One of the things I like best about The Memorial is--yes!--a print product
Jason Dufner’s 35-foot miracle par putt on 18 may have put a great exclamation point on the ending of The Memorial Tournament Sunday after two rain delays, but every year the Jack Nicklaus-led event in Ohio begins with a ceremony that honors the year’s honoree.
A big part of the yearly honoree atmosphere is the tournament program. In a print world sadly gone flat, it may seem odd to highlight a paper product, but in the history of the PGA Tour, The Memorial program has been one of the finest produced, and it’s all because of the history it lovingly chronicles.
A gallery of previous honorees, illustrated by Tony Ravielli, surround honoree Patty Berg on the 1988 Memorial program cover.
Most tournament programs are designed to do little more than ballyhoo the sponsors and tournament staff, reveal a two-page spread image of the course, with a hole-by-hole breakdown to follow.
At The Memorial, since writing about the honoree allows the magazine producers to present plenty of golf history, the program has more heft than most, both in weight and scope. This year’s program, with honoree Greg Norman on the cover, came in at 224 pages, which indicates another major reason for a tournament program: to sell ads and make money for the tournament. Program staff do such a nice job on the program because they treat it more as an annual magazine, guaranteeing it will have substance. (You can read more about the magazine at: https://thememorialtournament.com/the-memorial/magazine/)
My unscientific recall about the best nonmajor tournament programs over the last several decades would include the Bob Hope Classic, the Bing Crosby Pebble Beach Clambake, the Heritage, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and on the senior tour the Legends of Golf and the defunct Vintage Invitational. Sorry to use the old names of a few but I do so to show how the best programs were the best because legends such as Hope, Crosby, and Palmer could be featured on the cover, or in the case of the Crosby, you had Pebble Beach and the Monterey courses to beautify a cover.
For several years, The Memorial program cover benefited from the artwork of Tony Ravielli, a legendary illustrator who did some of the classic work on Hogan, Nelson, Nicklaus, Watson, and in Golf Digest among others.
The end result is that The Memorial program is a keepsake worth collecting and revisiting long after the tournament is done. If you can put a full set together, it’s like having an encyclopedia set containing bios on golf’s greats, plus a history of the tournament itself.