The PGA Tour is once again in Palm Beach Gardens this week to start its Florida Swing at one of the year’s stiffest tests, PGA National. But while the tour teeing it up at the Champion course for the Cognizant Classic in February has become an expected part of the calendar the past couple decades, only golf fans of a certain age will recall the venue hosting the world’s best golfers in the dead of summer.
The year was 1987. President Ronald Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” and “Fatal Attraction” took the box office by storm. It was also the last time Florida hosted a men’s major. And it took place in (gulp) August, which seems about as dangerous as, well, Glenn Close’s character in “Fatal Attraction.”
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Not too surprisingly, in that month’s issue of Golf Digest, the 1987 PGA Championship was declared “The Hot Major” in the headline of the tournament preview. And the event lived up to that billing with the temperature reaching 97 degrees during Sunday’s final round.
“If you’re just talking temperature, then it won’t be any hotter than some previous championship sites,” Tom Fazio, the original designer along with his uncle George of PGA National’s Champion Course, told Golf Digest that year. “Anyone who has been to Tulsa knows that. But the humidity in Florida will make the difference. And in Florida, it doesn’t take until mid-day to get hot; it starts out hot.”
But many players were only lukewarm on the course at best. Golf Digest’s preview notes, “There has always been a wide difference of opinion on The Champion. Jack Nicklaus, for example, has been privately critical of it.”
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Interestingly, it was Nicklaus who oversaw a 2002 redesign, which made a tough track even tougher and led to the BEAR TRAP nickname given to the particularly difficult stretch of holes 15-17. But in 1987, Fazio seemed worried his design that opened in 1981 might play too easy in the heat.
“While the course was designed to be hard, it was set up with winter golf in mind,” Fazio told Golf Digest. “The closing holes were to be played into the wind. However, in the summer the wind direction changes and those holes will be playing downwind.”
That turned out to not be the case. Larry Nelson and Lanny Wadkins were the only two players to finish in red numbers in the sweltering heat—and they only got to one under par for the week. Nelson wound up beating Wadkins in a playoff for a third and final major of his career after Wadkins missed a four-foot par putt on the first extra hole.
There hasn’t been a men’s major championship played in Florida since. And the only other one held in the Sunshine State was the 1971 PGA Championship at the original PGA National—now known as BallenIsles Country Club—in Palm Beach Gardens. But that tournament was played in February of that year. Smart.
Back to 1987, it was a brutal finish for Wadkins, the PGA champion a decade before, who would end his career with that lone major victory despite winning 20 other times on the PGA Tour. And as Golf Digest’s preview showed, he was the betting favorite entering the tournament.
In case you thought sports gambling was a new development! Anyway, be sure to check out the rest of the Golf Digest archive and enjoy watching the golf from PGA National this week. No matter what happens, the golfers will certainly enjoy playing it more in February than August.
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
