Head Pro Spotlight - Bob Ford

By: Joel Zuckerman

"I was in the right place at the right time. Twice."

So begins the estimable Bob Ford, who uses little more than 10 words to explain his unique employment situation, and in so doing showcases the self-effacing wit which is just one of the many positive traits that has led him to the apex of his profession.

Ford is the head professional at two of the most acclaimed clubs in all of golf: Oakmont, outside of Pittsburgh, and Seminole, in the South Florida town of Juno Beach. When he turned 50 some years back Ford longed to add a third job to his resume, but his attempt to qualify for the Champions Tour never came to fruition. It has been an ongoing theme of frustration in an otherwise-charmed professional life, the close-but-not-quite gestalt that has kept him from consistently competing at the game's highest echelon. Ironic, considering his place in the highest echelon of the game has long been secure.

Originally from the Philadelphia area, Ford moved west with his family to Pittsburgh just after his high school years. An avid player, Ford tried to land any job at all at Oakmont in time for the 1973 U.S. Open, just to soak in the ambience. The teenager found three weeks of temporary work at the club that summer, and was first exposed to legendary Oakmont pro Lew Worsham.

Worsham began at Oakmont in the spring of 1947, took a bit of time off that summer to win the U.S. Open by beating Sam Snead in a playoff, and continued his club-pro duties for 32 years. Between running the member-guest and selling sweaters, Worsham found time to win nine other PGA Tour events, was the circuit's leading money winner one year and went undefeated on a Ryder Cup team. So it's not hard to understand Ford's never-ending desire to make it as a Tour pro - his role model came to work every day in the same shop.

When he graduated from the University of Tampa in 1975, Ford went to work full-time as an Oakmont assistant. "I had never considered being a club pro, it never crossed my mind. I always wanted to play for a living," states Ford. "I figured if I couldn't play at the Tour level, being at a club like Oakmont would possibly lead to a member offering me a job to sell steel, or insurance."

When Worsham retired in 1979, the club's board chose Ford as his successor, bypassing the pro's son Rick, who had far greater tenure than the relative newcomer. Explains Ford, "It was an awkward situation, but Rick, who now owns a driving range in North Carolina, and I have remained friends to this day."

The differences between his summer and winter jobs are quite distinct. Oakmont, despite its incredible historical significance, reflects Pittsburgh. It's a lively, full-service country club, lots of kids and families, with the swimming pool and tennis an important part of the equation. Seminole, by contrast, is solely a golf club.

Oakmont has hosted as many important championships as it has holes on the course. Eighteen separate times the game's finest players have gathered for U.S. Opens, U.S. Amateurs, PGA Championships and the like. Three particularly incandescent moments would include Jack Nicklaus winning his first major, besting hometown hero Arnold Palmer at the 1962 U.S. Open; Johnny Miller's incredible final-round 63 to come from well behind and win the 1973 U.S. Open; and Bob Ford's 26th-place finish as the host pro in the 1983 Open - more on that in a moment.

Seminole has only hosted high-level amateur competitions, though one could effectively argue that any run-of-the-mill club event at Seminole is a high-level amateur competition. Its membership roster is peppered with former USGA champions and those who compete internationally at the game's most prestigious levels. A long-standing tradition dictates that all persons must be off the property at 6 p.m.; if there's two hours of daylight left and a player on the 17th green has a chance to set the course record, or at least log his or her best-ever score, more is the pity. The club serves lunch only, no dinner, no breakfast. There is a gorgeous pool overlooking the course, but it's innately understood that it's not only off-limits but not to be lounged around.

Long before he ended up at Seminole 30-odd years ago, the host pro owned the U.S. Open concession, and Ford knew it would soon be Oakmont's turn to host America's national golf championship again in 1983. Just a year after he took over the top spot in 1979, he qualified for the 1980 Open at Baltusrol in New Jersey and, when he wasn't playing or practicing, he was actually working in the merchandise tent for host pro Bob Ross.

"I picked his brain on merchandising, and wanted to learn as much as I could." Ford did the same thing (working the tent, not playing) in the succeeding two years, and was ready when the Open returned to Oakmont in 1983. "My innovation was the mail-order concept. We ran ads in various golf publications, using Bobby Clampett as the fashion model. The sales results were so impressive it didn't take long for the USGA to take over the mail-order business for themselves."

Ford also qualified for and played in that home Open, finishing 26th. Asked which was a greater windfall - the 26th-place check or the receipts that accumulated from all that mail-order merchandise - he cracks, "Never mind my top-30 finish, the concession, including the innovation of the mail order, was worth more than the first-place check they gave to Larry Nelson!"

The Open returned to Oakmont in 1994, but Ford was denied entry to the field by a whisker, losing in a playoff. He describes it as "one of the worst experiences of my competitive life." He was assuaged somewhat in being the last host pro to ever own the merchandising tent, even though he was by now sharing profits with Oakmont.

Better news was on the horizon about five years later, when Ford was asked to become the head professional at storied Seminole. "There are several Oakmont members who are also at Seminole, and being invited down to golf with them over the years allowed me to meet many other members. Conversely, there were plenty of Seminole members who visited Oakmont, so I really started to become familiar with the club," recounts the 1987 PGA Professional of the Year.

When after 28 years on the job, Jerry Pittman (who spent many concurrent summers as the head pro at esteemed Saucon Valley in central Pennsylvania) decided to retire as Seminole's head pro in 1999, Ford was asked to take over. There was no formal interview process, no resume submission or executive search. The club lost a quality man, and had no reservations about the best candidate to replace him.

Following in the footsteps of Tour-hardened pros seems to be Ford's lot in life. "One year as a club pro Jerry played in all four majors," says Ford with admiration, "and that same year finished in the top-10 at the Masters. His resume as a player was very impressive." The Oakmont brass renegotiated his contract to reflect the fact that Ford would be spending six months in both Florida and Pittsburgh going forward.

"Oakmont is a 24/7 job, open every day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner," continues Ford, outlining the differences in his two posts. "We have 400 families, which means about 600 or 700 members, and they play tennis, shoot skeet, have a swimming pool that's actually in use, that sort of thing. The biggest difference is the governance. It's a typical democratic system, with board members being elected to three-year terms to sit on the various committees. It's the normal hierarchy. At Seminole there are no committees at all. Everything is decided by one man."

Ford is referring to the "benevolent dictatorship" concept, the most well-known examples being the decades-long tenures of Clifford Roberts at Augusta National and John Arthur Brown at Pine Valley, two of the finest private golf clubs in existence.

Ford spells out some of the other disparities between his two jobs. "Oakmont is much busier, we do twice as many rounds as Seminole. At Oakmont you can show up in the late afternoon, grab a cart and go out and play six or eight holes. That doesn't happen at Seminole, where you generally come out to play a full round and walk with a caddie. It's a short day, because members don't come on property until 8:30 in the morning, and must be off property by 6:00 in the evening."

Another difference is the type of member each club attracts. Other than 50 national members, Oakmont's membership comes almost exclusively from Pittsburgh. While there are scads of excellent golfers at Oakmont (they have to be, considering it's one of the world's most demanding courses and being a member is a real trial-by-fire), Seminole draws a national, even international set of serious, competitive players. There are some 20 USGA champions on its membership rolls.

Early in his career at Oakmont, before the PGA Tour went to an all-exempt format in the mid-1980s, Ford spent significant time and energy during wintertime trying to Monday qualify for that week's Tour event. "The club was always very generous and supportive of me," he recalls. "They never begrudged me my desire to try and play competitively, and not once did anyone question me regarding the time I was putting into my golf game."

Not surprising, considering the understandable pride the club had taken in the success of Ford's predecessor. "But I realized after a few years and repeated attempts and repeated failures to make a go of it that I had made the right decision in becoming a club professional."

This is not to say Ford doesn't know which end of a club to hang onto. Never mind the repeated U.S. Open, Senior Open, PGA Championship and Senior PGA Championship experiences he's enjoyed, which helped to sate his thirst for top-level competition. A vignette that shows his ability and humility occurred one memorable afternoon several years back at nearby Latrobe Country Club, the western Pennsylvania course not far from Oakmont that Arnold Palmer grew up on, set the record, and now owns. With three holes left, Ford needed three pars to shoot 59 and best Palmer's course record by a stroke. But when he won his match on the 15th green, he chose to walk off the course, rather than go for the record.

When asked how the record would have been considered official since it was conducted at match play, and included conceded putts, Ford quips, "There were no concessions. All of the putts went in, which is probably always the case when you are on pace to shoot 59!"

Palmer has long appreciated all the positive attributes possessed by Ford, up to and including the fact he left his Latrobe CC record alone. "If you set out to describe the ideal golf professional, you couldn't select a more fitting person as a role model than Bob Ford," says "The King."

"I have known Bob since his days on Lew Worsham's fine staff at Oakmont Country Club and through the many years since then that he has served Oakmont and more recently Seminole as their head professional. He has a wonderful, warm, low-key personality that reflects itself in the way he treats everybody he comes in contact with all the time. In fact, he often goes out of his way to make appearances at sports and club functions throughout the area. Let's not forget the fine playing record he has compiled locally and in national PGA club pro events, either."

Besides his playing record, Ford takes great pride in the copious number of young men he has mentored, and then sent off to run clubs of their own. "I have had a huge advantage," he adds with a grin, "because I have been sending them off from two clubs, not just one!"

He is equally pleased to have raised his family in a mostly normal fashion, despite the unusual job pattern. "For 25 years I lived on the 18th hole at Oakmont, the only house on the course. When I got the Seminole job the three kids were little and they came down to Florida for three months through winter, and were home-schooled by my wife, Nancy. Now that they are in their late-teens and early-20s, with two away at school, we make our home down in Florida. While we are in Pittsburgh we live in another home in the town of Oakmont. The club uses our former home as a guest house.

"But if I were to pick the single best thing about these jobs, about being the head golf professional at these two wonderful clubs, it is being able to meet and befriend not only these distinguished members but also many of their guests. It's really been a 'Who's Who' experience, and the types of people I've met through the years have been incredible."

It is far easier to catalog those luminaries whom Ford hasn't rubbed elbows with, as opposed to whom he has. Elvis and the Ayatollah haven't been in his orbit, but he's hobnobbed with a Kennedy and thankfully nobody named Kardashian. Suffice it to say that a red-carpet roster of ball players, billionaires, power brokers, politicos, business titans, movie stars and jet-setters of all stripes have made their way to these golden realms in Pittsburgh and Juno Beach. In this digital age, the desktop Rolodex has gone the way of the buggy whip. But if Ford had one, it would be the size of a bowling ball, and carry the same weight.

"I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I didn't get up every day and come to one of these two jobs," he concludes. "I'm kind of one-dimensional. Other than my family, my whole life is golf."

And what a life it is.

Joel Zuckerman, called "One of the Southeast's most respected and sought-after golf writers" by Golfer's Guide Magazine, is an award-winning travel writer based in Savannah, Ga. His seventh and latest book, entitled "Pro's Pros - Extraordinary Club Professionals Making Golf Great!" was released in June 2013. This is the first-ever golf book to shine the spotlight on the beating heart of golf - the unsung, yet hard-working club professional. Joel's course reviews, player profiles, essays and features have appeared in 110 publications, including Sports Illustrated, Golf, Continental Magazine and Delta's Sky Magazine. He has played more than 800 courses in 40-plus states and a dozen countries. For more about Joel, or to order this unique new book, visit www.vagabondgolfer.com.

Tweet