To someone my age, 1980 doesn”t seem all that long ago. To a younger person, it might seem light years away. Yet with all that has gone on in the world of golf, 30 years ago was a very, very long time ago.
Golfers played with persimmon woods and hit balata golf balls. Dan Pohl led the PGA Tour in driving distance, averaging 274 yards off the tee. Tom Watson was the leading money winner, taking home just more than $530,000. Lee Trevino had the lowest scoring average at 69.73 strokes. Seve won the Masters, the U.S. Open at Baltusrol went to Jack, Tom lifted the claret jug at Muirfield, and Jack won a second major when the PGA was contested at Oak Hill. It”s not all that often you can use a bunch of first names in golf and have people understand who you”re talking about. 1980 did have rock-solid major champions.
PGA Tour Q School had been held at Fort Washington Country Club in Fresno and 25 linksters received their tour cards, which was a money clip. Mark O”Meara, Loren Roberts and Freddie Couples were graduates of that Q School class of fall 1980.
In November of 1980, the PGA Tour under the auspices of Commissioner Deane Beman published the 1981 Player”s Handbook, a 50-page pamphlet about the size of a golf rulebook. I received an original Player”s Handbook from the colorful Don Hunter, and since I am adamant about the fact that I don”t want to write about what happened in the world of golf at this time last year to the No. 2 golfer in the world, I thought I”d take a walk down memory lane, specifically to Thanksgiving 1980.
The Player”s Handbook opens with the 1981 schedule. It lists the addresses of the tournament director for each event so that tour members can write to enter in advance. It also lists the prize money breakdown for tourneys. For instance, if a tournament has a total purse of $250,000, then the winner takes home $45,000 while the 60th-place golfer pockets $500. The Players Championship is the big-money event, just like today, with a total purse of $450,000. The Canadian pays out $350,000, the Western has a total purse of $300,000, and the Quad Cities has the smallest payday at $200,000.
Interestingly enough, there is quite a complex policy regarding the bouncing of checks by PGA Tour members to tournament committees and tournament sponsors. The first time you bounce a check, you receive a $200 fine. A second offense gets you a three-month suspension, and a third time results in a permanent suspension. Something tells me that in golf”s pre-television heyday before the advent of the PGA Tour, professional golfers used to bounce a lot of checks.
The tour was divided into four geographical zones for scheduling purposes. The winter tour started in Tucson, then Palm Springs, then Phoenix, then Monterey, then San Diego, then Hawaii and finally Los Angeles. Today, this array of events is known as the West Coast Swing. From there, the tour went to Florida for four events, then to Hilton Head, Greensboro, Hattiesburg and the Masters. In the midst of all this, the winners of the previous 12 months played one another at the TOC at LaCosta, and then resumed again in New Orleans and three Texas stops. The summer tour started at the Memorial and ended at Pleasant Valley in Massachusetts some 17 weeks later. The separate leading money winners of the West Coast, Florida and Midwest/East swings received a golf money clip with a ruby. Finally, with all the majors completed and with football on the minds of most sports fans, the tour concluded with stops at Abilene, Pinehurst, the Texas Open, the Southern Open, Pensacola and Disney World.
Only the top 60 money winners were exempt some three decades ago. Tournament winners received a yearlong exemption, major winners were exempt for 10 years, and winners of the U.S. Open and the PGA took advantage of a unique clause prior to 1968 and had lifetime exemptions. Therefore, with no Senior Tour of any factor in 1980, there was an over-the-hill fivesome of Jerry Barber, Paul Runyan, Jackie Burke, Dave Marr and Ken Venturi that would occasionally tee it up on the regular tour. As an aside, Runyan won his first major, the PGA Championship, some 46 years earlier. Fields included the 94 exempt players along with anyone … and I do mean anyone … who had made the 36-hole cut in the previous week”s tournament. The rest of the field qualified on the Monday before the tournament, and because there were usually anywhere from 30-50 spots available during a Monday qualifier, there was an active fringe group of Monday regulars. These non-exempt golfers were called “rabbits” because they were just trying to get a nibble at the green stuff, namely money.
Of course, there was a European Tour going on at the same time, but the PGA Tour in America frowned on its members playing in non-sanctioned events. If a tour member wanted to travel to Scotland or Ireland to play in a national open, he had to apply for permission 60 days in advance. It was understood that you couldn”t do so the following year if the foreign tour event conflicted with the same American tour event.
While Tom Watson happened to win his third British Open title that summer, his brilliant efforts at Muirfield meant very little on the PGA Tour. Thirty years ago, the British Open wasn”t recognized as an official tour event. The money or the win didn”t count for the cause. Golf”s professional tours were very parochial in those days as evidenced by the less-than-warm welcome Seve Ballesteros of Spain received from Commissioner Beman. Nowadays, a British Open win will get you a five-year exemption on the PGA Tour as well as tons of glory and seven figures for the bank account, but back then it was just a foreign affair.
Finally, the Player”s Handbook has its micro-managing moments. For instance, PGA Tour members are directed to tip at least $10 to locker room personnel. If you happen to lose your PGA Tour money clip, then it must be immediately replaced for a $50 fee. If you think about it, $50 in 1980 money isn”t all that much. It”s about the same amount as a traffic fine in Florida for knocking into a fire hydrant over Thanksgiving weekend in 2009.
