Ebbs and Flows Mark
the Histories of Both Memphis
and Its Pro Golf Tournament
Both literally and figuratively, Memphis was built on the Mississippi River. But the river, like this 200-year-old city atop its eastern bluffs, is an enigma: its strength eludes any simple explanation. John M. Barry’s Rising Tide explains that from the convergence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers at Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River winds some 1,100 miles — but for all that length, it descends a total elevation of just 290 feet. That works out to about four inches of drop per mile; in places, its slope is less than two inches per mile. It is, as Barry puts it, “some of the flattest land in the world.” Rivers generally draw their strength from running downhill; water flowing across land as docile as this should be wandering lazily to the sea.
But the Mississippi does nothing lazily. It is one of the most powerful, complex rivers on Earth. At its surface, it flows down in places, upstream in others, and in still others it swirls and seems to boil. Beneath its surface, it cuts through the southern half of the country in a repeating “S” pattern, crashing against riverbanks and carving out its own bottom like a saw. Even for engineers, it is a mystery: theories that explain the dynamics of other major rivers frequently do not apply to the Mississippi.
At a glance, it shouldn’t deliver so much force. But the river punches hard. So does Memphis.
. . .
From its founding in 1819, Memphis’ history has been one comeback story after another. Wayne Dowdy’s A Brief History of Memphis tells tale that during the city’s first decade, a German nobleman passing through Memphis described it as “a group of rather miserable houses.” By the 1850s, though, it had parlayed its position on the Mississippi River into becoming an epicenter of American commerce. Memphis had arrived. During the 1870s, a series of yellow fever epidemics nearly wiped the city out; in the summer of 1878 alone, half the city’s population fled the disease, and of those who remained, one of every four died. But a little more than a decade later, Memphis’ population had doubled again. Memphis was back.
Some of Memphis’ wounds have been self-inflicted, though, and none more than white flight. In 1960, nearly two-thirds of Memphis’ population was white. By 1990, that figure had fallen to less than half; today, it’s just 29 percent. In 1999, the New York Times reported that the top-heavy economic boom of the Nineties had largely passed Memphis by: its unemployment rate was higher than its regional rivals, and so was its poverty rate. “Memphis has not experienced a major breakthrough for African-Americans in terms of accumulating wealth,” then-Mayor Willie Herenton told the Times that year. “It’s not an easy city to break the barriers of the past, getting capital, doing joint ventures, developing strategic alliances with successful majority companies.”
Today, Memphis has stopped a lot of its socioeconomic bleeding. The unemployment rate is 3.8 percent — in line with the national average, and about where it was in 1999, but now comparable to Birmingham (3.6 percent) and Atlanta (3.8 percent). And its white population, while still far below what it was 60 years ago, has remained stable since 2010.
Some wounds fester, though. Memphis’ poverty rate is an obscene 26.9 percent — more than twice the national average, and well above what existed a generation ago (20.6 percent in 2000). There is the ignominy of being the city where America’s most important civil rights champion was murdered. And there is the wounded self-esteem that comes from watching a rival metropolis three hours to the east rise to national prominence while this city remains, in the eyes of many, what Time magazine described in the wake of Dr. King’s murder: “a decaying backwater river town.”
“It bothered people and it still bothers them, about how people dismiss Memphis. It’s not the richest city, and it has its struggles, especially with poverty,” said Geoff Calkins, who has covered Memphis sports for nearly a quarter-century. “People denigrate Memphis unfairly all the time.”
Disrespect can lead to self-pity. Or it can put a chip on one’s shoulder.
. . .
The Jackson Sun (May 24, 1965).
The magnitude of Memphis’ new World Golf Championships event, which replaces the FedEx St. Jude Classic on the PGA Tour calendar this July, is difficult to overstate. It will bring together the strongest field of any publicly accessible golf tournament anywhere in the South, period (the Masters doesn’t count; any tournament whose attendees first must literally win the lottery isn’t publicly accessible). And occurring the week after the year’s final major makes this WGC arguably golf’s last big bang of the season.
Although this will be Memphis’ first WGC event, this tournament is no fly-by-night pop-up shop. Professional golf has been in Memphis almost as long as Rendezvous Barbecue. The WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational’s oldest ancestor, the Memphis Invitational, first took place in 1958. A few years later, it was the Memphis Open. By 1970, it became the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, when the comedian leant his name to the event in exchange for the tournament raising money for a new children’s hospital, St. Jude’s. FedEx came on board as title sponsor in 1986; only one event on the PGA Tour (the Honda Classic) has a longer-standing relationship between tournament and title sponsor.
That’s not to say that the event’s sponsorship has avoided tumult; in Memphis, nothing does. In 2007 and 2008, the tournament was called the Stanford St. Jude Championship — “Stanford” as in Stanford Financial Group, as in Allen Stanford, as in the Ponzi scheme operator who committed an $8 billion fraud and is serving a 110-year sentence in federal prison. After the federal government charged Stanford in 2009, the PGA Tour scrambled for a new title sponsor until FedEx — which had remained a “presenting sponsor” during the Stanford Financial era — came back to the rescue (in the middle of a recession, no less).
“FedEx believes in the game of golf and the PGA Tour,” said Darrell Smith, the tournament’s executive director. “There’s no better corporate sponsor, no more important sponsor, than FedEx.”
The event’s winners read like an almanac of golf’s greatest players through all the tournament’s eras. Jack Nicklaus won in 1965. Between 1971-1980, Lee Trevino won three times. Gary Player won in 1974. In 1987, Curtis Strange edged out Tom Kite and three others by a stroke. Fred Couples won in 1991; in 1997, it was Greg Norman. In 2010, Lee Westwood — just four months away from supplanting Tiger Woods as world No. 1 — won a three-way playoff. Last year, Dustin Johnson won it for the second time when he crushed the field by six strokes.
This isn’t some speed bump on the Tour’s schedule, or some gratuitous get-together for corporate bigwigs. It’s a proving ground. For 61 years, it’s been a barometer for the game’s elite. The best players in the world have won here, over and over.
Yet again, though, drawing the game’s best has not been easy. From 2007-2018, the tournament was played the week before the U.S. Open, leaving organizers the unenviable task of recruiting players to spend four days in the Tennessee heat just ahead of the year’s most brutal test (and dodging withdrawals from the Open’s final qualifiers). It has been an uphill struggle; the strengths of the past two events’ fields have been comparable to the Greenbrier event in West Virginia. But there have been coups, too: Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler have played in recent years, and Dustin Johnson’s win last year propelled him to No. 1 in the world.
“Through all the ups and downs of Memphis trying to be a major league city, Memphis has had a giant chip on its shoulder,” Calkins said. “As Memphis has wanted to be part of the big leagues, the event that it always pointed to was this Tour stop.”
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The Germantown News (July 20, 1989).
TPC Southwind might not inspire visions of rich golfing heritage, but it has quietly become one of the PGA Tour’s mainstays: only 10 events have been held at the same course longer than the Fedex St. Jude has been at TPC Southwind. July will mark the tournament’s 31st year at Southwind — fully half the event’s life.
Colonial Country Club in East Memphis served as the event’s original home, but even by 1970, Tour pros were delivering more than Colonial could take; it tipped out at less than 6,600 yards (short by Tour standards, even in those days) and played to a par of 70. But when Colonial moved outside the city limits in 1972, the tournament followed; it stayed there until 1989, when it was adopted by TPC Southwind and moved back inside Memphis. It’s been there ever since.
Undoubtedly, the PGA Tour’s ownership of TPC properties makes the arrangement between Southwind and the FedEx St. Jude more natural, but there is more to this marriage than convenience.
“I think it’s the most underrated course we have on Tour,” Phil Mickelson said in 2015. “It’s such a straightforward, fun test of golf. And if you hit good shots you get rewarded with good putts and birdies. And if you miss the greens you’re challenged by very difficult up and downs. It’s a wonderful layout.”
The course underwent a major renovation after the 2004 tournament: the bent grass greens were ripped up and replaced with Bermuda, and fairways were recontoured. More than 120 trees were added, as was 200 yards in length.
“The course was too easy,” Calkins said, and not without good reason: less than 10 years before the renovation, John Cook won the 2006 tournament at 26-under. Between 1990-2004, just one tournament was won with a score higher than 15-under.
“The golf course has improved greatly since 2005. We’ve overhauled the putting surfaces, and they’re in better shape,” Smith said. “The golf course rewards good shots and penalizes bad shots. There’s nothing silly about it. Everything is always right in front of you.”
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There is no point in pretending that FedEx is not the PGA Tour’s most important sponsor, nor that Memphis’ Tour event would now be a WGC without FedEx’s support. The tournament does not try.
But that oversimplifies things: this tournament would not exist without FedEx, either as a WGC or as anything else.
“The tournament had a really rough spot — it nearly went belly up when Stanford Financial came in and then went under,” Calkins said. “But people cared about the tournament so much, and FedEx has sustained the tournament. They were committed not only to not letting the tournament die but not letting it be irrelevant, and raising it to a level that was never thought possible.”
That commitment is a mirror image of FedEx’s role in Memphis’ cultural landscape. It is more than just a famous name in a local Chamber of Commerce brochure. It has been a $49 billion anchor in a city that has endured decades of anxiety, economic and otherwise. In February 2019, it announced its plans to move its corporate headquarters to downtown Memphis. It is not only difficult to imagine where this PGA Tour event would be in 2019 without FedEx; it is difficult to imagine where Memphis would be. And that commitment is finally paying dividends outside that company alone: of the $15 billion in development ongoing in the greater Memphis area, most is occurring inside the city limits.
“For decades, people have never been able to say there was more development inside the city limits than out,” said Kyle Veazey, a deputy chief operating officer for the City of Memphis (and himself a former Memphis sports reporter). “You’d probably have to go back to the Fifties to find the last time that happened.”
The local economy is not the only part of Memphis that has grown alongside the golf tournament. In 2013 — against pressure from state lawmakers — the city council renamed three Confederate-themed public parks. And in 2017, the city cleared the way to remove statues of two Confederate figureheads — again in defiance of the state Capitol. These steps were symbolic, true, but critical in a larger comeback.
“It was undoubtedly the right thing to do,” Veazey said, “but also the thing to do to be the city that we are becoming.”
. . .
A golf tournament does not undo decades of social anxiety. But in a city that has spent its history following setback with comeback, again and again, the evolution of Memphis’ Tour event into a WGC is another step forward — forward from the event’s glimpse at demise in 2009, forward from the city’s self-transformation from a “decaying, backwater river town” into a community that tears down statutes of white supremacists and welcomes sunlight into the shadows they once cast.
There is a symmetry to the evolution of Memphis’ PGA Tour event occurring in 2019: this is Memphis’ 200th anniversary. Hope naturally flows from such moments, even in a place whose history has been marked by ebbs and flows as much as the river running along its side. Likewise, until the curtains come down on Sunday afternoon in late July, the WGC will have its doubters: it still abuts a major, still occurs in the dead of summer. The tournament, the river, and the city all have been doubted before.
“The brand of Memphis wouldn’t work if we weren’t underdogs,” Veazey said.
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All photos: credit WGC-FedEx St. Jude Invitational