Magic Happened: Chapter Two

Open For Business

Deane Beman: Golf’s Driving Force is the spot-on title for Adam Schupak’s 2011 biography of the man who hoisted the trophy in each of the first two editions of the Quad Cities Open/John Deere Classic.

Two years after his second victory at Crow Valley Golf Club — a one-shot win over a young Tom Watson — Beman succeeded Joe Dey as PGA TOUR commissioner. That launched one of the most transformational reigns in the history of professional sports.

From 1974 through Beman’s retirement in 1994, TOUR purses grew from a collective $8.16 million to a sum total of $56.14 million. Television revenues increased over those two decades by 2,000 percent, from $2.8 million to $69 million. Total PGA TOUR assets expanded from $400,000 to $260 million.

In his time, Beman introduced and perfected the concept of corporate golf tournament sponsorship, and combined the sponsors’ interest in national exposure with the TV networks’ passion for profit, and built a uniquely fail-proof broadcast product. It is a model that remains successful while other sports broadcast ventures falter in the age of live streaming. Beman also convinced the vested PGA TOUR members who employed him that building and competing on stadium-style golf courses owned and maintained by the TOUR was a lucrative means of funding their pensions.

Ultimately, Beman built a major-league enterprise certain to challenge the PGA TOUR survival of events in smaller communities like the Quad Cities. In fact, most like-sized cities that preceded or followed the Quad Cities on TOUR — Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Hershey, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; Endicott, New York; Tallahassee and Sarasota, Florida; Columbus, Georgia; even Robinson, Illinois (population 7,200) — didn’t survive.

The John Deere Classic, of course, has more than survived. Entering its 50^th year, the JDC has flourished.

And the first critical instance of magic happening here may well have been welcoming golf’s future driving force as inaugural two-time champion.

More than once, Deane Beman stepped up to keep the QC event from disappearing. In turn, he said, the Quad Cities helped him forge his vision for what professional golf could become.

“I remember the community and the people in that community,” Beman said nearly 30 years beyond his term as TOUR leader. “I got close to people when I won the tournament a couple of years in a row there, and that instilled in me how important the volunteers in the communities were to a golf tournament. That was very, very helpful to me when I became commissioner.”

It is safe to say the PGA TOUR Beman joined as a player in 1967 looked nothing like the TOUR he’d leave behind in 1994.

“There were probably only a couple of tournaments that offered more than $100,000 in prize money, total,” he remembered. “It was a whole different landscape. And that’s one of the reasons I decided to take the job as commissioner. I was a fan of other sports, and I realized the kind of income other athletes were making. I thought that we ought to be able to do better. We were undervalued and underappreciated. When I became commissioner, bowling had more events on television and got more TV money than golf did.”

As commissioner, one of Beman’s most significant changes would be to create the all-exempt TOUR, where the top 125 money winners from the previous year would be card-carrying members eligible to tee it up in round one in all but invitational tournaments and major championships.

The TOUR he joined in 1967 granted that privilege only to the previous year’s top 60. Non-exempt players who made the weekend of the previous week’s event also were automatically entered into the next week’s field. The final 20 or so spots in most regular tournaments were filled by the so-called rabbits, men who lived Monday to Monday, vying to qualify, sometimes 100 at a time, for any given week’s event. Failure to advance ensured a week without a paycheck, and nothing to do but venture on like vagabonds to the next week’s stop.

To accommodate those rabbits, Dey introduced the concept of satellite tournaments. The 1971 schedule included 27 such satellites, each played opposite a nearby sanctioned event and with much smaller purses. A satellite win would not be considered an official TOUR victory, but any earnings would factor on the year-end money list, giving young professionals without exempt standing a backdoor opportunity to play their way onto the circuit.

At least one tournament played its way onto the TOUR through that short-lived satellite network as well, and it continues to run strong today.

On September 16, 1971, the Quad Cities Open debuted at Crow Valley Golf Club under the satellite umbrella of the Chicago District Golf Association. The 131-player field included a dozen or so local amateur and club professionals, including two of the visionaries primarily responsible for its existence, Bob Fry and Whitey Barnard.

The inaugural tournament offered a $25,000 purse for the assembled pros to pursue — not a huge incentive, but incentive enough for the man who’d leave with the $5,000 winner’s share.

“You’ve got to remember when I went on TOUR, I had four children and a mortgage,” Beman said. “Prize money everywhere wasn’t much, and you had to play 28 to 32 tournaments a year to make a living. So, we went anywhere we could play. We’d play on Monday for $1,000 in a pro-am. So, it was nice having a place to play on a regular week off. I wasn’t eligible for the Ryder Cup and this was an opportunity to make some money.”

Although that inaugural field would not stack up against the most modest of fully sanctioned TOUR events, it constituted a stronger group of contenders than most other satellite events in 1971. That was thanks to a late decision to move the tournament from an originally scheduled July date opposite both the Milwaukee Open and the British Open. The only competition in mid-September came from the aforementioned Ryder Cup in St. Louis, where only 24 of the top players from the United States and Great Britain were competing.

That first QCO was a byproduct of a long-held vision shared by Fry and several members of the Crow Creek Estates group — Barnard, Lujack and the McLaughlin brothers, especially — but also had the backing of a club looking to expand its membership and reputation.

“We felt we needed some notoriety at Crow Valley,” Barnard said. “At the time, the best means of doing that was to have a golf tournament.”

Barnard’s passion for bringing a pro event to his hometown actually pre-dated both Crow Valley’s existence and Fleck’s 1955 U.S. Open victory. It began, instead, when both Barnard and Fleck served as teen-aged caddies at the 1936 Western Open at Davenport Country Club. Intrigued by the experience, Barnard later was a key player in bringing the Western back to DCC one more time in 1951.

“That was the beginning of it all,” Barnard said years later of his foundational role in birthing the Quad Cities Open.

Fry’s experience in staging Iowa Opens and other such events at Emeis was helpful in the planning and execution of that first QCO. But it was his mentoring relationship with Jim Jamieson — a Moline native who launched a nine-year career on the TOUR just as Crow Valley was opening in 1969 — that gave the first-year event a trajectory other satellite tourneys couldn’t claim.

With a little coaching from Fry as a rising young player, Jamieson earned a scholarship to collegiate powerhouse Oklahoma State University. Ultimately, he built a game strong enough to win the 1972 Western Open while finishing in the top five of three major championships before injuries ended his TOUR career.

His QC-bred people skills helped Jamieson build relationships on TOUR that he would leverage to give the earliest QCOs a major lift.

“Of course, we had people like Whitey Barnard, Al Howard, the pillars of the community, and they said, ‘Why don’t you go see Joe Dey, and find out if we can possibly host a satellite tournament,’” Jamieson remembered roughly a year before his death in December of 2018. “We thought that was a great idea. So, I went to see Joe, he gave me a little book and said ‘This is how you coordinate. You put so much money into escrow and this is how you start a tournament.’”

Not everything about that first event went by the book, of course.

“It was a total club project, but at that point, it was a peanut operation,” remembered founding Crow member Wally Priester. “All the members were involved, but it was nothing like they have today, I’ll tell you. The funniest thing was finding a place to park out there. That was one of the big problems of the whole tournament. Where are you going to park your cars?”

Getting there was a hurdle all its own.

“Crow Valley was out in the middle of nowhere then,” remembered Kym Hougham, the then-bag room assistant. “Literally in the middle of nowhere. 53^rd Street was a two-lane gravel road from Harrison Street all the way to Utica Ridge. It was just cornfields all the way out there.”

Fry recruited Jack Groves to be the first QCO chair. “I was happy to do it, although I wasn’t sure what we were going to do,” Groves recalled. “I got a lot of good people helping me. It turned out to be a lot of fun and we were successful.”

From a Crow Valley perspective, the first tournament was an all-hands-on-deck affair. Bob McGriff, an early Crow member who would remain influential in the tournament’s story for years to come, helped the launch from behind the scenes. WQAD-TV general manager Art Swift served as publicity chair. Newspaper executive Henry Hook chaired the pro-am and sold every spot— at $250 a pop — in a single night. Coupled with concessions, parking and gate receipts, the pro-am sales helped fund the $25,000 purse, with a small surplus to boot.

Yet even with Joe Dey’s playbook and PGA TOUR staff on-site, Jamieson said logistics were a challenge.

“It was really a community project,” he remembered. “At the start of the tournament we ran out of parking, and I knew the guy who owned all the school buses in the area was playing gin upstairs. So, we sent Kym Hougham up to get him and got shuttle busses. We ran out of tickets, and Bob Fry had some movie tickets in his trunk. On pro-am day, Bob went off 10 and I went off 1 and people were coming up and asking us both all kinds of operations questions.”

The young golf course more than held its own. Bob Goalby, an Illinois native who played in that first QC event only three years after winning the Masters green jacket, said he’d never seen a two-year-old course in better condition, but added, “You do get afraid of the greens because they are so treacherous. You can’t afford to miss by an inch or you’re dead.”

Oh, yes. The greens. The pros did talk about those greens.

“There was a major headache when on Saturday they put the pin on 14 way back up in the right-hand corner,” Groves remembered of his biggest challenge as volunteer chair. “We had gone around with the guy from the TOUR early in the week and said you can never put the pin up there. Well, they did, and I think Tommy Bolt walked off the golf course.

“It was a bad deal. I went down there on Saturday and these guys are putting the ball up and it’s coming right back to them. Which we knew it would. They rebuilt the green after that tournament. And the TOUR fired the guy who was in charge of the set-up.”

Gary McCord, then a fledgling pro who would go on to a long career as a golf announcer, played the hole early and was among several players who returned to 14 at the end of his round to watch the toll it might take.

“Finally, someone, I don’t know who it was, goes, ‘I’m not going any farther,’’’ McCord said recently. “We watched the TOUR come out and change the pin. In the middle of the round! We went nuts. But there was nothing you could do.”

Beman’s winning four-day total of 7-under wouldn’t lead a lot of opening rounds of ensuing QC tournaments. And a half-century later, he hadn’t forgotten those greens. “Well, let me say they were a little different,” he said, pausing for effect. “They might have had a little tilt to them.”

Did. And still do.

“That’s been a good question since the day the damned place opened,” said Priester, who still was trying to solve those Crow Valley greens several years past his 90^th birthday. “As we get older, we all say, ‘Why the hell did they make the greens so damned fast?’”

Challenging greens, weekend rains, and high scores notwithstanding, that first tournament was deemed enough of a success that it was all but certain the QCO would return in 1972 as a fully sanctioned PGA TOUR event.

The buy-in was a $100,000 purse. To underwrite that expense, new co-chairs Barnard and Swift, along with Jim McLaughlin, led the formation of the Quad-City Golf Association, a group of 200 supporters.

The step up to full TOUR status officially was confirmed by Dey in January, and Jamieson and Fry went to work to bolster the field. A primary target was Lee Trevino, even after he won the British Open for a second straight year that July.

“I was good friends with Lee,” Jamieson said. “I said, ‘You’re going to come and play in the Quad Cities Open.’ He joked, ‘No, I’m not. I don’t like gringos and I’m not going north.’ Well, he did. We had Jim Dent and he had never seen an ear of corn.”

The 1972 and 1973 QCOs took place in the fall again, but the last Crow QCO was held in July of 1974, the first of 15 straight QC tourneys played opposite the British Open Championship. All three were qualified successes, with good crowds and increasingly more community participation.

The 1973 and 1974 tournaments even had a sponsor in Hardee’s Food Systems, Inc., thanks in large part to a community-minded regional supervisor, Brick Lundberg. The regional fast-food chain’s decision to end its participation after the July 1974 event put the tourney’s future in serious doubt for the first of what would be multiple times. Still, one young store manager’s deep respect for his mentor Lundberg would bring the hamburger group back to the tourney’s table at another critical juncture a decade down the road.

Those early Crow years introduced QCO fans to developing stars like Watson, Lanny Wadkins, Hale Irwin and Bruce Fleisher, each of whom finished sixth or higher in one of the three official events. The fields also were headlined by major champions of recent vintage, Goalby (1968 Masters) and Dave Stockton (1970 PGA Championship). And aging legends like Bolt and Slammin’ Sammy Snead challenged those Crow Valley greens, Snead with much better success than the notoriously tempestuous Bolt.

In fact, the 62-year-old Slammer was looking to add to his record total of 82 PGA TOUR wins when tournament Sunday dawned in 1974. It is a lasting point of pride to Stockton that he passed Snead and several others with a fast-closing 64 to join Beman and lefty Sam Adams, the ’73 winner, in the soon-to-be exclusive Crow Valley QCO club of champions.

“I remember Snead had needled me when I beat him in L.A. earlier that year,” Stockton recalled more than 40 years later. “I came to the Quad Cities, and Snead had the lead, which I believe is the last time he led on TOUR. I don’t know if he was madder that I won and beat him coming from so far behind or the fact that Fleisher three-putted the last hole to help me avoid a playoff.”

When the 1974 event ended, most assumed a return to Crow Valley was in the cards for the following year. But within a month of the last putt, Barnard and tourney leaders were feeling pressure from outgoing commissioner Dey to take the purse to $125,000.

Negotiations were in progress with Hardee’s to help make that happen, but in early February — with a new PGA TOUR commissioner eager to confirm the summer schedule —Hardee’s withdrew its sponsorship and co-chairs Barnard and Swift announced an urgent appeal for financial assistance.

Luckily, that new commissioner, a fellow named Beman, was willing to wait and see what developed.

(This content, first published in 2021, is shared with the permission of the Quad City Golf Classic Charitable Foundation. Please consider a donation to Birdies for Charity.)