How this pro won the Players with an orange ball

With all the talk of nine-figure LIV contracts and $20 million PGA Tour and PIF this and PIP that purses, it’s easy to forget that ultra-competitive golf wasn’t always such a lucrative profession, even for players at the top of the game food chain.

Think of the first Players Championship, held at the Atlanta Athletic Club in 1974. When Jack Nicklaus triumphed, he pocketed $50,000 from the $250,000 purse. That’s nothing special — Nicklaus’ haul is equivalent to about $320,000 in 2023 — but those numbers are still a fraction of the fortune the best players can earn on the tour today.

Jerry Pate wasn’t making money playing golf in the mid-1970s. That’s because he was still an amateur, and an exceptional one at that. In 1974, while a student at the University of Alabama, Pate won the US Amateur. The next year he played with Curtis Strange and Craig Stadler on the US Walker Cup winning team at St Andrews and finished with Jay Haas as a low amateur at the US Open in Medinah. Pate has been invited to half a dozen tour events and nearly won two of them.

In 1975, Pate joined the PGA Tour’s Q School and became a medalist. He had officially arrived. Wilson Sporting Goods took note and signed a cool $10,000 endorsement deal with Pate. The only Wilson employee with a broader agreement at the time was Sam Snead. Pate proved to be a wise investment for Wilson. As a pro, it took him a full six months to win the US Open – in 1976 – and before the end of the 1977 season he had already won four Tour titles.

Then, sometime in 1980, Pate recalls, his phone rang.

It was Wilson Sporting Goods general manager Joe Phillips who asked if Pate would be interested in showing off his new line of orange balls. Pate said he would, and shortly after received a six-figure offer to officially add the balls to his arsenal.

“I don’t even know why the hell I did that,” Pate, who is 69, said with a chuckle in a phone interview on Friday. “They paid me a lot of money and I said, ‘Hey, I do this for a living. I’ll take the money.’”

Pate wasn’t the only tour player to sport a colored ball — fellow Wilson player Wayne Levi played a yellow ball that he used to win the Hawaiian Open in 1982 — but Pate was by far the most prominent pro to break away from the established whites could loosen balls. ball tradition.

He said it took him little time to get used to the color and the ball’s frusto-conical dimples helped with accuracy. Pate adds with a laugh: “The biggest advantage was that you never hit the wrong ball.”

“People said to me, ‘How can you putt with that?'” he said. “I realized that I don’t even look at the ball when I hit it. It was just kind of down there. You think more about the swing mechanics or the outcome of the shot than the object you hit.”

After Pate won twice with the orange balls in 1981, PepsiCo, which then owned Wilson, featured Pate in a splashy two-page promo in its annual report. “I took a shot from the bunker with white sand in the background, so the orange ball really stood out,” Pate said. “The headline was something like Wilson Sporting Goods had its best-ever year thanks to sales of orange balls used by Jerry Pate.”

And then came 1982.

The Players Championship was in its ninth year but was held for the first time on the PGA Tour’s new home course, a Pete Dye design at TPC Sawgrass co-owned by the Tour members. Under the careful watch of PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman, Dye had built a challenging tournament course that is second to none. It was target golf on acid, and most players loathed it at first.

“All the players wanted to fire Deane Beman, they wanted to kill Pete Dye, they wanted to sell the golf course right away,” Pate said. “Nobody liked it. It was too hard, it was too devilish. But I kind of accepted it. I knew we were up to something with stadium golf. I thought, “What the heck, if everyone’s going to bitch and be negative, I’m going to take the Jack Nicklaus route and take the high ground and be positive.”

A positive sign came during Wednesday’s Pro-Am when Pate birdied 2 on the 17 island green. In the first round he did it again. And again in the second round. He cooled off with a par on Saturday but then made another two on Sunday. Four 2s in five tries? It had to be Godfather’s week, and it was. He was three down after three rounds but came alive on Sunday by scoring a five-under 67 to finish the week at eight under and beating Scott Simpson and Brad Bryant by two.

How fitting that on a course that some of Pate’s peers compared to miniature golf, he should prevail with a ball color more commonly associated with the same pastime.

If Pate was completely convinced of his red-hot balls, at least one golf power broker wasn’t: legendary CBS golf producer Frank Chirkinian. Although Pate’s eggs were easy to track with the human eye, this was not true for television cameras of the time.

“I was on TV a lot,” Pate said. “Played seven years, 77 top 10s. I was on TV almost every damn week, and Chirkinian said to me, ‘Let me tell you something, I can’t see that damn ball.’ He would raise hell and tell me to switch balls.”

Pate had no intention of doing so, but the point became moot when Pate tore a cartilage in his left shoulder shortly after his players won, disrupting his game. A year later he was dropped from the top 100 players in the world, and by 1987 he was outside the top 200. He had six shoulder surgeries in two decades, none of which allowed him to transform back into the player he once was.

Over time, Pate, who lives in Pensacola, Florida with his wife Soozi, began pursuing other pursuits, including broadcasting and golf course design. He also founded a company that provides outdoor beautification products to golf courses, communities and other businesses and today employs more than 250 people. He hasn’t fully retired from competitive golf — he won twice at the PGA Tour Champions, in 2006 and 2008 — but his Orange Ball days are over.

And hadn’t injuries derailed Pate’s playing career?

“I probably would have played that ball forever,” he said.