Koch recalls magical day during 1984 Bay Hill win
Gary Koch never played a round of golf before or since like he did on the final day of the 1984 Bay Hill Classic.
Forty years later, the memories, emotions and particulars remain fresh.
Koch hit 19 of 20 greens in regulation to record 8 birdies and 10 pars for a cool-under-pressure 63 on a par-71 layout, still the lowest final-round score by a champion. He then tacked on two birdies to beat George Burns on the second playoff hole.
“The game was easy that day,” he told the Orlando Sentinel on Saturday. “I went for the rest of my career trying to recapture the feelings of that day came close at times but never quite to the same level as that day. It pretty spectacular.”
While Koch couldn’t reproduce that magical day at Arnold Palmer’s tournament staged at his Florida home, he won six times on the PGA Tour — no small feat — and positioned himself for a post-playing career few have rivaled.
Most people know Koch, 71 and living in Tampa, for his 26 years on NBC — often as Johnny Miller’s steady sidekick.
Koch was the yin to Miller’s yang but also delivered a call as famous as any in the history of televised golf.
Tiger Woods’ 60-foot triple-breaking birdie putt on TPC Sawgrass’s famed 17th-hole island green during his 2001 Players Championship win inspired Koch’s famous utterance, “Better than most,” three times as the ball somehow found the hole.
As the PGA Tour reaches the second leg of the Florida Swing this week for the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Koch will cherish those moments and miss those chances to weigh in on the day’s events with Miller and Dan Hicks, the Last of the Mohicans on an iconic broadcast team also including on-course reporter Roger Maltbie.
“It was such a good team, so professionally done,” Koch said. “The camaraderie was there. It was like we had all worked together for so long that we kind of knew when somebody was going to be finished speaking and when it was OK to talk.”
This week carries more meaning than most for Koch, who moved to Tampa from Louisiana in 1968. His footprint in the Sunshine State is vast but left no deeper impression than at the Orlando-area Tour stop, scheduled this week to run Thursday through Sunday at Bay Hill Club and Lodge.
Other than eight-time champion Tiger Woods, Koch is among just six two-time winners of a event dating to the 1966 Florida Citrus Open Invitational. But he is the only golfer to win at both Bay Hill and Rio Pinar Country Club, still thriving 30 minutes or so across town in east Orlando.
Koch remembers he earned $40,000 for the 1977 win and $72,000 in 1984, or $1,000 more than 44th place during the 2023 event won by Kurt Kitayama.
The Tiger Effect on TV contracts and fan interest, monetary inflation and the recent threat of LIV Golf has pushed purses to unforeseen heights and spurred adjustments to showcase events and playing fields to ensure participation of the top golfers on the PGA Tour.
This week’s API, one of eight “signature events,” will feature a field of around 75 players, down from 120. A $20 million purse, including $4 million to the winner, will be up for grabs among golfers who are among the low 50 and ties making the 36-hole cut.
“It’s probably seven, eight, maybe even 10 years ago, we were doing the Players telecast,” Koch recalled, “and I happen to look and the winner of the Players that year was going to win more than I won in my entire career. I knew the times had changed.”
Technological advances are another massive shift since Koch’s heyday. Yet while purists have cringed as courses have been defanged, he understands the appeal.
Calling the 2021 API, Koch was mesmerized watching Bryson DeChambeau drive his ball over far reaches of the expansive lake guarding the par-5 No. 6 fairway.
“That was good TV,” Koch said. “And there were a lot of people there that were hooting and hollering and a lot of viewers saying, ‘Is this even possible …. to carry it 340 yards across this lake?’ “
When the short-hitting Koch won at Bay Hill, he faced several second shots with long irons in his hand. Unable to reach even the apex of the hill at the par-4 18th hole, he had to hit a 3-iron to a green mostly guarded by a water hazard.
But Koch was in such command of his swing, he easily found the putting surface.
“The iron play was clearly — and not just short iron play — it was all through the bag, it was very special on that day,” he said.
Seven years earlier, Koch was nearly as dialed in during his third-round 65 at par-72 Rio Pinar en route to a 2-stroke win against South Africa’s Dale Hayes and American Joe Inman. Koch’s second professional win was less than a year after his maiden victory at the 1976 Tallahassee Open.
In those days, the Tour staged tournaments in proximity to the next one, allowing travel by car and caravan. In 1970, the year after Koch unexpectedly won the prestigious 1969 Florida Open as a 16-year-old, the Sunshine State was host to seven stops, including six in a row stretching from Pensacola to Miami.
“The tour was really set up for us to be able to travel and drive from tournament to tournament,” he said. “I had a group — Bill Rogers, Bruce Lietzke, Bobby Wadkins and there were a couple others — we’d leave the tournament on Sunday, everybody in their cars, gone to the next tournament.
“It was kind of like a big happy family. You spent a lot of time together, much more so I think than the guys do now.”
Prior to those nomadic days, Koch attended the University of Florida, where he became a three-time All-American and key member of the 1973 teams that won the SEC and NCAA championships.
The year before he arrived in Gainesville from Tampa, a 17-yearold Koch met Palmer during an exhibition with Gary Player and high school teammate Eddie Pearce, a future Tour pro himself.
Years later, Koch’s record-setting victory at Bay Hill culminated with another lifetime memory during the trophy presentation.
“Before I could even get anything out, Arnold says, ‘A lot of people won’t know this, but I played with Gary when he was 17,’ ” Koch recalled. “‘I told him that we would see him on the PGA Tour and now he’s won my tournament. I couldn’t be happier.’
“That was Arnold. My jaw dropped that he would remember something like that.”