The first four Georgia PGA individual tournaments of 2014 featured two first-time winners, a second-time winner and an amateur winner,
Based on past history, that pattern is likely to change when the state’s top club professionals gather on St. Simons Island for the Georgia PGA Championship, which will be played August 25-27 on Sea Island Golf Club’s Seaside Course.
The list of tournament winners in the event, which was first played in 1962 contains the names of just about all the top players in the Georgia PGA Section over the past half century.
Among the early winners were Hugh Royer Jr. (twice), Jim Ferree, DeWitt Weaver Jr. (seven times), Davis Love Jr. (twice), Emory Lee, Wayne Yates (twice) and Paul Moran (twice).
Alan White, Dan Murphy, Richard Crawford (twice), Craig Hartle and Gregg Wolff (three times) were among the winners in the 1980s, before Stephen Keppler scored the first of his four wins in 1990.
Other than Hartle, who won for a second time in 1995, and 2004 champion Jeff Hull, who have both moved into the Carolinas PGA Section, all the Georgia PGA Championship winners since 1990 are still in the Georgia Section, with most of the last 24 tournaments having been won by players with multiple victories.
Keppler leads the way with four wins during that stretch, followed by James Mason and Craig Stevens (three each), and two-time champions Chan Reeves and Sonny Skinner.
Skinner’s first victory in 2009 concluded a stretch in which six players won the event for the first time. But three of the Section’s outstanding group of seniors has taken the last five titles, with Stevens winning in 2010 and ’13 and Keppler and Skinner the 2011 and ’12 champions.
Those three players have won nine Georgia PGA Championships between them, with Keppler taking the title the last time the event was played at Seaside in 2011. Keppler was also the runner-up the two previous times Seaside hosted the Section Championship, behind Clark Spratlin in 2008 and Tim Weinhart in ’05. Stevens won the first of his three titles at Seaside in 2001.
Stevens is the defending champion, winning on the Retreat Course last year, one shot ahead of Weinhart and two in front of Keppler, who has placed third or better every year in the tournament since 2005.
Keppler. who won three times between 1990 and ’96, had finished second four straight times from 2005-08 and third the next two years before ending his long winless drought in the Section Championship. He’s been a close second and third the last two years.
Weinhart, who won by seven over Keppler at Seaside in 2005, also has a string of close calls in recent years, placing second, third, fourth and second the last four times the event has been played. Weinhart is one of just two Georgia PGA members to have won the Section’s “Grand Slam.”
The other is 2007 Georgia PGA Championship winner Matt Peterson, who won the Georgia Open while he was a young tour player and took the other three majors – the Section Championship, Match Play Championship and Atlanta Open – after becoming a Georgia PGA member.
The only Georgia PGA member who has won at least two majors but not the Section Championship is Shawn Koch.
Among the players looking for their first victory in the Section Championship are Seth McCain, Kyle Owen and Bill Murchison. All three have won Georgia PGA tournaments, with McCain the only one of the three to include a major among his victories.
The Section Championship has been played at Sea Island GC since the club’s two original courses (Seaside and Plantation) were extensively renovated in the late 1990s. Seaside and Retreat have been the primary hosts for the event, with Plantation the tournament course in 2007 and 2012, with both those won by former tour players Peterson and Skinner.
Reeves, who is no longer a regular tournament participant, won at Seaside in 2002 and ’03 after placing second, one shot behind Stevens, in ’01.
Two months after the Section Championship, Seaside will host the PGA Tour McGladrey Classic, with the storied layout also serving as the annual site for the SEC Championship.
The tournament is sponsored by E-Z-GO and Path2College and Presented by TaylorMade-adidas Golf-Ashworth and the PGA Tour.