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Deciding
the 10 most influential people in South
Carolina golf proved to be a lot like
the game itself. Using a stick to hit
a ball into a hole sounds simple enough.
But once you get stuck into the exercise,
all manner of quirks and special circumstances
come into play. To define the criteria
for a perfect list might have required
a book with as many regulations and
codicils as The Rules of Golf. Should
a candidate be alive to be considered?
Do they have to live in the Palmetto
state? Does their influence need to
be current or can it be past?
Members
of the South Carolina Golf Course Ratings
Panel wrestled with these questions
and many, many more before returning
a slate of candidates. In turn, that
list was broken down, rebuilt, analyzed,
and kicked in the tires by the panel's
board of directors. NASA should be so
careful with the space shuttle.
Through
all the hand-wringing and back and forth,
one truth remained immutable - fame
alone does not equate to influence.
This may go part way to explaining Beth
Daniel's absence from the list. An LPGA
and South Carolina Golf Hall of Famer,
the Charleston native now living in
Florida has 33 wins on the LPGA Tour
but her impact on the game in her home
state is apparently not so, well, apparent.
Roger
Warren, director of golf at Kiawah Island,
is sitting president of the 28,000-member
PGA of America and recently secured
the 2012 PGA Championship for Kiawah's
Ocean Course. Warren has the firepower
to rival most of the big guns in American
golf administration right now, but South
Carolina is only one of 50 states in
that realm. He only landed in the state
from Illinois in 2003 and that's recent
by anyone's measure.
World
renowned golf course architect, Tom
Fazio, has built more courses in South
Carolina than in any state other than
Florida. Pete Dye has built some of
the best, like Harbour Town, home of
the long-running Heritage championship,
and the aforementioned Ocean Course,
which hosted the Ryder Cup in 1991.
Together Fazio and Dye have done as
much as perhaps any individuals when
it comes to laying the stage itself.
But Fazio lives across the border in
North Carolina and Dye is in Florida,
and what's more, someone else came up
with the money for each and every course.
Developer
Jim Anthony did provide the money and
the moving power to transform the golfing
map in the Upstate with his Cliffs properties,
which host the Nationwide Tour's BMW
Charity Pro-Am each spring. But each
of Anthony's ultra high-end developments
is extremely private which limits his
range of influence.
There
are myriad other notable absentees from
our list, many with legitimate claims
for inclusion. But there was only room
for 10. What we have in the end, we
hope, is a list that in some cases affirms
what you knew and in others illuminates
what you may not have known. The unarguable
certainty is that everyone who did make
our list has made a difference, in the
right way.
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