LOUISVILLE >> The first two days of the 104th annual PGA Championship at the Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville are now in the record books.
The 36-hole cut has been made and the low 60 golfers and ties are headed into a weekend of major championship golf. The PGA is the third oldest of the grand slam events in men’s professional golf, having first been contested in 1916. This will mark the third time that the PGA Championship has been contested at Valhalla and the first two times it has featured a victory by heavyweights with Tiger Woods winning in overtime in 2000 and with Rory McIlory capturing the fourth major title of his career by one stroke in 2014.
From the days of that inaugural PGA in 1916 through the playing of the championship in 1957, the tournament was contested at match play. A number of tournaments in the formative years of professional golf were match play events. There is a certain magic to match play golf since it is played on a hole by hole basis against an individual opponent instead of being played over four days with scores accumulated among the golfers in the field. Whether it’s good or not, match play success is all about the individual you are competing against. You could struggle, shoot the equivalent of an even par round, and win your match because your opponent is playing over-par golf. On the other hand, you could be playing great and shoot somewhere around 65 only to lose because your opponent is carding a 64.
In the earliest days of the PGA Championship, the cream oftentimes rose to the top. The top professional in the post-World War I era was Walter Hagen. Winner of 11 majors at a time when there was no Masters tournament, Hagen won five PGA Championships between 1921 and 1927, winning four in a row between 1924 and 1927. Meanwhile the diminutive Gene Sarazen was winning three PGA Championships. In the 1940s and 1950s, the American triumvirate of Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, and Byron Nelson won a combined seven PGAs. Nonetheless regardless of the star power of Hagen, Sarazen, Snead, Hogan, and Nelson, there were a bunch of ho-hum champions of the PGA Championship including Jim Ferrier, Chandler Harper, Jim Turnesa, and Walter Burkemo, all of whom won just one major title.
Alas, the PGA Championship went to stroke play in 1958. The powers that be always explained that the late 1950s was the start of the television era and the networks didn’t necessarily expect a high Nielsen rating when the finals on Sunday featured Burkemo and Felice Torza. On top of that, since the finals were 36 holes, there was always the fear that a one-sided match would end up 7&6 like it did in 1951, meaning the PGA Championship would have been completed well before the television airwaves came on.
Of course, I have an alternative take on the demise of match play. As a teenager working at Beverly Country Club in Chicago, well known 1930s and 1940s professional Toney Penna used to come and visit his brother, Charley Penna, Beverly’s head pro, during his time away from designing golf clubs for MacGregor Golf. On a rainy day one August afternoon as I was sitting in the pro shop with Beverly’s assistant golf professionals, Mr. Penna was holding court. He contended that “he” was the reason the PGA moved away from match play to stroke play. Hard to believe? Well, it’s not as strange a thought as one might be inclined to believe.
At the 1947 PGA Championship at Plum Hollow in Detroit, the defending champion Ben Hogan was seeded number one. Penna was a bubble boy who got into the tournament as the 64th seed. As fate would have it, Penna was on fire during day one play and was -7 under par through 17 holes, leading to his defeat of Hogan by a 3&1 margin. Failing to hang on to his hot streak, Penna, who did win four times on tour, was defeated the next day. To add insult to ticket sales, the ever popular Jimmy Demaret also lost in the first round. So in the end, was it television that led to the demise of match play in the PGA Championship, or was it Toney Penna? Let’s be realistic, like everything else in our world is was all about the money
Finally, there are 21 club professionals in the 150 man field at this year’s PGA. The top 20 club pros qualified into the field as did last year’s top 15 finisher, club pro Michael Block of Southern California. As for me, I’ll be rooting for club pro Jared Marek to excel this week. Marek is the professional at the Alameda Muni Golf Complex in the Bay Area. He finished sixth in the most recent PGA Club Professional tournament and when the PGA was held at Kiawah Island in 2021, Brad made the cut. A Chicago kid, Marek won the Illinois Junior, the Illinois Amateur, and played his collegiate golf at Indiana University. He won 17 times on the mini-tours and most recently won the 2023 Northern California PGA Tournament of Champions. A handful of the kids who were playing in last Monday’s North Coast Sections at Tilden Park have had Marek as their teaching professional. The very interesting thing about the PGA Championship is that very mixing of golf pros and club pros. Yes, I do believe that there is a place for the club professionals in their version of a major championship.
