I never knew my grandfather.
He died not long after my first birthday. From every indication, he would’ve been a terrific hang: career railroad man, World War II veteran, ex-amateur boxer. Hated Burl Ives. Probably a lot of fun to drink a beer with. But I never knew him.
Not long ago, I found his burial flag. When a veteran dies, the V.A. provides a flag for his casket; for obvious reasons, it often becomes a family memento. At some point, my grandfather’s flag found its way to my house. I was stunned. But I never knew him.
For golf fans of my generation — and the one before mine, for that matter — Byron Nelson was the game’s grandfather. Born in 1912, Nelson spent the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s battling Sam Snead and Ben Hogan as one of golf’s greatest champions. Nelson won five majors, including three from 1937-1940. And from 1944-1946, Nelson won an astonishing 32 PGA Tour events — including the 1945 Masters (one of 18 wins that year).
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Nelson worked as a television broadcaster, which only made admiration of Nelson grow. So it only made sense in 1968 for the Dallas Open to rename itself for its local icon and become the Byron Nelson Golf Classic.
That was more than 50 years ago. Nelson died in 2006. And by now, nearly a decade and a half since his death, the tournament that bears Nelson’s name is undeniably gathering dust.
On Sunday, The Dallas Morning News reported that 2020 will be the Byron Nelson’s final year at Trinity Forest Golf Club in southeast Dallas. The Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw-designed, links-inspired design has drawn widespread acclaim since opening in 2016, but it was always worlds apart from the staid, mass-produced, paint-by-numbers tracks that most PGA Tour events call home. And that was the point: Trinity Forest was a chance for the Nelson to be different, to reestablish a unique identity. For years, the Nelson has bled talent and, along with it, prestige; in 2019, the event’s strength of field was slightly weaker than the Desert Classic and the European Tour’s Turkish Airlines Open.
But the marriage between the Nelson and Trinity Forest never worked, for lots of reasons — some of them uncontrollable (like the weather, which was too rainy to support the design’s firm and fast intent), and some of them controllable but unavoidable (like Tour pros’ aversion to architecturally interesting designs). “The Byron Nelson’s short run at Trinity Forest wasn’t a failure,” Tim Cowlishaw of The Dallas Morning News mused, “but it was always a bad idea.”
A worse idea, though, would be to continue slapping Byron Nelson’s name on a thoughtless, uninteresting event and to pretend that it “honors” him. Trinity Forest has been described as a good golf course but not a good Tour venue; even if that’s true, Trinity Forest gave the Nelson an identity — it made the tournament mean something beyond the PGA Tour’s week-to-week mindlessness.
In fairness, the Nelson’s reported new permanent home — PGA Frisco, which Gil Hanse is designing ahead of a 2022 opening — has the architectural pedigree to deserve the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it will be worthy of Nelson. If it’s not, then perhaps there are other ways for the Tour to prioritize the event to the level it deserves.
Either way, the tournament’s departure from one of the PGA Tour’s only interesting designs merits finding a new, real way to honor Byron Nelson — or to stop trying altogether.
For fans of my generation, who remember Nelson more as a kindly, bespectacled old face than from his broadcasting days (much less his playing days), the tournament itself is an enormous part — if not the preeminent one — of Nelson’s legacy. We didn’t know him.
But even we know that, like a veteran’s old burial flag, slowly coming apart at the fibers in a dusty cardboard box, Byron Nelson’s memory deserves better. It deserves more than to be the only remarkable thing about an otherwise unremarkable Tour stop. And if the Tour can’t figure out how to honor Nelson, then it should end the pretense altogether.
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