Jet Cards For Pro Athletes

Golf, of course, is the sport that's most synonymous with private jets. Arnold Palmer may have popularized this privileged mode of travel when he first flew solo in a Cessna 172 a half-century ago, but it was a journeyman golfer named Johnny Bulla who became the first athlete to buy a jet.

Bulla acquired a C-47 in the late 1940s and converted it to a DC-3. For a small fee, the former Eastern Airlines pilot taxied his fellow pros to tour events, thus becoming the first jet provider to cater to athletes.

The 78-year-old Palmer no longer has his own army, but pro golf does have an air force. In January 2007, Sentient Jet Membership signed a four-year marketing deal with the PGA Tour. The Massachusetts charter broker, which introduced the jet card in 1999, counts dozens of golfers as customers.

Sentient is a pay-as-you-go club with dues between $100,000 and $250,000. As with Flight Options, membership entitles you to three jet types, each with a different hourly rate.

Roundtrips on light aircraft start at $2,600, a yield of about 38 hours of airtime per $100,000. Sentient's latest in-your-face move against Marquis came in the form of its Preferred Plus Card, which slices 6 percent off hourly rates for those who agree to spend $150,000 a year on flights.

All this aerial warfare has Itzler saying, "Bring it! When you're dealing with world-class athletes, you expect a good game. I love head-to-head rivalries." In fact, Marquis was born of one.

The company was annealed—diamondlike—under the crushing pressure of athletic competition. One day about a dozen years ago, Itzler, now 39, was pitted against a fellow Long Islander named Kenny Dichter in an exceedingly physical pickup basketball game on the Manhattan's Upper East Side. The lean, scruffy Itzler had made a name for himself—albeit a small one—as a rap artist going by the name Jesse Jaymes.

The young rapper had crashed the Billboard Hot 100 in 1991 with the ballad "Shake It (Like a White Girl)" on his album Thirty Footer in Your Face. While trying to escape a fate as a one-hit wonder, he wrote "Go New York Go!," a rally rap for the New York Knicks. The Knicks rarely go these days, but the song is still played at Madison Square Garden.

The stout, immaculately groomed Dichter sold "attitude" T-shirts for a living (the biggest seller: "Why Work?"). Together, they came up with an idea for a business that combined music and sports and called it Alphabet City Records.

With Itzler writing the lyrics and Dichter the checks, the company produced music compilations for colleges, pro teams, and leagues. In 1998, Alphabet City was bought out by SFX, the sports promotion and talent agency. "We had sold it after two years for $10 million," Itzler says. "Not bad, considering we were 27 years old when we started."

They gained entrée to private jets through SFX. After a charter flight to the 2000 Super Bowl in Atlanta, Dichter told Itzler, "We're in the wrong business. Private jets are the future."

Dichter thought back to a wildly successful marketing gimmick he had conceived at the University of Wisconsin: a prepaid card for sports tickets. Then he remembered NetJets. A lot of his friends were interested in private planes, but they were turned off by the constant care and feeding that fractional ownership involved: the sizable up-front acquisition costs, the monthly management fee, the 50-hour-a-year minimum. "Why not just rent one?" Dichter asked.

He and Itzler powwowed with Richard Santulli, the NetJets founder and chairman. "An athlete understands 25 hours," Itzler said. "If he's flying from New York to Miami, that's two hours. He's got 23 left."

Santulli listened with the weary, seen-it-all expression common to homicide detectives and White House correspondents. "I appreciate your time," he told them, "but we're not interested."

A second meeting was arranged. This time, the budding entrepreneurs brought along a couple of pals to show their access to rich, young athletes and entertainers: onetime New York Giants linebacker Carl Banks and Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC. Santulli listened some more and said, "You guys are crazy if you think I'll go for this. Don't call me again. Don't come back. Ever."

On the way out of the NetJets compound, vice chairman Jim Jacobs told Dichter and Itzler, "Now we're getting somewhere."

Itzler said, "But that's twice he has thrown us out of his office in eight minutes."

Jacobs said, "No one gets eight minutes."

The pair's persistence paid off. After three more meetings, Santulli gave in and cleared the venture for takeoff. He figured that Marquis would make a splendid farm team for NetJets. And he was right.

Ten percent of Marquis' customers (including New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter and Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine) have graduated to NetJets fractional shares. And some less peripatetic NetJetters (Kidd) have dialed down to Marquis.

To Itzler, passenger load is the biggest difference between sports figures and other corporate-jet-card holders. "Athletes' planes are almost always full, which is fairly atypical," he says. They're far more likely than hedge fund C.E.O.'s to arrive at the gate with a barber, a manicurist, a trainer, a masseuse, and a psychic. "Jet time is now currency," Itzler says. "If one of our ballplayers invites eight teammates to fly with him, we quickly become locker-room talk. If Jeter is flying with us, A-Rod is going know about it."

On an hourly basis, a Marquis flight is about 10 percent more expensive than a NetJets one. "We're like a 16-ounce bottle of soda," Itzler says. "In comparison, you pay a little more than you would for 32 ounces. Athletes with Marquis cards don't need the bigger bottle."

Ultimately, an athlete's choice of jet card may come down to liking a model of plane. Fans of the Gulfstream 400 fly Marquis. Embraer Legacy 600 aficionados stick with Flight Options. If you've got a Learjet jones, buy a 25-jet card from FlexJet, a Texas outfit owned by Bombardier.

Ever since FractionAir was permanently grounded by bankruptcy in 2006, the fractional-jet-ownership industry—plagued by chronic maintenance problems and too much downtime—has idled on the runway. Revenue growth in 2007 was around 2 percent. But jet cards are soaring, and operators continue to launch sky-breaking membership packages. "We've been doing this for eight years, and we're only in the second inning," Itzler insists. "For athletes, it's definitely the first inning."

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