Change has been a constant at the PGA Show during the past three decades.
The space in which it is held at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, for example, has mushroomed in size and now tops 1 million square feet. Some years, exhibitors spend wildly on their booths and marketing initiatives. And during others, they retrench. Companies re-brand and revamp. New features such as Demo Day are added, and a massive golf range rises inside of the cavernous hall. A pandemic sweeps across the world, and still the show goes on, only as a virtual event.
But there have been givens during that stretch of time as well. And among the most welcome of those has been the presence of Sherry Major. As the media consultant to PGA Golf Exhibitions (which owns the show) as well as the PGA of America (which helps run it), she performs a wide range of duties for what is the biggest and most important convocation of the golf business in the U.S. Those include helping an up-and-coming clubmaker find ways to stand out amidst a slew of other companies on the show floor and making sure that anchor tenants such as Titleist and Callaway have everything they need, to advising her clients on how they might better serve their many constituencies. Major is also tasked with ensuring that members of the news media receive the help and information they need to cover the exhibition itself and report on the multitude of stories that emerge from the assembly each year.
“(Sherry) is very cool under fire, and she is often under fire at the show. But she never lets it get to her and has a unique ability to calmly and strategically assess a stressful situation and then resolve it.”
Joe Steranka, former PGA of America CEO
These are important jobs for the event, which will run January 23-26 this year and usually attracts more than 1,000 golf companies and roughly 40,000 industry professionals from more than 80 countries who wander each day the nearly 10 miles of aisles that crisscross the convention center floor. And the tasks are invariably handled with great aplomb by the 56-year-old, auburn-haired mother of three.
“Sherry is one of the most trusted and recognized PR people in the golf industry,” said Julius Mason, the senior director of public awareness and external relations for the PGA of America, as well as a longtime colleague of Major’s. “She always finds ways to make each person with whom she interacts feel welcome, important and heard. She listens, she asks the right questions and she delivers. And while she is a PR professional by trade, she also has a unique marketing mind that allows her to see the bigger picture and help to grow brands.”
As the former CEO of the PGA of America, Joe Steranka watched Major in action at a number of PGA Shows.
“She is very cool under fire, and she is often under fire at the show,” he said. “But she never lets it get to her and has a unique ability to calmly and strategically assess a stressful situation and then resolve it.
“Sherry does not take herself too seriously, either,” added Steranka, who now serves as a strategic adviser to Buffalo Groupe and also runs his own consulting business. “But she is very serious about her job, and about doing it well.”
And as far as he and most PGA Show attendees are concerned, nobody does it better.
As the youngest of three children, Major grew up in the western Pennsylvania town of Plain Grove, just north of Pittsburgh.
“It was a farming community, and it took about 90 minutes to drive from one end of our school district to another,” she said. “Any after-school activity or event was a serious commitment.”
As for the family home, it was a converted hunting lodge that had been built in 1895.
“My father, whose name was William Schroeder and who was known as Bill, was a steelworker and a huge Steelers fan,” Major said. “I named my son after him. And my mother, Gloria, sold advertisements for the New Castle News. She was so good at her job, and while she sold ads for a living, she believed what she really did was sell relationships. I talked to her a lot about her job, and she greatly impacted what I have done in my own.”
Major often reflects on her late parents and all they meant to her. “They made so much of themselves,” she said. “They were married as teenagers, when my father was 19 and my mother 16. They didn’t finish high school, either. But they earned their GEDs, and they managed to create this amazing family life for me, as well as my older brother and sister.”
Major attended Wilmington Area High School. Her sport was gymnastics, which in retrospect seems like good training for what she does in her work today, and she was also a cheerleader in her senior year for the football team. “Not because I loved cheering but because my boyfriend was on the team,” Major said.
From there, she enrolled at Slippery Rock, a public, liberal-arts university located less than 10 miles from her childhood home. Major lived on campus during her four years there, graduating in 1989 with a B.A. in communications. That made her the first member of her family to receive a college education.
Her time at Slippery Rock was important for another reason, as it was where she met her future husband, Andy.
“We both interviewed for the same position on the school newspaper,” she said. “He was a senior, and I was a junior. He ended up getting the job, and I became his assistant.”
In time, they started dating.
“He played on the football team at Slippery Rock and graduated the year before I did,” Major said. “He moved to Florida and earned a master’s in sports management at the University of Miami. Then he started working for the Miami Marlins and later the Miami Dolphins, when both teams were owned by Wayne Huizenga. I was still in Pennsylvania, which meant that our relationship had evolved into a long-distance one.
“It soon became clear that if we wanted to take things to the next level, somebody needed to move,” Major said.
She turned out to be that somebody, which prompted her to relocate to the Sunshine State.
“I did not have a job and immediately started looking for one after I found an apartment,” she said. “All I had in the beginning was a bed I had bought, a lawn chair that I set up in my living room and a television that Andy had given me.”
In addition to taking her to her future husband, the move to Florida also led Major to the PGA, and in 1991 she accepted a job there as the association’s public-relations manager.
“As part of the interview process, I spent an entire day at PGA of America headquarters, which were then in Palm Beach Gardens,” said Major, who had held a similar position for Special Olympics in the two years prior. “Joe Steranka took me to what was my first high-level professional lunch, at PGA National. I had never been to a private club before or to a golf resort. And I was so taken by the moment that I ordered an appetizer, a main course and a dessert, which seemed a little over the top.”
Years later, Steranka does not recall what or how much Major ate that day. “I just remember being impressed with her,” he said. “Later, I gave her an assignment to do a Ryder Cup tour in upstate New York, back when the Ryder Cup needed a bit of promotion. And I found that she was very wise and mature for such a young person and seemed like she could handle anything.”
The one problem in the eyes of some at PGA headquarters was her lack of experience in golf.
“I knew nothing about the game growing up,” Major said. “And my only experience with it had been working in the snack shack for a local golf course.”
But the communication specialist at the PGA who would go on to become Major’s mentor, the late Terry McSweeney, told colleagues that she was a talented writer who could help the association in the public-relations realm even if she did not have a background in golf.
In the end, the PGA offered Major a job. Then, in January 1992, she worked her first PGA Show. The next year, she and Andy married.
“Our first child, a daughter named Rami, was born in 1997,” Major said. “Two years later, Billy was born during the PGA Show, and that is the only one I have ever missed since I started with the PGA. Our youngest, Rachael, was born two years after Billy.”
“I love helping people behind the scenes to communicate their messages, build their brands and make their show experiences better.”
Sherry Major
Rami’s birth was certainly a life-altering experience for Major, and it prompted her to leave her position as PR manager at the PGA. At that point, she began working at home and consulting exclusively on the show to the PGA and PGA Golf Exhibitions as she raised her daughter.
“That arrangement started in 1998 and has worked out very well,” Major said. “At first, I was supposed to work 12 hours a week. But it grew to 15 hours, then 20, and then we decided not to put a time limit on it, because I could not really limit myself to how much I worked on the show. As a result, it became a full-time consultancy.”
And it remained that way even after the Major family left Miami in 2008 for Buffalo when Andy took a job with the Bills, where he serves today as the vice president of fan experience and operations.
Major has adjusted to life in the snowy north and considers herself “the biggest Bills fan you’ll ever find” even though she still bleeds a bit of black and gold for the Steelers that she and her father once followed so fervently.
“I go to every Bills game during the season,” she said.
Along the way, Major also has become a golfer as well as a fan of the sport – and of the PGA professionals who are such an important part of it. “The more I wrote about the game and spent time on events like the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup while working at the PGA, the more I learned about it,” she said. “Friends bought me some introductory golf lessons not long after I joined the association – from a PGA professional, of course – and Joe Phillips, who had worked for Wilson Golf [as vice president of golf promotions] and was very close to Gene Sarazen, gave me a set of Wilson clubs I still have.”
“I play mostly in the summer with Andy and Billy,” she said. “I like shorter courses, executive courses.”
As for other sporting pleasures, Major enjoys yoga and Pilates. “The old gymnast in me still likes to work out,” she said.
And you can be sure that when she hits the mats, her play list includes plenty of tunes by U2. “I love their music and have seen them play on every one of their tours,” Major said.
Thinking back on her career, as well as her role as a parent, Major believes that working at home and being able to raise her children and see them grow up has been a “blessing.”
“So has being able to work on the PGA Show,” she said. “I love helping people behind the scenes to communicate their messages, build their brands and make their show experiences better. I love that I have so much space to get creative, and make suggestions with the PGA and PGA Golf Exhibitions. I love connecting with my friends in the media every year and helping them tell their stories.”
As Major reflects on those things, she cannot help but think about what lies ahead for her three kids.
“I want them to find careers that are as fulfilling to them as mine has been to me and as Andy’s has been to him,” she said. “I want them to love what they do.”
There is no shortage of people attending this week’s PGA Show who love what Sherry Major does for them.
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Top: The annual PGA Show draws tens of thousands of visitors, presenters and golf industry members to Orlando.
USGA, Chris McEniry