Seven-time PGA Tour winner and current PGA Tour Champions player Peter Jacobsen is always thinking, planning, and creating, whether on or off the course. Just as every golf shot is a new adventure, seeing new ideas come to fruition can be equally exciting, at least for a mind that works like Jacobsen’s.
His most recent one is the Skechers World Champions Cup, which will return in December after a one-year hiatus. But before that, he created the Fred Meyer Challenge, which was played from 1986 to 2002.
The Fred Meyer was a two-person best-ball format that drew many of the day’s top players, including Greg Norman. Norman played often and won often, starting with Gary Player in the inaugural year, and later won three times with Brad Faxon as a partner.
“Obviously, he’s a great player,” Jacobsen said about Norman. “He wanted to have an event in his name. So, up came the Shark Shootout,” Jacobsen recalled in an interview for The Golf Show 2.0.
Jacobsen and Norman began discussing possible formats for an event for Norman. It all came to fruition in a tournament that is still run today as the Grant Thornton Invitational. Norman, however, has stepped back from the event.
“We were talking about doing formats (for the Greg Norman event). We had scramble, best-ball, and a modified alternate shot,” Jacobsen said. “I played with Arnold (Palmer) in the first couple of years. And doing a straight alternate-shot like the Ryder Cup was too hard on Arnold because he was obviously not playing his best golf. He was older. But any tournament wants Arnold Palmer in their field, right? So that’s when they changed to a modified. So, we both would drive, and then we choose (the ball they wanted to play).”
Because Jacobsen played in the Shark Shootout, he was in the room at Sherwood Country Club when Norman first pitched his world tour idea in 1994. It was very similar to the original LIV Golf concept.
“Arnold stood up and said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m leaving.’ And he walked out of the room, and all of us in the room said, ‘Well, if it’s not good enough for him, it’s not good enough for me,” Jacobsen recalled.
He feels that if Palmer were still alive today, there would never have been a LIV Golf. And like many people who were close to Palmer, Jacobsen misses him and what he meant to the game and the PGA Tour. After all, Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, along with some of their fellow professionals, were the ones who originally started today’s PGA Tour. Why would they be in favor of another tour? They remember how hard it was to get this one started.
Jacobsen said he learned many valuable lessons from Palmer and from the musicians and actors and other amateur golfers he played with over the years.
“They say, without the fans there would be no you,” Jacobsen noted. He was told that by Palmer and the late actor, Jack Lemmon. “That’s one of the big lessons I learned. And the other thing I learned from Arnold was kindness doesn’t cost you anything.”
Palmer also reminded him that the fans who come to watch golf may not be coming to watch him specifically, but that didn’t matter.
“At that time, when you’re hitting a shot and eyeballs are on you,” Jacobsen said, “you’re representing not only yourself and your family, but you’re representing the game of golf, and you’re representing the PGA Tour. So, act like a professional. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t be don’t be dismissive of people. Don’t be cruel. Just show some kindness.”
He thinks the game misses Arnold Palmer and the kind of manners that Palmer professed.
“Look at it this way. If Arnold had still been alive, we never would have seen the LIV tour created. Period,” Jacobsen emphasized.
That said, he harbors no animosity against those who took money to join LIV.
“I would never criticize any of those players that left taking the money because that’s generational wealth,” he explained. “You can’t criticize somebody for changing jobs. But once you change your job, you can’t do both jobs at the same time.”
In other words, you can’t go to LIV and play on the PGA Tour.
“If anybody wants to come back to the PGA Tour, there are rules and stipulations and maybe penalties that the players are going to have to adhere to to be able to get their card back,” Jacobsen said. “I’m really curious to see what’s going to happen in the next two to three years. The one thing is that in an effort to avoid losing players to LIV, we became LIV.”
He said there’s now an A Tour and a B Tour with the Signature Events.
“That’s the wrong direction,” he insisted. “The one thing Arnold always talked about was open competition. And if you close your shop like LIV has, you see the same players over and over and over. There’s no opportunity for a player to emerge on the world stage.”
“Players come and players go. But what remains is the strength of the organization,” he concluded. An organization that has always had a focus on raising money for charities in various towns and cities across the country.
Meanwhile, Jacobsen’s latest brainchild, one he came up with in partnership with Charles “Charlie” Besser, the founder of Intersport, is the Skechers World Champions Cup. It is a tournament that pits three teams of PGA Tour Champions players from the U.S., Europe, and the Rest of the World against each other in a fun and exciting golf event. It will be played December 4-7, at Feather Sound Country Club in Clearwater, Florida, and televised on ESPN and ABC.
