Haverford Philadelphia PGA Classic features rich traditions

Local club professional George Forster has been skilled and fortunate enough to compete in the Senior PGA Championship 10 times. And on many of those occasions, he has spread the word about a lucrative golf tournament that sets apart his home PGA section in Philadelphia.

“I’d invariably get paired with a Champions Tour player or someone that was trying to make the tour and I’d always tell him about this tournament,” said Forster, professional emeritus at Radnor Valley Country Club. “I’d preface it by saying, ‘I’m playing in this tournament [next week] and second place is $5,000. How much do you think first place is?’

“They’d go, ‘$15,000?’ and I’d say, “How about $100,000?’ They’d go, ‘You’re kidding. How can we play?’ And I’d laugh and say, ‘Sorry, you have to work in the section as a club pro.’”

The tournament is the Haverford Philadelphia PGA Classic, which will be contested for the 25th time Tuesday at Sunnybrook Golf Club in Plymouth Meeting. The event was created in 1997 by George W. Connell, the founder and current director of the Haverford Trust Company, as a way of thanking Philadelphia area club professionals.

The first prize for the one-day, 18-hole tournament will be $100,000 for the seventh consecutive year. The winner’s check has grown from $10,000 at the inaugural 1997 event and was increased by $2,500 every year to reach $45,000 by 2011. Connell then hiked the prize money to $50,000 in 2012, $75,000 in 2013, and $100,000 in 2015.

The $100,000 makes the Haverford Classic the tournament with the largest one-day first prize for a club professional of any event in the 41 sections of the PGA of America.

“What George Connell does for us PGA professionals, what he gives back to us, words can’t describe it,” Forster said. “It’s incredible. It’s unheard of. I don’t think there’s anything across the country like we have. The fact that it’s one day, anything can happen. He likes everybody to tee it up that day, feeling that pressure and feeling like they have the chance to win $100,000.”

In all, the event has awarded more than $1.2 million to the winners.

“The real thing is to give a guy a break,” Connell said in a 2015 interview. “If you’re an assistant pro and you’re making 25 to 30 grand a year, and you’ve got a shot at 100 [grand], that to me is pretty good. So it’s giving back a little bit, thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice if one of these guys could make some real money?”

Forster has won the event twice, the last time in 2019 when he was 63 and the $100,000 came in handy because “I knew retirement wasn’t far away.” He retired earlier this year.

Dave McNabb, head professional at Applebrook Golf Club who has played in nine majors on the PGA and Champions Tours, took home $100,000 after winning the 2016 Haverford Classic. He calls Connell’s annual contribution “nothing short of amazing, incredible.”

“He does it because he believes in what we do, day in and day out,” McNabb said. “He wants to give somebody a life-changing experience. He wants everybody to get together and have a day where they can enjoy each other’s company, compete, and try to replicate the feeling of what these guys on the tour have when they’re playing for big money.”

The money has meant a lot to all winners of the Haverford Classic, whether they’re paying off student loans or buying a house, or investing it to prepare for retirement. However, for Billy Stewart, it was career changing after he survived a four-way playoff to win the 2013 Haverford and $75,000.

Stewart, now teaching professional at Union League Liberty Hill, won the 2002 Philadelphia Amateur right after graduating from Malvern Prep and was a former Atlantic 10 individual champion while at St. Joseph’s. But six years playing on the Florida mini-tours left him short of his goal of playing on the PGA Tour, and he returned home to follow a different path.

“I changed my direction to helping others in golf by being an instructor and giving back to the game,” he said. “So to have a putt go in for $75,000 was such an incredible feeling and such a rewarding feeling.

“I was able to kind of niche out myself as an instructor with that money. But that feeling of that putt going in … I can’t believe this gift I was given in a one-day tournament. Of course I earned it, but it really is so lucrative. Only club professionals could dream of a sponsor like George Connell to do something like this for us. It’s incredible.”

In addition to his work at Liberty Hill, Stewart teaches in the winter at the Leadbetter Golf Academy at PGA National Resort in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Connell is known to love watching a playoff if two or more contestants are tied at the end of the day, seeing how they react under pressure when the first prize is $100,000 and second place is $5,000. There have been 10 playoffs in the history of the Haverford Classic, one in each of the last two stagings of the tournament — 2019 and 2021 (the 2020 event was canceled due to the pandemic).

Forster earned both his wins in a playoff — a three-way competition in 2008 and a seven-man, seven-hole battle royal in 2019 during which the players still alive were halted by darkness and had to return the next morning.

“Honestly, when I got into that [2019] playoff, I didn’t feel like I had a very good chance of winning,” Forster said. “I knew I was going to get outdriven by 50-plus yards. But then it dawned on me that I’m hitting first, and if I can hit a good shot, the pressure is all on them. I probably played the best golf I ever played in my career that day hitting the 3-hybrid and the 2-hybrid over and over again.”

In the end, Forster drained a 12-foot birdie putt on the seventh playoff hole to defeat Rusty Harbold, an assistant pro at Philadelphia Cricket Club and the 2014 Haverford Classic champion.

Harbold’s win also stretched over two days. He already had finished when a lightning delay forced those still on the course to return the next day, and Harbold came back from Lancaster, his home area at the time, in case of a playoff. As it turned out, he didn’t have to hit another shot and left with a $75,000 check, which he used to pay for his upcoming wedding.

He had another chance to win big money in the 2019 playoff. Although he didn’t, he called it “an experience I may never have again.”

“With seven guys playing for that kind of money, it was really cool,” he said. “It was great to be a part of. It was fun, a lot of good shots in that playoff, a lot of close calls, guys hitting pins, lipping out putts for birdies. It was memorable just from the environment.”

Harbold’s victory was his first in the section. Another first-time winner was Andrew Turner, now of Berkshire Country Club, who was about a month into his job as an assistant pro at Sunnybrook, the host course, the day of his 2017 victory.

“I played in the morning but I don’t remember a lot of the afternoon,” Turner said. “I went back to work, worked all afternoon in the shop. It was just a little bit of a blur, pretty surreal.

“It’s really hard not to think about the money when you’re playing. I know the cliché, ‘One shot at a time.’ Of course you can hit only one shot at a time. It doesn’t mean that your mind doesn’t wander while you’re playing. I was fortunate. I had finished second the year before, so I could grow off that.”

A field of 133 players will compete this year. Forty players, or about 30% of the field, will take home a share of the purse but, the big prize of $100,000 will be on most minds.

“It’s a pretty special day for a lot of us,” McNabb said. “I hope the guys that have the opportunity to play in this event really understand and appreciate what a wonderful opportunity it is for us to have this. We don’t ever take something like this for granted.”

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