From Royal Troon to Black Desert: 

The Golf Life of Tom Weiskopf

 

 

Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah, was the final course designed by Tom Weiskopf with longtime design partner Phil Smith. The course includes architectural references to several places Weiskopf encountered during his playing career.

There is a piece of Scotland sitting in the black lava of southern Utah.

The 17th hole at Black Desert Resort drops from an elevated tee toward a compact par-3 green. Tom Weiskopf freely acknowledged where the thought came from. His final golf course included a nod to Royal Troon’s Postage Stamp, the famous eighth hole at the place where he won the 1973 Open Championship.

It is not a copy. Black Desert’s 17th is longer, and Weiskopf did not intend it to extract quite the same punishment as Troon’s tiny target. What matters more is the connection. A golf hole that helped define the championship course of his playing career remained in his head long enough to find new life nearly 50 years later.

The PGA Tour returns to Black Desert in Ivins, Utah, this week for the Bank of Utah Championship, Oct. 1-4. The par-71 course will measure 7,421 yards for the third playing of the tournament.

Weiskopf never saw that tournament arrive. He died in 2022 while Black Desert was still being built. Yet few venues on the PGA Tour calendar offer a more tangible look at the distance one man traveled through the game.

A Boy From Ohio Watches Snead

Tom Weiskopf was born Nov. 9, 1942, in Massillon, Ohio. His first powerful impression of championship golf came as a teenager in 1957, when his father took him to Inverness Club in Toledo during the U.S. Open.

It was not a tournament shot that stuck with him.

Weiskopf watched Sam Snead hit balls on the practice range. He later traced his fascination with golf to that experience.

Ohio soon provided another important part of his education. Weiskopf attended Benedictine High School in Cleveland before following the path to Ohio State University, where Jack Nicklaus had recently played. Weiskopf earned All-America recognition in 1962 and would remember those years in Columbus with uncommon affection.

He turned professional in 1964. Four years later, he won twice on the PGA Tour, including his first victory at the Andy Williams-San Diego Open Invitational at Torrey Pines.

The swing made an impression almost immediately. Weiskopf was 6-foot-3, powerful without appearing to force the motion and capable of producing the high ball flight that became one of his trademarks. There was another side, too. He expected a great deal from himself, sometimes more than tournament golf was willing to give him.

His temper became part of the public image. So did the feeling that a player with that much ability ought to win everything.

For one extraordinary stretch in 1973, he nearly did.

The Year Everything Lined Up

Weiskopf entered 1973 carrying something much heavier than tournament expectations. His father was dying.

Before his death, Thomas Weiskopf offered his son an assessment that went directly at one of Tom’s problems as a competitor.

“You just don’t believe in yourself,” Weiskopf later recalled his father telling him. “Just be a little more patient and let it happen. It will come.”

Then it came.

Weiskopf won five times on the PGA Tour in 1973. The victories included the Colonial National Invitation, Kemper Open, IVB-Philadelphia Golf Classic, The Open Championship and Canadian Open. PGA Tour records show those five wins landing during a remarkable eight-week stretch.

Royal Troon supplied the one that changed his place in golf history.

Weiskopf opened with a 68 and never surrendered the outright lead. Rounds of 68, 67, 71 and 70 produced a 12-under-par total of 276, three strokes better than Johnny Miller and Neil Coles. The score matched the championship record Arnold Palmer had established at Troon in 1962.

It was Weiskopf’s only major championship victory.

That number has always had a way of dominating discussions of his playing career, but it can also distort one. Weiskopf won 16 times on the PGA Tour. He finished runner-up at the Masters four times. In 1995, long after his best years on the regular tour, he won the U.S. Senior Open at Congressional Country Club by four strokes over Nicklaus.

There was considerably more golf there than one Claret Jug.

The Player Who Studied the Ground

Some professional golfers remember golf courses as places where they shot 66 or 76.

Weiskopf remembered holes.

He noticed sight lines, angles, green shapes and the decisions architects asked players to make. Years later, when architecture became a second career, those observations still informed his work.

One idea became especially associated with his work: the short, drivable par 4.

Weiskopf did not pretend he invented it. He had encountered versions of the idea while playing older courses, including the Old Course at St. Andrews. What interested him was the decision the hole created. The golfer could attack the green, but only after accepting what might happen when the shot missed. Playing conservatively was easier, but it did not necessarily produce the easiest next shot.

TPC Scottsdale’s 17th became one of his best-known examples.

That design instinct says something about Weiskopf the player, too. His best architecture rarely told a golfer simply to hit a technically demanding shot. It asked the golfer to decide what kind of shot was worth attempting.

 

Tom Weiskopf chats with spectators during a Practice Round at the Augusta National Golf Course during the 1982 Masters. 04/07/1982; Augusta, Georgia. Credit: Larry Grayam -The Augusta Chronicle via USA TODAY NETWORK

 

Architecture Became a Second Career

Weiskopf became deeply involved in golf course architecture during the 1980s, initially working extensively with Jay Morrish. Their projects included Troon Golf & Country Club and work that helped establish Weiskopf’s reputation well beyond his playing record.

His architectural portfolio eventually grew to more than 70 designs and renovations. Loch Lomond in Scotland became one of his most celebrated courses. Other work included Double Eagle Club in Ohio, Forest Dunes in Michigan, TPC Scottsdale in Arizona and the renovation of Torrey Pines’ North Course.

The architecture also gave Weiskopf another way to use the competitive life he had already lived.

Players spend careers discovering which holes remain interesting after the novelty disappears. They learn where aggressive design becomes unfair, where visual intimidation works and where a strategic choice survives repeated play. Weiskopf had decades of that information stored from the player’s side of the equation before he ever began moving dirt.

Black Desert gave him one last piece of extraordinary ground on which to use it.

Black Desert Became the Last One

Building a golf course through ancient lava is not ordinary construction.

Black Desert’s fairways and greens had to be fit among black volcanic rock with the red cliffs of southern Utah rising beyond them. Weiskopf developed the routing with longtime design partner Phil Smith, and construction began while Weiskopf was dealing with pancreatic cancer.

His health declined. His involvement did not simply disappear.

Smith continued the work on site while Weiskopf remained engaged with the design. The front nine opened in November 2022, several months after Weiskopf’s death on Aug. 20 at age 79. The back nine followed in May 2023.

By then, some of Weiskopf’s golf memories had become part of the property.

The 17th recalled the Postage Stamp at Troon. The bunker placed within the third green brought to mind the sixth at Riviera. The 13th green referenced the demanding 14th at Pebble Beach.

They were not replicas dropped into Utah. They were ideas that had stayed with a golfer long after the scorecards from those rounds had been signed.

In June 2024, Weiskopf was inducted posthumously into the World Golf Hall of Fame. The honor recognized a career that had become difficult to fit into a single category: major champion, 16-time PGA Tour winner, senior major champion, broadcaster and architect.

Black Desert may offer the clearest way to see those careers together.

When a player arrives at the 17th tee during the Bank of Utah Championship this week, he will be standing on a golf course that opened in the 2020s. In front of him will be a design thought that reaches back to a small green on the Ayrshire coast where Tom Weiskopf became Champion Golfer of the Year in 1973.

That is a long way for one golf hole to travel.