Lynch: As Golfweek celebrates its 50th, the only constant is change

(Editor's note: Golfweek is celebrating its 50th anniversary, which will continue through upcoming issues of the magazine and a gala to be held in conjunction with this year's PGA Show in Orlando. For the first 50 days of 2026, Golfweek will share former employee memories and covers from through the years.)

For those among us who believe that the PGA Tour has gradually sacrificed character for corporatism, the 1975 schedule provides a substantial book of supporting evidence. That was the year of Golfweek’s debut, when a slew of tournaments were hosted by celebrities whose naming privileges have long since been erased by whiz kid CMOs who value only KPIs.

Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Andy Williams, Glen Campbell, and Danny Thomas have ceded top billing to AT&T, American Express, Farmers Insurance, Genesis, and FedEx St. Jude. Dean Martin also had a stop, in Tucson, which later became the Chrysler Classic before going dark. Even Ed McMahon was attached to an event, which still bears a guy’s name: John Deere. Celebrity affiliations these days don’t extend beyond a Creator Classic.

Since it was held opposite the British Open, the purse at the ’75 Deere was just $75,000, about $450,000 in today’s dollars. Roger Maltbie won that week, and the next. His two first-place checks totaled the equivalent of $330,000, less than Sepp Straka received for finishing dead last in the Tour Championship.

Unlike Roger, Sepp didn’t leave his check in a bar. Jack Nicklaus won five times that season, including two majors, and topped the money list with an inflation-adjusted $1.78 million — about what Cameron Young picked up for winning his first title in August at the Wyndham Championship.

That was the spring when Lee Elder broke the color barrier at the Masters. It was dismally appropriate to golf’s modern ethos that a 2021 first tee commemoration of that historic moment was marred when a grifting gobshite named Wayne Player did what he’d spent a lifetime doing, riding his dad’s coat tails to a place he had no business being, then performed a marketing stunt by positioning a sleeve of golf balls head high behind the wheelchair-bound Elder.

The Open was held at Carnoustie that summer. Vintage photos show players on a practice range that resembled a chewed-up cow pasture, the likes of which would have today’s superstars hurdling handers to post intemperate complaints on social media. Tom Watson beat Jack Newton in a playoff. Newton died a few years back. He was a hell of a player and hellraiser. A few years after finishing runner-up in the ’80 Masters, he walked into a propeller on a rainy night at the Sydney airport, losing his right arm and eye.

Bert Yancey competed in his last major that summer of ‘75. He’d logged a half-dozen top-five finishes in the game’s biggest events but also battled bipolar illness. Leaving the Westchester stop in August, he climbed a ladder at LaGuardia Airport and told arriving passengers to separate themselves by race so he could preach harmony. His career all but derailed, but Yancey’s episode stands as a reminder that mental health crises existed in elite golf long before the recent tragic death of Grayson Murray.

So many other aspects of that ’75 season have gone the way of the stymie.

The schedule then lacked today’s rigid structure, with no playoffs or even a finale, things petering out in a run of tournaments out west, the last of them in San Antonio, before a silly season team event at Disney. Players were home by the end of October. Now they’re done by Labor Day, save a Ryder Cup or paying gigs farther afield. Scottie Scheffler topped the money list with $26 million. Toss in bonuses from FedEx and Comcast, and his ’25 earnings surpass the Tour’s entire prize fund for the ’75 season. Even the newspaper beat writers who followed the circus then have long since been rendered roadkill by cost efficiencies, replaced by pay-for-play influencers.

As John Wooden said, all progress is change but not all change is progress.

The PGA Tour is improved in so many ways since Golfweek first published 50 years ago, and that ought to be celebrated. Perhaps decades from now an AI bot will look back at 2025 and find the quaint appeal we can see when gazing back a half-century, memorable and thoroughly authentic characters and a simplicity that bordered on homeliness. After all, professional golf is changing so rapidly that our current dispensation will soon seem like a relic of a bygone age, some of which we will even miss.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Lynch: As Golfweek celebrates its 50th, the only constant is change