The wild history of Southern Hills, the 2022 PGA Championship’s host site — life, death and naked hippies

The wild history of Southern Hills, the 2022 PGA Championship’s host site — life, death and naked hippies

Brendan Quinn
May 17, 2022

When playing golf in Tulsa, the ground does the talking, you do the walking. The city resides in Oklahoma’s northeastern corner. It’s squeezed between the edge of the Great Plains and the foot of the Ozarks, resulting in the topography of rolling hills and deep forests. Elevation ranges from a low of 534 feet above sea level to a high of 1,093 feet. Up and down, up and down.

Advertisement

The region known as Southern Hills is — shockingly — south of downtown Tulsa and pretty hilly. That’s where, in 1936, famed architect Perry Maxwell, navigating both the terrain and the Great Depression, choreographed an army of mules and strong men to push and shape the earth, carving out a golf course. It evolved into one of the sport’s great theaters, ultimately hosting 11 USGA national tournaments, including three U.S. Opens (1958, 1977, 2001), four PGA Championships (1970, 1982, 1994, 2007), and two Tour Championships (1995-96). Modern architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner recently oversaw a historical restoration, returning Southern Hills to its original glory and, this week, the course will stage the 2022 PGA Championship.

That, as it stands, is the very polished, ironed-pleats, proper golf history of Southern Hills Country Club.

And then there’s the other history.

This is where things get weird. This is where you wonder if maybe there’s something in the water down there. This is where you wonder what this week might hold.


Just ask Bob Dickson. He knows.

It was 1965. Dickson, a native Okie and member of the Oklahoma State golf team, was a quality young player. He’d won three straight high school state titles and was on his way to a two-time All-American college career. At this time, the U.S. Amateur was experimenting with stroke play to determine its champion.

Dickson entered the week feeling he had a chance, but was far from a favorite. A good first round put him in contention and he was ready to make a move on Day 2. That’s when, on the second hole of the day, sitting in a greenside bunker, Dickson reached into the bag, pulled out his Spalding & Brothers Dynameter wedge and did a double-take.

His heart stopped.

“Saw a wedge I’d never seen before,” he says now, 57 years later.

Advertisement

It’s not exactly clear what happened, but somehow, before Dickson teed off for the second round of the Amateur, a rogue wedge found its way into his bag. By mistake? Deliberately? Who knows. A few newspaper reports from the time said it was accidentally tossed in there by a careless caddie.

Either way, Dickson was screwed. He called a USGA rules official over, explained that he was mistakenly carrying 15 clubs, one over the limit. The USGA doesn’t do mistakes, so Dickson was penalized four strokes — two each for each hole played with the extra club in the bag.

“It was all on me — nobody else,” he says today. “I should have noticed it on the range and I most definitely should’ve seen it on the first tee. But I didn’t. It’s the player’s responsibility. Man, I learned a lesson.”

This is only relevant now because of what happened next. Dickson’s tournament should’ve essentially been over. Instead, the 78-year-old now says, “It lit my engine.” He birdied three of the next six holes. He erased the penalty damn near as soon as it was issued. He played so well that, by the time Dickson made the turn in the final round two days later, he had, incredibly, built a three-stroke lead over the field and sat alone in first place.

Those hills, though. Up and down.

Heading into the 17th hole, Dickson’s lead was down to a single stroke. An errant drive led to a scrambling bogey. Now he was in a tie atop the leaderboard. On 18, needing a par to force a playoff, Dickson found a green-side bunker and left himself 20 feet for par. The putt missed 2 inches to the left. He lost by one stroke to Bob Murphy, a cigar-smoking 22-year-old from the University of Florida who took up the game only four years earlier after shoulder injuries ended his hopes as a quarterback and pitcher.

Dickson, undone by Southern Hills, was crushed.

Advertisement

So often, this is where these types of tales end. And we talk about a man left stained with regret. In Dickson’s case, he went his own way.

“I’m glad I didn’t have to live with it,” he says. “It came out in the wash a couple of years later.”

In May 1967, Bob Dickson, only a few days before reporting to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, for active duty in the National Guard, traveled to Formby Golf Club in Merseyside, England, and won the British Amateur. The win felt redemptive but was only the start. A few months later, Dickson was granted leave to compete in the 1967 U.S. Amateur and, wouldn’t you know it, posted a one-shot victory at Broadmoor West Golf Club in Colorado Springs to become the first man since 1935 to win both the British and U.S. Amateurs in the same year.

The New York Times reported his performance as alternately brilliant and erratic. Sort of like those hills in northeastern Oklahoma.

“That name — Southern Hills — they aren’t kidding,” says Dickson, who stopped playing on the PGA Tour in 1977 and presently lives outside Tallahassee, Fla. “It’s an incredible test.”

Bob Murphy, left, celebrates his 1965 U.S. Amateur win next to a dejected Bob Dickson. (Courtesy Southern Hills CC)

In the days leading up to the 1970 PGA Championship, pre-tournament storylines matched the Oklahoma summer — tired and dry. An aging Arnold Palmer pursued the final leg of the career grand slam. Lee Trevino, a tournament favorite, was trying to amend for oversleeping two weeks earlier and missing the first round of the Westchester Classic. Raymond Floyd was trying to defend his 1969 PGA title. A 57-year-old Ben Hogan was trying to give it one more go on his worn left knee. Ho-hum.

Then came Tuesday, Aug. 12, 1970. The Associated Press moved a story on the wire.

“Rumor: Nude Hippies May Invade PGA Championship”

OK.

Who isn’t reading that story?

The whole ordeal began at an unnamed restaurant in downtown Tulsa, so the story goes. Early in the week, well before the tournament began, a man called the local police department with a tip. He said that while working at his restaurant, he overheard a table of young vagabonds mapping out a plot to derail the tournament with chaos.

Advertisement

The information, as relayed from Tulsa PD Capt. Bill Melton to a group of reporters, was that the group planned to sneak onto the grounds and lure security guards away from the 18th hole with … you guessed it … five nude women. With those patrolmen occupied, the plan then called for the male saboteurs to sneak onto the course and sprinkle weed killer onto Southern Hills’ 18th green. The toxin wasn’t going to be thrown around haphazardly. No, it was going to scrawl out a message for the world to see. The envisioned TV cameras panning across the green to display their proclamation.

“PEACE”

The tip was met with everything from eye rolls to concern, but it couldn’t be ignored. So Melton, overseeing a 44-man patrol force on tournament week, put his people on high alert. The AP reported an “all-night vigil” guarding the 18th green. UPI reported, “Melton, though skeptical of the sabotage plan, ordered his security forces to stay at their posts — naked women or not.”

All this time later, it remains unclear whether this plan was real or a hoax.

But we do know there were never any naked hippies seen trespassing at Southern Hills, cajoling some kindly policemen from their posts.

And that’s a bummer.


Imagine this. It’s deep into a summer Sunday afternoon in Tulsa. You’re trying to win the freakin’ U.S. Open. Your breath is hot. Your shirt clings to your chest. Your palms can’t stay dry. Every swing feels like it’s through a thousand pounds of sand.

And then a guy comes along and tells you someone is trying to kill you.

In the annals of oddities at Southern Hills, Hubert Green and the 1977 U.S. Open stand alone.

During the tournament, a woman called authorities to say her boyfriend and two other men were conspiring to commit a murder. The target? Green, who by the time the fourth round began, led the tournament by one stroke over Andy Bean. The plan, the woman said, was to shoot Green on the 15th hole. Right there, out in the open, in broad daylight.

Advertisement

Authorities were confounded. Inform Hubert Green he may be in danger? Or assume the whole thing is bull? Police scrambled, both weighing the veracity of the threat and investigating where it originated.

Ultimately the decision came to not immediately tell Green.

As Sunday morning turned to Sunday afternoon, the calculus changed. Unable to confirm if Green was in peril, Tulsa police decided he must be informed. They decided to do so right there as he walked off the 14th green and walked toward the 15th tee with a one-stroke lead and four holes to play.

USGA official Sandy Tatum, along with uniformed police, pulled Green aside. They told him an assassination attempt was potentially taking shape. He was given the option of clearing the course, ending play for the day and moving to a Monday finish, or continuing on.

Green’s decision? Play on.

“I could tell something was up,” says Shayne Grier, Green’s caddie that day.

Grier was the sort of caddie who subscribed to the “Up Rule.” Show up, keep up, shut up. So he dropped Green’s bag on the 15th tee, pulled out his yardage book and went through the motions. Green arrived shortly thereafter, looking shook, acting otherwise.

Green hit, as Grier describes it, “a scraggly hook,” and handed Grier the club. “Meet me at the ball,” Green said, before walking off on his own. Grier hoisted the bag on his shoulder and made his way down the 15th. He still didn’t know what was going on, but began seeing police officers emerge from behind every tree lining the hole. Some had a hand on their holstered pistol. Grier hollered to one officer, “Everything all right?'”

“Oh yeah, no worries,” the cop replied.

As extra security lined the hole, police seized ABC’s cameras and scanned the galleries, looking for anything suspicious.

Now, set for the second shot, Grier gave Green his yardage. Green pulled a club and sort of snapped, “OK, now back off. Just back off.” Grier half-thought his man might be falling apart under the pressure.

Advertisement

Another scraggly hook. Green started walking. “I’ll meet you at the green,” he said to Grier, trailing behind.

“By now, I knew Hubert wasn’t himself,” Grier says. “On the green, I handed him the ball and he goes, ‘Don’t stand there. Just take the pin and go over there.’ He lagged it down, made his par, and said, ‘Meet me at the next tee,’ and stormed off.”

Grier beelined over to a group of police. “I’m trying to win the U.S. Open with this guy. Will someone tell me what the fuck is going on?” An officer finally let the caddie in on the secret.

Now, on the par-5 16th tee, Green again hooked a shot into the left trees and walked up the hole alone.

Standing together in the left rough, Grier gave Green the yardage for a simple layup. Green struck an iron, handed the club to Grier, and again told him to meet him at the ball, but the caddie had had enough. Having grown up on some tough streets in Worcester, Mass., Grier didn’t suffer fools. He grabbed Green by the arm and made eye contact.

“Hey, pro, I don’t know what this bullshit about someone shooting you is all about, but where I’m from, if someone is gonna tag you, they’re not gonna send a telegram first.”

Grier’s theory: Some gambler was trying to knock Green off-kilter to win a bet. He told Green the whole thing was a bluff.

“You’re right,” Green said.

Then the 32-year-old hit his third shot to about 3 feet. Birdie. Two-shot lead.

Green went on to beat Lou Graham by 1 stroke. Instead of a typical ceremonial celebration after the final putt dropped, he was swept off the green by helmeted-police officers, barely given time to shake Andy Bean’s hand. Back in the locker room, Green told Grier not to talk about the threat. He didn’t want to give it oxygen or spawn copycats.

In 2007, speaking to Golf Digest about that day, Green said: “I never looked into it. I never asked any questions. I never worried about it. I didn’t believe in it.”

Advertisement

Hubert Green died in 2018 at age 71. Throat cancer. He was a two-time major winner and a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.

The entire ordeal at Southern Hills and its place in history feels, in hindsight, overly cruel. Not only was the hoax both empty and sinister, but it indelibly attached itself to a moment that should’ve otherwise been the crowning moment of Green’s career.

Thinking on it, Grier, who carried Green’s bag for just over four years, working 10 of his 29 professional wins, says, “You know, I hope that doesn’t define Hubert’s career. … You know what’s interesting? His nickname out there was Dobermann, like a Dobermann Pinscher. It was because, when he got in contention, man, he wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything.”

He proved it at Southern Hills.

Hubert Green and caddie Shayne Grier at the 1977 U.S. Open. (Courtesy of Southern Hills CC)

To this day, there’s an outstanding balance.

Rich Jones still owes $3,445.80.

“Seems like he just sort of waited it out,” the voice from the Tulsa County Court Clerk says on the other end.

In a lot of ways, it’s fitting. The story has gone away, but the ordeal never will. Not entirely, anyway. Not to those who remember the summer of 1999, when on a June morning an Oklahoma sun rose to reveal obscene messages and swastikas scrawled on several Southern Hills greens and tee boxes, written in grass-killing acid. This was two years before the club was to host the 2001 U.S. Open. Officials were entering a key stretch of improvements for the USGA. Now eight greens and three tee boxes on the championship course, plus four greens on SHCC’s second 18-hole course, were ruined.

“You could see it as you drove up the entrance that he, in no uncertain terms, told the general manager and superintendent what he thought of them,” says Tim Moraghan, the former USGA championship agronomist who worked with Southern Hills in prepping for the Open.

Advertisement

He is Rich Jones, a disgruntled member of the Southern Hills grounds crew who took out his frustrations with club general manager Nick Sidorakis and course superintendent John Szklinski by defacing the course. We know this because he wrote: “FUCK YOU NICK AND JOHN! BE BACK FOR OPEN 2001.” Not a lot of room open for interpretation there.

Jones quit his job at the club three days later. He packed up and traveled to Europe, before returning stateside to California, ultimately resettling in Arkansas.

Maybe this could’ve ended there.

It did not.

Shortly after the incident, Jones was charged in September 1999 for felony malicious injury to property. He was already outside state lines, though, and Tulsa police didn’t see country club vandalism as grounds for a manhunt. Southern Hills, meanwhile, wanted the whole episode to pass. In terms of repairs to the greens, the club couldn’t simply treat the affected areas. As Moraghan puts it: “If there was an elevated camera shot, and you had only sodded or reseeded the damaged area, it’d still be visible, or maybe even highlight the — uh, comments — even more.” The club opted instead to close the championship course from August 1999 to June 2000 and reseed all 18 greens. Total cost: $2.9 million. For good measure, in February 2000, the club’s maintenance facility burned down. That was unrelated, though. Faulty wiring, they said.

As 2001 approached, Southern Hills’ journey from closure to recovery was an unavoidable topic leading into the U.S. Open. Sports Illustrated set out to report the story. Staff writer Ivan Maisel spoke to the folks at SHCC who “begrudgingly talked,” as he now remembers. The story was rather straightforward, until the magazine finally tracked down Jones in Eureka Springs, Ark., where the divorced father of one was working on the maintenance crew at Holiday Island C.C.

George Dohrmann — then a Sports Illustrated staffer, now an editor at The Athletic — was dispatched to the small town in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. Eureka Springs was hosting its annual blues festival and Jones, a member of the Jones Brothers Band, was expected to be there. Dohrmann, then 28, spent the day wandering the town, asking around about Rich Jones. A few people recognized the name. That night, he settled into a bar and waited for the Jones Brothers Band to take stage.

Advertisement

The show began.

No Rich Jones.

That is, until the lead singer leaned into the mic and welcomed the man himself on stage. There, wearing a Southern Hills 2001 U.S. Open hat, was Rich Jones.

Dohrmann approached Jones afterward. He sidled up, told Jones he was from Sports Illustrated and that he’d flown overnight from San Francisco just to find him. Jones was blown away. “Thought it was so cool,” Dohrmann remembers.

Jones, whose record included a previous 1996 conviction for terroristic threatening, laid out his story between swigs of beer. He all but admitted to the vandalism, without directly saying so. A wink and a nod. He wondered aloud why, if everyone was so confident he was guilty, then why was he still walking free? Here was a blues man in a blues bar, doing as one does — taunting the law.

“If they’ve got all this evidence, why don’t they come and get me?” Jones told SI. “I’d love to fight them, but I don’t have the money to go back there and do that.”

Well …

A word for the wise — don’t mock police when they hold a warrant.

Sports Illustrated’s story ran on June 11, 2001. Jones was picked up the next day by the Carroll County, Ark., sheriff’s department. He was extradited back to Oklahoma, handed over to Tulsa County authorities, and held on charges of felony malicious injury to property.

In late August 2001, Jones pleaded guilty and admitted to pouring acid on the greens. In an agreement with prosecutors, he received a five-year deferred sentence, 40 hours of community service and was barred from Tulsa County for the ensuing five years. Additionally, he was ordered to pay $5,000 in victim compensation, plus court fees totaling just more than $600.

To this day, he has paid just more than $1,500 of his fines. His last payment was made in December 2003. That’s despite the court ordering his tax returns be claimed beginning in March 2004, a bench warrant being issued in December 2005, and his case being sent to collections in May 2008.

Advertisement

Now, in May 2022, Tulsa County says, because so much time has passed, the case has been closed and Jones is no longer on an active warrant.

Today, wherever he is, Rich Jones is 59. His last known address is in Kenosha, Wis. A call placed to his last known phone number was unanswered. A message sent to what’s believed to be his last known email address went unreturned.

Sidorakis, still the GM at Southern Hills, declined to comment on the episode, other than to say, “We’ve moved on.”

The fourth green at Southern Hills, pictured in 2021. (Gary Kellner / PGA of America via Getty Images)

And then we arrive at the story of Roger Wheeler and the morning of May 27, 1981.

No jokes here.

Wheeler was a self-made multimillionaire. From a middle-class upbringing in Boston, he earned degrees from MIT, Notre Dame and Rice. At age 55, he was chairman of Telex Corp, with holdings in oil companies and a nine-figure settlement stemming from a victorious predatory pricing suit against IBM. His net worth was estimated, according to the New York Times, in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

One investment, though, would go horribly wrong. We could spend another three or four thousand words unspooling the circumstances of Wheeler’s 1978 purchase of World Jai-Alai Inc. — the largest network of jai-alai frontons (playing courts) in the country — and the sordid mob ties that came with it. But the gist is this: At the time, jai-alai, a sport similar to handball, was frequently associated with organized crime because of its ties to gambling. Wheeler bought World Jai-Alai Inc. as an investment, only to realize later that it wasn’t meeting its projected profits because money was being skimmed from the company. As it turned out, those funds were being funneled to Boston’s infamous Winter Hill Gang.

It was a door Wheeler was bound to open, but he didn’t sign up for where it led. Once the mob got wind that Wheeler was snooping around the books and about to uncover the embezzlement scheme, they decided he needed to be eliminated.

Advertisement

They knew exactly where they’d find him — on the golf course at Southern Hills Country Club.

It was a Wednesday. Wheeler played 18, shot an 88, had a cocktail or two. Then he left the clubhouse and pulled open the handle of his black Cadillac. As he slid into the driver seat, the door was pulled away from him. There stood a man later identified to be Johnny Martorano, gun drawn.

Dave Kindred can take it from here:

One bullet, .38 caliber, delivered by a professional assassin.

The hit man left four live cartridges inside and around the car, perhaps a signature of his black art. No one reported seeing the murder done. But people heard a firecracker sound, and they came into the parking lot, where they found Wheeler dying.

By then, and before the chaos of sirens and police helicopters fell upon the club, the brown car sped toward a back entrance, carrying the killer toward his next job.

Wheeler slumped over. Martorano got into the getaway vehicle alongside Joe McDonald. They drove off.

For all the oddities at Southern Hills, this was a tragedy. Wheeler left behind a wife and five children.

The investigation lasted years. The murder was featured on “Unsolved Mysteries” in 1987.

Martorano was arrested on racketeering charges in 1995 and turned state’s evidence in 1999. As part of the deal, he confessed to more than 20 murders, including Wheeler’s, and received only a 12-year prison sentence. He was paroled in 2007 and is now 81 years old. In 2001,  James “Whitey” Bulger, head of the Winter Hill Gang, and Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, were also indicted on murder charges in Wheeler’s case. Bulger remained a fugitive until 2011 and died in prison in 2018. In 2003, Paul Rico, a retired FBI agent and former head of security at World Jai-Alai, was charged with first-degree murder in the case. He’s believed to have hatched the embezzlement scheme and helped arrange the murder. McDonald, the driver, died in 1997 before ever facing charges.

Advertisement

For years, Wheeler’s family railed against FBI corruption in the case and the bureau’s use of informants who were allowed to act with impunity.

As for Southern Hills’ place in all this, the club was rattled. This was a quiet, elite, old-school course built by oil-wealthy membership. Wheeler was a prominent figure at the club. The shooting shattered any illusions of solitude.

“Back then, there just wasn’t any security,” says Clyde Chrisman, who has been involved with Southern Hills since 1977 and assumed a role as the club’s historian over time. “I mean, anyone could drive through the property back then.”

Today, the parking spot where Wheeler was murdered remains there in plain sight. There’s no signage. Four decades have passed and, according to Chrisman, the mob hit that played out in front of Southern Hills’ clubhouse is “sort of an unspoken thing.”

“It never comes up,” he says. “It just kind of went away after it happened.”


There’s more. More strange turns, weird days. Plenty on the course, too.

In 1953, a 13-year-old Jack Nicklaus nearly missed his tee time in the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship, prompting USGA executive director Joe Dey to say, “Young man, 30 seconds later and you would be starting on the second tee, one down.”

In 2007, Sergio Garcia was disqualified from the PGA Championship for signing an incorrect scorecard.

At the 2001 U.S. Open, Stewart Cink flubbed an 18-inch putt that would have earned him a spot in the Monday playoff and had to wait eight more years to win his lone major.

There’s the ugliest cloud — an exclusionary all-white membership policy that lasted through the early 1980s.

Even in the present day, the factors leading to the 2022 PGA Championship coming to Southern Hills are … tangled. The club was only awarded the tournament after the PGA of America’s decision to strip the event from Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, a club owned by former President Donald Trump. All these twists and turns.

Advertisement

What’s most odd is it’s often said that Southern Hills Country Club doesn’t create tournament drama. Its substantial major championship history is filled with runaway wins and oddly lacks indelible moments — the come-from-behind win, the memorable shot, the iconic finish. But everything else? Is there a major championship course with more random drama than what’s come from those hills south of Tulsa? Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t. Such things aren’t measured. Sometimes the land speaks for itself.

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photos: Associated Press and Getty Images)

Get all-access to exclusive stories.

Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us.

Brendan Quinn

Brendan Quinn covers college basketball and golf for The Athletic. He came to The Athletic from MLive Media Group, where he covered Michigan and Michigan State basketball. Prior to that, he covered Tennessee basketball for the Knoxville News Sentinel. Follow Brendan on Twitter @BFQuinn