Toshiba Senior Classic Golf: Rolling the dice

Richard Dunn

Weather can play a huge factor in an outdoor event, especially a

professional golf tournament in the winter.

“Actually, the best weather we’ve had since we’ve been running this

tournament was the year of El Nino (1998),” said Jeff Purser, tournament

director of the Senior PGA Tour’s Toshiba Senior Classic at Newport Beach

Country Club.

That year was the tournament’s first under the management of Hoag

Hospital, which hired Purser away from the Midwest.

“It was absolutely gorgeous all week that year,” Purser added. “And it

was the latest we’ve ever held the event in the calendar year.”

Last year, the predicted rain that threatened to shorten the

tournament to two rounds for the second year in a row never materialized.

In the end, after a nine-hole playoff victory for Jose Maria

Canizares, Purser came out smelling like roses.

Purser resisted the suggestion from Senior Tour officials to send

players off both the first and 10th tees for Sunday’s final round. Tour

officials wanted to complete the tournament as soon as possible in an

effort to avoid the storm.

Purser gambled and said no. He decided against that option because it

would take away prime afternoon time for sponsors, many of whom endured

the previous year’s final-round rainout.”I told (tour officials) that

I’ve got sponsors and ticket buyers expecting a show today. Let’s roll

the dice,” Purser said. “It was just a matter of explaining to them what

was important ... they understood what we were doing. There wasn’t an

argument; it wasn’t confrontational. They wanted to do things by the

official rules. Their specialty is the play and competition; our first

objective is to have a good community event.”

One day after Canizares defeated Gil Morgan in the event’s second

nine-hole playoff, the second-longest on the Senior Tour, Purser said he

wanted “70 degrees and sunny ... We got 60,000 to 65,000 fans (for the

three-day weekend, including 17,000 to 18,000 on Sunday) in poor weather.

If you consider we had nobody for the Wednesday and Thursday pro-ams,

that’s a pretty good turnout. If we had great weather for a whole week,

including Friday, Saturday and Sunday, there’s your 80,000 to 90,000

people and $1.3 million to charity.”

Vice President and General Manager of Toshiba Computer Systems Group

Mark Simons, for one, was impressed with Purser’s leadership last year.

“We made a lot of comments about (Purser) being the best tournament

director,” Simons said, “but I think anybody who can control the weather

like he did last year -- he held off the rain for at least 36 hours --

and anybody who can have us going ... has got a lot of control that we as

a tournament can’t do above and beyond the call.”

While an estimated 17,500 attended the final round last year, the

educated-guess attendance by Purser for the Saturday second round was

between 20,000 and 21,000, the largest of the tournament, when the

weather was dry for the third straight day.

Purser arrived from the Midwest shortly after Hoag Hospital took over

as managing charity in August 1997.

“Hey, I’ve gotten rained out before and I’ll get rained out again,”

Purser said. “I’ve had entire greens under two feet of water and

tornadoes surrounding us (at a tour event in the early 1990s at

Youngstown, Ohio). There were five tornadoes within a five-mile (radius),

and one touched down a half-mile away. We had hospitality tents under

water. So what happened (in 2000) wasn’t that bad.”