THE BOOK

BOOK REVIEW

ON BEMAN
A New History Dishes
The Details and Some Dirt
By Guy Yocom
he triumphs, trials, innovations and feuds of
Deane Beman during his 20-year run as commissioner of the PGA Tour were many, and
a visible backdrop to the tour itself. The largest cogs of the modern tour leviathan were
established during Beman’s run (1974-’94), including the Champions and Nationwide
tours, Tournament Players Clubs, the Players Championship, the Presidents Cup, sta-
dium golf, the all-exempt tour for players and even early forerunners to the FedEx Cup
and Tour Championship. There also were misses, most notably a courtroom clash with
Karsten Solheim over U-grooves that nearly ended in disaster for the tour. Beman’s
public rows with players and more covert dust-ups with executives and administrators
made his tenure contentious and colorful. The PGA Tour before 1974 was primitive in
many ways, and when he succeeded Joseph C. Dey, the challenge of growing the tour
seemed suited for a man of Beman’s drive and guile. Over the next two decades, Beman
escorted the tour into the modern age with a combustible blend of initiative, force of
will, political savvy and a paternal determination to protect the men he represented. ➸

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 BOOK REVIEW
This is a guy we’d like to meet. In Deane Beman: Golf’s Driving
Force, the reader gradually extrapolates what Beman was about, not
through examination of his personal life or the events that shaped
his personality and character but by extensive chronicling of his ca-
reer and his battles. You discover, through a detailed recounting of
each Beman initiative, a man whose nature as an executive mirrored
the qualities he showed as a player. Smallish in stature and never a
long hitter, Beman compiled a spectacular amateur record (win-
ning two U.S. Amateurs) and a successful one as a pro, relying on
tenacity, shrewd course management and deadly putting. He was
dogged and intense, a player who, as Dave Marr once said, “beat you
with his intellect.” These traits carried over into his job as commis-
sioner, the right man at an opportune time.
So, the book ultimately is a portrait of Beman told within the con-
text of his life’s work. The author, Adam Schupak, a skilled writer
who had known Beman while working at the World Golf Hall of
Fame, for years had urged the former commissioner to tell his story.
Beman finally relented in 2009 and had considerable influence on
the book’s authorized telling, offering his records, recollections and
personal notes as well as reviewing Schupak’s manuscript.
Schupak says Beman insisted on balance and varying viewpoints,
encouraging Schupak to interview as many individuals as possible,
friend and foe alike. Schupak eventually talked to more than 200
people. “Deane told me early on, ‘I’m not looking for a stenogra-
pher,’ ” Schupak says.
WINNING SOME,
LOSING SOME
I
ndeed, much of the content is no valentine to Beman. The
chapter on the U-grooves episode is comprehensive and,
though implying that Beman’s desire to ban them was noble,
makes clear that his tour’s funds were at risk if the legal
dispute with Solheim were lost. When the case was settled out of
court, with Solheim’s Ping Eye2 irons remaining legal on tour and
the tour’s insurance fund paying Solheim an estimated $9 million,
Beman declared victory. His statements in the book reiterate that
claim, but the preponderance of evidence weighed against him
for years. When the USGA rolled back groove guidelines in 2008,
Beman seemed to have been at least partially vindicated, and he lets
it be known in the book. Elsewhere, Beman demonstrates humility,
particularly when he arrives at an NBC executive’s office just a few
days after spurning him, this time apologetic when a deal with an-
other network had suddenly fallen through.
Chapters are dedicated to every key phase of Beman’s career and
provide an interesting recounting of how he acquired the commis-
sioner’s job, and insight into the PGA Tour operation he inherited.
It is noted how Beman, a sharp man but a golfer by trade, learned
as he went along. His early conquests included getting the tour as-
signed tax-exempt status, which has saved the organization close
to half a billion dollars. His negotiations for TV packages and his
sparring with the various networks are explored with a level of de-
tail that a casual reader will strain to get through but which serious
Deane Beman: Golf’s Driving Force. The Inside Story of The Man
Who Transformed Professional Golf Into a Billion Dollar Business,
by Adam Schupak, copyright © 2011 by East Cottage Press, $27.95.
126 / G O L F D I G E S T. C O M / JUNE 2011
fans will devour the way political junkies dig into C-SPAN. Beman’s
separation of the PGA Tour brand from the PGA of America, then
helping the two bodies reunite (sort of ) was a battle with several
hard-fought turns, and it’s told well. Even the back stories to each
section, necessary to provide context, give a look at how big busi-
ness was and is conducted.
BATTLING
NICKLAUS
T
here is minute-by-minute drama, too. The important
episode in which players (Jack Nicklaus and Arnold
Palmer among them) revolted against Beman for estab-
lishing initiatives that they maintained were robbing
them of their independence and were contrary to their individual
business interests, is especially dramatic. After a meeting in which
the player grievances were announced, a huffy Nicklaus boards a
flight and is seated next to Jim Colbert (a Beman ally). Nicklaus,
aghast at Beman’s blatant use of authority, asks Colbert, “Who
granted [Beman] those privileges?” Colbert, pointing at an early
tour charter that Nicklaus and others had signed, answers, “You
did.” Nicklaus and other players, it turned out, had granted Beman
that authority after all. They eventually backed off their efforts to
have Beman removed.
From Beman’s memory come some quirky surprises. Schupak
reveals an occasion before Beman became commissioner when
he suggested to Joe Dey that the U.S. Open be played on a rota of
USGA-owned, spectator-friendly courses. “The USGA just didn’t
have the vision for what it could be,” Beman sighs today.
No question, Beman was an idea man. The PGA Tour’s statistics
program, modern electronic leader boards and the slogan “The lead-
ing money-winner is charity” originated with him. Most ideas were
realized, and a few were not. But what emanates through the text is
that Beman imparted his notions decisively and was an audacious
administrator, unafraid of failure and quick to rebound when he fell.
There are bits that will elicit arched eyebrows. The section on
the development of TPC Sawgrass and the Players Champion-
ship is perhaps too earnest in its praise for Beman, emphasizing
that Pete Dye’s masterpiece design was performed on a template
of Beman’s making. The Champions Tour is depicted as an initia-
tive that, though not conceived by Beman, needed his guidance to
make it a success. True to some extent, but would not inertia and
Arnold Palmer have taken it there eventually? Of the all-exempt
tour and its chief designer, Gary McCord, Beman merely says, “Gary
deserves a lot of credit for convincing the guys that it was a better
ALL SECON DARY CREDITS • WI LL GO HERE • AS SH OWN
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idea.” The TPC network of courses was a tremendous innovation
that was right for the time, but how many of them are thriving now?
For readers with a taste for the salacious, Beman’s spats with
Mac O’Grady and Seve Ballesteros are covered in delicious depth.
These are juicy episodes that apparently are too appealing for
Schupak or Beman to ignore.
Beman in retirement is depicted as a man active and willing to
voice observations on the game, particularly a condemnation of
equipment technology. A certain restlessness comes through, and
you wonder where Beman, 73, will go from here. In the end, he de-
fined the job of PGA Tour commissioner, it defined him, and mil-
lions were better off having had him. ♣
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