Berrygolf@aol.com
It’s the weekend of the PGA Championship. The 36-hole cut has been made and the 70 remaining golfers in the field have these final two rounds to win the final major championship of the year. It’s been a different sort of year for major champions with Patrick Reed, Brooks Koepka and Francesco Molinari winning the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open, respectively. For the top guns of the game such as Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson and Jordan Spieth, this is their last shot in 2018 to make it a successful year by their standards. We’ll know a whole lot more come Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, I want to take a look back in time to 50 years ago as it relates to professional golf, the tour, and the PGA Championship. Initially my story goes back 48 years to the playing of the 1970 Western Open at Beverly Country Club in Chicago. I was 17 years old, was the assistant caddie master, and while I was really employed that week as a caddie for Bob Lunn, I also had an official’s pass and had the run of the entire complex. I recall going to the upstairs portion of the clubhouse where the pros checked in. I was surprised by two sets of tables on opposite sides of the room. The pros checked into one table with signs saying Professional Golfers Association. Then they checked into a table that was for the Tournament Players Division. I was confused, but I also knew my place and was smart enough not to ask questions.
Several weeks later on a rainy day in the pro shop, I asked Charley Penna, our head pro, and his brother Toney Penna, the chief designer of clubs for MacGregor Golf, about the two tables. They immediately said they didn’t want to discuss it. Both Penna brothers had played on the tour from the late 1930s through the 1950s and Toney had won four times. Both men were PGA through and through. Yet because of the equipment connection, they were tight with the touring pros of the day, most notably Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf, both MacGregor pros.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized that 1970 was the third year of an active war between the PGA and the tour pros. The PGA ran the tour for close to 40 years, and yet its membership consisted of 6,000 club pros or teaching pros, and approximately 250 tour pros. There weren’t a whole lot of issues in the early days of professional golf when top pros such as Byron Nelson made more money as the head pro at Hershey Country Club than he did playing professional golf. Yet by the late 1960s, there was a wide chasm between the pro shop guys and the tour pros. There was big money in tour purses, television revenues and the like. The tour pros were upset with the management style of the PGA and it all came to a head in 1968.
The tour pros were irate about the heavy handedness of the PGA. For instance, when the Westchester Classic put up a $250,000 total purse in 1968, the PGA siphoned off $50,000 of that for its organization. When Frank Sinatra offered to start up a $200,000 event, the PGA rejected it. The tour pros didn’t like the way the PGA set up courses, they objected to some of the municipal courses they played, they wanted a health and a pension plan, and they wanted a say in the management of the tour. The PGA Championship was an issue with 50 tour pros and 112 club pros in the field. They were especially upset with Bob Creasey of the PGA who was quoted as saying, “When Bob Creasey travels, he travels double first class.” The men who ran the tour were making as much money as the players themselves if not more. Creasey also negotiated six-figure television deals with the World Series of Golf and Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, with all the money going into the coffers of the PGA.
In 1968 the touring pros wanted autonomy from the PGA and in response the PGA threatened to suspend the pros from their tour. Negotiations went back and forth for a number of months and tournament directors and television got into the act. Roone Arledge of ABC Sports sided with the players and stated that “we won’t televise a tournament with nobodies.” The tournament directors also sided with the players. Jack Nicklaus penned a column in Sports Illustrated in September of 1968 taking on the PGA and explaining the views of the tour pros. Arnold Palmer tried to put together a compromise and was shot down by the PGA. In the end it was a power struggle featuring golf pros and pro golfers. The pro golfers such as Palmer, Nicklaus and the rest knew they were the show. Their lifestyle had little in common with the club pros. They didn’t want the elected officials of the club pros to determine their purses, pocket their television revenues, and allow them zero say in the management of the 33-tournament tour.
By December of 1968 a compromise was met with new PGA president Leo Fraser, who showed a more conciliatory tone than his predecessor, Max Elbin. The tour would still be under the umbrella of the PGA but the players would have their own Tournament Players Division, hence the two check-in tables at Beverly in the summer of 1970. Joe Dey, the former executive director of the United States Golf Association, would serve as the commissioner of the TPD, a position he would hold from the start of the 1969 season to the conclusion of 1973. A TPD Board made up of players such as Doug Ford, Frank Beard, Gardner Dickinson and Jack Nicklaus would set the tone for tour pro interests such as health plans and pensions. By 1974, the touring pros would bring in one of their own, Deane Beman, to serve as the new commissioner. Beman would break off completely from the PGA of America, rename his entity the PGA Tour, negotiate television and sponsorship deals, and start the brand of PGA Tour courses that nowadays go under the name Tournament Players Courses (TPC).
It was 50 years ago that an internal war between touring pros and the organization that ran their tour went head to head. Oftentimes bureaucrats can be intractable. The pros knew they were the show and they wanted empowerment. Thankfully golfers such as Jack Nicklaus weren’t suspended for their stand and thankfully the PGA Championship as a grand slam event didn’t go by the wayside. The tradition and history of the PGA Championship continues this weekend and the entity that is nowadays known as the PGA Tour does a great job of putting on a most popular show. Yet back in 1968 the game was growing way too fast for the PGA of America to adjust to the new world of television, corporate sponsorships and the like.
Meanwhile, we still have 36 holes of great golf to be played at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis this weekend. By Sunday evening someone will have made it a career year. For the res it will mark the end of the major championship season with nothing less than disappointment.
