White Bucket Hats and Confidence - Part One

The mid-1970s was an exciting time in the world of golf. Jack Nicklaus, Tom Weiskopf and Johnny Miller battled head to head. Lee Elder was invited to play at Augusta, becoming the first black ever to tee it up at the Masters. Tom Watson appeared on the scene as a Nicklaus challenger and at the British Open in red plaid pants.

Golf apparel reached a flamboyant level of eyeball-popping colors. Pastels, plaids, stripes, wide white belts and sharp dagger-like collars were the rage. Hubert Green actually wore green polyester pants, and Nicklaus had a pair of bright yellow pastels. It was a vibrant time, and threads were plug-em in at night, glow-in-the-dark outrageous. This included headwear; white bucket hats and visors covered trendy hair styles. Sponsor names like Amana and big alligator logos that represented Izod adorned the headgear like billboards. Chi Chi Rodriguez's sword dance strut was better than any end-zone dance.

There was the birth of Eldrick Woods to Earl and Kultida and an inauspicious dinner at the Sea Turtle restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida. This was just a dinner meeting at a junior clinic. Tom Watson, Puggy Blackmon and Mike Bentley talking junior golf and eating stuffed flounder. Bentley was doing most of the talking; Watson and Blackmon listened intently. Bentley's agenda was to get Watson to be his honorary chairman for a new national junior golf association. Watson was just beginning to dominate on Tour, and Bentley saw him as a perfect fit for a national spokesperson for his new organization, which up to this point was just verbal hyperbole. Somehow, Bentley was going to create a national playground for junior golf, something similar to a PGA Tour, only for 11 - 1 8-year-old boys and girls. Everyone at dinner that night agreed it was a great idea.

Based in Atlanta, Bentley forged ahead with his plan. He changed the names on the junior program in Atlanta like a rotating title sponsor at a PGA event. In 1978 he ushered the Dekalb County Junior into the Atlanta Junior, and then before any 14-year-old could put a peg in the ground, the adoption of the moniker American junior Golf Association (AJGA) became the dimpled cover exterior of the junior game. It was really the Dekalb County junior and the AJGA under one roof Bentley saw both a need and an opportunity to create an overall structure to further foster the game on a competitive, amateur grassroots level. "I thought it was a great idea at the time, but I thought he would starve," said Blackmon. With that in mind, Blackmon turned his two Jacksonville junior events into a chapter of the national structure, giving Bentley a club length's support-humble beginnings. The AJGA still had little cash flow and it began running two Tournaments (the American Junior Classic and the Tournament of Champions). A member of the AJGA board of directors, Kay Slayden, created a first Tournament home for the Tournament of Champions at Inverrary in Lauderhill, Florida. Inverrary had been the longtime site of the PGA Tour's Jackie Gleason and the initial home of the PGA Tour Players Championship. The American junior Classic was welcomed by the Innisbrook Golf Resort in Tarpon Springs, Florida. All of a sudden, Tournaments at Inverrary and Innisbrook gave credibility to the fledgling nonprofit organization.

The first two Tournaments created a small national stage for a handful of junior golfers. Future PGA Tour players like Willie Wood, Jodie Mudd, Andrew Magee, Mark Calcavecchia, Jim Gallagher Jr., Mark Brooks, Andy Dillard and Tommy Moore saw the AJGA as an opportunity to compete with the country's best. Their pictures still hang at AJGA headquarters near Atlanta. "I saw the way they set up one of the first Tournaments at Inverrary," recalls Blackmon. "I told them it was too difficult, the kids won't finish. Willie Wood went out and shot 66."

The AJGA was certainly not the first organization to initiate national Tournament golf for juniors. The USGA has organized the Boys' Junior Amateur event since 1948, when Dean Lind defeated Ken Venturi in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Events like the "Big I" Insurance Classic, the PGA Junior, the Optimist World and the Hudson Junior have all contributed to the development of junior golf. But, as far as a complete Tournament schedule is concerned, utilizing national sponsors and courses that test young minds and games, the AJGA was the beginning.

Like most great concepts, it started with Bentley's vision. But Bentley, the visionary of the future of junior golf, was caught in the middle of the program's structure. Chris Haack joined Bentley in 1981 to handle Tournament operations for both events so Bentley could raise funds. A year later the AJGA had a permanent headquarters at Horseshoe Bend Country Club in Roswell, Georgia. About this same time junior golf began to erupt just like Bentley's vision. Watson came on board as the national spokesperson. The AJGA’s initial Tournament offerings escalated to six events. The junior players started to realize that there was somewhere else to compete. Blackmon said, ")"at happened was kids that were big fish in a little pond become the little fish in the big pond. All of a sudden, the ability to play at a higher level raised everyone's game."

Stephen Hamblin, a teaching pro at Innisbrook, took the reins from a distraught Bentley and became the organization's executive director in 1984. "That same year we almost closed the doors," said Hamblin. The AJGA had a board of directors in place but little working capital. They were lean years according to Hamblin. The AJGA persevered slowly, developing a cadre of efficiently organized and staffed Tournaments nationwide.

Today there are more than 4,500 members of the AJGA. Hamblin and his staff of 30 direct more than 50 Tournaments a year.

Blackmon was teaching his golf camp in South Carolina earlier this summer, when one of his campers asked about David Duval. "What was David Duval like as a junior?" asked one camper. In Blackmon's mind was a picture of an 18-year-old Duval wearing a white bucket hat, the kind with the brim that covers the periphery of the entire lid. Blackmon was unable to resist the urge to tell the story about Duval's freshman year at Georgia Tech. Like a lot of AJGA alumni, Duval was a maverick, plotting his own confident course. His last summer with the AJGA, Duval wore a white bucket at many junior events and at the beginning of his freshman year at Georgia Tech. Blackmon took a picture of Duval wearing shorts, white golf shoes and socks, a bucket hat and a bright pink shirt. Blackmon had the picture transferred to a mouse pad and sent it to the headquarters of Tommy Hilfiger Golf before the 1997 PGA Tour season, Duval went to Tommy Hilfiger Golf headquarters to be fitted for apparel. While at the office, he was reintroduced to the retro photo of his early college days. All Duval could think was, "Coach, I'm going to kill him."

Duval was not the only junior that wore a white bucket hat. In the late 1980s the white bucket hat for the boys' junior player was cool. "That's all I remember about Duval, that gosh-ugly white bucket hat he wore," said Haack. "And Leonard wore one of those hats, too. I can remember more than a dozen players wearing those things," said Haack. Trip Kuehne recalls that the bucket hat brigade started at La Paloma for the AJGA team championship. "It was so hot in the desert that we would fill those things with water and dump them over our head to cool off. It was also a great sun protector," said Kuehne.

Jack Nicklaus wore a white bucket hat to compete for most of the 1965 and 1966 PGA Tour seasons. He set a trend wearing the fashionable headgear, winning back-to-back (1965, 1966) Masters and one British Open (1966). The American 20-something players were not even born. Al Geiberger and Don January donned bucket hats in the 1970s. To Leonard and Duval, January was the first month of the year and Geiberger may as well have been a lunch special at the TPC Woodlands grill. To the junior golfers in the late 1980s, the white bucket hat was just another trend in bravado for the junior players with a game. No Fear t-shirts, Air Jordans, white bucket hats and roller blades, just another fad in the mix. It was an accessory that looked cool and kept them cool.