Vision
Columbus is where Nicklaus was born and raised, learned the game of golf, went to college, and where he started his own family. It was Nicklaus's vision to create a golf club that embodied his personal and professional life and to create a golf tournament that would long represent his passion for tournament golf, and would give back to a community that has embraced him and the game. This vision was fulfilled in May 1976 with the first Memorial Tournament, two years to the day after the doors were opened and the first shots played at Muirfield Village. The par-72 course was set at 7,072 yards (6,467 m), a considerable length for the mid-1970s.
Nicklaus signalled his intent to host his own tournament during Masters Week in 1966, when he spoke of his desire to create a tournament that, like The Masters, had a global interest, and was inspired by the history and traditions of the game of golf. He also wanted the tournament to give back in the form of charitable contributions to organizations benefiting needy adults and children throughout Columbus and Ohio. The primary charitable beneficiary of the tournament is Nationwide Children's Hospital.
The Memorial reached the height of its popularity in the 1990s having reached "Sold-Out" status, a first on the PGA Tour other than the major championships. For a variety of reasons the event has started seeing ticket sales decrease during the last five years.
Read more about this topic: Memorial Tournament
Famous quotes containing the word vision:
“I wish I could take back some of the things I said and some of the things I did. But in the bigger picture, I don’t feel that it was violent and terrible. I feel like it was primarily—obviously not completely—moral, based on a vision that the government should be better, and that people could be better, and that democracy should be real.”
—Bernardine Dohrn (b. 1942)
“At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces—a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)