What’s in a name

Hazeltine, the golf course with a name that sounds like a health drink, has come a long way since staging it’s first major golf championship in 1970.

The site of this week’s United States PGA Championship, the fourth and last major of the year, was extremely unpopular among the pros when they made their way to the outskirts of Minneapolis for that year’s US Open.

The course, according to one historian, was “short on tradition and long on dog-legs” and the field complained bitterly about blind shots; the normally diplomatic Jack Nicklaus going so far as to say it lacked definition and revealing that on one hole his target was the chimney on someone’s house.

Dave Hill, a moderately good player who earned greater notoriety for his peppery temperament and acerbic wit, in fact, was fined $150 by the PGA Tour for an exchange he prompted in the Press room by stating that if he had to play Hazeltine every day, he’d find another game.

“What does it lack?” he was asked.

“Eighty acres of corn and a few cows,” he quipped. “They ruined a good farm when they built this course.”

“What do you recommend they do with it?” came the next question.

“Plow it up and start over.”

In the end Hill would finish a distant second (seven shots adrift) to Tony Jacklin – the latter becoming the first Englishman in 50 years to claim the United States Open.

Hill, however, remained sour. Years later in recalling his experiences there he said: “The greens resembled Indian burial mounds more than anything else, and their horses had been buried along with the Indians.”

That was then. Many changes were made to the course in Chaska, Minnesota, which takes its name from the lake along whose banks it is built, and by 1991 when Payne Stewart beat Scott Simpson in a play-off for the US Open it was considered one of America’s finest.

An interesting oddity of this week’s PGA is that it links two of the most interesting names in the glossary of golf. Hazeltine National Golf Club was founded by a former president of the United States Golf Association by the name of Totton P Heffelfinger (I kid you not!) and, of course, the PGA trophy bears the name of Rodman Wanamaker, the New York department store magnate who donated it to the championship in 1916.

This week, however, the names on everyone’s lips will be Ernie Els and Tiger Woods – the former going for back-to-back majors and the latter attempting to become the first player to twice win three majors in a single calendar year.

As always SuperSport will bring you all the action. Check out the Action Attractions to see when and on which channel you will be able watch the golf.