{{ubiquityData.prevArticle.description}}
{{ubiquityData.nextArticle.description}}
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA | To fully appreciate how Ed Ibarguen got to where he is – a PGA master professional, the longtime director of golf at Duke University Golf Club and a confidante of Michael Jordan – let’s go back to a Holiday Inn lounge in the mid-1980s.
That’s where Ibarguen found himself, playing “Boogie, Oogie, Oogie” on his guitar in a Chapel Hill bar where about five people were largely ignoring him and his band. Somehow Ibarguen had gone from playing covers of the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers to thumping out disco tunes.
“I thought to myself, this is nonsense,” Ibarguen remembers all these years later.
Ibarguen had come from New Jersey to the University of North Carolina where he graduated and fell fully into golf’s trap while spending his days at the school’s Finley Golf Course between his own night shifts and those his wife was working at UNC’s Memorial Hospital.
He mowed fairways one year for access to the course and when an assistant’s position opened in 1979, Ibarguen applied.
More than 40 years later, Ibarguen’s resume includes the PGA of America’s prestigious Horton Smith and Bill Strausbaugh awards, a spot in the Carolinas PGA Hall of Fame, a regular place among the top 100 teachers’ lists and an enduring spot in the hearts of the many people he’s touched with his infectious enthusiasm and passion.
Ibarguen is the proverbial ray of sunshine, a gifted instructor inspired years ago by Davis Love Jr., who wrote teaching notes on yellow legal pads he kept close and who changed the course of Ibarguen’s life with a simple piece of advice.
“I had the mistaken notion that maybe I could play,” Ibarguen said, sitting in his office decorated with golf art and New York Yankees memorabilia. “After a round of golf with young Davis (who played at North Carolina), his dad put his arms around me and he said, ‘Son, I’m sure you don’t know much about my background but I used to think I could play, too. I had a great teacher named Harvey Penick and he told me I might make a greater contribution to the game as a teacher. … If you can’t beat my son, you’re never going to make it out there because I’m not sure he’s going to make it.’”
Said Ibarguen of Love’s advice: “It turned me around.”
Ibarguen points to a bookcase in his office that’s stuffed with the writings of the game’s most influential instructors. He has stacks of other books at home, using them to learn all he can about the game and the different ways it can be taught.
He would go to Pinehurst years ago and hang out to watch Love, Jim Flick, Bob Toski and others teach there. He cold-called Strausbaugh at Columbia Country Club in Maryland and asked to come watch him teach one day. He wound up getting invited for golf, dinner and a private tutorial.
“Being a teacher is like being a detective,” Ibarguen said. “You’re trying to figure out who’s in front of you because you’re going to teach them as an individual. The beautiful thing about how I learned to teach is I learned everybody’s method.
“What you do as a teacher is you continue to have a bigger and bigger toolbox you can reach into. You’re not stuck in one way.”
Ibarguen knows better than most the importance of finding the right fit.
When he became director of golf at the Duke facility in April 1988, Ibarguen was doing more than moving 10 miles from Chapel Hill to Durham. He was going from North Carolina to Duke. Light blue to dark blue.
It’s a real thing.
Working in a trailer with men’s golf coach Rod Myers and women’s coach Dan Brooks before the Washington Duke Inn was completed, Ibarguen put an autographed photograph of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith on his desk when he arrived.
“Being a teacher is like being a detective. You’re trying to figure out who’s in front of you because you’re going to teach them as an individual."
ED IBARGUEN
Ibarguen and Smith had become good friends and it was Smith who helped convince Ibarguen to take the Duke job, appreciating the opportunity to turn around a struggling operation. It wasn’t long until a member of the men’s golf team challenged Ibarguen about his loyalty to Smith and the argument escalated.
Within 30 minutes, athletic director Tom Butters, who loved golf, had summoned Ibarguen to his office.
“He says, ‘Is there something wrong with you?’ ” Ibarguen said. “ ‘You’re going to bring a signed picture of Dean Smith into your office at Duke University who just gave you a job here? And you’re from Carolina, so you understand the rivalry.’
“He was serious. I said, ‘He’s been like a mentor to me, like a father.’ Tom said, ‘I respect all that. I love Dean Smith. He’s one of the great coaches who ever lived but you take that picture out of the office at Duke and put it at home where it belongs.’
“Early on, I think they would have hung me in effigy. They hated the guy from Carolina. He’s raising the beer prices. He’s raising the green fees. But 32 years later it worked out.”
Ibarguen’s loyalty now runs to Duke blue, though he and Jordan remain close. While Davis Love III and Jordan’s teammate Buzz Peterson get most of the credit for introducing Jordan to golf, it is Ibarguen who became his teacher and lifelong friend.
Jordan was still in school when he asked Ibarguen to help him learn to play. Ibarguen asked one question in return.
“I said, ‘Are you really interested in golf or would you be wasting my time?’ ” Ibarguen recalled. “He flashed that million-dollar grin and said, ‘I really love the game and want to learn how to play.’ So I said, ‘Let’s get started.’ ”
For a time, Jordan would hit balls on the back of the Duke range in relative privacy, prepping for his offseason golf. He told Ibarguen the lessons and work he put Jordan through were more difficult than two-a-days under Phil Jackson in Chicago.
Ibarguen and Jordan still talk once a week or so and when Jordan built his private club in South Florida (called The Grove XXIII) he asked Ibarguen if he had an interest in being part of it.
“We have a lifelong friendship through golf,” Ibarguen said. “I didn’t want to change that to an employee relationship.”
When Ibarguen catches a glimpse of Jordan’s now-loopy swing on social media, he’s not above sending a text asking who that guy is, contrasting it with a shot of Jordan’s swing when the two of them worked more closely together.
Jordan’s response is, shall we say, colorful.
More often, Ibarguen reaches out to his current students, checking in with them before they check in with him.
“I have 25 minutes going home so I will pick up the phone and get a chance to go over who did I teach last week and I’ll give them a call just to check how they’re doing,” Ibarguen said.
“You’re totally invested in whatever their goals are. It’s unbelievably satisfying.”
E-Mail Ron