History Calls

Interested in retracing the steps of past greats? Tour-tested munys offer lore and affordable golf

1957 St. Paul Open at Keller GC in Minnesota.

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By Al Barkow

Photo Courtesy of Keller Golf Course

March 21, 2008

A kind of elite cadre of golfers go out of their way -- well out, in many cases -- to play America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses as ranked by Golf Digest. Some may be golf architecture buffs, some hard-core players out to see how they can handle these layouts. Others may merely be celebrity hunters. Whatever, they must have plenty of disposable income, or jobs that require a lot of travel on the company sleeve. At that, they will need connections to get on many of those eminent grounds. You don't just show up at Augusta National or Seminole and ask for a tee time.

On the other hand, if you relish the history of the game and want a special taste of it without restrictions -- and for much less out-of-pocket -- we offer an alternative. There still exist a number of courses where PGA Tour events were played when the circuit was far from today's multimillion dollar show of shows. We speak in particular of municipal golf courses, where you can get a walk-up tee time, pay a pittance of a green fee by today's standards, then take your shots in the shadow of American golf's most richly anecdotal, colorful, inventive era -- the old days of the pro tour.

To give you a heads-up, we visited eight of these courses where Hagen and Sarazen played (yes, that Hagen and Sarazen); where Sam and Ben and Byron got their on-the-job training; where Arnie made a 12 on a hole; where Jack took his first pops as a pro; and even where Johnny Miller added to his reputation as the game's Desert Fox.

In design terms none of these courses qualifies for anyone's top 100 list, or even 500. But that's not the point. Along with the fantasy mingling with golf history, you will get a real live learning adventure. On these "tracks," so-called with a certain disparagement even in their heyday, you will discover first hand why the pros of that era became such brilliant improvisers and shotmakers. They had to play out of grasses and lies that you have probably never seen. They are still there. For example, a kind of clover that sprawls tightly atop a chalky soil called caliche, which when dry is iron-skillet hard. After dealing with this, you will feel less put-upon with that bit of thatch in the fringe at your home course. You will play to greens the size of a one-car garage and visit the art of running balls onto those greens rather than flying them home.

Why did the pros play on municipal golf courses back then? Because, believe it or not, the tour from the 1920s through the '50s and even into the '60s was not a high-profile, upscale-demographics enterprise. It was more like a gypsy caravan, the players dressed in bland brown and grim gray, wearing fedoras, hats now associated with Humphrey Bogart in his detective roles or men on the soup line in the dire days of the Depression. Furthermore, private golf clubs were not enthusiastic about hosting a PGA Tour event and giving up their course for a week, then seeing all those divots the pros dug. Nor were they much pleased with the golfers' complaints about course conditions, setup and the size of the purse, for starters. The pros then had a not entirely undeserved reputation as ripely outspoken discontents. And besides that, there was no money in it.

These courses are not big enough for today's pros, but average golfers will have enough on their hands with them, even with the highest of high-tech equipment. Where are these courses and what bits of golf lore are embedded in their primordial soil? We will take them one by one.

KELLER GC
St. Paul, Minn.
Keller (or Keller Park) opened in 1929 and a year later hosted the first of 33 St. Paul Opens, not to mention two PGA Championships, a Western Open, 11 LPGA events and a U.S. Amateur Public Links.

Don Peddie, an ageless Minnesotan, competed as an amateur in an early St. Paul Open and recalls playing just ahead of Walter Hagen. "I thought it noteworthy that he used his putter from off the green more than usual, and even out of the bunkers," says Peddie. "Of course, the bunkers had no lips and weren't deep."

When Olin Dutra won the 1932 PGA Championship at Keller, he became the first American of Spanish descent to win a major title. Ken Venturi's first victory as a pro was in the 1957 SPO. The event's sponsors were one of only three in the U.S. at the time -- the 1940s -- who allowed blacks to compete at a tour stop; Joe Louis played as an amateur, and Ted Rhodes and Bill Spiller as pros. Gangsters sneaking a break from the "heat" in Chicago, played regularly at Keller in the '20s and '30s. They included John Dillinger, as legend has it, and one day, when Dillinger was playing the third hole, he saw FBI agents approaching his group. He jumped the fence and hopped a train that ran adjacent to the course. He left his clubs behind.