From August 14 to 17, the 1969 PGA Championship was played at the National Cash Register Country Club outside of Dayton, Ohio. It was held in the aftermath of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing, the tragedies of the Manson murders and Chappaquiddick, and contemporaneously with the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in upstate New York. It would have been hard for a mere golf tournament to match the drama of the time. The PGA Championship did its best.
This article about that eventful week is adapted from my book, “The Age of Palmer, Pro Golf in the 1960s, its Greatest Era” (Canoe Tree Press), which is available through Amazon.com. The 1969 season marked the first since 1957 in which none of golf’s “Big Three” of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player won a major championship.
For the most part, the tour had been sheltered from the tumult of the 1960s. Early in the decade, the PGA of America’s “Caucasian-only” clause had been removed, and by the end of the decade Black pros Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder and Pete Brown were tour mainstays who, for the most part, were accepted by their peers and appreciated by fans.
Many established pros, such as Arnold Palmer, Julius Boros, Phil Rodgers, Orville Moody and Lou Graham, had served in the military during the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s and had fulfilled their obligations and/or were too old for service when the Vietnam War began to sow divisions in America in 1965. Bud Allin delayed his golf career while he earned decorations for combat in the early days of the war in Southeast Asia. Cliff Harrington, who excelled on the United Golf Association while he served as a career Army paratrooper, lost his chance to prove himself on the PGA Tour when he was killed in action in Vietnam. Steve Eichstaedt earned his player’s card in 1967 and entered five tournaments in 1968 before he was drafted. After service as a combat medic in Vietnam, he briefly played the tour (finishing second to Bruce Devlin at the 1970 Cleveland Open). But, for the most part, golfers who came of age during the war were able to use college or family deferments, or service in the reserves, to stay out of Vietnam.
However, cultural upheaval and professional golf intersected at the last major championship of the decade. As Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated, “the PGA would be remembered as the tournament that let golf in on what's going on out there in the real world.”
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