Fans had precious few opportunities to walk the fairways with their favorite players, most notably at the Greater Greensboro Open and at Senior Tour stops at TPC at Piper Glen in Charlotte and Tanglewood Park in Clemmons.
However, the trickle of top pros coming to the state became a stronger stream when Peggy Kirk Bell persuaded the USGA to bring the U.S. Women’s Open to Pine Needles in 1996. Then Don Padgett and Pat Corso fought through every logistical roadblock imaginable to land the men’s championship at Pinehurst No. 2 in 1999.
Those first national golf championships ever staged in North Carolina were so successful that return engagements were booked in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The women, after giving Pine Needles rave reviews in ’01, will return again in 2007.
Now, only one thing was missing — a premier tour event that would attract the likes of Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, Phil Mickelson, Davis Love III and other top-10 players who had shown little desire in fitting Greensboro into their tight April schedules.
That final piece of North Carolina’s golf puzzle fell into place with last May’s announcement that Charlotte’s Quail Hollow Club will host the annual Wachovia Championship, beginning this May 8-11. With a $5.6 million purse, the fifth largest on tour, the Wachovia Championship may not deliver Woods but it guarantees a world-class field and adds to the state’s blossoming reputation.
Further evidence that North Carolina has arrived as a big-time golf state came this year on two fronts.
First came news from the Triad that its tournament was being revamped and improved. The newly named Chrysler Classic of Greensboro would move to a fall date — this year it’s Oct. 16-19 — and increase its purse by $700,000 to $4.5 million. Also, significant renovations would be made to the course at Forest Oaks Country Club.
Then in November, Hickory business man Don Beaver, who built his fortune in nursing homes, convinced officials from the Champions Tour — the new name for the senior tour — that Rock Barn Golf and Country Club in Conover would be a worthy test for the 50-and-over crowd. From that sales pitch, plus a guaranteed purse of $1.5 million, grew the Greater Hickory Classic at Rock Barn, which will be played Sept. 26-28.
Beaver’s bold move means the state will continue hosting two Champions Tour events. The Greater Hickory Classic essentially replaces the Vantage Tournament, which lost R.J. Reynolds Tobacco as its sponsor. It will follow by one week the two-year-old SAS Championship at Prestonwood Country Club in Cary.
“Given North Carolina’s history of golf, the state deserves to have the best golfers in the world play here every year,” says Johnny Harris, a Charlotte developer and the driving force behind the birth of the Wachovia Championship. “It’s an exciting time for everyone involved.”
Been Here Before
It’s not as if North Carolina hasn’t experienced big-time golf before. The GGO dates to 1938, and in its heyday in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s was one of the PGA Tour’s most popular events. Charlotte had a tour stop for awhile in the ’40s and again from 1969-79, when the Kemper Open was contested at Quail Hollow before the title sponsor opted to move it to Washington, site of its headquarters.
Even Pinehurst No. 2 got into the act — albeit briefly — for several years by hosting the World Open. But golf course superintendents didn’t know then what they know now, and it was difficult to maintain ideal playing conditions during the intense heat and humidity of a Sandhills summer.
The LPGA Tour had its North Carolina moment as well in the mid-1980s when Willow Creek Country Club in High Point hosted the Henredon Classic. But when sponsorship money dried up the tournament did, too.
The only constants were the Vantage Championship, which also arrived in the mid-’80s, and the GGO, which had its own problems. As the PGA Tour grew, both in the number of events and the size of their purses, Greensboro became an afterthought. Many players needed time off after The Masters and the following week’s Heritage Classic, which remained popular due to its family-friendly locale in Hilton Head, S.C., and its close proximity to Augusta.
Title sponsors, first Kmart and now Chrysler, kept the GGO going through the ’90s only to see the event’s reputation absorb another blow after a disastrous redesign of the Forest Oaks greens by former champion Fuzzy Zoeller.
“The redo of the greens was just short of a disaster,” says tour regular Paul Azinger. “The greens are way too small, and I think that impacted the field. What they had here before was fantastic.”
Enter tour star Davis Love III, who won at Greensboro in 1992. The Charlotte native and former University of North Carolina standout’s design group has been hired to renovate Forest Oaks. Given the six months gained from the switch to a fall tournament date, Love promises a challenging yet fair layout will greet players in October.
Irwin Smallwood, a retired editor with the Greensboro News & Record and the 1999 honorary chairman of the tournament, says: “Moving from the spring is sort of like seeing your life flash before your eyes. We’re not drowning. We’re being rescued, I hope.”
The new date doesn’t come without challenges. October weekends already are filled with football and the baseball playoffs, and the weather can be just as unpredictable in October as April.
Still, second-year tournament director Mark Brazil sees brighter days ahead. “I think we are trying to pump some new life into this tournament,” he says. “We just have to keep our eye on the goal and the goal is to improve the event in all aspects.”
Brazil has two reasons to believe better days are ahead. Given his reputation, Love’s redesign should draw more big-name players to the field. And by falling toward the end of the PGA Tour season when many players are making a last climb up the money list and hoping to qualify for the mega-richseason-ending Tour Championship, more players will be eager to come to Greensboro.
Coming Back to Quail Hollow
Getting a quality field isn’t a concern in Charlotte, where stars will flock in droves in search of a big payday and anxious to test a course that many feel is worthy of hosting a major championship.
A George Cobb design that opened in 1961, Quail Hollow has long been a favorite of players. The first Kemper Open was played in 1968 at Pleasant Valley Country Club in Sutton, Mass. When the insurance giant decided to move it after the inaugural year, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus threw their considerable weight behind Quail Hollow — and you know that result.
Once the big boys left for the nation’s capital, the start-up Senior Tour played an event at Quail Hollow each September until the PGA Tour built Piper Glen and shifted the tournament there.
In 1995, several Quail Hollow members, Harris — now the club’s president — among them, quietly approached noted course architect Tom Fazio about a renovation. He made extensive changes at the time, but also left areas where new tees could be built should the PGA Tour return.
Since last May’s announcement, minor revisions have lengthened the course to play as long as 7,360 yards. A new fairway bunker has been added along the right side of an already-demanding 18th hole, and trees have been removed to provide better viewing areas for galleries.
“This place will be second to none,” says tour veteran Jay Haas, who played Quail Hollow in a pro-am last fall. “It was a great facility before, but now it doesn’t lack anything.”
Including corporate support. Even with a superb facility and Harris’ considerable influence, the Wachovia Championship wouldn’t exist without a title sponsor, and the recent merger between Wachovia and First Union opened doors to market “the new Wachovia.”
Charlotte’s deep-pocketed businesses have responded. Corporate sponsorships are sold out, as are all skyboxes and chalets. Less than a third of the weekly tournament tickets remain, and only a limited number of daily tickets will be sold, beginning in late March or early April.
“It’s been gratifying and beyond our expectations,” says Wachovia executive Mac Everett, the event’s general chair.
No one has been more impressed than tournament director Kym Hougham, who moved to Charlotte late last summer after running the John Deere Classic in Silvis, Ill., for several years.
“I’ve been amazed by it all,” he says. “The excitement here is so great. This is a perfect example of what the tour needs to do more of — get a great title sponsor, a cooperative site and be in a city that’s excited by it all.”
Beaver Strikes It Big
While North Carolina has hosted at least one senior tournament every year since the tour debuted in 1980, excitement throughout the state perhaps has never been greater.
This is despite the loss of the Vantage Championship, for years one of the richest events on the senior tour. Staged for the final time last October as the RJR Championship, the event had long lost most of its luster and much of its life with fans, yet was kept on life support by Reynolds, which saw value in its appeal to customers and vendors.
Reynolds’ decision to drop its sponsorship was forced in large part by the recent Master Settlement Agreement mandated by the federal government that limits a tobacco company to one major sports sponsorship. Understandably, Reynolds decided to continue its sponsorship of the widely popular and more market friendly NASCAR Winston Cup racing series.
Terry Barber, the tournament’s director, tried in vain to land local sponsors to keep the event running, but with the sour economy among other factors, it couldn’t be saved.
“This is a sad day,” she said when xthe tour announced its 2003 schedule. “I’ve dreaded this day because it’s hard to look at the schedule and not see Tanglewood Park.”
It remains to be seen whether fan interest will be that much greater just 60 miles west down Interstate 40, where the Greater Hickory Classic at Rock Barn will be played. What isn’t questioned is the facility.
Beaver, who owns interest in four minor-league baseball teams and a small stake in the big-league Pittsburgh Pirates, bought the 1,300-acre Rock Barn development in 1997 and has made extensive improvements, including the addition of a 25,000-square-foot clubhouse. Foremost, however, was the addition of a second 18 holes of golf, which he hired Robert Trent Jones Jr. to design.
All told, Beaver and his minority partners have invested nearly $11 million in the facility, with a full-service spa and lodge still under construction. Securing a pro tournament was a long-term goal, and it happened quicker than anyone expected.
Three factors were key: 1) Beaver’s willingness to guarantee the $1.5 million purse; 2) already available dates on the Champions Tour, which has suffered at the hands of the economy; and 3) endorsement of the course by tour regulars Morris Hatalsky and Walter Hall, who played the layout early last fall.
“The players’ opinions really went a long way in getting this thing done,” says John Hemmings, Rock Barn’s president and COO. “We know we have an outstanding golf course and country club, and we think the community will get behind it. We have a lot to do in a short amount of time, but we want to see if we can make this work.”
Hemmings can draw comfort in his tight schedule from Prestonwood, which in 2001 had just five months to pull off the first SAS Championship. The short time frame came about when Nationwide pulled its sponsorship of a senior event in suburban Atlanta in April. Jim Goodnight, one of Prestonwood’s owners and co-founder of SAS, the world’s largest privately held software company, stepped in with both guns blazing.
Tour officials and Vance Heafner, Prestonwood’s director of golf and a former PGA Tour regular, worked together to pick and choose the best-suited 18 of the club’s 54 holes designed by Tom Jackson. The tournament has been a hit with both corporate sponsors and players, the latter of whom rate it among the tour’s top five stops in “customer satisfaction.”
“We did better than anyone expected the first year,” says Heafner, “and better than even we expected the second year. It’s only getting bigger and better.”
It’s only getting bigger and better for North Carolina as a major player in golf, too.
