Today, at age 85, Nicklaus is involved in a bizarre lawsuit that pits him against, among other entities, an AI version of himself.
when they began placing small booklets of golf tips – with subscription information included, of course – under the windshield wipers of cars in the parking lots of Chicago-area golf courses. The magazine went national within two years. The trio sold it to The New York Times in 1969, and since it has been sold twice more, in 2001 to Condé Nast and again in 2019 to the current owner, Warner Bros./Discovery. Tarde has been present for all three owners. He began reading Golf Digest in the early 1970s as a teenager and got his foot in the door as an intern in 1977 while a rising senior at Northwestern. Golf Digest offered him a job at the end of the summer, and he’s been here ever
gate an attempted (and failed) coup against tour commissioner Deane Beman on the grounds that on issues like TV rights, course design, and mar- keting opportunities, the growing tour was aban- doning its member-first principles and, more importantly, cutting into his earning potential. Today, at age 85, Nicklaus is involved in a bizarre lawsuit regarding his image and likeness that pits him against, among other entities, an AI version of himself. Progress takes us in strange directions. Golf Digest has been there every step. In these pages, Larry Mowry told the harrowing story of driving through the night in Georgia with Charlie Sifford. Writer Tom Callahan travelled to Viet- nam to find Tiger Woods’ namesake and reveal how Earl Woods’ experience in that country in- fluenced a worldview that would shape a legend. In his only Golf Digest cover story, Harold Varner relayed the story of his childhood to interviewer Mark Whitaker. While little looks the same today as it looked 75 years earlier, the changes in Golf Digest over the years have been particularly profound. Golf Digest began as a regional publication in 1950, the brainchild of William H Davis, a World War Two naval officer and Northwestern graduate with a vision for a magazine geared towards the golfer, rather than the golf fan – a market already cov- ered by Golf World, which would eventually come under the Golf Digest umbrella 38 years later. Davis’ lieutenants (officially “co-founders,” though nobody doubted who ran the show) were Howard Gill and Jack Barnett. As Jerry Tarde, Golf Digest’s current Editor-in-Chief, wrote in 2010, the trio’s reputation for penny-pinching was such that Dan Jenkins later claimed that Gill con- vinced him to write articles in the early days in ex- change for Velveeta cheese sandwiches. Gill was the charmer of the group, Barnett the business- side grinder, and Davis ... well, Davis’ unofficial nickname among his editorial employees was the “Prince of Darkness.” He was the type of relent- less boss, it was said, who could walk by a senior editor’s office, look in and ruin his life for a year. They were the definition of hustlers. They con- vinced players like Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson to write for the magazine, and one of the early turning points for the business came
SEEING GREEN Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer transformed the business of pro golf.
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