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DEL.ICIO.USUSGA business never better under Driver
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
His stern features leap out at you from the cover of Golf World, Walter Driver, like the principal you have been called before to answer for some misdemeanor. Seriously handsome, jaw firmly set, his salt-and-pepper hair strategically in place. This is the chief executive of the U.S. Golf Association, of whom the headlined question reads: “Can the USGA Survive Walter Driver?”
Not some driving club named Walter, but the man of whom the subhead reads: “The tumultuous reign of the association’s controversial president.”
USGA presidents usually glide smoothly into office and usually glide just as “untumultuously” out. Usually, they are lawyers, bankers, brokers, realtors, and usually with a respectable handicap. In some cases, champion players, as was Driver’s predecessor, Fred Ridley Jr., who had been U.S. Amateur champion. Rarely ever a newspaperman, as in the case of Reg Murphy, once editor of papers in Atlanta, San Francisco and Baltimore, hence retired and living at Sea Island.
Walter Driver Jr. came out of Texas, schooled at Stanford and settled in Atlanta, chairman presiding over about 800 lawyers at the firm of King & Spalding at the time he cut his teeth as general counsel of the USGA. A player himself, three-time champion of Peachtree Golf Club, noted for the handicap caliber of its membership. Driver’s entry into the USGA presidency came on the wave of a storm.
The Open had returned for the third time to Shinnecock Hills in 2004. Driver was chairman of the USGA’s competition committee, which means the responsibility of setting up the course was his. “His arid setup,” as Golf World phrases it, “was an embarrassment,” a term to be questioned.
“Arid” refers to the rain which was forecast, but didn’t fall, and the winds which dried out the greens. Curses to the competition chairman. Now, checking the record, you will find that when Raymond Floyd won the first Open played at Shinnecock, his score was 1 under par. When Corey Pavin won the second, with a storied 4-wood to the 18th green, his score was even par. When Retief Goosen ran down Phil Mickelson in the stretch in 2004, he played the “arid, embarrassing” course four strokes under par. Weathering the storm, so to speak, Driver moved ahead in the order of succession into the presidency.
Thus, he became the bull’s-eye in a public-relations shooting gallery. He was dead game. But did he flinch? Not Walter Driver. He forged ahead with his game plan unruffled, to instill some sound business principles into a somewhat “bloated USGA” (Golf World’s term), and addressed it head-on with his speech at the annual convention in February, titled “The USGA As An Organization and a Business.”
It’s noteworthy here that since his ascension to the presidency, Driver has left King & Spalding for a career with the investment firm, Goldman Sachs, which has been a raging inferno of prosperity of late. He’s still based in Atlanta, chairman of the southeast region, and it all fits into his ambitious plan for the USGA. He has his critics within the stuffed-shirt, navy blue, red, white and blue-tied drawing-room culture, but here Reg Murphy speaks up.
“I would say his effort to instill a new level of business-like procedure at the USGA has been important,” he tells Golf World. “He’s tried to create a more business-like organization.”
Driving the USGA deals with a variety of avenues. Grooves. Trampoline effect. Coefficient of restitution, or COR. This golfspeak reads like some planetary tongue to the everyday golfer. What they don’t speak of with enough force is reigning in the ball, one of Jack Nicklaus’ main interests. Driver has a few more months to put his USGA plan into play, but this week will be his last on the public stage.
This will be the last U.S. Open of his presidency, played on one of the classic old courses in the country. This will be the eighth Open played at Oakmont, and only once in modern times has par been broken there, in 1994, when Ernie Els, Loren Roberts and Colin Montgomerie checked in at 279, one under. (Els won the playoff.)
This will not be an Oakmont any of these players remember. A few years ago, a rather surreptitious tree-cutting program was started, and carried out so devilishly that all of a sudden, one day members looked around and said, “What happened to our trees?”
They’re all gone. The place looks like one huge prairie of green. And nobody can blame Walter Driver and his little red axe. It was all done before he got there.
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