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Kansas Golf Hall of Fame to induct two Kansans in Class of 2010
   Knox, Whitten are key Kansas golf contributors

   The Kansas Golf Foundation has selected two Kansans for induction into the Kansas Golf Hall of Fame, Class of 2010. Both Bill Knox of Salina and Topeka’s Ron Whitten are to be honored in the Contributors to the Game category.
   Knox’s vast work in golf includes helping develop The First Tee program in Salina and administering/officiating numerous amateur events. Whitten is honored for his involvement with golf course architecture, most notably his writing and efforts in developing the country’s golf Bill Knox

course rating system employed by Golf Digest.
   In a ceremony later this year, they will join 34 men and women previously honored for their accomplishments and contributions to the game of golf in the Sunflower State, according to Kansas Golf Foundation Executive Director Phil Miller.
   “Everyone who has been around golf in Kansas knows Bill Knox and has benefited from his many contributions to the game. He has generously given his time and talent at every level -- and continues to do so -- and his election to the Hall of Fame is well-deserved,” Miller said. “Ron Whitten's unique contributions to the game of golf extend far beyond Kansas, and it's great that his years of work are being recognized in his home state’s Golf Hall of Fame.”

Bill Knox, Salina
   For more than 30 years, Knox has been involved in golf in Kansas as a tireless volunteer for organizations in the state. He is a past president of the Kansas Golf Association and remains an emeritus director, and is a past president of the Kansas Golf Foundation, currently serving as an advisory director to the Foundation.
   Knox, 76, spearheaded an effort to provide accessible, affordable golf facilities for young people in Saline County, leading to the establishment of The First Tee of Salina. Involved in various charitable endeavors over the years, Knox was the initial sponsor of The First Tee in Salina and was responsible for collecting more than $700,000 in funds towards the construction of the six-hole, par-3 course at Salina Municipal. He served as its president for five years and continues to serve on the board of directors.
   “None of this would have happened without Bill,” says Steve Hardesty, Salina Municipal Golf Course head golf professional and director of The First Tee of Salina. “He was the one person in Salina who could make the dream a reality”.
   Of course Knox is more humble about the accomplishment, deflecting the praise for bringing the nationally-respected program to central Kansas.
   “The First Tee program of Salina is probably the most significant involvement in golf that Bill Knox

I’ve had,” Knox says. “There have been so many people involved. A lot of the people, if they hadn’t been involved, we probably wouldn’t have a First Tee program here in Salina. The other significant thing, (Hardesty) and his assistant Mike Hargrave, they were here back in 1999 when we started and they’re here now and they work with 400-500 kids in teaching life skills and golf every year here at this facility. They are tremendous people and they really do a job.”
   The work with The First Tee has been rewarding for Knox, who was also instrumental in establishing the Saline County Golf Association, the governing body for all men’s city tournaments.
   “It’s certainly been a personal reward to see,” he said of the program’s evolution. “I remember looking out the window in 1999 to see just a field with an old oil well on it and visualizing what’s there now. It’s almost unbelievable that we have that kind of facility in Salina, Kan., a city of 50,000.”
   An authority on the Rules of Golf, Knox has served as a Rules official at all levels. He officiates at Kansas Golf Association events, Big XII Championships and at all levels of competition for the United States Golf Association, including the U.S. Open.
   “I have consulted Bill on many occasions when making a difficult ruling,” says Randy Syring, head golf professional at Salina Country Club.
   In the late 1980s, Knox got involved in work with the KGA at the urging of Salina CC’s Jim Knight, who was retiring from his board service.
   “I worked some of their tournaments and was a director representing Salina Country Club and then became president in the early ‘90s,” Knox says.
   Knox says he quickly learned that volunteering with a golf organization “gets in your blood” and that type of work can be rewarding for the right kind of person.
   “You travel, you get up early, you go 100 miles, go to a meeting, get your radio and then you’re out there, quite often all day long,” Knox says. “Then you go eat and go to bed because you’re tired. Then you get up and do the same thing the next day. You’ve got to have a special breed I think. For all these people in the KGA today that are volunteers they have to want to do it and they have to feel good about doing it.
   “They’re challenged. I think, with their rules interpretations and how good of an official they can be. There’s a lot of pride in that with all these volunteers. You learn more about a person on a golf course than you might anywhere else…when things go bad you can get a good feel how (players) handle it.”
   Working with the KGA through the early ‘90s, Knox had a chance to work with the USGA rules committee when KGA Executive Director Kim Richey suggested him to Mark Passe, a regional manager in Colorado for golf’s national association.
   “I jumped at that; it was a good opportunity,” Knox says. “My first tournament was at Pinehurst in North Carolina when Payne Stewart won with a birdie on the 17^th hole and then made a long par putt to keep his lead on the last hole. My next tournament was out at Pebble Beach and then it has just gone from there to all the really great courses across the country.
   “What I’ve tried to do with my experience with the USGA is see how the tournaments are run and I see the efficiency of everything and I’ve tried to bring back (that atmosphere) to the KGA tournaments we run -- no matter what level of tournament it might be, whether it’s the seniors, the state amateur or the junior events. That they be run properly, be run efficiently and people know what to do and how to do it…try to do it just like the U.S. Open. Of course it’s not…but I think we have brought back to Kansas that kind of thinking.”
   After graduating from the University of Oklahoma and playing professional baseball for a year, Knox went into pilot training in the Air Force. He became a pilot and was stationed in Salina with the Strategic Air Command.
   “I met a person in the financial business and I got interested in that and that was sort of what I studied in college,” Knox says. “I joined (financial service company) Waddell & Reed in 1957. I was with them, starting as a representative and then a district manager, then a division manager, then a regional manager here in Salina with responsibility in nine states.”
   Knox was with the company for 38 years, retiring in 1995. Knox met his wife Pat as a sophomore at OU, married her as a senior and the two were together 51 years before her passing in 2007. The two had four children: daughter Shaun Havard lives in California and has a Master’s degree from Cal-Berkeley; son Jeff is an obstetrician/gynecologist in Salina; daughter Sandy Knox-Martin is a physical therapist in Albuquerque, N.M.; and son John is a captain on an air bus for FedEx.
   For Bill Knox, induction to the golf Hall of Fame is still a bit overwhelming.
   “It’s pretty difficult to describe your feelings,” Knox admits. “I accept it with great humility because I know there are many, many people involved with golf in Kansas that have every qualification that I might have. It’s kind of a staggering thing to have happen…I don’t know how to describe it.”

Ron Whitten, Topeka
   Ron Whitten also enters the Hall of Fame as a Contributor to the Game. He has devoted his professional career to studying, critiquing and writing about golf course architecture. At first a journalism major who worked on a golf course maintenance crew in college, Whitten dreamed of becoming a golf course architect, but earned an education degree and decided to attend Ron Whitten

law school instead.
   Later, after co-authoring the first (and still only) history of golf course design -- The Golf Course, he would go to work for Topeka native and longtime Golf Digest editor Nick Seitz.
   “He looked me up because he’d seen some of the stuff I’d been writing and he’d also seen my book and they offered me a job,” says Whitten.
   At the leading golf publication, Whitten helped shape the concept of national golf course rankings. He was responsible for the present scoring system used by the magazine for rating golf courses and for coordinating the panelist evaluations.
   “One of my first assignments was to re-vamp their course rankings system,” he recalls. “I sat down with some full-time members of Golf Digest’s staff at the time and we sort of invented the system that we use today to evaluate courses on a scale of one to 10 on a bunch of different categories. I started doing that in 1985 and have handled that the last 25 years. At the same time, Tom Doak was doing the same sort of thing for Golf Magazine, so both publications had part-timers handling that.”
   Whitten has produced all of Golf Digest’s features relating to architecture, including the biennial survey of “America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses,” the annual “Best New Courses” survey, previews of major championships, plus Golf World’s annual “Architect of the Year” feature. The ratings have truly become a source of pride for club members all across the country.
   “We created a monster…,” Whitten says. “We do it biannually because it takes so long to get people around to play different courses and we do the ‘Best New’ every year. The (100 Best list) was meant to be our ‘swimsuit’ issue quite frankly. We wanted to have something where we could throw in a lot of splashy pictures of great looking golf courses. Magazines live and breathe on lists and people love to debate lists in the grill room. They are to this day one of our more popular features, one of our more popular subjects.”
   In 1996 Whitten, who has written more than 800 articles about golf course architecture, was honored with the prestigious Donald Ross Award from the American Society of Golf Course Architects. The award is given in recognition of his contributions to the public understanding of golf course design. Winners of the award include Pete Dye and Gene Sarazen. Whitten’s travels have included rounds of golf with some the industry’s heaviest hitters.
   “I like to tell people I hold the world’s record for playing courses with their architect…I think that’s because nobody else has ever kept track,” he admits. “I’ve played with Nicklaus, Crenshaw, Tom Weiskopf, Tom Fazio, Pete Dye -- I’ve probably played 25 courses with Pete over the last 30 years -- Rees Jones, Bobby Jones, even the late Robert Trent Jones. I’ve been really lucky to have spent time with all of the major characters in architecture. I knew Tom Doak from the time he got out of college and I’ve known Bill Coore since he was an assistant superintendent down at Waterwood National in Huntsville, Texas. So I’ve been able to follow their careers from the very start.”
   And one of his early projects at Golf Digest gave Whitten a brush with golf greatness, even if that greatness was yet to fully blossom.
   “For the first of our ‘Armchair Architect’ contests in 1987, golf design contests are not a new idea, but they hadn’t been done for 50 or 60 years, so I ran one in Golf Digest,” Whitten says. “We had people design an imaginary finishing hole for a U.S. Open. My editors said we wouldn’t get 500 entries and I bet we’d get 5,000 – we got 22,000. One of those was from an 11-year-old named Tiger Woods. And no, I still have not met Tiger even though he writes for our magazine.”

   Whitten has also been involved in designing golf courses, notably Erin Hills in Hartford, Wisc., which he co-designed with Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry. Erin Hills was voted “Best New Course” in 2007 by Golf Magazine and has been selected by the USGA to host the 2011 U.S. Amateur Championship.
   “We bid on Erin Hills in 1999 and luckily got the job…I spent a ton of time there,” Whitten says. “We’re really proud of it because everybody talks about Mother Nature being the best architect, so we tried very hard to let nature (dictate) the shape of the holes and the strategy of play so we only moved dirt on four of the 18 holes.”
   A Nebraska native, Whitten started playing golf with his father at age 10 in Omaha. He played up through high school (and at the time developed a passion for golf course architecture) and later attended the University of Nebraska. Though he’d started out as a journalism major, Whitten, who’d also gone to work on the maintenance staff at The Country Club of Lincoln (Neb.), earned a degree in education.
   “I bailed out because back then a journalism degree took five years and they were emphasizing broadcast journalism because that’s where the money was and I wasn’t interested in broadcast journalism,” says Whitten, who’d also experienced an engineering internship at Northwestern University which fueled his passion for course design.
   But Whitten migrated south to Topeka’s Washburn University and earned a law degree. After a stint as a city prosecutor in Topeka and as a writer for Lawrence’s Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, in 1984 Whitten went to work for Golf Digest.
   Whitten and wife Lynn, who works with the Veteran’s Administration in human resources in Topeka, recently celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. The couple has a combined five daughters and five grandsons. Whitten has three daughters from a previous marriage including Jennifer, an electrical engineer in Dallas; Sarah, part of speaker’s bureau in Kansas City; and Beth Govea, working in communications for Lockton Insurance in Kansas City. Lynn has two daughters including Katie Harbour, a teacher in Fort Worth, Texas, and Julie Boggs, a marketing communications coordinator for a professional association in Knoxville, Tenn.
   Whitten says his inclusion in the Kansas Golf Hall of Fame is humbling at his age, especially when you consider the likes of those that precede him.
   “I must admit I laughed out loud when Phil called me…I’d just turned 60 years old and was still struggling with that milestone,” he says of receiving his Hall call. “First I thought it was a joke and then I realized he was serious. I just didn’t feel like I was old enough to have sort of a lifetime achievement award.
   “It still sort of overwhelms me because when you look at the names, to be listed on the same list that Tom Watson is, quite frankly, very intimidating and embarrassing because my accomplishments pale in comparison to Tom Watson’s accomplishments. It’s a bit humbling to think other people look at my career and think it’s deserving of special recognition.”