After eking out just $86,000 in the past 18 months on the PGA Tour, Trinity College graduate Jay Williamson walked home with $650,000 and the mantle of hometown favorite after his surprise runner-up finish in late June at the Travelers Championship in Cromwell.
Now it is former tournament director and Newtown native Daniel Baker who is raking in the big bucks with the PGA of America as director of new business development, charged with lining up corporate sponsorships at tournaments across the country.
While the PGA Tour and LPGA run most of the premier pro tournaments, the PGA of America runs 40 tournaments itself, and has a major role in the running of the PGA Championship, the PGA Grand Slam of Golf, and the Ryder Cup, the biennial tournament pitting the best U.S. and European players against each other in match play.
Baker has the Ryder Cup to thank for his own professional development, having served as tournament director at the notorious 1999 Ryder Cup in Brookline, Mass. There, European players were incensed by what they deemed excessive celebrations by players and fans after Justin Leonard sank a long putt on the 17th hole to lead the U.S. team to a miracle come-from-behind victory.
Baker still sees his stewardship of the event as a minor miracle of sorts. He traces his golf career to when he was 10 years old, caddying at Rock Ridge Country Club in Newtown and eventually working his way into the golf shop. After playing for Wake Forest University, he took a job as an assistant pro at a course in Winston Salem, N.C., then made an unsuccessful bid to stick on the Florida subtours that were precursors to today”™s Nationwide Tour.
After assistant-pro stints at Ridgewood Country Club in Danbury and a course in Boca Raton, Fla., Baker got a phone call in 1991 from a golf pro wondering if Baker wanted to take on organizing a charity golf tournament in Boca Raton featuring football legends Joe Namath, Dan Marino and Phil Simms, among others.
“I had no idea of what I was getting into,” Baker said. “I was selling sponsorships, coordinating air fare, running three days of golf for amateurs, and then on the fourth day handling 4,000 spectators.”
He stuck with it, however, and arranged tournaments for the next several years.
“It turned into a business overnight,” Baker said. “There was no real game plan.”
His big break came when he was made tournament and marketing director for the 1997 Walker Cup held in August that year at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y. Named for George Herbert Walker, the great-grandfather of President George W. Bush, the event is the amateur equivalent of the Ryder Cup.
With Winged Foot Golf Club in nearby Mamaroneck, N.Y. readying for the PGA Championship the following week, Baker won the notice of PGA organizers who hired him to take similar duties at the 1999 Ryder Cup in Brookline.
The Ryder Cup in turn served as a springboard to leading marketing and operations of the annual PGA tournament in Cromwell, which is now sponsored by Travelers.
Most recently, Baker was a senior director in the Norwalk office of Octagon Worldwide, a unit of Interpublic Group that runs sporting events and arranges marketing promotions for athletes and entertainment figures.
That parallels the sports-marketing background of PGA of America CEO Joe Steranka, who while working for ProServ created public relations and marketing programs for athletes like Michael Jordan.
Even as Williamson forced a playoff in this year”™s Travelers Championship, Baker was in Sunriver, Ore., where Virginia pro Chip Sullivan was running away with the PGA Professional National Championship trophy.
The job requirements haven”™t changed since his job interview for the 1999 Ryder Cup.
“The Ryder Cup is going to be one of the most difficult things we are going to run,” Baker recalls being told. “We need someone to stand there, smile and take it on the chin.”
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