The U.S. Open is over, and we’re quickly teeing up hostilities again. Through all of this, especially after the announcement two weeks ago between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which owns LIV Golf, a thought keeps creeping in.
This isn’t the first upheaval within the world of men’s professional golf — specifically the touring variety. It’s natural to suggest nothing like this has ever happened before, and it hasn’t, but this also isn’t the first time onlookers have said, “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”
The PGA Tour owes its very existence to a late-1960s rebellion that had some high-profile critics — Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen and Sam Snead among them. About 15 years later, and 40 years ago, another big fork in the road arrived, and none other than golf’s two biggest draws of the day — Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer — had to receive the lion tamer’s treatment.
Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in 1968, when professional golfers were still playing under the auspices of the PGA of America.
Some history …
Soon after the PGA of America was born in 1916, a tournament division was formed and was originally filled with club pros and teaching pros who could play a bit. Before long, the likes of Hagen, Tommy Armour, Gene Sarazen and Henry Picard were true touring professionals and paved the way for the early nomads. “The circuit,” most called the PGA’s tournament wing.
The great American triumvirate of Snead, Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan led the way through mid-century, and all was well for 30 or 40 years, until Arnie elevated the game into a marketable showpiece while also introducing it to America’s living rooms via the still-young network TV conduit.
By the time the ’60s arrived, the PGA’s rather draconian rules began to ruffle the double-knitted proletariat.
Among the bylaws, and impossible to fathom today, the PGA tournament division withheld all purse winnings from a new pro for his first six months. An internship, of sorts.
Also, by the fall of ’69, when Nicklaus made his first Ryder Cup appearance, he’d already won 28 tournaments, including seven professional majors, dating back to ’62. The PGA of America, which owns and operates the Ryder Cup to this day, had a rule forbidding a touring pro from competing in the biennial matches for the first five years of his career.
Seriously, imagine that. The Ryder Cup was nowhere near what it would become in subsequent generations, but still, it’s a head-scratcher.
The 1969 rancor between the PGA of America, which basically represents the nation’s club professionals, and its tournament-player faction didn’t have the international intrigue and subsequent geo-political controversies of today’s ugliness, but it was ugly nonetheless.
With the benefit of current knowledge, particularly knowing how it all turned out, it’s hard to imagine just how nasty it was as the newly named American Professional Golfers broke off from the PGA of America.
Over time, and after much posturing and some legalities, there was peace, and the eventual compromises included the settled-upon name: PGA Tour, which to this day confuses casual fans who assume “The PGA,” as in the Professional Golfers Association of America, and the PGA Tour are under the same officially licensed umbrella. They’re not.
The original Tour bylaws gave the new league authority to conduct professional tournaments, but also to market the Tour and, if and when feasible, get into the golf course and real estate markets. That little throw-in came into play 40 years ago and helped preserve the modern PGA Tour at a time when Palmer and Nicklaus often bristled at competing against their own Tour in the merchandise and course-design games.
Deane Beman and PGA Tour pro Gardner Dickinson at TPC Sawgrass.
PGA TOUR Archive
The 1983 revolt specifically threatened the job security of PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman. Some digging through the original Tour bylaws reminded the leading rebels they had signed off on the Tour’s outside endeavors, beyond running tournaments, and Beman survived.
But it was close. Much of the legal and PR combat was hidden and didn’t surface until well after the fact, but that history suggests the professional game has been through turmoil before.
This time, of course, it’s different. But you know, every time is different.
The convictions of one man changed the course of racial inclusion at the major in Alabama — and golf.
Pat Rielly was never afraid to stand up for the little guy.
In 1953, the 6-foot-tall junior reserve forward on the Sharon (Pennsylvania) High basketball team was on his way to play in the state regional finals in Pittsburgh when the team stopped for dinner in Zelienople, Pennsylvania, a borough north of Pittsburgh in the heart of coal and iron country.
Rielly noticed that his three Black teammates – Charlie Shepard, Charlie Mitchell and Edward Woods – weren’t eating and sidled over to talk to them.
“I said, ‘What are guys doing? Are you saving your $5?’ ” Rielly recalled more than 60 years later. “Mitchell said, ‘They won’t serve us.’ I said, ‘Why?’ All three stared at me and said, ‘You know why.’ ”
This sort of discrimination was illegal but still prevalent, even in southwestern Pennsylvania, and it sent Rielly into a rage. He was the eighth or ninth man on the team, a sub, but he knew right from wrong. When he approached the owner and asked politely why his teammates were being refused to be served, the owner didn’t hide his contempt. “We’re not serving any (N-word),” he said.
With the courage of his convictions, Rielly said they would not pay until the entire team was fed. The owner wouldn’t budge. Neither would Rielly.
“So, we got up and left,” Rielly said. “We stopped and got something to eat another 20 miles up the road, closer to Pittsburgh.”
To Rielly, his memory of the game, which the team won, paled in comparison to the lesson he learned that day.
“You do the right thing, and sometimes you get criticized for it,” he said. “But when you do the right thing for the right reasons, it turns out the right way always.”
Pat Rielly (pictured, back row, fourth from right) and his 1953 high school basketball team from Sharon, Pennsylvania (Courtesy of the Rielly family)
In the early 1960s, Rielly was traveling with a handful of fellow Marines. They needed a few more hours of flight time and convinced the pilot to fly to Reno, Nevada, the self-proclaimed “Biggest little city in the world,” where Las Vegas-style gambling, entertainment and dining is compressed into a few city blocks. As only Rielly could do, he placed a roulette bet not even understanding the rules and won several thousand dollars at a time when that was a lot of money. He took everyone to dinner and ordered a feast. After paying the bill, he still had a wad of cash left over, so he tipped the waiters generously, loaned some money to his pals and went into the kitchen. The employees stopped what they were doing to hear him speak.
“My mother was a dishwasher,” he said. “That’s why I was able to play golf on Mondays. This game has given me everything.”
Then he handed the dishwashers in the restaurant a stack of cash from his winnings. Most of them didn’t understand a word he said, but they shook his hand and gladly accepted the money.
These two dinner stories illustrate why Rielly was the right man at the right time to be serving as the 26th President of the PGA of America in 1990 when Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Alabama, was scheduled to host the PGA Championship, and professional golf would be forced to change its rules regarding clubs with exclusionary practices. This was uncharted territory for a golf association and a watershed moment in golf’s race relations. It demanded a leader with a dose of humility just below his confidence.
“His own personal integrity matched the integrity of the game he loved,” said Rielly’s longtime friend and former PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman.
But it wasn’t until more than 20 years later that Rielly learned just how important his role in a long-forgotten dinner played in launching an era of inclusion. Then he insisted this story wait until after he died. Now it can be told.
As a PGA Tour winner who then went on to spend 20 years as PGA Tour Commissioner, Deane Beman has seen it all in pro golf.
As a former PGA Tour winner who then went on to spend 20 years as PGA Tour Commissioner, Deane Beman has seen it all in professional golf.
Beman, 84, who ran the Tour from 1974 to 1994, was the architect behind making the Tour a billion-dollar business. He developed much of the business model still in use today, and while now devoted to enjoying retirement, playing golf as he likes to joke only on days ending in ‘Y,’ he remains is one of the brightest minds in golf. He still has plenty of opinions, especially on the PGA Tour and LIV Golf controversy. Here’s a short conversation held recently on the subject with Beman, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman: “I don’t think anybody could have anticipated what it’s become.”
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The Phoenix Open was being held at the Tournament Players Club of Scottsdale for the first time and course designer Tom Weiskopf wanted to know what players thought of the place.
Tom Byrum had to think for a moment before answering.
“I guess all I could come up with was I didn’t realize how far out here it was,” Byrum recalled.
That was 1987. This week, the Open will return to the TPC Scottsdale for the 36th time. No one is questioning the locale anymore. Instead, the decision to move the tournament to the TPC has turned out to be one of the most inspired decisions in Arizona sports history.
“To have that be almost a Super Bowl every year for the Phoenix area. … I don’t think anybody anticipated that,” said former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman.
How could they? At the time, all the Tour and the Phoenix Thunderbirds had in mind was finding a more spacious venue than Phoenix Country Club, which had hosted the tournament on a permanent basis since 1975. By the mid-1980s the galleries had overwhelmed the course; the Thunderbirds began selling disposable cardboard periscopes so fans in the back could see over the heads of those in front of them.
After considering several options, including a makeover of Papago Golf Course, a decision was made build a new course inside the Phoenix Mountain Preserve, near the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs in north Phoenix. Beman and the Thunderbirds found a willing partner in a land developer but when they went to the Phoenix City Council for approval, Beman said, “We got our head handed to us. It was no way, Jose.”
That’s when Beman got a call from then-Scottsdale mayor Herb Drinkwater. Drinkwater said he had a piece of land he wanted Beman to see. Beman flew into Scottsdale Airpark and Drinkwater picked him up. On the drive Beman told Drinkwater that it would be difficult for the Thunderbirds to move the tournament outside of the city of Phoenix.
When they arrived at the property Drinkwater said, “Do you know where we are right now?”
“Yeah,” Beman said. “The city of Scottsdale.”
Drinkwater drove across the street.
“You know where we are now?” he said.
“No,” Beman replied.
“You’re in the city of Phoenix,” Drinkwater said. “You’re going to give this opportunity up because of a couple of feet?”
Beman was sold. He had seen how PGA Tournaments held “in the boonies” as he put it, facilitated growth and he was convinced the Phoenix Open would do the same for north Scottsdale.
“It didn’t bother me that the golf course was sort of pretty far from where the center of things were,” Beman said.
Others were. Pete Scardello was the chairman for the first tournament at TPC, in January of ’87. In the months leading up to the event he’d have lunch a couple of times per week at Phoenix Country Club, where he was a member. Invariably, his lunch would be served with a side of derision.
“Other members would say, ‘Hey, Pete, I like you but nobody is going to go to the tournament out there,’ ” Scardello recalled.
The fear of sparse galleries was the least of Scardello’s concerns. He thought fans would come to appreciate the easy sight lines and ability to move around without feeling like they were in a cramped bus station. But when it came to putting the first tournament on he and the rest of the Thunderbirds were in the dark – figuratively and literally.
“We didn’t know what we were doing because we hadn’t been there before,” Scardello said. “I was the crash dummy. We didn’t realize until we got out there that there was no electricity to the site. We had to bring in a power line from APS (Arizona Public Service) and pay for that.”
Roping off the fairways took three hours at Phoenix Country Club. It took the better part of two days at the TPC. On Thursday Scardello was told on his walkie-talkie that his wife needed to talk to him. He found a phone, called her and she said, “I’m out here on No. 15. You’ve got six (portable toilets) and 25 people in each line. I would suggest you get more.”
“I think we ended up with 20,” Scardello said. “There were just all kinds of different things, from busses to security, that we didn’t realize the scope of what we were undertaking. We had never done anything that big.”
Bob Hope works the crowd at TPC Scottsdale during the 1987 Phoenix Open. (Photo: The Arizona Republic)
Still, the initial tournament, won by Paul Azinger, was an immediate hit. Attendance for the week was 257,000, compared to 186,000 the year before. In the weeks following the event fans told Scardello they had stopped going to the tournament because it was too crowded at Phoenix Country Club.
“We got out here and it wasn’t crowded at all,” they said. “It’s really nice.”
It’s a bit more crowded these days, of course. The 2018 tournament hosted closed to 720,000 fans for the week. That was the last year tournament organizers announced attendance figures.
“It’s like the Super Bowl of golf tournaments,” said Champions Tour player Steve Jones, who played in the ’87 event and won it in ’97.
The stadium concept at the par-3 16th hole gets much of the credit for the tournament’s growth but Byrum believes the unique atmosphere, at least initially, had more to do with alcohol than aces.
“I don’t know what the attraction was other than there was beer being served for a long time,” Byrum said. “There was a beer stand on a hill that stayed open longer and it was perfect little amphitheater for people to gather around.”
Whatever the reason, the Open has come a long way since its dark beginning.
“I don’t think anybody could have anticipated what it’s become,” Beman said. “It evolved on its own. I’m very proud of it, honestly.”
Editor’s note: This story was originally published January 31, 2016, and written by Scott Bordow of the Arizona Republic, which is part of the USA TODAY Network, and updated to reflect 2022 is the 36th playing of the Phoenix Open.
Nicklaus led the tournament wire-to-wire, becoming the first player in history to complete the modern career Grand Slam twice.
On February 28, Jack Nicklaus returned to the scene of his ninth of 18 major titles, 50 years to the day that he hoisted the Wanamaker Trophy for the second time. Nicklaus recounted to members at BallenIsles Golf Club in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which then was known as PGA National’s East Course (until 1987) when it hosted the 1971 PGA Championship, that he was paired in the opening two rounds with Hall of Famer Gene Sarazen.
The Squire, who won the first of his three PGA titles in 1922, was playing in his 50th PGA while celebrating turning 69 years old and looking as dapper as ever in his trademark knickers and a straw Panama hat.
“Now they say if you’ve played a long time you’ve played with Jack Nicklaus,” the Golden Bear said.
But 50 years ago, Nicklaus was 31 years of age and in full flight. He led the tournament wire-to-wire en route to shooting 7-under 281, two strokes better than Billy Casper, and in doing so became the first player in history to complete the modern career Grand Slam twice.
“The world’s largest bookshelf may be needed one of these days to store all the records that belong to Nicklaus,” Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated.
No truer words about Nicklaus may have ever been written as he was just making the turn on the way to filling up his bookshelf with a record 18 majors, including five victories at the PGA. Nicklaus’s passion and desire to win the Wanamaker Trophy took shape more than two decades earlier when the 1950 PGA Championship was held at Scioto Country Club in Columbus, Ohio, where the Nicklaus family had a membership.
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With the help of his teacher, Scioto’s head professional Jack Grout, a 10-year-old Nicklaus gained access to the locker room to meet many of the stars of the game, including acquiring autographs from Hall of Famer Sam Snead, eventual champion, Chandler Harper, who had been assigned to father Charlie Nicklaus’s locker, and most memorably Lloyd Mangrum.
“I can still see that slim, dark figure sitting at a table with a fan of cards in one hand and a glass of hooch in the other and a cigarette dangling from his lips, and recall how intimidated I was when he turned to me and gave me that famous tough look of his and snarled, ‘Whaddya want, kid?’ ” Nicklaus wrote in My Story, his 1997 autobiography. “But he signed my autograph book, and I remember being extremely proud of my courage in standing up to such a fearsome character.”
Nicklaus often has credited that experience with shaping his desire to be a professional golfer when he grew up. Having already won the PGA in 1963, Nicklaus enjoyed a veritable home game in 1971, one of three times in his career where he slept in his own bed in North Palm Beach. Holding the 53rd PGA in Florida required reorganizing the golf calendar so that the championship could be held in the balmy conditions of February rather than its traditional slot during the dog days of August to avoid the Sunshine State’s oppressive heat. It’s the only time the PGA was played in February, earning the moniker of “Glory’s First Shot,” and marked the first time the PGA was conducted as back-to-back majors.
“I thought it was the best time and the best thing for the PGA because it gave them the opportunity to start the year off in the majors,” Nicklaus told Golf Digest in 2011.
Nicklaus had just a five-mile commute to the course from Long Tree Village and his houseguests included Gary Player and Tony Jacklin. On the Sunday before the tournament began, Nicklaus had shot a dreadful 80 and struggled on the greens, leaving several putts short. Deane Beman, who had given Nicklaus a putter nicknamed “White Fang” ahead of the Golden Bear’s victory at the 1967 U.S. Open, stopped by for dinner and a game of bridge. The Bemans dominated at bridge — “They murdered us,” Nicklaus recalled — but Nicklaus gained some valuable intel. Beman, regarded as one of the best putters at the time, had a hunch what was plaguing his putting: he wasn’t finishing his backstroke.
Jack Nicklaus smiles and holds up his club after winning the PGA Championship, 7 under par, at Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., Feb. 28, 1971.
That night, about 11 p.m., Nicklaus took a putter and some balls out to a patch of Astroturf near his backyard pool and practiced. Beman’s tip was spot on.
“I concentrated on doing that with every putt the rest of the week,” he said. “I putted very well that week because of that lesson.”
Did he ever. Nicklaus took just 23 putts on the slow Bermuda greens in the first round and he one-putted eight of the last 10 holes. He opened with a pair of 69s, including birdies on four of the last nine holes Friday, to take a two-shot lead over Miller Barber at the halfway point. In all, 81 players made the cut at 5-over par.
Nicklaus’s most noteworthy achievement to the midway point of the tournament may have been impressing Sarazen, the first player to complete the career Grand Slam, who joined the masses in awe of Nicklaus’s vast talents.
“I saw a real champion,” Sarazen said. “I never saw such power and Nicklaus putted magnificently.”
South Africa’s Gary Player, one of Nicklaus’s closest friends and a housemate that week, shot a 68 Saturday to move into second place entering the final round, four shots back of Nicklaus, who reeled off four birdies in a row, beginning with a 40-footer at No. 11, in posting a third-round 70 in gusty conditions.
“Jack saw the competition and he met it,” Player said of the birdie run by Nicklaus just as he and others were on the verge of overtaking him.
Player also joked that since he was the only player within shouting distance that Barbara Nicklaus might try and poison his food. Player wasn’t taking any chances at breakfast, claiming he watched Barbara prepare the meal “like a hawk.”
“I told her Jack would have to be the official food taster before I’d eat,” Player said. “When he sipped his milk, I switched glasses. When he took some grapefruit, I switched them.”
“He’d tell me to look out the window and then he’d switch plates,” Nicklaus recounted 50 years later. This running gag took on a life of its own in the locker room ahead of the final round.
“Barbara’s getting a complex,” Nicklaus relayed. “She gives him a cheese omelette, he pours catsup all over it. She cooks him a steak, he pours catsup all over it. A couple of fried eggs, catsup all over it.”
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“So would you if you had a catsup contract,” Player cracked. “I didn’t know you had a catsup contract,” Nicklaus said. “I will when these fellows get through writing about it,” Player said. The night before the final round, Nicklaus and Player had stayed up late watching Mannix, a detective show they both liked on television. On Sunday, Player posed a real threat to play the spoiler, cutting the deficit to one stroke until disaster struck at 15. “I hit my drive to the right, only about 4 yards off the fairway. But the ball hit on the cart path and bounced way out-of-bounds,” Player said of the shot that sealed his fate. Or was it something else? “He was convinced Barbara’s prune cake eventually got him at the end of that week,” Nicklaus said.
The blond bomber had been cruising along for three days, but leading wire-to-wire is no easy bargain even for a player of Nicklaus’s caliber and he made three bogeys in his first five holes to give his competitors a ray of hope.
“I had a hard time settling down,” Nicklaus conceded. “When you play late in the days and lead, you get a bit tight and tired. That’s the way I felt out there.”
He got one stroke back with a birdie at the sixth, bogeyed the 11th but bounced back with a birdie one hole later. Despite a shaky passage, Nicklaus recovered and maintained the pole position for the stretch run.
“I felt like it was my tournament all along after Thursday,” Nicklaus recalled. “I wanted to avoid only one thing. I didn’t want to have to make a 4 at 18 on Sunday to win it. That’s a hard hole.”
Casper, who started the day seven strokes back, made a late charge with birdies on the final two holes, including a 25-footer at the last, to shoot 68 and signed for a 72-hole total of 5-under 283. Ageless wonder Tommy Bolt, 52, finished in third another stroke back and one better than Barber and Player, who tied for fourth.
PGA champion Jack Nicklaus smiles at the trophy he earned after winning the tournament at Palm Beach Gardens, Fl., Feb 28, 1971. (AP Photo)
“I hadn’t thought of Casper all day,” Nicklaus said. “Now I’m on the 17th with a one-shot lead. If I don’t birdie the 17th, I’m in exactly the situation I don’t want to be in. I’ll have to make 4 on 18 to win.” Nicklaus removed any doubt at the 588-yard par-5 17th. Despite being one of the few players capable of reaching the green in two, Nicklaus elected to lay up short of the bunkers guarding the green. He wedged to five feet and stood over his birdie try in his trademark cocoon of concentration for 21 seconds before holing the putt that gave him a two-stroke cushion going to the 72nd hole of the tournament. “I’ve never seen a man stand over a putt so long and putt as well,” Sarazen said that week. “People who do this generally finally come apart.” Not Nicklaus. He remained red hot, tallying 29 one-putt greens for the week and deeming it “the best putting in a tournament in my life.”
“When you point for something so long, you want it to end up sweet,” said Nicklaus, who closed in 1-over 73. “The birdie putt on 17, I felt, was it. I said to myself, ‘Work hard on this one and you’ve got it.’ ”
Nicklaus notched his 31st Tour title, his first trophy in his adopted home state of Florida and capped off the double career slam – at least two victories in each of the four professional major championships, a feat matched by only Tiger Woods.
When Nicklaus arrived home with the Wanamaker Trophy, there was a double celebration. It was wife Barbara’s 31st birthday. She had traipsed after her hubby with their oldest son, Jackie, 9. The previous day, she had taken 7-year-old Steve. Asked by the Palm Beach Post why she hadn’t taken both boys at the same time, she replied, “Never. There’d be the biggest knock-down, drag-out fight you ever saw.” The fight was on for Nicklaus, who conceded afterwards that eclipsing Bobby Jones’s major total of 13 was on his radar.
“I’ll be honest about it,” Nicklaus said. “I want to win more than Jones. That’s what you play for, to separate yourself from the crowd.”
He would go on to do that and then some, etching his name on the Wanamaker Trophy again in 1973, 1975 and 1980. Fifty years after being crowned champion at BallenIsles Golf Club, Nicklaus may be smaller in stature but he remains a giant in the game and his record in the majors still is the gold standard.
“The greatest champion in the history of the game won here,” PGA CEO Seth Waugh told attendees at the ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of Nicklaus’s achievement. “You can’t ever take that away.”
TPC Sawgrass, home of the Players Championship and the iconic 17th island green, opened on this day 40 years ago.
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – All it took was a dollar and a dream – and 415 acres of swampland in northeast Florida – for Deane Beman to redefine the notion of spectator-friendly and launch the first of what became a network of 30 TPC golf facilities across the country.
Forty years ago, at 9 a.m., on Friday, Oct. 24, 1980, TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course a bagpiper led a host of dignitaries into the clubhouse on a gnarly rain-swept day. Hall of Famer Byron Nelson and Beman’s predecessor Joe Dey, the PGA Tour’s first commissioner, were among the guests along with active Tour pros Bob Murphy, Mark McCumber, Bert Yancey and Hale Irwin, a member of the Tour’s player advisory board.
“We have a place we can call home,” Irwin said. “Everybody needs a home.”
TPC Sawgrass and the concept of Stadium Golf was Beman’s brainchild and early in his tenure as Commissioner he sought a permanent home for the Players Championship. Initially, Beman approached the owner of neighboring Sawgrass Country Club, the Arvida Corporation, and offered to buy its facility. Not only did Arvida refuse to sell, it doubted that Beman would ever obtain financing or approval to buy a facility and proposed a $100 bet to Beman that he could never achieve his dream. Challenge accepted.
The 40th anniversary of the opening of TPC Sawgrass was celebrated with cake. Photo by Adam Schupak/Golfweek
Beman set out to build his own course for what he envisioned becoming the Tour’s flagship event and found willing partners in Jerome and Paul Fletcher, the largest landowners in the area. They eventually agreed to sell 415 acres of swampland to the Tour for $1. It was a land coup on par with the purchase of Manhattan from the Indians.
“It sounds like, oh my God, they got 415 acres for a dollar, that’s the deal of the century, and it was the deal of the century, but it was also the deal of the century for the Fletchers. It was truly a win-win,” said Vernon Kelly, the TPC’s project manager and retired longtime Tour executive.
With some more savvy wheeling and dealing to acquire a loan and the sale of a limited number of memberships, Beman said the PGA Tour didn’t have to spend a nickel to develop the course ranked No. 12 on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list.
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“Actually, I did write a check for $1,” he says before remembering that the Fletcher Brothers never cashed the check and later returned it to him. For years, it hung in his office and now resides on the wall in the TPC Sawgrass clubhouse.
Beman hired course architect Pete Dye to design a golf course not built for the players, but rather for the gallery. The concept was to accommodate spectators in a way that they never had been before with huge mounding for an improved viewing experience on par with other sports. At their initial meeting, Dye scribbled the makings of a course on a restaurant placement.
“Pete Dye embraced Stadium Golf as if it was his own child,” Beman said in Deane Beman: Golf’s Driving Force.
In March 1980, three years after making a bet, Arvida’s Chuck Cobb paid off his lost wager by presenting Beman with a $100 bill mounted on a plaque that included the following inscription: “To Deane Beman, the man who did what we said couldn’t be done. From Chuck Cobb and his associates at Arvida, who bet on the difficulty of the task, not on the capability of the man doing the task.”
Architect Pete Dye, right, and project manager Vernon Kelly, left, during construction of TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, circa 1980. (Photo by PGA Tour)
During TPC’s grand opening ceremony, it rained so hard that they had to move the celebration into the clubhouse. When it was his turn to speak, Beman ditched his prepared remarks. Instead he looked out the clubhouse window and said, “Some 400 years ago, I believe it was on a day just like this in St. Andrews, Scotland, on a gnarly, windy day that somebody played the first round of golf. So it’s not inappropriate that we open a new era here at the Tournament Players Club on just such a day.”
“Alice Dye looks at me and said, ‘How does he come up with these things?’ ” Kelly recalled.
Almost on cue, the rain stopped and shortly thereafter the inaugural group of Beman, Dye, Irwin, and John Tucker, the ceremony’s emcee and the first chairman of the Greater Jacksonville Open in 1965, teed off.
But not before Rev. Abraham Akaka, pastor of the Kawaaiahao Church in Honolulu, christened the course, dipping palm leaves in an ancient ceramic bowl that Beman held with water. He said a prayer and waved the wet leaves in four directions, representing the four corners of the Earth. “I think of Deane as a prophet and a priest of golf,” Akaka said. “A prophet is one who sees the future and helps to bring it into being and a priest is one who nurtures the life of golf that is here.”
“He blessed every blade of grass,” Judy Beman, Deane’s wife, remembered. “Hale said, ‘Judy, if he doesn’t shut up I’m going to hit him with this iron.’ It took forever to get off the first tee.”
Forty years on, the Players Championship is one of golf’s most prestigious events, the TPC course one of the most popular destinations in the country, and its island par-3 17th one of the most iconic holes in golf. Asked how close the golf course is today to his original concept, Beman didn’t hesitate with his answer.
“It might be just a cut above what I envisioned,” he said. “The facilities are a lot more than what I envisioned and I’m proud of what it has become.”
The Presidents Cup served as a good excuse for golf’s governing bodies to meet and also play some great golf courses.
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MELBOURNE, Australia — As meetings of the Five Families of golf goes, it doesn’t get much better than a gathering in the Australian Sandbelt. The leaders of golf’s governing bodies had one of their quarterly get togethers under the auspices of a board meeting of the International Golf Federation and while The Man Out Front’s invitation went missing once again, he heard all about the birdies and bogeys and offers a hearty golf clap to one and all.
Thanks, of course, go out to PGA Tour Commish Jay Monahan, who threw his own outing at Metropolitan Golf Club, not far from Royal Melbourne Golf Club, site of the Presidents Cup. The three people who have had the pleasure to suspend John Daly for conduct unbecoming—Monahan, Tim Finchem and Deane Beman—were scheduled to tee it up together on Friday. USGA CEO Mike Davis, PGA CEO Seth Waugh and the R&A’s big cheese Martin Slumbers were on the attendee list too.
Earlier in the week, TMOF bumped into Beman, who cracks that he only plays once a day, at Peninsula-Kingswood Golf Club, and he squeezed in a round at Victoria Golf Club, where he played with Junior Presidents Cup participant Jackson Van Paris during another outing.
Finchem, whose daughter Stephanie works on the Presidents Cup staff, had come over early and stopped in New Zealand to play Tom Doak’s Tara Iti, and couldn’t stop raving about that vaunted layout. He pledged that he’ll make a return trip someday.
Finchem wasn’t the only golf leader heading to New Zealand to play some of its beloved courses. TMOF hears that the USGA’s Davis and R&A’s Slumbers were headed on a buddies’ trip and will be hitting the links for some post-Presidents Cup golf of their own. Could they be ironing out the final details of the long-awaited Distance Insights Project Report, due to be release in February, at the 19th hole? TMOF approves of golf’s leaders losing their blue blazers and chasing the little white ball around some of golf’s great cathedrals. If any of them needs a fourth, The Forecaddie’s set is packed and always ready to play an emergency nine.
