certain plane type, the program appears to be resonating with PGA Tour players since Sentient struck a four-year marketing deal last January, making the company the “Official Private Aviation/Jet Provider” of the PGA Tour. As part of the relationship Sentient provides PGA Tour members with a variety of benefits tailored to fit the unique demands of a tour golfer’s travel schedule. These include a special offer to join the program, flexible billing options, and guaranteed jet availability on short notice for tournament cut days. Hankin reports that as of November approximately 20 players had signed up for Sentient’s services.
Sentient’s membership “operates more like a debit card, where you put money with us, and then you call up and tell us you need to take a trip, and we help you figure out what size jet is good for it,” Hankin explains. “So it starts with the premise that we’re in the business of trips, not planes. That’s one of the reasons it’s so appealing for the PGA Tour player. Obviously their schedules change, and how much they want to fly private or not changes throughout the season. This really suits them well. And for the average client it works well too because you may have a trip with four guys who want to play golf, or you change it and it’s two foursomes. We really became famous for offering financial and plane flexibility and focusing the business on trips. In the end it’s not about the aluminum, it’s about the experience people have,” he emphasizes.
It’s an experience Hankin certainly plans on leveraging more in the future—from both a personal and professional perspective.