Longtime golf columnist Larry Bohannan retires after nearly 4 decades

PALM DESERT, Calif. — Most people dream of having their story told in the newspaper. Desert Sun golf columnist Larry Bohannan is not most people.

For more than 40 years, he has held onto one hard and fast rule he learned in his college journalism classes: Never be part of the story. Unfortunately for him, the moment has come to step into the spotlight.

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Bohannan, who has been with The Desert Sun since 1986, will retire on Friday, May 29. He closes a nearly 40-year chapter on an illustrious career as the paper’s golf columnist, which has included tournament coverage, interviews with cultural figures and an impressive encyclopedic knowledge of the Coachella Valley’s favorite green sport. Additionally, Bohannan has penned two golf books, “50 Years of Hope” and “Palm Springs Golf: A History of Coachella Valley Legends and Fairways.”

“I’m scared to death,” Bohannan admitted about the next phase of his life. “For 45 years, when I wake up in the morning, I think, ‘What do I have to write today? Who do I have to interview today? What event do I have to go cover?’ I do wonder what it’s going to be like waking up one morning and not having any of that to do. I might start sitting in my chair, levitating.”

Finding his place

Bohannan’s path to journalism and the Coachella Valley involved a few stops along the way. Born in El Paso, Texas, his family moved all throughout the United States (Albuquerque, New Mexico; Overland Park, Kansas; Columbus Ohio; and Aurora, Colorado) before they settled in Victorville in 1971. Golf was always part of his life in some way, as his grandfather introduced him to the game. He later became a three-year varsity letterman in the sport and was the team captain and most valuable player his senior year of high school.

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Larry Bohannan: As I step away after four decades all I can say is thanks for the memories

When it came time for college, journalism wasn’t necessarily top of mind. He enrolled in the University of California Riverside in 1976 as a math major, but soon he “didn’t necessarily see the point of solving equations.” What he did enjoy was reading the sports sections of the San Bernardino Sun and the Press-Enterprise.

“Each of them had front-page columnists, and I would read them and, somewhere along the line, I thought to myself, ‘I could do that. I could do that better than these guys,'” Bohannan said (though he was “not at liberty to say” if he did do it better than them). In changing majors, he also transferred to California State University, Fullerton in 1978.

His journalism career began in 1982 at the Fullerton News Tribune covering junior college baseball along with high school sports. He later worked for the twice-weekly Hi-Desert Star in Yucca Valley for around four years as a sports and news reporter, sports photographer and page designer.

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In September 1986, The Desert Sun called looking for a new sports reporter. Before he got back to the high desert to clock in for work, he had been offered the job. Two weeks later, he started working at the daily newspaper, which was “a big deal” in his career.

‘Golf was exploding’

He was initially hired to cover College of the Desert football games, but a few months later, the then-executive editor, Jim Lycett, asked him to pen a golf column to help buff up the paper’s nearly non-existent golf coverage. Bohannan jumped at the opportunity.

“I got here in time when golf was exploding,” Bohannan said. He arrived the first year of the PGA Tour Skins Game, the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic was still one of the biggest tournaments on tour and the Nabisco Dinah Shore was a major championship for women’s golf.

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Not to mention, the Coachella Valley was building golf courses “like crazy,” he said, leading to its second golden era of golf. In the 1980s, 33 golf courses were built in the area, according to Bohannan, and he got to report on all of it and meet the people involved, which would serve him well during his career.

Stepping into that world was an exciting time for the young reporter, he said, eager to cover tournaments and to see a growing interest in a game he loved. However, he was a bit intimidated by all the big names who hung around the desert and who he’d have to interview. Arnold Palmer was one.

“I think it was my second month, and Arnold was at PGA West. I was pretty shaken about the idea of walking up to him and telling him who I was and saying, ‘I’d like to ask you a couple questions,'” Bohannan recalled. “He could not have been more accommodating, he could not have been nicer. It got to a point where I even would go over to his house from time to time to do an interview with him. It’s like, holy cow, what’s going on here?”

It got easier as the years went on, and he forged strong working relationships with icons. He enjoyed getting to know Shore and seeing how dedicated she was to women’s golf. Bohannan interviewed two presidents, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton, with the former telling him he read his stuff “all the time” and the latter remembering their numerous conversations over the years.

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But you don’t need to be a famous name for Bohannan to take interest in your story. Whether he’s interviewing a high school football player after their first game or sharing the latest news at one of the valley’s many golf courses, he listens intently so that he can write the best story. That, in turn, means a great deal for those he’s writing about. At the 2026 Coachella Valley Journalism Foundation Hall of Fame ceremony, which honored Bohannan and four other journalists, a man arrived holding a 30-year-old article that Bohannan wrote about him.

‘Hall of Fame journalist in every sense’

His compassion, conversational interviewing style and sheer charisma stand out to anyone who has the chance to be in his orbit. But perhaps his greatest superpower as a journalist and human is his unbelievable memory. He can rattle off who won which tournament in any given year without skipping a beat, and, more often than not, you don’t need to fact check him on it. Bohannan said his skills date back to childhood, when he would memorize baseball batting averages and other stats, often with a clipboard in hand, and read the encyclopedia for fun.

That has been a key tool for Desert Sun sports reporter Andrew John, who has lost track of the many times he’s asked Bohannan about a topic and would come away with a detailed answer. That was often his go-to move before starting a story: “First, find out what Larry knows,” he said.

Bohannan is also known as one of the first employees a new hire or intern befriends. His extensive tours of the previous Desert Sun building on Gene Autry Trail are legendary among the staff, and no Desert Sun employment was official unless you heard him tell countless stories about late nights watching the printing press run.

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If a new employee moved to the desert for the job, he always made them feel right at home.

“He was the one who helped me navigate the valley when I first got here,” John said. “If I ever needed to know where something was, or who someone was, or why something mattered to the valley, Larry is the one I would ask — and he’d always seem to have the answer.”

Golf may be his specialty, but Bohannan has written about various beats throughout his career. He even invited readers into his life through an emotional column following his prostate cancer diagnosis in 2019. The response was “just overwhelming,” he said, as he received emails, texts, phone calls, cards and letters from people all over the Coachella Valley, including from those he had never met before.

For 23 years, Shad Powers, The Desert Sun’s sports and leisure editor, has had a front-row seat to “a free master class on how to be a journalist” by working with Bohannan. That includes Bohannan’s “willingness to jump in and help on a hard news story or handle a touchy subject with skill.”

“Don’t pigeonhole him as ‘the golf writer,’ he’s a Hall of Fame journalist in every sense of the word,” Powers added.

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Much has changed in the media landscape since Bohannan started working at the newspaper, both with the industry (moving from solely a print edition to many online components) and covering golf (players are “a little more reserved than they used to be”), but his dedication and passion has remained the same. While Bohannan admits journalism is a tough career to get into, especially today, its importance and impact remains clear.

“There are a million stories that have to be told, and that’s really what we are, storytellers. We can’t afford to be numbers-crunchers or just talk to talking heads from organizations,” he said. “As long as you write about people and as long as you write about their stories, there’ll always be people who want to read that.”

Time to par-tee

The last several months have been a celebration tour for Bohannan, a difficult task for a journalist who never wanted all the attention.

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In addition to his Hall of Fame induction, he was named Indio’s citizen of the year in October and the American Express PGA tournament named its media center after him. The cities of Palm Springs and La Quinta also proclaimed May 17 and 19, respectively, as Larry Bohannan Day.

Though he has some mixed feelings about retiring, Bohannan said there is plenty for him to look forward to, such as traveling, spending time with family in Texas and pursuing various hobbies. Just because his time at The Desert Sun is ending doesn’t mean Bohannan won’t continue to write in some capacity either.

First things first, though, he has one activity top of mind: “I want to play golf instead of watch other people do it.”

Ema Sasic covers entertainment and health in the Coachella Valley. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @ema_sasic.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Larry Bohannan retires from Desert Sun after 40 years covering golf