A Logo Turns 40

Art West had a problem. He stared down at the glass-top table that served as his desk at the PGA TOUR’s makeshift headquarters inside a converted house in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. Sitting atop the table was a book from that year, adorned with the TOUR’s logo and the words OFFICIAL PGA TOURMEDIA GUIDE 1979. The recently hired PGA TOUR marketing director shook his head. The logo on the cover staring back at him was at issue. In an adjacent office, another man had experienced the same feelings of unrest about the logo—only for a longer period. In 1974, Deane Beman became the PGA TOUR’s second commissioner, and even before he started on the job he realized the TOUR’s logo, a shield with its blue outline, vertical red-and-white stripes and PGA TOUR in white lettering against a blue field inside the shield, suggested nothing of golf. “You have to realize we didn’t really have a brand. Back then, commercialism in sports was almost non-existent,” said Beman, who understood marketing his sport was how he could generate additional revenue for the TOUR. That’s why he hired West, to facilitate the kind of growth he envisioned. One of the things holding back the TOUR was the logo. Beman was sure of that. Beman had actually tinkered with the logo some previously. Beginning in 1969, when the players formed their own Tour independent of the PGA’s teaching professionals’ division, the logo’s blue field at the top of the shield read in a three-row stack PGA TOURNAMENT PLAYERS DIVISION. For the 1976 season, two years after the players incorporated and became PGA TOUR, Inc., Beman switched out the wording, making it PGA TOUR, and changed the shield’s outline to blue from the previous. Still, something was missing. Beman knew it. Around that time, the commissioner sat for a magazine interview and told Golf, “We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of our game as a mass appeal for spectators. We’re drawing very well on the TOUR, but the vast majority of the fans who come out are players themselves. Golf is the only sport I know that has flourished with participants as spectators. That in itself is a tribute to its appeal, but we must reach deeper and attract the general run of fans.” Among other things, that was Beman’s mission in 1979: get rid of the logo. I looked at the old logo and said, ‘This looks like a Ducks Unlimited patch or something. I can’t sell that.’ Forty years after that interview, Beman, sitting with his wife, Judy, elaborated. “I was highly aware of brand values. Just being close to business and seeing how businesses run, it was sales and marketing. I’m a salesman. I know that building a brand is important. It’s important to the success of a business, especially if you’re in a retail business that deals with the public.” Beman only told part of his story, certainly burying the lead. Maybe he was a salesman back in the day, but he, by the way, was also the CEO of a major sports organization and a four-time PGA TOUR winner who left his playing career behind to assume the role of commissioner. Along the way, he had piled up more than a few bona fides. Where Beman was on point was with the logo, a symbol that had represented him first as a player and then the first five years in his current role. Beman wanted to find a replacement, something that could help move the TOUR into a new and more-exalted realm. One comment Beman made always stuck with Judy, who began working for the TOUR when the headquarters was in Washington, D.C. Judy married Deane and made the move to Florida when the TOUR relocated. In the Sunshine State, she continued to work alongside her husband. “He always said the old logo didn’t say golf. He wanted it to say golf, which makes sense,” she remembered. “I wanted the logo to tell a story,” the commissioner explained. “I didn’t want it to be inert. I wanted it to be active. I didn’t want anybody to make a mistake and look at it and think it wasn’t golf and that there wasn’t action.” In other words, a red-white-and-blue shield wasn’t going to cut it. “I looked at the old logo and said, ‘This looks like a Ducks Unlimited patch or something. I can’t sell that,” said West, who immediately upon taking the job had trouble envisioning the existing logo stitched on shirts, printed on coffee cups and other merchandise—most importantly—appearing on network golf telecasts. West couldn’t avoid equating his new company’s logo with the ones the Union Pacific Railroad and the Amateur Athletic Union used. The similarities were striking in a same-chapel-different-pew sort of way. In a 1979 memo to his boss, West wrote, “Our current logo (red, white & blue shield with the inscription PGA TOUR) is not appropriate for establishing the proper identity and marketing appeal. It is too patriotic in design and color. It does not imply that we are related to golf to the unaware consumer.” Beman studied the memo and nodded in approval. West had himself a convert, and vice versa. West, who left a career with IBM to join the TOUR, knew the value of a brand. For years, despite IBM owning a large share of the copy machine market, he found that most people referred to copiers as “Xerox machines,” and when they used them, they were “Xeroxing” something. It was a constant source of aggravation. West wasn’t necessarily enamored of the PGA TOUR’s name, either. After taking the job at the TOUR, many friends, acquaintances and business associates referred to his new place of employment as simply the PGA, not differentiating between the PGA TOUR—for players who play tournament golf for a living—and the PGA of America, an organization for PGA professionals who work at golf courses, teach lessons and sell merchandise in pro shops. In that same memo to Beman, West cited the Securities and Exchange Commission and college athletics’ Southeastern Conference having a similar issue. Although even then, West admitted, the two SECs didn’t run in the same circles and really had nothing to do with each other, something that couldn’t be said for the PGA TOUR and the PGA of America. Consequently, simultaneous to his logo work, West led a study about the viability of the TOUR’s name. Should it change its nomenclature? After mulling over that subject in his mind again and again and following discussions with business associates and members of the media, West concluded, writing in his memo, “Serious consideration should be given to changing our logo—not our name.” Beman agreed, the name change was a dead issue, the logo change, however, a front-and-center matter not only up for discussion but action, too. So, that’s what the two did. They went to work, formulated a strategy while considering various options. Beman and West picked brains to get the thoughts of other employees who had a vested interest, including Labron Harris, Jr., the director of tournament administration; Dale Antram, the TOUR’s public relations director; and Tom Place, the public information director. Office assistants B.J. Tyner, Dee Scott and Judy Beman also made suggestions. After gathering the feedback, Deane Beman and West even went so far as to make crude sketches of what they were envisioning, neither man reminding anybody of Rembrandt. Their due diligence done, West’s assignment was to put the wheels in motion to create a new logo. The commissioner gave West only one mandate. “I thought as smart as Disney is and as aware as they are of image and brand,” Beman said of the entertainment giant, “if he wasn’t brought in, he’d be offended.” The “he” the commissioner was referring to was Esmond Cardon Walker, Card to everybody who knew him. Walker was The Walt Disney Company CEO who also happened to sit on the TOUR’s Policy Board. He was certainly an ally, and Beman and West both reasoned that Walker, as head of the entire Disney organization, probably, ahem, had enough pull to enlist the help of Disney’s artists to assist in the creation of a new PGA TOUR logo should he ask. Yes, if you can design the Carousel of Progress and Tomorrowland, you’re probably good for a few logo prototypes, too. “I showed [Walker] our shield logo and told him what we were trying to do from a marketing standpoint, and he totally agreed with Deane and me,” West explained. Walker said he would gladly coordinate things, and later, from his Anaheim office, he called the creative team at Walt Disney World in Orlando, explained what he wanted the artists to do and told them someone from the PGA TOUR would be stopping by for a visit. That someone was West. Upon his business trip to the Florida complement to California’s Disneyland, West unwittingly received an insider’s view of the eight-year-old theme park. Disney World is actually a massive three-story building, the park that everybody knows essentially the top floor spread out over acres and acres. The park’s offices, wardrobe facilities, food-prep areas and dressing rooms—what Disney calls utilidors for its out-of-sight network of tunnels that allows Mickey and Snow White and all the rest to quickly and quietly reach the surface without park patrons knowing where they came from—is all below where the action is. That’s where Disney’s creative team worked, where West had his appointment. “It’s a Pentagon-like office space under the park. It’s fascinating, and I went to the basement at Disney World, the operations department down in Orlando, and met with their design people,” West recalled. Once there, West showed off the sketches and told the graphic designers what the TOUR was envisioning. “I told them what we were trying to do and gave them a deadline.” “Having Card participate was helpful to us, and we got [the logo prototypes] done for nothing by Disney,” added Beman of the man who died in 2005. The free part was important to Beman, who was always conscious of costs but especially at a time when the TOUR didn’t have a lot of extra money laying around. Plus, he recognized he would have to spend money for marketing research. Most importantly, though, cost considerations or not, Beman knew how good Disney was at what it did. After his visit to Orlando, West traveled to New York and checked into The Helmsley Palace Hotel. He had a plan upon arrival in the Advertising Capital of the World. “I went to a lot of agencies up there, and I said, ‘Here’s an opportunity if you want to do some pro bono work,” West explained, remembering the experience of telling the creative people at each advertising and PR agency he visited that he was looking for additional logo design concepts. The carrot West dangled was that he planned on hiring the agency to implement its logo, if chosen. J. Walter Thompson, with more than 200 offices in countries around the world but headquartered in New York, took West up on his proposal. It agreed to ask its artists to come up with designs, all of this happening in the late spring of 1979, and Beman envisioning a debut of the TOUR’s new logo—whatever it looked like—in early January in La Quinta, Calif., at the Bob Hope Desert Classic, the first event of the 1980 season. Within a month, by June, West had 19 full-color prototypes from Disney and Thompson on his desk to go along with the current shield logo, giving him 20. That was too cumbersome a number, he decided, so West began paring the possibilities. He couldn’t envision under any circumstances keeping the existing logo, which was the entire reason for this exercise in the first place, but West left the old standby in the “keep” pile anyway. He eventually winnowed the logos to a workable 11, seven coming from Disney and four from Thompson. He set the other eight aside, rejecting them outright, knowing they wouldn’t work for a variety of reasons. That left him with an even 12. West’s next call was to Guideline Research Corporation in New York. He needed a company to design a market research study to see how people in different parts of the U.S. felt about the designs, essentially asking ordinary citizens to serve as a focus group to help choose the TOUR’s logo. Of the 12 choices, West knew which logo he liked, but he kept his mouth shut. Beman liked the same logo as West, but he, too, said nothing. It was time to find out how others felt. For $15,950 (a $14,500 fee plus a 10-percent surcharge; approximately $56,000 in today’s dollars), GRC agreed over the next month to interview 400-plus individuals, broken down as such: • Teens ages 16-19 who were interested in sports • Males ages 20-59 who were golf enthusiasts • Males ages 20-50 who were sports enthusiasts • Females 20-59 who were sports enthusiasts • Selected advertising and media executives That was the plan, but in the end, for unknown reasons, Guideline ended up interviewing only 214 people, all men, 50 or so each in New York, Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles, the company reducing its initial costs. Of those who participated, 104 were between the ages of 20 and 34 and 110 were 35 to 59. There were three traits the respondents all had to have in common: they watched at least some TV every week; they considered themselves sports-minded; and they either watched golf on TV or played the sport. Guideline then took the questionnaire and the prototypes, each logo printed in color on 8 ½-inch-by-11, slick-coated card stock, and hit the road. It had a month. To look at some of logos 40 years later is an exercise in what-if. It’s like thinking about Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones or John Travolta playing Forrest Gump. Imagine the opening of a TOUR telecast on CBS, NBC or Golf Channel today with the TOUR’s logo appearing as three red, silhouetted golf clubs extending from a golf bag with the words PGA TOUR written on the side. Or how about a golf ball sitting next to a pin with the letters P-G-A on the flag and TOUR beneath the ball? Maybe a silhouetted golfer inside a star, with PGA in small letters and TOUR much bigger? Those describe three of the prototypes that were part of the 12, logos that clearly didn’t make the cut. Now age 82, Beman smiled on a January morning earlier this year as he picked up the 40-year-old prototypes spread out on a conference table. He examined each of them individually and started critiquing them like it was 1979 all over again. “This says golf, but there’s no action, and this one is too busy,” he said of two of the “losers.” “And this one is too much Dallas Cowboys.” He was referring to the logo with the star. While one specific logo had everybody’s attention and was clearly the betting favorite, Guideline still had to go through its rigors. During its month-long process, the research company showed each survey-taker all 12 logos, two at a time, using a pre-designated rotation. Respondents chose their favorites from the six pairs they looked at. Guideline then re-paired the six “winning” logos and repeated the process to get to the final three, at which time each person queried ranked the logos in order of his first, second and third preferences. As Beman and West expected, the TOUR’s existing shield logo did not perform well, finishing ninth and not advancing to the finals. Meanwhile, that certain logo with a little white golfer swinging a club against a blue field set in a vertical rectangle performed exceedingly well. In eight categories, it finished No. 1 in six of them: “Eye-Catching,” “Masculine,” “Would Appeal to All Types of People,” “Attractive,” “Has Prestige” and “Would Appeal to Young People.” It finished fourth in the “Modern” category and third in “Different from Other Sports Emblems.” OK, so the logo didn’t win Miss Congeniality. What it did do was take home top honors in just about everything else. Forty-six percent selected the design as either Nos. 1, 2 or 3. Forty years later, there is no record of who created the original design, only that it came from Disney. One thing is certain. Whoever did the designing basically nailed it. “We wanted to trade on the letters P-G-A,” Beman continued, “but I didn’t want PGA to be front and center. It’s the TOUR. We’re the TOUR. That’s what this logo did.” Beman pointed at the logo that has since become one of the iconic symbols in all of professional sports. “We were all pleased that this independent research confirmed what our gut feeling was,” Beman continued. “It’s instantly recognizable. I think it immediately says golf,” Judy Beman said of the logo that eventually emerged as the top choice. “This logo says golf, and I think it’s competitive with all the big-name sports and their logos. “I also think the logo gave tournament sponsors a feeling of unity to be under that logo,” she continued, “something they didn’t have before.” Even with the overwhelming popularity of the logo, Beman wasn’t entirely happy with the winning design, especially with the bottom of the logo that featured square instead of rounded corners and the golfer’s feet outside the rectangle. Needing a second opinion, Beman took the prototype to a friend in Jacksonville who in later life became known as “The Master of the Logo.” The commissioner wanted a little tweaking, and he knew the man to do it. If Floyd Benton, a partner in Benton and Hoover Plus, knew anything, it was logos, having created images for numerous companies throughout his career after graduating from North Carolina’s Elon University. Prior to his death in 2000, Benton, shared with his son, Mark, a current PGA TOUR employee in the Creative Services department, how satisfied he was to be associated with his work on the logo. Floyd’s wife, Lura, knew her husband felt the same way. “My husband was a pretty humble guy, and he would not have spoken so proudly about the logo if he had not made a significant contribution to the design,” Lura said. After Floyd finished his handiwork, Beman, with the top-choice logo in hand and all four sides completely closed and the golfer’s feet inside, moved to the next step in the process. He was confident he would get the thumbs-up treatment, but he understood it wasn’t a 100-percent certainty that the Policy Board would unilaterally accept the new logo. That made board approval his next item of business Beman wanted the players’ buy-in, as well. After all, the new logo would be the banner under which he anticipated they would play for, well, forever. So, he organized a logo committee that consisted of one player (Tom Kite), a golf administrator (the United States Golf Association’s Joe Black) and Donald Regan, a Policy Board member and the CEO of Merrill Lynch, who, two years later, would become Treasury Secretary in President Ronald Reagan’s cabinet. Before his signature began appearing on U.S. currency, though, Regan first had to sign his name endorsing a really big change for the TOUR. “Those three guys weren’t involved in the process very much,” Beman recalled. “What they did do was help in notifying the players and carrying the message to the rest of the board to get [the logo] fully approved. “We had a board that had the ultimate call and decision,” he continued, “but they relied on the staff and on me to make sure that when they were asked to rubber stamp something, it damn well better be pretty good.” West elaborated. “We were not going to go to that board and have them vote no.” Judy Beman had this recollection: “I think that since Card was peripherally involved in the design, that carried weight, too, because he was the person who had the most creative background of the members of the board at that time.” And how did the vote turn out? “Bam! Eleven to nothing,” West said. “New logo approved. We’re out of here.” A couple of months later, Antram was putting the final touches on a press release that announced the new logo. There was no big rollout of the logo like you might see today. The announcement was an understated affair, consisting of a simple media announcement but no logo-under-satin-draping unveiling anywhere to be found. Sports Betting News did write an article about it, and a smattering of newspapers printed the piece. Golf World ran a short, three-paragraph story. In California, signage at the Bob Hope Desert Classic featured the new logo at all four of the tournament’s sites: Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes, El Dorado and La Quinta. Beman’s press release statement was simple and to the point: “We think the new logo, which clearly says PGA TOUR and golf in a distinctive and graphic way, will serve to strengthen our identity and image.” Prescient comment. Back in Ponte Vedra Beach, in early January 1980, Art West arrived at his office. There was a delivery sitting on his desk. As he sat down, he saw the newly printed PGA TOUR media guide waiting for him. Prominently displayed on the red cover of the book was the new logo. Having overseen its creation from start to finish, and more than slightly acquainted with the emblem, West liked what he saw, especially how it stood out and what he felt the logo represented. I can sell that, he thought. The marketing director leaned back in his chair, a wide, broad smile forming on his face. On the other side of the country, at a golf tournament in California, a self-proclaimed salesman had the same response.

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