Twenty years ago, at the moment of LINKS Magazine’s birth, I was with another
publication, knee-deep in another celebration, an enormously successful one that
was enjoyed by all but ended, in my case, with some bitterness. I figure this is
as good a time as any to vent.
The year 1988 marked the 100th
anniversary of the Apple Tree Gang, the group of pilgrims from Scotland who are
generally agreed to have
introduced organized golf to the U.S. with the
establishment of St. Andrew’s Golf Club in Yonkers, New York. In the summer of
1987, seeing this event looming on the horizon, Golf decided to throw a party—a
very big party—to commemorate the centennial of golf in America.
The U.S.
Golf Association, PGA of America, and the PGA and LPGA tours jumped on the
bandwagon, as did—blessedly—20 corporate sponsors. At the same time, my
colleagues and I collaborated with publisher Harry N. Abrams to produce Golf in
America, a lavish 400-page celebration of the first century. It would go into
several printings and sell more than 100,000 copies—if I do say so myself, it
was quite a book. Meanwhile, we invited the magazine’s readers to
submit nominations for “100 Heroes of the First 100 Years,” and formed a
blue-ribbon panel to name the final 100, along with 20 male and female players
of the decades. The panel also named a player of the century, from a ballot that
included Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. The vote was
taken 10 months before the results were announced because the award was a
full-size bronze statue by Leicester Thomas, a London sculptor to both the Royal
Family and Madame Tussauds. For 10 months, only three of us knew the winner, and
somehow managed to keep it a secret.
The pinnacle of all this came on the
Monday following the 1988 U.S. Open. The celebration began with a “Hero-Am,”
wherein many of the living 100 Heroes gathered for a day of competition at St.
Andrew’s Golf Club, relocated to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and culminated
that evening in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City with a
black-tie charity auction and dinner for a packed house of 1,000 guests.
Jack
Whitaker rushed back from the U.S. Open playoff at The Country Club in
Brookline, Massachusetts, to emcee the festivities, and the three-tiered,
60-person dais that evening included more Hall of Famers than have ever been
assembled before or since, including Ben Hogan, who made his first public
appearance outside Texas in over a decade. He was joined by Byron Nelson, Sam
Snead, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Ken Venturi, and Tom Watson. On the women’s
side, there were Louise Suggs, Patty Berg, JoAnne Carner, Betsy Rawls and Nancy
Lopez, along with more than a score of other players and contributors—everyone
from Chi Chi Rodriguez to Mark McCormack.
This was also the official
publication day for Golf in America. We had hoped to place a book on each seat,
but didn’t quite make the deadline. Only one copy had come off the press, and I
had it with me.
