The 75 Biggest Moments in Golf Digest History, Part III: 1981-1992

Nobody likes listening to a golfer go through his or her entire round shot by shot, but allow us some indulgence as we near the end of our 75th anniversary year. We were very selective. To choose the 75 moments that tell our story—from a naval officer named Bill Davis getting a taste for magazine publishing after writing an account of a kamikaze attack, to our current position within global sports leader TNT Sports—we discarded stories and episodes that were merely popular or fun in favor of those that had lasting effect. An editorial moment had to ripple for years afterward in the way Golf Digest operated, the golf world or even media at large. That’s why senior editor John P. May quietly deciding in 1961 to try photographing Ben Hogan with an 8-millimeter motion camera, which birthed our interactive and digitized modern swing sequence analyses, gets the same nod of importance as when we upended tempers at the PGA Merchandise Show in 2004 with our first Hot List ranking of clubs. We also didn’t spare our embarrassments, such as when in 2010 the cover story “10 Tips Obama can take from Tiger” landed the same week revelations of Woods’ personal life busted the Internet and a fire hydrant.

Thank you for being a member of the Golf Digest community. We hope you enjoy the stroll down memory lane of this special club that predates us all.

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Max Adler, Editorial Director

The 75 Biggest Moments in Golf Digest History: 1940-1969 / 1970-1980 / 1981-1992 / 1994-2006 / 2007-2023

1980s

1981: Jerry Tarde describes the famed Merion East Course as a three-act play in a preview of the U.S. Open—the first six holes as a drama, the middle seven “short” holes as a comedy and the last five “long” holes as a tragedy. The analogy becomes part of the club’s historic narrative.

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The ninth hole at Merion Golf Club (East).

Stephen Szurlej

1981: The first mention of Tiger Woods appears in Golf Digest. Entitled “He’s Incredible,” the article says: “Initially exposed to golf at the age of six months, when he sat in a highchair and watched his dad hitting balls into a net in the garage, Tiger went to a driving range at 18 months and hit his first bucket of balls. Then he returned home, had his bottle and took a nap.”

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1984: We publish our first Best New Courses of the Year awards citing SentryWorld in Wisconsin (public) and Oyster Bay in South Carolina (resort). Best New becomes as equally popular as America’s 100 Greatest, especially over the next decade and a half when the number of courses built in America reaches one a day.

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1984: Herbert Warren Wind reveals for the first time how he came to name Augusta National’s 11th, 12th and 13th holes after a song (“No Shouting on the Amen Corner”) from the less popular side of a recording by Chicago clarinetist Milton (Mezz) Mezzrow.

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1984: The poet laureate Peter Dobereiner writes a column about the man already being called The Shark in his second year on tour, entitled “Will Greg Norman Reach Superstardom?”—“I will wager my Scottish castle that Norman will win at least one major championship. Beyond that I would prefer to hedge my bets.” (Norman won two.)

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1984: Jerry Tarde becomes chief editor at 28, and his first hires are Dan Jenkins as exclusive columnist and major championship writer and Ron Whitten as senior editor of architecture.

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1985: “We Found Him,” announces the headline to a story ending Golf Digest’s Search for America’s Worst Avid Golfer. Pittsburgh grocer Angelo Spagnolo shoots 257 over 18 grueling holes on the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course using “strict rules of golf” under the scrutiny of Deane Beman, the nation’s press and television coverage on all three networks’ evening news shows.

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1987: Our first Armchair Architect Contest challenges readers to design their own hole using a detailed topographical map of a fictional plot of land. More than 20,000 enter, including an 11-year-old named Tiger Woods. The winner is Robert R. Reilly, a retired dentist living in Boynton Beach, Fla. Another entry is filed by Mike Keiser, the Chicago-based greeting-card magnate who would protest not winning to architecture editor Ron Whitten but go on to develop the masterpieces known as Bandon Dunes, Cabot Cape Bretton and Sand Valley.

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March 1989: Golf Digest purchases Golf World with Dick Taylor as editor. The weekly becomes the news division of Golf Digest and later fuels a website and digital platforms with boundless content about every aspect of the pro, amateur and recreational game.

1989: Teaching pro John Elliott dons shorts on our cover, the first male to do so.

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1990s

1990: Contributing Editor Marcia Chambers writes a two-part series on the revolution in private clubs focusing on discriminatory membership practices against women and people of color. It leads to explosive revelations at Shoal Creek (“We don’t discriminate against anybody except the Blacks”) that cause momentous changes throughout golf’s top organizations, private clubs and competitive event venues. The series earns a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. Not through crusading, but solid reporting, her book The Unplayable Lie, published by Golf Digest and Pocket Books, changes the game at a time when it desperately needed to change.

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1991: Founder Bill Davis dies of ALS at 68. He once told an editorial assemblage that if they didn’t cost the company $1 million a year by incurring the wrath of a major advertiser, they probably weren’t doing their jobs.