By MARTIN KAUFMANN
Managing Editor/The Golf LifeCATANO, Puerto Rico – Given his relentless travel schedule, which included 180 days on the road in 2007, Joaquin Bacardi says he had few opportunities in recent years to use his old set of Callaway golf clubs. But he suddenly started getting a number of golf invitations earlier this year when he was named president of Caribbean operations for Bacardi Limited, making him the highest-ranking family member of the spirits powerhouse founded by his great-great grandfather, Don Facundo Bacardi Massó, in 1862.
As Bacardi sits at a picnic table near the Casa Bacardi Visitor Centre, which annually attracts about 250,000 visitors to this San Juan suburb, passing employees greet him warmly.
“A lot of these people have known me since I was this high,” Bacardi says, holding his hands a few feet off the ground. “People in the plant say, ‘Yeah, you were a rascal. You used to run around here (and) we used to chase you out of here.’ ”
When he wasn’t spending his childhood zipping around the Bacardi property on a moped, he sometimes could be found playing golf with his mother, who taught him the game and always won their family matches.
“She was a very avid golfer,” he says.
“She represented the Puerto Rican women’s team for two years in the Caribbean. . . . She needed a partner on the weekends. She started beating my dad, so he switched to tennis. He couldn’t accept that his wife was killing him at golf. So I started getting dragged to golf.”
Bacardi, 43, is polished but unassuming. When he decided to leave a marketing job with Nestle in 1993 rather than accept a transfer to California, he didn’t pull any strings. He instead sent his résumé to the company that bears his family’s name.
“I like following the rules,” he says.
“I don’t think there are any free rides because of my last name.”
The man who hired him, Angel Torres, stepped aside last month as chairman of Caribbean operations, leaving the region in Bacardi’s hands.
I first met with Torres this spring at Bahia Beach Golf Club, a private, seaside enclave east of San Juan with a course that had just reopened following a massive overhaul by Robert Trent Jones Jr.
Although Jones describes Bahia Beach as a course “that’s supposed to be pleasurable” as opposed to some of his more penal layouts, the prevalence of water hazards and jungle lining many fairways ensure you won’t sleepwalk through your round. So it was helpful that Torres, who took up the game six years ago, quickly brought me up to speed on several popular Spanish expletives, which came in handy throughout our round.
So, too, did the company’s products, which are celebrated at Casa Bacardi.
That’s where I met William Ramos, Bacardi’s Brooklyn-born “brand master,” who readily admits to having the “best job in the company.” When he’s not traveling the world promoting Bacardi products, he serves on the company’s tasting panel, sampling the redestilado and the aguardiente – rum’s signature ingredient – throughout production.
“That’s why we’re always so happy around here,” he says, laughing.
Ramos is scholarly in discussing Bacardi’s fractional distillation process and the subtle distinctions between various products. But the Bacardi brand is imbued with exuberance, appropriate for the company that famously gave the world the Cuba Libre, or Free Cuba – commonly known as rum and Coke. (Given Cuba’s longtime dictatorship, the drink has come to be referred to as “the little lie.”)
Joaquin Bacardi, who rose through the marketing ranks, says it is the company’s “mission that we’re free-spirited.” Upon being appointed president, he sought to highlight that symbolically by tweaking the company’s famous logo so that the wings of the Bacardi bat extended beyond the circle that surrounded it.
“If you’re inside the circle, you’re caught, you’re trapped,” he explains. “Let’s make this bat release its spirit.”
Just as Bacardi himself is doing.
• • •
Martin Kaufmann is the managing editor of The Golf Life. To reach him e-mail
mkaufmann@golfweek.com.
Posted: 11/18/2008
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