Golf executive led renewal of Harding Park
Frank “Sandy” Tatum, who had a profound influence on golf in Northern California and throughout the United States — including spearheading the renovation of San Francisco’s Harding Park — died Thursday morning, his family confirmed. He was 96.
Mr. Tatum, whose deep voice, sharp intellect and abiding passion for the game were well known across golf circles, was an accomplished player at Stanford. He won the NCAA individual championship in 1942 — to this day, Tiger Woods (1996) and Cameron Wilson (2014) are the only other Cardinal men’s golfers to match the feat — and helped the school take the
team title in 1941 and ’42.
But Mr. Tatum’s lasting impact on the game occurred when he wasn’t playing. Most notably, he served as president of the United States Golf Association in the 1970s and spent eight years on the executive committee of the USGA, golf ’s national governing body and the organization that annually runs the U.S. Open.
Mr. Tatum, a longtime San Francisco lawyer, selected and set up Open venues, including the “Massacre at Winged Foot” in 1974. Hale Irwin slogged to the tournament title at the uncommonly high score of 7-over-par at Winged Foot Golf Club in suburban New York, and Mr. Tatum soon revealed his quick wit and guardianship of the game.
Asked about ringing criticism of daunting course conditions, Mr. Tatum succinctly offered one of the most memorable quotes in golf history.
“We are not trying to humiliate the best golfers in the world,” he said. “We are simply trying to identify who they are.”
Beyond his interest in wide-ranging issues affecting the game — from ball and club technology to architecture (he helped design Spanish Bay on the Monterey Peninsula, among other layouts) — Mr. Tatum took special interest in Harding Park. Harding, a tree-lined municipal course weaving around Lake Merced in the southwest corner of San Francisco, had been a regular PGA Tour stop in the 1960s.
Mr. Tatum annually played there in the San Francisco City Championship, an amateur event he came to cherish for its egalitarian flavor. So when Mr. Tatum, approaching his 80th birthday in the late 1990s, returned to Harding and found it had slid into disrepair, he was alarmed.
“I had played Harding enough to understand and appreciate what special qualities it had,” he said in a 2010 interview. “My regard for it had the added factor that it was, and happily still is, a muni where non-private club golfers can get a very special experience. …
“I’ve thought about how out of balance it all is — how rare it is the public golfer has a chance to play on a course of real quality. That’s been a focus of mine for a long time.”
Thus did the lifetime private-club golfer throw himself into an oh-sopublic project. To refurbish Harding Park meant navigating the minefield of San Francisco politics, an often frustrating process.
Mr. Tatum found allies in then-Mayor Willie Brown and then-city attorney Michael Cohen, who helped overcome many obstacles — giving the project a “Mount Everest dimension,” as Mr. Tatum once put it.
Finally, after 15 months of renovation, Harding reopened in August 2003 — its fairways clean and weed-free, its greens smooth and pure. Barely two years later, in October 2005, Woods and John Daly engaged in a riveting playoff in the American Express Championship, triumphantly returning Harding Park to the national stage.
The project was not without its severe problems and loud critics. They were not happy about the money used to refurbish Harding — $16 million in state grant money from the city’s Open Space fund — and became even more vocal when the project ran $7 million over budget.
The agreement called for the money to be paid back to the Open Space fund with income from Harding Park’s operations, but the course has not generated as much revenue as projected. Then again, it also helped pump millions into the local economy through two marquee PGA Tour events, the AMEX in ’05 and the Presidents Cup in 2009.
Also, Rory McIlroy won the tour’s Match Play Championship at Harding in May 2015. The course is scheduled to host the PGA Championship, its first major tournament, in 2020.
Mr. Tatum’s efforts at Harding were recognized when city officials named the new clubhouse the Frank D. “Sandy” Tatum Clubhouse.
Harding’s transformation also included the founding of a First Tee chapter in 2004. The First Tee is a program designed to teach life skills and core values, through golf, to inner-city kids. Mr. Tatum took immense pride in his role as chairman of the First Tee of San Francisco, which has introduced the game to thousands of Bay Area kids.
“The First Tee is reaching a lot of kids in places where they need outreach desperately,” he once said.
Mr. Tatum was born on July 10, 1920, in the Los Angeles area. He once described his father as a “lover and true believer” of golf who passed along his passion for the game to his son.
The younger Tatum graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in 1942 and earned his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1950. Mr. Tatum was inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame in 2011, in the “Distinguished Achievement” category.
Tom Watson, a Stanford alum, eight-time major champion and longtime friend of Mr. Tatum, introduced him at the enshrinement banquet. Watson also wrote the foreword to Mr. Tatum’s 2002 autobiography, “A Love Affair with the Game,” in which Watson said, “Knowing Sandy as I do, I can honestly admit I have never met a golfer who has been so thoroughly possessed with the game.”
Mr. Tatum is survived by six children — Jeffery Anne, Timothy, Peter, Christopher, Victoria and Shelley — and 11 grandchildren. His wife, Barbara, died in February.