Dave Marr (2022)

In his essay Here is New York, E. B. White identified three kinds of New Yorkers: natives, rooted to their neighborhoods and inured to the urban bustle; commuters, who flow in and out like the tides; and those born elsewhere who come to the city “in quest of something.” This final category describes Dave Marr, a Texan turned New Yorker who flourished in the big town.

Shortly after turning pro at age 19, David Francis Marr Jr. left Houston, the place of his hardscrabble youth — his club-pro father died when Dave was 14, and money was tight — and moved to the Met Area in 1953. It was a golden opportunity: the chance to work as an assistant pro for Claude Harmon at Winged Foot. Marr thrived under the tutelage of Harmon, the 1948 Masters champion, and went on to a head professional job of his own at Rockaway Hunting Club – and eventually to success on Tour, capped by his victory in the 1965 PGA Championship.

In the years that followed, Marr became known for more than just his playing career.  Witty, well-read, and imbued with a boyish charm, he worked the room at celebrity haunts such as Toots Shor’s and the 21 Club and socialized with the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Gifford, and fellow Texan Dan Jenkins, who in a Sports Illustrated piece dubbed him “the pro of 52nd Street.” In the early 1970s Marr made a seamless transition to television, broadcasting golf for ABC, where he would work for more than 20 years and earn praise for his amiable and insightful commentary. He later did stints for the BBC and NBC.

“Everyone talks about him as a Texan, but Dad became Dave Marr in the Met Section,” says his son David Marr III, who hosts golf programs for Sirius XM Radio.

Marr landed the Winged Foot job largely out of happenstance. After two years in college, first at the Rice Institute (now Rice University), then the University of Houston, he was trying to scratch out a living in golf when he received a call from Tour pro Tommy Bolt, a friend from Texas.

“He said, ‘Drive my Cadillac from Houston to Palm Beach. We’ll go to dinner, take you to lunch at a couple of places and figure out where we can get you an assistant job at a really good club,’” Marr III explains. The night Marr arrived, Bolt was going to dinner with Claude and Alice Harmon; Marr held the door for Alice as they walked in, and she told her husband, “Sit me next to the boy.” Afterward, she insisted Claude hire him, despite his age.

Marr spent three seasons at Winged Foot (with winters at Seminole), learning from Harmon and brushing elbows with the club’s cosmopolitan assortment of members and guests. “It was a place where if you cared to grow your person, cared to grow your character, you could, and Dad did,” says the younger Marr. “He took advantage of it and forever afterwards this boy who was born in Beaumont, Texas, raised in Houston, and traveled the world broadcasting with that Southern twang—New York was his favorite city.”

Marr began playing the tour on a regular basis in 1960. That year he won the Sam Snead Invitational (now considered an unofficial event), then captured the Seattle Open the next year and the Azalea Open in 1962. Competing in the era of the Big Three (Palmer, Player and Nicklaus) and lacking length off the tee, he tied for second at the Masters in 1964 but felt the game’s biggest titles would continue to elude him.

Then came his breakthrough at the 1965 PGA Championship at Laurel Valley Golf Club in Ligonier, Pa. (just a few hours before his third child, a son named Anthony, was born in New York). Tied for the lead through 54 holes, Marr won by two strokes over Nicklaus and Billy Casper.

“All I could think of was that the title was for everybody who had helped me,” he told Jenkins years later, mentioning Harmon first and foremost and also the members of Winged Foot who had sponsored him on Tour. “The $25,000 [winner’s check] was for me, and the prestige was what I would spread around New York and see what it would bring.”

It brought quite a lot. In addition to his television career, Marr popularized corporate outings in golf, headlined charity events, and founded a golf course design firm with his old Houston friend and former Winged Foot assistant Jay Riviere. When he died in 1997,The New York Times deemed Marr “an ambassador for the sport.”

In tribute to their father’s place in the game, his children scattered his ashes far and wide. The “eight-year world tour,” as Dave Marr III fondly describes it, included visits to, among other places, Memorial Park, the historic Houston muni where Marr came of age; Winged Foot; Laurel Valley; and, over in England, Royal Birkdale and Walton Heath, where, respectively, he played on and captained victorious U.S. Ryder Cup teams. At Winged Foot his kids sprinkled his ashes in two places, both on the West Course: in the front right bunker on the par-3 10th hole, where Marr joked that he spent so much time he had his mail delivered there; and at No. 7, where one day in 1961 he walked off the course while four under par to drive his first wife, Susan, to the hospital for the birth of their son David.

To honor Marr’s broadcasting career, the Metropolitan Golf Writers Association established an endowed scholarship in his name at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2001, yet another legacy tying the man to the city he adopted and loved.