Where it All Started

“Oh my god, that’s Follow the Sun,” Ed said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Follow the Sun,” he said. “It’s the Ben Hogan story.”
“No,” I said. I’d never seen the movie.
“Sure,” Ed said. And sure enough, he was right. It was hilarious, but there was Glenn Ford dressed as Ben Hogan, coming back from his near-fatal car crash to win the US Open, with Chinese voices dubbed over the picture.
Ed and I watched the movie for thirty minutes. Then our clothes – washed, dried and perfectly pressed – showed up on the doorstep.
A few months after that first site visit, Ed got a call from the project manager. There was a problem with the irrigation system and they needed some help. Ed called a friend in Hong Kong and asked him to trek up to Chung Shan. When Ed’s friend called back, he could barely stop laughing. “You’re not going to believe this,” the man said. “They’ve assembled the irrigation to exact specifications. But they did it above ground.”
Ed had a representative from [irrigation specialists] Toro fly to the project site and confirm that the crew had, indeed, assembled the irrigation system perfectly. The pipes and heads were all in place, except they were above rather than below ground. When water passed through the system, the heads were flying everywhere, and men were being injured when they tried to hold them in place. Toro brought in an engineer, and the staff quickly buried the lines in place.

Extract taken from Arnold Palmer: Memories, Stories and Memorobilia from a Life On and Off the Course