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.