FedEx St. Jude Classic: Memorable moments

In the second round of the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, Al Geiberger became the first player to shoot 59 in a PGA Tour-sanctioned event. Starting on the 10th tee, he made 11 birdies and an eagle on the 7,193-yard, par-72 Colonial Country Club course in Cordova, Tenn. Geiberger won the tournament, but he had to come from behind to do it. Even-par scores of 72 in the first and third rounds, plus a 2-over 38 on the fromt nine in the final round left him two shots behind Gary Player, but Geiberger closed with a 32 to beat Player and Jerry McGee.

In his 13th winless year on Tour, playing in the next-to-last tournament of a medical extension after hip surgery, Harrison Frazar was thinking about retiring. And then, of course, he won. Frazar has a one-shot lead going to the final hole of regulation, but he found the water with his second shot, made bogey and fell into a playoff with Robert Karlsson. On the third extra hole, Frazar won when Karlsson bogeyed. It was the second consecutive year that Karlsson lost in a playoff at Memphis.

OK, calm down, Elvis fans, we’re just talking about golf here. And the undisputed king of PGA Tour golf in Memphis is Dave Hill, with four wins. Hill won with scores ranging from 265 to 283, beating the likes of Lee Trevino (who he prevented from winning the tournament three years in a row), Bob Charles and Lee Elder, among others.

Former President Gerald Ford had a lot of ups and downs on the golf course. If you judged strictly by TV highlights of Ford’s pro-am rounds, they seemed to be mostly downs – shots of Ford beaning, or nearly beaning – spectators with errant shots. But the former Michigan football center was actually a good athlete and an extremely avid golfer. In the celebrity pro-am of the 1977 Memphis tournament (the year Al Geiberger would shoot 59), Ford, who had left office in January, made a hole-in-one while playing with tournament host Danny Thomas and Ben Crenshaw.

In no tournament was Lee Trevino more successful than the PGA Tour’s Memphis stop. He won it three times, the same number of wins as he had in the Canadian Open. His first two Memphis wins came in 1971 and ’72, which were his two biggest years on Tour. In 1971 he won the U.S., Canadian and British Open championships during a 20-day span. Three weeks before that remarkable stretch, he won the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic. In 1972 his Memphis win preceded his second Open Championship. He added a third Memphis win in 1980.

A popularly held image of Greg Norman is that he never visited the winner’s circle again after his meltdown in the 1996 Masters. Not true. In June 1997, 14 months after he was famously consoled by Nick Faldo at Augusta, Norman birdied the final three holes at TPC Southwind to beat Dudley Hart by one shot in the FedEx St. Jude Classic. It was Norman’s next-to-last of his 20 PGA Tour wins.

Jerry Pate is famously remembered for diving into the lake beside the 18th green at TPC Sawgrass after winning the 1982 Players Championship. But that wasn’t Pate’s only victory dive. It wasn’t even his first. He initially did it in 1981 at Memphis after making a birdie on the 72nd hole to win by two shots over Tom Kite and Bruce Lietzke.

Englishman Lee Westwood became the first European to win in Memphis, an event that dates back to 1958, but that’s not the most memorable thing about the 2010 edition of this tournament. Robert Garrigus, who had never won on Tour – never previously held a lead on a Sunday – went to the final hole with a three-shot lead, but made a triple bogey to fall into a three-way playoff with Westwood and Robert Karlsson. He then fell out of the playoff with a bogey on the first extra hole.

John Cook won 11 times in his PGA Tour career, never more decisively than in Memphis in 1996. Cook opened with rounds of 64-62-63, for a 54-hole total of 189, which broke the PGA Tour record for the first three rounds of a tournament. Cook shot 69 in the fourth round to cruise to a seven-shot win over John Adams.

Bert Yancey won by five shots over Gene Littler, but he almost didn’t even get to play the final round. Only a last-minute phone call from his caddie saved Yancey from being disqualified for showing up late. Yancey forgot that tee times had been moved up for television. When he got the call he had 15 minutes to make it to the first tee. “I’ve never been so frightened,” he said, but he recovered sufficiently to shoot 66.