Stars have always been part of Toshiba Classic lore
Richard Dunn
It’s appropriate that the final round of the Toshiba Senior Classic
will be played the night of the Oscars.
After all, the PGA Champions Tour event at Newport Beach Country
Club has long song-and-dance ties that date well beyond the Gary
McCord-John Jacobs playoff scene of 1999.
From an operational standpoint with Hoag Hospital as the managing
charity, the Toshiba Senior Classic can be traced back to the early
1970s, when Bing Crosby got the ball rolling on a satellite tour
event called the Crosby Southern Pro-Am.
Crosby, good buddies with Newport Beach’s Marshall Duffield, felt
bad the golfers up north in Pebble Beach who didn’t make the cut at
his former Crosby National Pro-Am and had nowhere to play over the
weekend. And so Duffield and Charley Hester started the “Little
Crosby.”
Duffield had urged Crosby for years, local lore has it, to link a
two-day mini-tour stop to his Pebble Beach clambake, and, one toasty
night during a Christmas party Crosby said yes. Crosby could now take
care of the weather-beaten and tour-beaten golfers who were stuck in
an empty hotel room in pricey Monterey or Carmel.
An avid golfer himself, Bing wanted to give them hope, lift their
spirits, provide another purse for these guys, some of whom were
broke, lonely and out of birdie putts, never getting past the cut at
the former Crosby National Pro-Am. Like a great entertainer, Crosby
gave them good theater on a budget, set up in Newport Beach by two
distinguished gentlemen, Duffield and Hester, who made service a
priority for golf’s minor leaguers aspiring to crack the PGA Tour and
journeymen looking for a weekend out.
It was long before the days of the Nationwide Tour (or Buy.com or
Nike and Hogan tours before it). Crosby gave the pro-am in Newport
Beach a prize of $1,700 for the winner, no chump change for a
journeyman golf pro or some young hotshot out of college.
The first tournament was a success with 72 amateurs and Fred
MacMurray of “My Three Sons” television fame as a celebrity player.
Back then, amateurs were charged only $350 to play in the Pro-Am, but
few signed up. In order to provide a complete field, golf team
members from local colleges were recruited. Gags and gimmicks were
tried throughout the 1970s.
First played in January 1975 after organizers rushed in only a few
weeks to get ready, the Crosby Southern evolved at a time, keep in
mind, when baseball owner Charlie O. Finley of the Swingin’ Oakland
A’s was experimenting with orange baseballs and paying his players to
grow mustaches, while the ill-fated World Football League flirted
with all sorts of innovative schemes, no matter how outrageous.
One year, a heavyweight Crosby Southern sponsor came up with the
ingenious idea of pop-out cups, which were fixed at the bottom of
each hole on the green. It was an invention that didn’t last, but for
awhile golfers in the Little Crosby could stand over the hole and
catch their ball as it popped out.
“You wouldn’t have to bend over and get the ball out of the hole,”
said Mike Crosthwaite, a former PGA Tour rules official who served in
that capacity in the early years at Newport Beach.
It was Duffield who started the 552 Club at Hoag Hospital as a
fund-raising organization. The 552 Club operated the golf tournament
for 23 years, an event known as much for its elaborate parties as its
golf. The parties always had a theme and headliner, like Ray Charles
one year.
“It was a lot of work, and a lot of fun,” the late Hester, a noted
philanthropist, once said, referring to the first year when he and
Duffield scrambled in about a month to stage the inaugural Crosby
Southern Pro-Am.
Hoag Hospital and its army of tournament volunteers for the old
Crosby Southern clambake (later known as the Newport Classic Pro-Am)
closed up shop after the 1997 event and shifted over to the Toshiba
Senior Classic, which was played for the first time under the
auspices of Hoag in 1998.
Duffield, the former USC quarterback whose late 1920s and early
‘30s star-status evoked Hollywood types to seek out his company, was
the key to the Crosby Southern.
Like Crosby, the late great entertainer, golf was Duffield’s
passion. In fact, before his death on July 6, 1990, he teed it up
with five U.S. presidents and myriad Hollywood folks, including
Crosby, W.C. Fields and Bob Hope. At USC, Duffield was a football
teammate and fraternity brother of Marion Morrison, a tall, handsome
fellow who would later become John Wayne. Morrison was voted the most
“unlikely” to succeed by the Sigma Ki fraternity and wasn’t much more
than an average football player as a lineman for the Trojans.
Duffield and Wayne would later become neighbors in Newport Beach and,
according to Duffield’s son, Marshall Duffield Jr., they’d still use
their secret fraternity handshake.
Duffield also became close with Crosby. They played golf together
for years following Duffield’s brilliant collegiate football career,
which included a memorable performance in the 1930 Rose Bowl game
against heavily favored Pittsburgh, an eventual 47-14 blowout victory
for the Trojans and Coach Howard Jones. Duffield, known as the
“tow-headed flash” as a high school star in Santa Monica, was the USC
captain his senior year, leading the Trojans in their Rose Bowl win
by scoring two touchdowns and passing for another. “He was such a
celebrity back then, people would love to pal around with him,” his
son, Duffy, once said.
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