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Tom Dudley reached his early 40s having only a cursory relationship with golf, but that changed in a dramatic way one summer morning in San Francisco.
Dudley and his wife, Bonnie, flew to Northern California for their daughter’s swim meet in June 1987. Unbeknownst to Dudley, the U.S. Open was taking place at Olympic Club that week. One of his friends worked for the PGA Tour at the time, and invited him to meet prominent USGA officials P.J. Boatwright and Mac England.
“I ended up having three dinners with them that week,” Dudley recalls. “I had always loved volunteering throughout my adult life, spending 20 years with Little League Baseball and 10 years as a pilot flying University of Georgia football coaches around on recruiting trips. After meeting them, I felt energized to do something with golf.”
That energy helped launch of a Hall of Fame-worthy career as a rules official for the FSGA. Dudley, who is being inducted Friday during the Annual Dinner at Timuquana Country Club in Jacksonville, has volunteered at more than 100 USGA championships including 27 U.S. Opens and 25 U.S. Amateurs. The Columbus, Ga., native also has worked more than 300 FSGA championships and served as FSGA president (2008-2009) during a 31-year tenure with the organization. He is a member at the club where he'll receive the award.
When Dudley first started with the FSGA after that stop-in at the U.S. Open, he flourished under the mentorship of Jim Callender, a retired naval officer who served in World War II. Callender, a rules official who held the highest USGA certification, was adamant that Dudley should learn the game and everything it takes to run a tournament, down to the last detail. Dudley immersed himself in FSGA events and received such a high grade on the rules test that he eventually was appointed to the USGA Rules Committee in 1990.
“It’s been a great honor to be involved in the game the past few decades and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the FSGA.”
Tom Dudley
His positive test score coupled with a lack of rules officials at the time created an unusual circumstance.
“My first USGA event was the U.S. Open,” Dudley said. “Normally you start with the U.S. Junior or the U.S. Mid-Am … but my first round as an official was with Sandy Lyle, Larry Mize and David Graham, all three major winners, and I’m thinking, ‘My God, what am I am going to do if I have to give a ruling?’
“Well the first tee shot of my rules official career, Lyle pulls his drive toward the portalets to the left of the fairway. I looked down on my notice and it didn’t say anything about whether we treat portalets as TIO (temporary immovable obstructions). So instead of getting on the radio and asking someone, I decided that I was going to give him relief from those, which would have been the wrong thing to do. That’s why they give you a radio. Luckily we got down there and he wasn’t impacted by them or I would have given him the wrong ruling.”
Later in the round, Dudley was helping Mize take relief from television cables when Mize misunderstood instructions from Dudley and picked up his ball at the incorrect time during the process.
“I never made that mistake again,” Dudley said while laughing. “Ever since, I tell people to mark your ball with a tee but make sure you leave the ball.”
It didn’t take long for Dudley to master the rules while understanding how to handle the best players in the world and the different situations they presented. At one tournament a few years later, Jack Nicklaus got inches from Dudley’s face and demanded to receive relief from a tire track within a sandy area.
“I said, ‘Jack, I can’t give that to you, but I’ll get you a second opinion if you would like,’ ” Dudley recounted. “And he said, ‘No, I think I’ve had a string of good rulings recently.’ I told him, ‘You could have gotten away with that five years ago, but I know the rules a lot better now.’ ”
Being a rules official can be difficult and thankless, particularly when standing one’s ground to protect the proper ruling. Last year at a college tournament, Dudley was working the scoring tent area and noticed that a competitor had signed his scorecard twice rather than having his marker sign in the proper area. The player had shot 67, but had to be disqualified for the error. Those are not enjoyable conversations, but it’s a part of what it means to be a rules official.
For all of his work, the USGA awarded Dudley the Joe Dey Award earlier this year, an honor given annually to a volunteer who has given selflessly to the game. Even now in his mid-70s, Dudley says he takes on an aggressive schedule because he loves it so much. This spring he worked the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur and the Masters a week later. Two weeks after that, he worked the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball at Timuquana and then the U.S. Senior Women’s Open at Pine Needles in North Carolina. Shortly after that came the U.S. Women’s Open in Charleston, S.C., and then the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.
He’s a student of the game to this day. Dudley has attended 30 PGA-USGA Rules of Golf Workshops and has been an instructor at 150 rules workshops. He has scored 94 or higher on the rules test every year since 1994 and has earned four perfect scores in his career.
“It’s pretty neat, because I’ve been able to give the proper rules recommendation to the best players in the world,” Dudley said. “It’s been a great honor to be involved in the game the past few decades and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the FSGA.”
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