Arnold Palmer did more for golf than perhaps any other person in the sports history. He did, also, have a slight connection to the sport of tennis. Palmer was known as one of the best corporate spokespeople in sports marketing and was one of the first athletes to be used in using sports to market products. One of his early associations with in a partnership in a laundry business with 1931 Wimbledon champion Sidney Wood. In his biography “The Wimbledon Final That Never Was” ($15.95, New Chapter Press, available for sale here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0942257847/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_yNv6xbA0ER7MQ writes of his association with Palmer in this excerpt below.
In 1939, I thought I’d like to try something where the value of a name in sport could be exploited in a competitive business, where the name would have a greater value than “Mr. Smith.” I looked into different businesses that were essential to people’s lives and I picked the laundry business.
I started it with Frank Shields because I thought it would be nothing but a laughingstock, so I said, “Frank, let’s get laughed at together,” and it was an instant success. Frank was otherwise involved in the insurance business and was asked by his bosses to drop the laundry pursuits, so he dropped out and Don Budge came in. Don was a great friend of mine and somewhat a protegé in a sense. I believe Don would have confirmed that it was I who got him to change from a Western forehand to an Eastern forehand. I was the one who actually initiated with the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association that Don should travel with the U.S. Davis Cup team that first year when they weren’t going to take him. Don actually replaced me on the team, so maybe I shouldn’t have been so generous!
Anyway, we went into business with the idea that Don would open us in California, but Don got much more involved in professional tennis after winning the Grand Slam in 1938 and really didn’t have an opportunity to do this. However, it turned into a terrific success (one of our slogans was “Rub-adub-dub, Budge-Wood have a tub”) and subsequently I introduced the idea to golfing legend Arnold Palmer and his camp.
The first time I met up with Arnie was in the bar of a Philadelphia Marriott Inn near the Whitemarch Club where he was playing in a tournament. It was essentially a business meeting, but undoubtedly there would be sporting overtones. My wife Pat was there, as was Arnie’s Winnie and his chum, super-agent head of International Management Group, Mark McCormack.
When I dreamed up the idea of setting up a marquee name, national franchise laundry and dry cleaning chain, there was no question that Arnie’s name was far and away the one that would sell the best. So I called Mark, who was interested and asked me to meet with him. A couple of days later when I knocked on the hotel door, it flung open and this guy points his finger at me and hollers, “I saw you beat Frankie Parker in Chicago!” That was my introduction to Mark McCormack, and you can say I liked his style!
I asked Arnie if he ever hoisted one during a tournament, and he said, “One after a good round; and two if it was a lousy day.” That afternoon it was just the pro-am, and Arnie, a Pennsylvanian to the core, asked for a boilermaker and looked at me. I nodded, and after another round there was little talk of business and much comparing of golf and tennis play and players. We ended up founding the Arnold Palmer Cleaning Centers, which was an immediate success and was subsequently sold out among some of Arnold’s other enterprises.
Wrote McCormack in Sports Illustrated in 1967, “What Sidney Wood knew, and we all learned, was that if two dry cleaning shops are going to open in the same block and one is called Arnold Palmer and the other is Jack Smith’s, it is the Palmer shop that a new customer is more likely to try.”
