Jack Nicklaus started it, Arnold Palmer followed suit and Greg Norman has taken the concept to its logical and expensive conclusion. Personalised air travel for professional golfers, like that for any high-profile business figure, can make sense - but only for the very few and the very rich.
For that reason only a handful of golfers in the United States actually own aeroplanes; the majority of those wealthy enough even to contemplate it settle for a leasing deal, a kind of aeronautical timeshare. That was the arrangement Payne Stewart had had, which lead to initial reports of his tragic death describing him as joint owner of the Learjet 35 that crashed on Monday in South Dakota.
In Europe, the ownership list starts and ends with Ian Woosnam, although Colin Montgomerie has an arrangement with British Aerospace. Nick Faldo lists "flying helicopters" among his interests, and Darren Clarke and Lee Westwood use charter aircraft for some of the tougher journeys.
Nicklaus was the first golfer to earn enough to think about buying his own plane, and, when he did, it was quickly christened Air Bear. It was unthinkable that Nicklaus' great rival Palmer would stand idly by, but in more recent years Norman has moved beyond both of them.
The Australian currently has a state-of-the-art Gulfstream 5, a jet big enough to get him almost anywhere in the world, non-stop. It cost more than Stg£6 million, but even that is small change when set against the £24 million or so Norman was contemplating on laying out for a Boeing 737. That deal fell through when he discovered that many of the places he wanted to go in connection with his golf course design business did not have a sufficiently big airport.
Norman, whose earliest ambition was to join the Royal Australian Air Force, now flies around 300,000 miles annually, but the reason he abandoned scheduled and charter flights goes back to the summer of 1992 when he nearly lost his life on one of the latter.
"I had flown up to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a chartered plane for a corporate outing," he said, "and on the return, like I usually do when I fly, I was sitting up in the cockpit for take-off. The instrument panel indicated that one of the engine batteries was running a little hotter than normal, but the pilot determined it wasn't enough of a problem to delay.
"So we taxied out onto the runway and got into position. As we went wheels up, we experienced an unrelated but far more serious problem: one of the engines blew. The pilot regained control of the plane, circled back and landed.
"Now I was faced with another problem. We were stuck in tiny Latrobe with no way to get home. Fortunately Arnold Palmer lives there, I saw his plane in a hangar, so I gave him a call and Arnie said we could charter his plane."
In talking to Palmer, though, Norman realised "the magnitude of what had happened", and he added: "The after-shock set in and I realised how close I had come to a real disaster. "That night I called Guy Maira, a charter pilot I had flown with before. I told him I had had it with air jockey pilots and ill-maintained charter planes. I told him to start looking for an aircraft for me and within five weeks I had a JetStar executive jet and Guy was my full-time pilot."
Norman also owns an advanced helicopter, a Belljet, to get from his home to the airport, although most of the time he would be just as quick using one of his seven Ferraris.
On the whole, though, even men as rich as Tiger Woods prefer leasing, whereby they buy a share of a jet. "You buy as much of a share as you need hours," explains Bev Norwood of the International Management Group, which represents many of the Tour professionals.
Woods has a share in a Citation 10, the same type as owned by Palmer, and which is claimed to be "the fastest non-military jet" available.
Financially, buying or leasing is only an option for perhaps 20 per cent of professionals, but there is no doubt personal planes are much more than a toy, since they can save two days a tournament in some cases.
An example was the 1995 Tournament Players Championship of Europe, played at a course near Hamburg which was difficult to reach. Woosnam, having his own plane, was able to fly out a day later than the rest and still get in his practice round. As it happened, he finished in a title playoff, which would have meant missing the only flight home and an overnight wait for the next.
Instead he was given a police escort to the private airstrip. He drove on to the tarmac, threw his clubs in the hold and, within 30 minutes of leaving the last green, was in the air. He was home in time for supper and, more important for him, was able to fulfil his spot on the school car rota on the Monday morning.
