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The legendary Tulsa club has hosted more major championships than any course except Augusta National, Oakmont and Oakland Hills. (John Mummert/USGA)
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By Jimmie Tramel
Right here, in this very spot, you could be reading a quote from a golf legend about what a wonderful place Southern Hills Country Club is.
Praise for Southern Hills isn’t hard to find. It can be located by anybody with Internet access and Google capability.
But if actions really do speak louder than words, let’s skip the quotes and go straight to the action:
How’s this for world-class achievement?
Southern Hills has hosted three U.S. Opens, a record four PGA Championships and seven other major championships.
The legendary Tulsa club has hosted more major championships than any course except Augusta National, Oakmont and Oakland Hills.
Another major championship – the 2009 U.S. Amateur – is currently taking place.
The USGA and the PGA of America keep coming back to Southern Hills over and over and over again. Golf’s governing bodies could choose to take their championships anywhere, but the road to the Wanamaker Trophy and U.S. Open Trophy and Havemeyer Trophy continues to tour through Tulsa.
The Havemeyer Trophy, by the way, goes to the winner of the U.S. Amateur. Bob Murphy won a Havemeyer Trophy back in 1965 (the last time a U.S. Amateur was held at Southern Hills) before embarking on a career as a PGA Tour pro and a tower reporter for NBC.
Why do the USGA and PGA keep coming back to Southern Hills?
“First of all, the golf course, it is absolutely terrific. It always has been,” Murphy said. “I know as a youngster when I got out there to try to play my practice rounds and get an idea of how to play the golf course, I was just struck by not so much the huge elevations that you have at some golf courses, but the change of angles, and there is
an awful lot of shooting uphill and downhill and whatnot.
“But the greens are fantastic and I think I remember reading somewhere that Tommy Bolt said he had to shape more drives at Southern Hills than
most any place he had ever played. That speaks well for an old golf course designed as long ago as it was.”
Sam Snead won the 1945 Tulsa Open at Southern Hills and called Southern Hills one of the “class courses” in the country.
“So much is said about Augusta, but Southern Hills is so much better than Augusta,” Snead said. “If Augusta had these greens it would be something. I would rate Southern Hills with Pebble Beach and Baltusrol as the best U.S. Open courses I’ve ever played.”
Bob Dickson, runner-up to Murphy in the 1965 U.S. Amateur, said the fact that majors keep coming back to Southern Hills is a testament to the design of the course.
“Perry Maxwell and – I guess followed by his son – they didn’t design a lot of courses,” Dickson said. “But, boy, Southern Hills and Prairie Dunes and Dornick Hills, they just clicked. They took a piece of land and they were real artists. Southern Hills has certainly stood the test of time.”
Maxwell’s Genius
The golf course at Southern Hills was born one day before the Harper Valley PTA, sort of.
The course opened for play on May 24, 1936. Tom T. Hall, a country and western singer and songwriter who penned “Harper Valley PTA” for Jeannie C. Riley, was born the next day in Olive Hill, Ky.
Hall had hits of his own, as did New York Yankee Tony Lazzeri, who – the same day the course opened – bashed two grand slams and knocked in 11 runs in a 25-2 thrashing of the A’s.
But never mind birthdates and historic events. Really, the course was born when Perry Maxwell got a twinkle in his eye.
Born to Scottish parents in Kentucky, Maxwell was a banker who moved to Oklahoma when it was Indian Territory rather than a state. Intrigued by golf-course architecture and design, Maxwell created Dornick Hills in Ardmore. He is buried in a private cemetery on the edge of Dornick Hills and, before passing away in 1952, designed 75 courses and participated in the redesign of 50 others, including a sprucing up of Augusta National.
Maxwell’s masterpiece is Southern Hills, once a piece of pastureland in south Tulsa.
The pasture was converted to a country club in the heart of the Great Depression. The stock market crashed in 1929, and a country club near downtown Tulsa was considering opening its doors to the public. That, and a shortage of family recreational facilities, led businessmen Bill Warren and Cecil Canary to spearhead a charge for a new country club.
Tulsa oilman and banker Waite Phillips agreed to donate more than 300 acres of land for a country club if financial backers for construction could be found during those difficult economic times.
Phillips recruited Maxwell to design the golf course. Not much persuading had to be done, since Maxwell was champing at the bit to mold 18 holes over the natural contours of the land.
“It is just a heck of a layout,” Dickson said. “It’s very natural. They didn’t push a lot of dirt.”
Actually, Maxwell did uproot a bit of dirt – with tent stakes. He lived in a tent at Southern Hills during the two years it took to finish the project.
Southern Hills had its championship course. Now all Tulsa needed was someone to bring championships to the course.
Decision Pays Dividends
John M. Winters Jr. was a big, husky lad who captained University of Michigan golf teams in the 1920s. After college, he moved with his father and the rest of the family from Quincy, Ill., to Tulsa.
Dad eventually packed up and went back to Illinois.
John Jr. chose to stay and practice law.
The decision to stay greatly influenced Tulsa’s golf history. Would Southern Hills have ever hosted majors if Winters had followed his father back to Illinois?
Winters is regarded as the key man in bringing a U.S. Open to Southern Hills for the first time. The 1958 “Blast Furnace Open” – so named because of the weather – was won, coincidentally, by hot-tempered Tommy Bolt, an Oklahoman.
Winters, a Southern Hills founder and three-time club president, had all kinds of golf credentials and therefore possessed the clout and connections to get a championship delivered to Tulsa.
A taste of Winters’ golf resume: He was chairman of the USGA’s Rules Committee from 1956-59 and was a member of the Executive Committee from 1955-63, serving two years as USGA president. He chaired a committee that negotiated with the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of Scotland to unify the Rules of Golf in 1967. He was salty enough as a golfer that he was once considered a prospect for the Walker Cup team and was chosen a non-playing captain of the 1965 Americas Cup team and the 1971 Walker Cup team.
Winters was a bystander-turned-messenger in one of the most infamous finishes in major championship history. Roberto De Vicenzo lost the 1968 Masters because he signed an incorrect scorecard. Winters inherited the duty of delivering the bad news.
“Dad was on the Rules Committee at the Masters at the time,” said Winters’ son, J. Otis Winters.
“He told this story about walking across the grounds to Butler Cabin to get ready for the presentation and [tournament director] Cliff Roberts, the czar, came up to him and said ‘John, we have got a problem. You are going to have to disqualify Roberto.’
“Dad was the biggest guy and he was a lawyer on the Rules Committee, so they figured he was the one who got the job. He said he was as nervous as he could be doing that. He said he was a lot more nervous doing that than he was about listening to a judge give him a bad decision in court.
“But he said Roberto was a perfect gentleman and couldn’t have been nicer. He said ‘my fault.’ He really was very gracious and as a result of that he won the Bob Jones Award the next year, which the USGA gives out every year, and it’s a very cherished and coveted honor that golfers very much appreciate.”
J. Otis Winters said his father presented the green jacket to the Masters champ for six or seven years. John M. Winters Jr. died in 1989. Ben Hogan told the Tulsa World that Winters was a man who loved golf and wanted to give Tulsa something to be proud of.
Said Hogan, “He had a big hand in [Southern Hills’] development and it was very important to him.”
Southern Hills hosted two U.S. Opens and two PGA Championships during Winters’ lifetime. Two PGAs and a U.S. Open have been held here since.
J. Otis Winters is proud of his father’s role in bringing the highest level of golf to Tulsa. Others took the baton from Winters and continued
pursuit of major championships. For instance, people like Randy Olmstead and Larry Houchin worked tirelessly to secure the 2001 U.S. Open. Judy
Bell, a former USGA president, also deserves credit for her role in bringing the 2001 U.S. Open to Southern Hills.
Bell is from Wichita, Kan., and is an advocate of conducting national championships around the country instead of staging them primarily on
the East Coast or West Coast.
“They like to move their tournaments around to different areas,” said J. Otis Winters when asked why Southern Hills continues to get championships.
“That’s one of the reasons, and Southern Hills is certainly one of the best courses in the Southwest area. I think that’s a major reason. And Southern Hills has always put on a very good tournament. They have always had a wonderful staff and they have had just an extraordinary group of volunteers that keep coming out. Both the PGA and the USGA appreciate the way the community – not just the club, but the community – gets behind tournaments and supports them so well.”
More to Come?
Southern Hills is the only club ever to host four PGA Championships. During a press conference prior to the 2007 PGA, PGA of America CEO Joe Steranka said choosing Southern Hills wasn’t difficult.
“Southern Hills is a classic championship golf course that favors no one,” he said. “Because of its design and conditioning, it’s going to identify the very best player for the season’s final major. When you look at major golf championships, you want to start with a great site, a great golf course and have the support of a host club.”
Al Bush, a Southern Hills member who served as general chairman of the 2007 PGA Championship, once told Steranka that Southern Hills likes getting majors and is good at hosting them.
“The entire spirit of this club seems to be built around wanting to host the greatest championship in the world,” Steranka said. “That’s very attractive to the PGA to come to a place like this over and over.”
Southern Hills has a relationship with the USGA that dates to the 1946 U.S. Women’s Amateur. Other USGA events hosted by the club include the 1953 U.S. Junior Amateur, the 1961 USGA Senior Amateur, the 1965 U.S. Amateur and the 1987 U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur.
Perhaps hosting another U.S. Amateur will lead to Southern Hills getting another U.S. Open.
“The USGA is very, very good about that,” J. Otis Winters said. “They appreciate clubs taking – not lesser championships – but the big, nonrevenue championships. The U.S. Open is the one everybody wants.
But Southern Hills has always been good about taking the Amateur or the Senior Amateur or a Junior championship or a Mid-Amateur and things like that, and that means a lot to the USGA. I was on the USGA Sectional Affairs committee for many years and I always knew that an important part of being able to get a U.S. Open was to host their other championships, too.”
Before the 2007 PGA Championship, the Tulsa course was viewed as kryptonite to golf’s supermen.
Southern Hills hosted three U.S. Opens and three PGAs prior to 2007 and the men who won them (Bolt, Dave Stockton, Raymond Floyd, Hubert Green, Nick Price, Retief Goosen) combined to capture 14 majors. But Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus – winners of a collective 33 majors – went 0-for-Southern Hills.
“I’ve always had a hard time at Southern Hills,” Nicklaus once said. “It’s a wonderful golf course. It’s a tough golf course. But, you know, there’s some golf courses that you just never quite get the hang of.”
Nicklaus said he always liked the course, but never left with a trophy. “I guess there’s some other guys that didn’t come out with trophies either.”
Tiger Woods used to be in that group. Southern Hills was reputed to be a Tiger tamer because the Tiger Slam – his winning streak of four majors – ended there at the 2001 U.S. Open. Then Woods went out and obliterated the theory that Southern Hills is icon-proof by winning the 2007 PGA Championship.
Now the best amateurs get a crack at a course that has bedeviled pros – and may bedevil them again in the future.
Forty-four years after winning the 1965 U.S. Amateur, Murphy predicted the USGA and PGA will continue to bring championships to Tulsa.
Said Murphy, “I think they will be coming to Southern Hills for a long, long time.”
This article originally appeared in the 2009 U.S. Amateur Championship program.
