Tommy Jacobs who won the Palm Springs Classic and plenty of friends along the way dies at 87
If 53-year-old Jimmy Demaret had made what was reported to be an 18-inch par putt on the first hole of a playoff in the 1964 Palm Springs Golf Classic – now The American Express – he would to this day be the oldest winner of a PGA Tour event.
But Demaret’s nerves may have been the cause of him missing the short putt at Eldorado Country Club. The playoff went to a second hole, and that’s where a 29-year-old named Tommy Jacobs won the event, the year before the tournament was renamed for Bob Hope.
For Jacobs, who died Saturday at 87 in Reno, Nev., the win was the fourth and final victory of his PGA Tour career. But it was also a win by a golfer who had desert ties and who would keep those ties alive for decades.
By the early 1960s, Jacobs had moved his family from the Arcadia area to the desert. While continuing to play on the tour, he became the touring professional from Bermuda Dunes Country Club. So the 1964 Palm Springs Classic win was literally in his own backyard.
Jacobs enjoyed telling the story of the playoff with Demaret in the eventful 1964 tournament that was the last played without Bob Hope’s name, the first for La Quinta Country Club in the rotation and the only year an African-American golfer, Charlie Sifford, led even a single round of the event.
In the playoff, Jacobs said he pulled his drive onto an undeveloped home pad on the course, but undeveloped pads were still considered in-bounds. His second shot tangled with a tree, and he made a 6 on the par-5. But Demaret admitted he hit an awful putt from short distance, and the playoff went to the second hole.
This time it was Demaret who hit a bad tee shot into the gallery on the par-3. Jacobs made a routine par. Ever the jokester, Demaret said that, at 53 years old, he had plenty of time left on tour, but Jacobs, at 29, was pretty much through.
Close to two majors
Turns out Jacobs never did win on the tour again, but he would be a big part of two majors after that Eldorado win. Later in 1964, he was the 36- and 54-hole leader at the U.S. Open in the days when the Open played the third and fourth rounds on the same day. A final-round 76 in the infamous heat and the humidity of that day and after gulping down two large glasses of iced tea, as he recalled, Jacobs stumbled to a final-round 76 and a second-place finish behind Ken Venturi.
In 1966, Jacobs had another near-brush with major greatness. He was again the third-round leader of the Masters, this time with Jack Nicklaus, and was tied for the lead with Nicklaus and Gay Brewer after 72 holes. In the 18-hole playoff, Nicklaus shot 70, while Jacobs shot 72 and Brewer shot 78.
“If I had gone on to win, it wouldn’t have meant as much to me as it would to somebody else to win the Open,” Jacobs told the Desert Sun in 1995. “That’s just the nature of myself. It would have changed things. How much, who knows?”
As Jacobs felt his game slipping away, and because of his involvement as chairman of the Tournament Players Board of the PGA of America, which broke off to form the PGA Tour, he played less golf and left the tour entirely at the age of 35. Even when the PGA Tour Champions was a possibility, Jacobs was more interested in working as a club pro, most famously at La Costa Resort in Carlsbad. But later he returned to the desert and took over operations of Bel-Air Greens in Palm Springs.
But more than for his golf, Jacobs can be remembered as a truly nice man, someone who would rather spend time with his family than lug golf clubs across the country in search of another PGA Tour title.
As the years march on, the winners of The American Express in the 1960s and 1970s are leaving us, with only three champions (Jack Nicklaus, Bruce Devlin and Johnny Miller) between 1960 and 1975 still alive. It means we lose good golfers, but also good people like Tommy Jacobs.
Larry Bohannan is The Desert Sun golf writer. He can be reached at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com or (760) 778-4633. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @larry_bohannan. Support local journalism. Subscribe to The Desert Sun.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: PGA Tour: Tommy Jacobs was a touring and club pro with Palm Springs golf ties
