For the past 25 years I have found an available day over the course of the three-day weekend during the final week of April to attend the Golf Expo at Sacramento’s Haggin Oaks Golf Course. Haggin Oaks is a 36-hole golf complex with an Allister Mackenzie-designed course, a super-sized pro shop, a separate pro shop filled with golf shoes, and a 70-terminal driving range.
Haggin Oaks is always a very active place with its 24-hour lit driving range, concerts and contests. It is also the home of the State Fair Amateur, a prestigious tourney held during Labor Day weekend, and it formerly served as the site of two USGA national championships.
The golf expo is considered the largest of its kind in America. There are hundreds of vendors promoting everything from golf destinations, golf resorts, sunscreen, golf carts, organizations and brokerage firms. I’m not too sure what investment advice has to do with golf. Maybe they know that some golfers are financially sound enough to be making their money while golfing.
Another aspect of the Golf Expo is its main stage where local radio talking heads perform their shows live on location, golf instructors talk about the merits of angles of descent and swing tempo, and some of the game’s personalities are interviewed and field questions from the audience. Johnny Miller was the headline speaker a year ago and he was as interesting and entertaining as one might expect. This year it was Sacramento resident Al Geiberger serving as the headline attraction on the main stage. The winner of 11 tour events, Geiberger won the 1966 PGA Championship. He is also widely remembered for carding a 59 at the 1977 Memphis Classic. It was the first sub-60 round in tour history. Hank Haney, a well known golf instructor who once worked with Tiger Woods, also was at the Sacramento Golf Expo.
Yet in the end I was most intrigued by the interview and question-and-answer session featuring golf professional and noted instructor to the pros Stan Utley. Utley’s playing background included a two-time stint as an All-American while playing collegiate golf at Missouri. He won the Chattanooga Classic in 1989 for his lone PGA Tour victory. The most amazing stat on his golfing resume has a permanent place in the PGA Tour record books. Playing in the 2002 Air Canada Open in Vancouver, Utley needed only six putts during the course of nine holes. He had six one-putts, a chip-in and two hole-outs from the sand. No one in the history of tour putting stats has come close to recording just six putts for nine holes.
Surprisingly, there is little ego in Stan Utley’s make-up and he made sure to tell the crowd that although he only needed to stroke six putts, he so underachieved with his ball-striking skills that day that he had 29 shots and ended up carding a 1-under-par 35. Of course, there are two ways to look at this. Either Utley is a historically marginal ball striker who got lucky on a lousy ball-striking day or else he truly was a short-game savant with a rock-solid putting stroke coupled with great sand, chipping and wedge skills.
Utley spent 16 years on the tour’s fringes after winning at Memphis. He was sometimes barely above the top-125 exemption list and other times he was below the top 125 with limited exemption status. However, he was a past champion, a good guy with the sponsors, and he usually got into a good number of tournaments. While his career was winding down in 2005, Stan gave a putting lesson to Jay Haas. Haas was an underachieving top-20 golfer at that time. Whatever Utley told him must have included the missing link as his putting stats started to shine. Haas won twice on the senior tour in late 2005, won another four times in 2006, added four more victories to his golfing resume in 2007, and won twice in 2008 and 2009. Three of those 14 wins in that five-year period were senior major championships.
Haas attributed part of his success to Utley and suddenly Stan was the short-game teaching guru to both senior professionals and regulars on the PGA Tour and the European PGA Tour. Utley started working with Peter Jacobsen, Sergio Garcia and the Irish connection of Graeme McDowell, Paul McGinley and Darren Clarke. He was at the end of his career, he was in demand as a top-notch instructor to the pros, and he wrote a pair of well-written golf instruction books entitled The Art of Putting and The Art of the Short Game. He later added a third book to make it a trilogy with the release of The Art of Scoring.
Utley, who grew up just north of the Arkansas border in southeastern Missouri, is a plain-speaking golf instructor. He contends that he provides “time-tested delivered information” and his major mantra is “see it, feel it, trust it, but don’t try to make it.” Utley contended there is no pure “Utley method” and he tries to teach what the student needs to improve his or her game. He spoke of the importance of the student setting the tone for instruction instead of simply parroting what the instructor teaches. He had an interesting take when asked what category of golfer was easier to instruct – top professionals or bogey-golfing amateurs. Utley felt his instructional techniques were similar regardless of who he worked with although he wryly added that “If I mess them (pros) up it’ll cost them millions.”
Utley talked about junior golf and strongly encouraged kids in the audience and their parents to play other sports and not just focus on golf. He stated that he played basketball in high school. He mentioned that Jordan Spieth had been a pitcher and that Jack Nicklaus had been a shooting guard. He told an interesting story about a Manhattan business man who had his 12-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter hit into a net at their house for two hours every evening. The two kids pounded golf balls throughout the winter in New Jersey. They didn’t play other sports and weren’t involved in activities such as music or drama. Utley felt they weren’t getting any better under the watchful eye of their dad. He also thought the excessive nature of trying to raise the next great golf professional was more detrimental than helpful.
Stan Utley is a three-time winner on the Nike Tour, has a PGA win to his name, and also has a place in the tour record book that may never be eclipsed. More importantly, he is a big-time golf instructor with down-home values regarding the short game, the putting stroke and the raising of junior golfers. Stan Utley showed himself to be a most interesting instructor who described his methods as “hillbilly logic” at last weekend’s Sacramento Golf Expo. The proof is in the results his students produce and he has made a positive impact with his famous students.
