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In the main hall in San Francisco, the crowd was thick with employees from AT&T. Corporations buy about 40% of Success's tickets, mostly to reward good work or to perk up salesmen and saleswomen suffering from syndromes called "fear of closing" and "cold-call reluctance."
The first speaker was Dave Dravecky, the San Francisco Giants pitcher who came back from cancer surgery on his throwing arm to win a game before the arm broke like a twig in his second comeback start. A videotape of that last game had most of the crowd crying, then cheering the big and earnest one-armed man onstage. "When You Can't Come Back" was his title, and he talked about God and Jesus, telling some awkward jokes with punch lines like, "She is the wind beneath my wing . . . singular, not plural, get it?" Another video introduced Mary Lou Retton, reminding the crowd of the spunky kid from West Virginia who in 1984 became, against all odds, the first American woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal in gymnastics. "For me," she said, "the word team stands for Together Everyone Achieves More."
"I am in the life-changing business," said Ziglar as he came on. "Failure is an event -- it is not a person," he said. He attacked "mental B.O." and "stinking thinking" and "people who think denial is a river in Egypt." Of freedom, he said, "Take the train off the tracks and it's free -- but it can't go anywhere." He dazzled them with statistics: 72% of the students in Who's Who Among American High School Students are virgins; immigrants have four times as much chance to become millionaires as native-born Americans. "Listen to this," he said; "67% of all golf strokes are made within 60 yds. of the hole, but if you go out and watch golfers practice, I guarantee you they will spend 80% of their time concentrating on shots longer than 60 yds. The least effective people spend their time on actions that are not productive but which they are most comfortable doing."
Ziglar has been doing this and writing best-selling books with titles like See You at the Top for more than 30 years. He gets paid $30,000 up front for each appearance on the Success circuit, quite a bit less than half of what Reagan and Schwarzkopf collect. But he commanded the Cow Palace for 2 1/2 hours with only a 15-min. break to sell his tapes, both audio and video. How to Stay Motivated was $169.95, Courtship After Marriage was $60. "The whole shootin' match, value $2,515," could be had for $995.
Ziglar was followed by the Success tour's organizer, Peter Lowe, 35, the son of Canadian missionaries. Lowe, small and red-haired, looked like the teenager Ron Howard once played on Happy Days as he gave an hour and 15 minutes of tips on "Success Skills." No Zig Ziglar, he comes across as a mechanical model of the older man, finally zeroing in on fear -- a word he defined as "False Evidence Appearing Real" -- as the reason for business failure.