The Magnolia Golf Classic was less than 10 years old when Robert Morgan, its executive director, appeared one morning grim and sullen in the doorway of the Hattiesburg American, metaphorical hat in hand. It was 1976. One day earlier, the tournament had finished playing host for the ninth time; for all Morgan knew, it was the last time. Sponsorships were down; the tournament was operating at a steep financial deficit; the country was still limping out of a brutal, two-year recession, and local businesses were offering few hints that they could (or would) do their parts to keep the event running.
The Hattiesburg American (April 12, 1976).
“He came in and sat down and talked to us,” said Rick Cleveland — the dean of Mississippi sports writers, and then the American’s young sports editor — “and said, ‘Boys, I’m coming to y’all because I’ve got nowhere else to go.’” The Magnolia Classic was on life support, Morgan explained. Unless its prognosis changed in the next 60 days, the tournament would be history.
Morgan brought a press release that read more like a manifesto, detailing the tournament’s perilous financial standing and all but naming the local restaurants, motels, and shops that had shunned the tournament. Cleveland ran the entire thing in his column that afternoon, admonishing — all but begging — the public to renew their support of Mississippi’s only moment in the professional sports spotlight.
Somehow, the gambit worked. The Magnolia Classic staved off death — though not for the last time — and enjoyed nearly 20 more years at Hattiesburg Country Club before moving north to the metro Jackson area, where it exists today as the Sanderson Farms Championship. This fall, the Sanderson takes a place more than 50 years in the making: financially secure, even flush, with a phenom defending champion and likely the strongest field in its history on tap. Nothing lasts forever, but today, the Sanderson’s financial perils are in the rearview mirror.
Whether the championship has left anything else behind is yet to be seen.
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The Magnolia Classic appeared in 1968 at a strange moment in professional golf’s history: mere months before the breakup between touring professionals and the PGA of America, which eventually led to the creation of the PGA Tour. The era of television contracts and ubiquitous title sponsors was still years away. A handful of events dented the national conscience, but for the most part, tournaments were local affairs.
The Magnolia Classic was more local than most. In its earliest iterations, the Magnolia Classic was part of a series of “PGA satellite” events — essentially opposite-field events with small purses that didn’t count as official tour wins. True to form, the inaugural Magnolia Classic offered a purse totaling $20,000 (or about $147,000 in 2019 dollars) and, in its early years, it played opposite the Masters (coincidentally, when Bob Goalby defeated Robert De Vicenzo in 1968, he pocketed $20,000). Rain, the event’s constant companion, forced a 36-hole final day that first year — and then some: Mac McLendon, playing his first tour event, outlasted veteran Pete Fleming in a nine-hole, sudden-death playoff. Spectators had to turn on their cars’ headlights in the nearby parking lot for the players to see.
In 1980, Roger Maltbie shot an opening-round 65 for a one-shot lead — which, after three days of torrential downpours, was declared the rain-shortened event’s winning score. After three days holed up in a Ramada Inn, Maltbie was approached by a sports writer with news that he’d won the $4,500 winner’s share. “Hell man,” Maltbie responded, “that won’t even pay my bar tab.”
Clint Eastwood, Mickey Mantle, and Dizzy Dean were frequent participants in the pro-am. Craig Stadler, Payne Stewart, and Jim Gallagher, Jr., won in the Hattiesburg Country Club days, too.
Of course, they rode those successes to something the tournament’s officials also wanted: something bigger than a satellite event, with the security of larger purses. That meant leaving Hattiesburg. In 1994, the tournament — by then the Deposit Guaranty Golf Classic — did just that and relocated to Annandale Golf Club, a Jack Nicklaus design in the suburbs north of Jackson. With the move came the legitimacy of being an official PGA Tour event — and survival. “If we had stayed in Hattiesburg at $300,000 [purse], my best guess was that we could probably play one more year, maybe two, and then we would have been gone anyway,” said Morgan (by then still the tournament’s director). “We were not able to keep pace with the other tournaments.”
Even at Annandale, though, some things did not change. The purse grew to $1 million in 1996, but still, no purse on Tour was smaller. The tournament finally came out from underneath the Masters’ shadow on the schedule, but moved to July to play opposite the Open Championship. The strength of the event’s field corresponded: just 17 of the PGA Tour’s top 100 money winners appeared in 1995. “Just because the name players aren’t here doesn’t mean the quality of golf isn’t here,” Kirk Triplett bristled ahead of the tournament. “It will still take the same score to win.”
And still, financial insecurity and various other calamities followed the tournament year after year — leading Sports Illustrated to dub the event “the little tournament that could.” Hurricane Katrina delayed the 2005 edition by a month; in 2009, Annandale received so much rain that the tournament was cancelled (“I told them it was closer to a FEMA disaster site than a golf course,” the tournament director said at the time).
Not all the tournament’s disasters were acts of God, though. Deposit Guaranty dropped out as title sponsor in 1999; Southern Farm Bureau stepped in, then itself walked away in 2007. The next title sponsor, Viking Range Corporation stuck around for four years, and a hodgepodge of medical clinics kept the event afloat in 2012 under the banner of something called the True South Classic. Its $3 million purse was smallest on Tour — and even that required tournament organizers to dig into a rainy-day fund. “(The tournament) is definitely going to be there. It just needs a lot of support from the local area,” an organizer said at the time. Somewhere, Robert Morgan’s ears must have been burning.
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Sanderson Farms might be known to golf fans as the sponsor whose event gives out a weird chicken trophy, but its place in the Mississippi economy is much more serious. It is a $3.1 billion company (by comparison, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company is a $2.8 billion company) — the third-largest poultry producer in America, and an employer of more than 15,000 people. On the spectrum of Mississippi’s possible PGA Tour title sponsors, Sanderson Farms was about as far from a hodgepodge of medical clinics as you could imagine. Since coming on board in 2013 and dubbing the tournament with its present name, the Sanderson Farms Championship, the company has brought nearly everything that the event has ever craved: year-to-year financial security, and — perhaps more importantly — an identity.
Cameron Champ, triumphant at the 2018 Sanderson Farms Championship after a four-shot win in only his seventh PGA Tour start as a pro.
“I’ve heard the stories of how they struggled, and I saw it from a distance,” said Steve Jent, the Sanderson’s tournament director since 2013, who previously led marketing efforts for the Wyndham Championship. “I’ve been part of the PGA Tour for about 15 years now, so I saw what everybody goes through. It all comes back to having a great title sponsor; I think they had good title sponsors here, but there wasn’t any kind of longevity or consistency. It always seemed like just when they’d get things going, they’d have to be on the lookout for a new title sponsor. I think people still remember those times and are very grateful for where we are now.”
Since moving to the Country Club of Jackson in 2014, Sanderson Farms has extended its title sponsorship through 2026 and has increased the event’s purse from $3 million to $6.6 million in 2019 — a purse that would have been the fall’s largest stateside Tour event a year ago, and which nearly matches the 2018 purses of the Honda Classic ($6.8 million) and the RBC Heritage ($6.9 million). Critically, the increased purse value allowed the Sanderson its own spot on the PGA Tour schedule, without having to stomach a larger event poaching the world’s best players. That means a full-sized field (156 players, up from 132), a full offering of 500 FedEx Cup points to the winner (opposite-field events award just 300 points), and a spot in the Masters to the tournament’s winner.
“You’d have to have seen how precarious their situation was in the early years,” Cleveland said, “to know how amazing it is to see where it’s come to now.”
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The Sanderson Farms Championship is, without doubt, the only tournament in PGA Tour history whose tee boxes are adorned by hand-painted chickens.
A funny thing happened on the Sanderson’s 50-years-long road from obscurity to legitimacy: hardcore golf fans really started liking it. On a tour where drama and ambiance usually are badly manufactured, a small handful of events have developed genuine, organic followings: the Waste Management, Riviera, and the John Deere, for example. The Sanderson lacked Scottsdale’s depravity or Riviera’s history, but it had something all its own: quirkiness. A small, (somehow) tasteful chicken logo is ubiquitous on the event’s merchandise; patients at Batson Children’s Hospital, the event’s primary charity, hand-paint the chicken-shaped tee markers; the trophy — sure to adorn the winner’s home in a place of great honor for decades to come — is a chicken, for God’s sake.
“I think it’s one of those events that’s the guts of the PGA Tour’s origin story,” said Brendan Porath, a golf writer for SB Nation and co-host of The Shotgun Start podcast. “And maybe the Sanderson wasn’t there in the beginning, but it’s out of a time and place of where the Tour came to be: markets creating, supporting, upholding events. It’s not the only game in town, but it’s probably one of the biggest games in town, and it kind of evokes this era of guys getting in their car and traveling from one stop to the next.”
The fields have been equally eclectic: while majors and World Golf Championships have lured the world’s top headliners, the opposite-field Sanderson has drawn rookies straight off the developmental tour fighting tooth and nail for status, along with veterans desperate to find lightning in a bottle one more time. Recent winners have represented this range: 23-year-old freakshow Cameron Champ plowed the field in 2018, but a year prior, it was 41-year-old Ryan Armour making the Sanderson his first PGA Tour win (Armour ranked 185th in driving distance among Tour pros that season).
Forget purse size or FedEx Cup points. Nearly by accident, the Sanderson became a golf fan’s golf tournament.
“The Sanderson should embrace its identity as this awesome, first look,” Porath said. “You know how NBA Summer League has this whole culture around it? Building a whole culture around getting that first look at all these new rookies and young guys who just realized a lifelong dream of getting a Tour card — playing for status, playing as a rookie, that should be the identity separate and apart from the purse.”
Even Jent, the Sanderson’s tournament director, acknowledges that personality might soon change.
“I said a few years ago that we considered ourselves a launching pad for a player’s career — coming right off the Web Tour, a lot of times it was these guys’ first win,” Jent said. “That was kind of our identity. It’ll be interesting to see how things change over the next few years with our new position.”
Jent is quick to point out that the 2019 tournament’s larger field, made possible as a standalone event, should mitigate against rookies and lower-status veterans being pushed out of the Sanderson. On the other hand, the PGA Tour requires players with fewer than 25 starts to add a new event the following year; for pros who have to pick somewhere new, the Masters berth and increased prize money undoubtedly will make Jackson more attractive than it has been. And Porath argues that the Sanderson’s place on the schedule — the event’s organizers prefer a Fall spot — probably insulates it from too much growth too quickly.
Both are probably right. But it is inevitable that the Sanderson’s field will be much stronger in 2019 than it ever has before (the 2018 edition’s strength of field fell between the John Deere Classic and the Barracuda Championship). For every top-100 pro who plays, someone else can’t.
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To be clear, a bigger purse and a stronger field are good problems for a golf tournament to have; stronger fields attract bigger crowds. For half a century, this event has ached for those problems. And now, they have taken the Sanderson Farms Championship to a place where even the most vocal supporters of its early years would never have dreamed (“We may never get the ‘name’ players,” a Hattiesburg American columnist mused after the 1968 tournament’s exciting finish, “but who needs them when you get golf like we had this past week?”). No tournament would turn down the possibilities that more money brings, nor would its charity beneficiaries. “There’s really nothing holding us back from meeting a lot of our goals,” Jent said.
But there is another side to that coin: indisputably, the Sanderson is no longer the little tournament that could. A $6.6 million standalone event is not an underdog. A field whose strength is more in line with the average PGA Tour event is, by definition, more average.
The troubles that plagued the Sanderson for decades are now fully a thing of the past. Whether the qualities that lured hardcore golf fans also are gone is, for now, as unclear as the tournament’s future used to be.
“I think we’re entering a new stage of it,” Cleveland said. “We’ll just have to see. ‘Quirky’ probably has been a good adjective for it over the course of its existence, but I do think it might be entering a new stage.”
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All photos: credit Sanderson Farms Championship
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