Q&A: Notah Begay III on senior golf goals, what about Tiger Woods annoys him and how good is Charlie Woods?

NB: Well, I don’t know that there’s one sort of uniform solution for it. You know, you look at what happened just over 10 years ago, Joseph Bramlett through the old qualifying system through the PGA Tour made it through the Q-school in 2011, and when he did he was one of two Black players on the Tour. Two. Anytime in the ’70s and ’80s there was 10 to 12 players, and it had been over 25 years since another Black player had made it through the Q-school, and that was Adrian Stills in ’85.

You talk about the caddie system, right. So the ’60s and the ’70s caddies were much more prevalent in the game at clubs across the country. I think that was an access point which no longer exists, and so the avenue to more participation hasn’t changed. It’s an access issue.  

Now, whether that access is being limited through costs, through membership, or through infrastructure depends on each player and their situation, but everybody understands, whether it’s the USGA, the PGA Tour, PGA of America, the AJGA, and our organization, as well, we understand that it’s important to attract as many kids that want to be a part of this game as possible.

So however we can lower those access points to get more kids involved, it has to be an industry-wide initiative to just get any and all kids that want to play golf into the game. The easiest thing is lowering costs in terms of tournament entry fees and equipment if we can do that.  

GWK: What was the motivation to put your name on a junior event and get real involved on that sector?

NB: Well, I thought we could provide a tiered system for young players because I think that Ryan Burr, my former colleague at Golf Channel, he was the brainchild behind this whole initiative, and he asked me to sort of come along and partner with him to promote this whole concept.  

It was based upon little league baseball, essentially, that when you first start in little league, you sleep in your own bed, you go play two games a week, and you don’t have to leave your town until you get good enough, and then you get recruited for a travel team, and then things become a little bit more demanding. There’s not really that availability for golfers to play this kind of little league type of system where they’re being evaluated in a similar fashion to the way some of the elite level players across the country are being evaluated in terms of points, access to points and rankings.

So what we simply tried to do by starting a junior Tour in New Mexico, a junior Tour through the southern states, I think we’re in like 11 states throughout the South, is No. 1, we lowered our entry fees to below $100 per event, and we also are playing a lot of our events that are awarding nationally ranked points to these kids that they don’t have to go far from home to compete in events on good courses, to give them the feedback that they’re looking for to determine whether or not they’re ready to take that next step. 

If they are ready to take that next step, then we have a regional level that they can qualify for. If they’re good enough at the regional level, then they go to our national championship, which is on Golf Channel. So college coaches from across the world can watch our broadcast, and we provide backgrounds, biographical information, swing information, videos on our site of these kids so coaches can go on, and if they see a kid that is in 16th place that they’ve never heard of, they can go and sort of figure out whether or not that’s somebody they want to get in touch with.

We had a young kid named Lance Christensen from the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota. You can look it up on any website you want, and I’ve been there; it is truly one of the poorest communities in our nation. This guy would drive one way, one hour to the nearest golf course to play. Two years ago, he won a state high school championship in one of the smaller divisions, and I read about him, and I invited him to our national championship, and he was playing against some of the highest ranked junior golfers. Nick Dunlap was in the field, who went on to become the U.S. Junior champion the next year, Brandon Valdez. There were some highly ranked junior golfers. Lance goes in and wins the long drive contest, hits it 360. All these kids who know each other, who have been playing against each other all summer were looking at each other going, who is this kid? I didn’t know he had that kind of heat. 

Well, he ends up, I make a call down to New Mexico State, and he’s now playing on that team down there. He’s like a 3.4 GPA, and he’s going to graduate with a degree.

I know Lance, he’s going to go back to Pine Ridge and he’s going to make a difference in his community. That’s what our junior series is all about is giving kids opportunities that they’ve never had, that they would have never had in the first place.