As part of the fun surrounding our 50th anniversary, Golfweek walked down Memory Lane with a number of former employees who helped make the brand what it is today.
We continue with one of the names who started it all, Tom Stine. Tom’s father, Charley, started Florida Golfweek in the garage of his home and within a few years, Tom moved back to be part of the family business.
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Stine’s recollections of the early years, elevating the business to become a national player, and some of the relationships made along the way reads like a Who’s Who of the golf industry in the last 50 years.
Golfweek: There’s not even a thought of 50 years of Golfweek if there was no Stine family. When you think about the fact that it’s 50 years old and you think about going way back into your childhood, and growing up and watching your dad build this thing and then becoming such a big part of it, what’s the first thing that goes into your mind at 50 years?
Tom Stine: Wow, that’s a really good question to start. The first thing that goes into my mind, I guess, is we never thought this far in advance. We never thought beyond the end of the year. We never thought much beyond six months. It was hand-to-mouth. And it was all Dad’s idea. His original idea for Florida Golfweek and putting out a news publication. He did not want to put out a feature golf magazine. He wanted to publish the news. If it happened last week, it would be in this week’s Golfweek. And one of his other mandates was that we would run all names and all scores. Not just the top 10 or the top five and not just their scores, but if you WD’d, your name would be in Golfweek and it would say WD. And if you shot a million, it would say that you shot a million. And we were insistent upon that. When people would want to send us their results, you have to send us all of your results. We just don’t want to hear who finished in the top 10.
GW: It’s interesting, asking players about Golfweek. The first thing they talk about is the agate (the scoreboard). They all read the agate. How what how important was that to the development of the magazine that players to read this?
TS: It was essential. It was absolutely essential. It was essential for the players because you’ve got to remember this was in the 70s and you couldn’t get this anywhere else. Golf World was around, but Golf World limited themselves to only certain tournaments and only certain results because, given their format and the expense of their format, that’s all they could afford to do. And the other wasn’t important enough. Our attitude was exactly the opposite. Every name would be in there. Consequently, we had mothers and fathers and brothers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles who wanted to subscribe to Golfweek because their nephew or their niece or their grandson was playing in some junior tournament in Pittsburgh and they got to see his name in print, even if he finished way down the list. It was a cool thing, you know, light years before the internet. There was no other way to know. There was no other way to see results.
Tom Stine and his dad, Charley, talk with Jack Nicklaus.
GW: We’ve got to ask you just because we’ve heard so much about this. Fact or fiction: This really started in a garage?
TS: It started in the garage. Swear to God. Dad’s garage, which I don’t know, a year or so after we started it, we put paneling on the walls of the garage, but we were still in the garage and it went from there. Dad is the one who started it. He and my stepmother Jackie, who’s still alive and doing well, they were instrumental and dad got help from some local guys who worked at the paper – the Winter Haven (Florida) News Chief. And literally, he just started going out to tournaments, calling tournaments and telling him what he was doing and if you’ll send us your results, we’ll print it and we’ll send you copies. This was light-years before the ABC Invitational in Podunk, Florida, ever got publicity for anything. So they said, “Great. We’d love to do that. We get all of our names and it just continued on from there.”
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GW: You talked a little about Jackie. She was actually the golf wonk, right? From what I’ve heard, your dad was a decent golfer, but Jackie was actually a good player, right?
TS: Jackie was a good player and she was an avid player. She would play anytime, anywhere, any weather. Dad would say, you know, I’m going to go, I need to drive and review this course and do a feature. And Jackie was there. She went every time. And she could beat his brains out. He was an average golfer on a good day.
GW: That makes it even more impressive, his passion for the game, though, right?
TS: He was a journalist. All his life, he worked at newspapers and he had a couple of small-town newspapers for a while in Ohio. He worked at big newspapers like the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Columbus Citizen-Journal and several others in Ohio. He was a newspaperman and that’s where the lifeblood came from. Golfweek showed his passion for news and he was an excellent editor, and that’s what he did when he worked at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, he worked on the copy desk, editing all the copy and so forth. And so it was well-written, grammatically correct, accurate, and presented, easy to read, and complete. That was the real key to what he was doing.
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GW: We just recently spent some time with Joe Staranka, who at the time was at the PGA of America, just starting when you started the magazine, and he went on to become the CEO of the PGA of America. He said Charley would talk his ear off. He would tell Joe what should be done differently. Charley had opinions on everything. Joe said he listened to about 10% of it and put it into action, but he always had an opinion.
TS: He did. He did. And if you asked him, he would tell you what his opinion was. And he didn’t give a damn whether you liked it or not, or it hurt your feelings or not. It’s like, well, you asked me, so I’m telling you, I don’t think this makes sense. Or I think you ought to turn it upside down and do it that way. Or he would compliment the heck out of them. And he was that way with organizations and associations and with players. He had an appreciation for all players, the best guys, and the not-so-best guys. It was important to him.
Tom and Charley Stine led Golfweek from a Florida garage into a national publication.
GW: Let’s get to you and your tenure at the magazine. You’re in New Mexico. Your dad comes out to visit. You’re not even thinking about this. I know you had a journalism degree, but you had played football in New Mexico, and he comes out to visit. And tell us the rest of the story from there.
TS: Well, it’s a long story. It’s not really a simple story. He was constantly trying to get me to come and help him. And I was a banker and was working my way through the banking business and he’d say we’re growing and I can always find a place for you. You could help me with this, you could help me with that. And it was like, ‘Dad, I can’t, I can’t do that.’ He kept it up. I guess the breaking point was when I went through a divorce, and as anybody who’s been through a divorce knows, that’s kind of a point in your life where things change or you decide to make things change. And after him asking and asking and so forth, I called him up one day and said, ‘Dad, I’m going to come and help you.’ I literally packed up my car and drove across the country and drove to Winter Haven and started, you know, started the next day after I arrived, doing whatever needed to be done.
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GW: Did you know when you looked at the books and started to comb through the fact that your dad was a good newspaper man, but not a publisher and not a sales guy by nature, that there was potential here?
TS: The concept made sense. The concept of Florida Golfweek publishing golf news in a state like Florida,where the only comparable was Golf World, which was a national magazine. But we knew it was going to be hard and so I said, OK, let’s go for this. My focus was on sales, both advertising sales and circulation sales. However, we could get circulation, any deals we could make with golf associations and so forth. And it didn’t happen overnight. I mean, this was a long, hard slog through the snow to get it to work. It took a long time, but it worked because it did make sense.
GW: Your dad credited you with the push to go national. He said he was pretty content with Florida Golfweek, but you said it could keep growing and growing and growing. Is that accurate?
TS: Yeah, that’s accurate. Yeah, I humbly say that it was the only way to grow. It was the only way to get interest from the major advertisers, the golf manufacturers. Florida was great and all, and that was the leading golf state, but in order to make real headway for them to spend advertising dollars and at the same time to compete with Golf World, we had to have news from all over the country. And again, this was a hole. This was something that was not being filled. If you were a serious amateur golfer in Florida, you still wanted to know about the good players in Texas and California. You still knew about those famous, if you will, invitationals or amateur events going on in different states and so forth.
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GW: Scores were instrumental and then you did some course reviews, but you didn’t do instruction until you made friends with someone and it happens to be a pretty good person, if I’m not mistaken.
TS: Yeah, that was our venture into instruction with David Leadbetter. He was at Greenleaf and working off the back of the range, and he started teaching mini-tour players and guess what? Some of those mini tour players became PGA Tour players, and so their friends showed up and then he had more students, and finally Greenleaf caught on about this guy working at the back of their range, and all these famous guys were showing up at the back of the range. David and I became close friends, and we hung out together. We were just all into what we were doing, working golf. Him teaching me, me working Golfweek, however we could. We only lived 10, 15 miles apart and after the sun went down, we didn’t have anything else to do. So we would hang out, and so I would go over there just to break up the monotony of being at home in my apartment. I got to know some of the players that he was working with and got to know him really well. In fact, I introduced him to his wife, Kelly, because Kelly and I got paired together in a mini tour pro-am. She was playing the ladies mini tour, and they had an event in Winter Haven and we got paired together in the same group and got along. She was just a young up-and-coming golfer out of college and she was obviously trying to get on the LPGA and needed help with her game, but didn’t know where to go. And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend not very far from here. I could introduce you to him. His name’s David Leadbetter.’ Of course, she had never heard of him. No one had ever heard of him. And so after the LPGA event was over, she stayed in town and I took her over and introduced her to David Leadbetter, and she stuck around town for 3 or 4 days, maybe a week or something like that, and took lessons from David every day. And obviously, he was helping her. And also obviously, he saw her talent. He did not suffer fools, but if you were a player, he was interested in making you a better player, and she was a player. That’s how they got to know each other and then she went on with her mini tour career but obviously, they stayed in touch and she showed up back in Winter Haven more often. And the rest is history.
Lydia Ko, pictured with David Leadbetter at the 2016 Evian Championship
GW: What a great story. You bring up such an interesting point that some of the mini tour players go on to be pro players. And I mean, I think what made this magazine successful is when you’re covering college players, when you’re covering amateur players, you get to know these people as people, not as superstars. And that’s something that is kind of consistent throughout Golfweek. I remember reading that I think it was early ’80s, probably right about when you came aboard, you had a Golfweek event and Paul Azinger won it. Well, of course, Paul Azinger is going to be tied to Golfweek in the future because it’s one of the first events he won. How important is it that you get to know these players when they’re young?
TS: It was pretty important as it turned out. You know, your example of Paul Azinger is an excellent one. He grew up reading Golfweek, and it was important to him and it was important that he got his name in there, whether he won or not. He went down through the agate and found Paul Azinger 69, 74, 82, whatever. And then when he went away to college, it just expanded. There were just more names that he wanted to follow and names that wanted to follow him. It was natural. It was, you know, it was communication. It was the internet before the internet. I mean, that’s what it amounted to. And yeah, we ran into a lot of players that way. They grew up reading Golfweek. Why wouldn’t you? You know, that’s what everybody did. And part of our business sense was that we sent copies of Golfweek to every golf course in Florida for free. We sent five copies and then later we increased it to 10 copies every week to every course in Florida. And then when we expanded into the Carolinas, we did the same thing. A lot of the time they ended up in the snack bar, in the coffee shop, to be passed around. So they got read by many, and that was our circulation campaign.
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GW: You have a line on one of your social media accounts that says ‘former publisher and chief problem solver at Golfweek magazine, which is so appropriate. When you think back to your time at Golfweek, give us one of those hair-on-fire moments that you can think of, if you have one, that you go, “Geez, I can’t believe we got that done that day.”
TS: I don’t know that I could come up with one day because it happened every week. It was hair on fire every week. I remember the first time we got credentials to go to the Masters and dad and I went, and one other writer that we had at the time and we, of course, had to drive there and drive back, which from Winter Haven to Augusta was a long drive. Particularly back then, particularly with the cars we had. I mean, like all night. But we finally got credentials, and by God, we were going to have a live story and live photos from the Masters in Golfweek. And we had to go to press on Monday. So, the three of us drove up there. As soon as the tournament was over, we got in the car and headed for Winter Haven. And dad and our other writer started writing and I drove. And I drove until they were done writing. And then when we got back, we had film that I took, I was the photographer, and had to process that and then sort through and decide what photos we were going to use. And we used more than we normally did for tournaments, because it was the Masters and because, by God, we were going to show those people at Augusta National that we covered it well so we’d get our credentials next year. Then we had to, you know, we put everything together. Then we had to drive the layout to our printer in Lakeland and wait for it to be printed. Then we’d load up the papers into the back of the station wagon, drive back to the office, run them through the mailing machine, put them all in mail bags, and then get them to the post office, which we did about, I don’t know, midnight, maybe 1 in the morning on Monday night or Tuesday morning, all in order to get them in the mail, so that people would get them by Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. It was fun. It was exciting and it was hard as hell.
GW: I know there have been so many important employees of Golfweek, but I want to ask about two specifically. I mean, there are a couple after you guys sold the property, Jeff Babineau and others who have been tied to the magazine, but I want to start with James Achenbach, who obviously was just instrumental. Can you talk a little about him, your relationship, what you remember, and what he was like to work with on a weekly basis?
TS: Jim and I became friends in the early days of Golfweek. He was the golf writer in Sarasota for the Herald-Tribune. He wrote a lot of golf along with his other duties. He found out about Golfweek and he really appreciated Golfweek and he started sending us golf stories from Sarasota because he liked what we were doing. He didn’t care about the money. He wanted to get some publicity for Sarasota golf in this regional publication. And he knew if he sent it in to us, we’d publish it. And Jim and I were about the same age, and we were both single and we had nothing else to do but our golf work. We became friends and played a little golf together and became more friendly. And then, as we got bigger and expanded, we needed more editorial help. He took it on, you know, willingly. He was a real people person, even though he was reserved in his personality and kind of quiet. He was very inquisitive, as a good reporter should be. And so he got to know the golfers and they got to know him, and he started producing great stories, great feature stories as well as covering events.
GW: Finally, Ron Balicki is a name that’s so tied to Golfweek. And again, we talked about learning about players as people when they’re younger. This is a guy who was kind of a master of that.
TS: Absolutely. Achenbach loved golf and liked covering it. Ron Balicki liked it even more, but he was even more personable with the players. He was more interested in the people and the people side of it. And as with people like that in everyday life, guess what? People liked him. He was absolutely genuine about liking them and getting to know them and getting to know their parents and getting to know their uncle because their uncle was there every time. Boy, to talk about (Balicki), I tell you, it chokes me up. It brings a tear to my eyes to think about him. He was so good. He was so honest. He was so important to Golfweek and what we were trying to do. He wasn’t the best golf writer we ever had or that you’ve ever read, quite frankly, and he knew that. But that’s why God made copy editors. Everybody who knew Ron Balicki loved Ron Balicki. He’s one of the finest individuals I have ever known. And I would challenge anyone to come up with someone who didn’t like Ron Balicki, the players, the tournament directors, the caddies. He would go into a caddie room and it was universal. He was a prince of a guy and he was exactly what we needed at that point.
Tom and Charley Stine.
GW: Now we get into the sale in 1990. What were your genuine emotions at the time when you guys sold this thing
TS: Happy. We had grown as much as we had grown and our advertising was up and our circulation was up. We were working our butts off to make ends meet. We never had extra money. Everything that had to do with finances was a challenge because we started with nothing and we didn’t have anything to save and every dollar that we earned, we put back into making it better. And it just was wearing us down. People would look at us and say, ‘Geez, you’re doing so well.’ And we would smile and say, ‘Thank you very much.’ And then go rest. We needed to sell it. We needed the money and there was no way for dad to get out otherwise, and he was getting tired and needed to.
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GW: Makes sense. Now tell me this. Are you truthfully surprised it’s made it to 50 years?
TS: I believe it. I’m not surprised. Why shouldn’t it? It’s still serving that function of publishing the news and so forth. I doubt if it does as good a job, as thorough a job of publishing every name and every score. I know it doesn’t. But I still think it’s important. I still think it’s important for the golf business, for the industry, for the players to have. Golfers are international. Just because I grew up in Ohio, I live in Florida now. Well, I still want to know about golf in Ohio and I went to school in New Mexico, so I would like to be able to read about that too, right? And I think the premise is still there. I’m very proud that it has lasted 50 years. We never ever thought in terms of 50 years or 20 years or whatever. We thought about next week, next month. And that’s just the way we operated.
GW: Tom Stine, we so appreciate you taking an hour now out of your schedule. This was so much fun.
TS: It’s my pleasure. I’m very honored. I’m very humbled that you’re taking the time to do this and I appreciate you doing it, too. And I appreciate it for my dad, and I appreciate it for all the other people who were with us along the way. Happy birthday to Golfweek. My goodness, 50 years. I remember when you were a baby. I’m so proud of all that Golfweek has accomplished.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Golfweek at 50: Tom Stine on its garage start and 50-year run
Read the full article here