Golf tourney drives local business boost
Restaurant owner says WGC’S effect ‘totally blew us away’
For the past 15 years, Walker Taylor, owner of the Germantown Commissary barbecue restaurant, has attended the Fedex St. Jude Classic golf tournament and donated food to more than 1,000 volunteers. Every year his restaurant saw a sales boost during the four-day competition as golf lovers found their way to his barbecue. This year’s boost was even bigger than expected. For the first time, Memphis’ annual golf tournament was elevated to become the World Golf Championships-fedex St. Jude Invitational, one of four such championships in the world. It welcomed most of the world’s top golfers to Shelby County, filling hotels, restaurants and retail stores with more tourists than past competitions ever saw. “It was a great thing for our city, there’s no question about it,” said Darrell Smith, tournament executive director. “I don’t think we could have asked for better.” Taylor didn’t share specific sales numbers but said during past golf competitions, he saw sales jump as high as 15%.
This year, he was expecting sales to be only slightly higher, maybe about 25% above a normal weekend.
“My expectations were not exceedingly high,” he said. “It totally blew us away. It was fantastic.” Taylor said not only did he see more support than expected in The Pit, where he joined Hog Wild, Central BBQ and Rendezvous to showcase a range of Memphis’ barbecue scene, but both his Germantown spot and his recently opened restaurant in Collierville needed extra wait staff to keep up with the crush of customers.
“You’ve got to have bodies to wait the tables,” he said. “That just tells you the economic impact that something like this has. That’s extra people that got to work extra hours and get extra money.”
More than a week before the competition began, the planning team said more tickets had been sold than at any other golf competition in Memphis history. The average impact of past competitions was usually about $20 million. The full picture of impact is not yet available, but officials expect the championship tournament doubled the financial impact on the area.
Wayne Tabor, president of the Metropolitan Memphis Hotel & Lodging Association, said based on preliminary data, many hotels, particularly those in Germantown and Collierville in the vicinity of the TPC Southwind golf course, where the championship was held, were either full or nearly at capacity.
“It was a really good week for the East Memphis hotels and in the Germantown and Collierville area,” Tabor said. “It was a good week from what we can tell throughout Memphis . ... It was a heck of a lot busier than what it would have been without that tournament. Hotels did pretty darn well.”
Still, he said some hotels didn’t see quite the boom expected.
Tabor expects more data to come in over the coming days and weeks to understand better which hotels fared the best and which didn’t see an expected boost.
For Kevin Kane, president of Memphis Tourism, that kind of data is an invaluable yardstick to gauge the number of tourists who came to Memphis last week.
Kane said this year’s numbers will be compared with the past four years of the Fedex St. Jude Classic to determine how many more hotel rooms were sold and how much additional money was brought into the city and county.
Ticket sales data will also be used to show where the visitors came from and help Memphis Tourism decide how to spend marketing dollars leading up to the 2020 golf championship.
“We will see what we can do next year to stimulate more interest from certain markets into the city,” Kane said, adding that while the next golf championship is a year out, the strategic marketing starts now.
Desiree Stennett covers economic development and business at The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at desiree.stennett@commercialappeal. com, 901-529-2738 or on Twitter: @desi_stennett.