Peyton Manning’s club-pro invitational is best golf event you’ve never heard of

It’s likely you’ve heard of the Seminole Pro-Member, the one-day event held each March at the regal Donald Ross course on the Atlantic Ocean in South Florida. It has drawn, through the years, Nick Price, Ernie Els, Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Nelly Korda, among other touring luminaries, Jimmy Dunne, the longtime Seminole Golf Club president, presiding. The so-called fifth major.

This week a group of elite club pros get their turn to be spoiled in style, at an event that has bubbled under the surface of national attention for decades, the Smith Cole pro-am at the Cherry Hills Country Club, outside Denver, a three-day tourney hosted by Peyton Manning, a Cherry Hills member and Denver resident. The event is named for the late Warren Smith and Clayton Cole, very much alive, both longtime head pros at Cherry Hills. The Smith Cole is a club-pro major. This year’s edition is No. 34.

Jimmy Dunne is playing with the head pro from Deepdale Golf Club. Augusta National will have a pro and a member at the event. So will the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, the Inverness Club, the San Francisco Golf Club, among nearly two dozen other clubs you know or wish you did. All three Manning brothers — your Cooper, your Peyton, your Eli — are playing. Kevin Hammer, the USGA president, is playing with Martyn Huish, the pro from North Berwick, in Scotland, and Mike Whan, the USGA CEO, is playing with Andy North, the two-time U.S. Open winner and a Cherry Hills member. Wyndham Clark, another two-time U.S. Open winner and Cherry Hills member, is playing with Michael Meldman, the golf-course developer. There are club pros from The Olde Farm in Virginia, Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia, Shooting Star in Wyoming. Yes, new kids on the block.

It’s a happening, for the embroidered-belt crowd.

There’s a practice round Wednesday, pros with pros, ams with ams. Wednesday night, at a tournament dinner in the Cherry Hills clubhouse, Manning will interview Ben Crenshaw, attending this year as a special pro guest and bringing an amateur from his home club, the Austin Golf Club. The first round for the 55 two-man teams is on Thursday. Thursday night, the fellas will gather for dinner at the Denver warehouse from which the ManningCast Monday Night Football broadcast is set loose onto the world. Friday, the second and final tournament round is played. Then the Smith Cole wraps up with a luncheon. Awards for many and bro-hugs for all. Then everybody disperses back to their real lives.

Sound like a good time?

“The Seminole event is in-and-out,” Jimmy Dunne said recently. “The pros are there to see the course, the members are there to see the pros. At Cherry Hills, as good as the course is, you’re there for the people.” Three days of golfing, eating, drinking, talking — and more golfing. The Cherry Hills thing is a hang.

Curtis Strange was invited last year as Ben Crenshaw was this year. On its face, it didn’t sound like an easy sell. Strange, the two-time U.S. Open winner and broadcaster, needed another pro-am in his life like he needed another sleeve of balata 384s. The event was two flights and two time zones away from his home in coastal North Carolina. He had never known Warren Smith or Clayton Cole. The last time he had been to Cherry Hills was for the PGA Championship in August 1985, where, despite his three wins on Tour that year, he missed the cut by six.

Still, off he went, one year ago, joined by the older of his two sons, Tom, named for Curtis’s club-pro father. Joy comes from the things you do in life, not the things you don’t.

“I just couldn’t believe how good the course was,” Strange said the other day, revisiting the experience in an interview. He had turned 70 a few months before the 2025 Smith Cole and was seeing the course, where Arnold Palmer won a celebrated U.S. Open, through a different lens. Strange was now a father, a grandfather, a World Golf Hall of Famer. Strange’s only real responsibility was to tell war stories at the opening-night dinner by way of gentle prodding from Peyton. Strange had been an Arnold Palmer Scholarship recipient as a student at Wake Forest in the mid-1970s and he found himself taking in Cherry Hill’s collection of Arnold Palmer memorabilia. So, a lot, and it was all good.

But when the event was over, Strange realized that the thing that made the biggest impact on him was not the golf course, for all its mile-high delights, and it was not the trip down memory lane, as pleasant as that stroll was. It was, echoing Jimmy Dunne, the assembled people. (It’s like when you go on a trip to a national park and you take all those nature snaps, but it’s the ones with actual people in them that you linger on in the home-again slide show.) A short list of Curtis’s enduring highlights: being with Tom; seeing Andy North, who won his first Open, in 1978, at Cherry Hills; playing with Fred Ridley, the Augusta National chairman, 50 years after they both played in the 1975 U.S. Amateur; eating lunch with Clayton Cole.

“What a classy man,” Strange said of Mr. Cole, a pro of the old school. You know: the low-buff FootJoys, the sharply creased pants, the by-the-book manner. Strange knows the territory, though his father’s club life was way more rough and tumble, with heavy action both on the first tee and in the card room.

“Are we going back this year?” Tom asked his father.

“No,” said the father. “It was a one-and-done thing.”

Still, a good time was had by all.

In a manner of speaking, and in a quiet way, Clayton Cole, now 85, is the star of the event. Cole plays in the event every year, chatting with the 100 or so members and guests in it and thereby reminding all, without even trying, of the pleasure that comes from getting lost in the company of golfers.

Cole has always had game and breaks his age regularly. Having an on-the-screws golf game was once a job prerequisite for club pros at prominent clubs, and Warren Smith and Clayton Cole fit the bill. They were expected to put up good scores, and they did. Adding their playing resumes together, they played in scores of U.S. Opens, PGA Championships and other national events, plus innumerable local ones. This was in an era when members wanted to see the names of their pros in their Tuesday paper after Monday tournaments. Members had more faith in the lessons they were getting, and in the clubs they were buying, when they knew their pros could break par on any given Monday, or any other day for that matter. In a roundabout way, the Smith Cole honors all of that.

Strange’s lone complaint (insert air quotes) from last year’s event concerned the slippery Cherry Hills greens. “The greens were perfect,” Strange said. (Nobody says perfect quite like Curtis, in his son-of-the-South, pro-for-the-ages way.) “But they had ’em Stimping about 15.” That is, Oakmont fast and then some.

Poa annua greens, by the way. William Flynn course. The ’38 Open was played there, the first time the tournament was played west of the Mississippi. Cherry Hills is an elite club, but Denver-style. Its vibe is rancher western, not E-ZPass eastern. It’s Robert Redford on a horse (or would Ronald Reagan work better here?) and not Thurston Howell III on a yacht.

Maybe that’s why Peyton Manning, who turned 50 this year, is so at home there. Manning has a sharp wit with the skill set to process both minute tourney details (and surely other things) while also painting on a big canvas in another room. He is an honors graduate from the University of Tennessee (1997) and now a guest lecturer there. But his out-and-about manner is loose, almost casual. He can’t oversell or overpromise. It’s not in him.

Manning joined Cherry Hills after becoming the Denver Broncos quarterback in 2012. He’s the Smith Cole greeter, sheriff and part-time bookkeeper. His older brother, Cooper, plays in the event and pays for the privilege, without complaint. (He also helps Peyton write his material.) Their younger brother, Eli, the former New York Giants quarterback and winner of two Super Bowls, plays in the Smith Cole, too, but requires more attention. “He thinks he should be comped,” Manning said recently. “I disagree.” The disagrees have it, and there was no vote.

The Smith Cole (it has had different names over the decades) has 55 two-man teams. So 110 players, ams from gravel-driveway clubs with their driver-off-the-deck pros, plus two-dozen member-member Cherry Hills teams. For the out-of-towners, that’s the typical path in: The invited pro brings an am from his home club, or the invited amateur brings a pro from home, plus the various Cherry Hills members playing with other Cherry Hills members. The ability to break 80 is not a prerequisite, though many in the field can. There are more net and gross and pro and am and pro-with-am divisions than any normal person would want to monitor. Really, every last participant should go home with a bumper sticker for their preferred back-to-school minivan: Every Golfer is an Honored Golfer at Smith Cole Middle School!

Cherry Hills members with sporty resumes in the field include Joe Buck (the broadcaster), Josh Kroenke (the Denver Nuggets president) and Greg Penner (the Denver Broncos owner). One of Augusta National’s co-head pros, J.J. Weaver, played last year with Fred Ridley, the Augusta National chairman, and this year is playing with another member, Tom Nelson, the Masters media committee chairman. Eli Manning is playing with the head pro from the oh-so-genteel Somerset Hills Country Club in New Jersey, Daniel Joseph. Peyton is playing with Penner, as both a member-member and a Broncos-Broncos team.

The club is an elemental part of Manning’s life, and so are the pros there. He knows them all, teaching and assistant and head and emeritus. He knows a lot of the caddies. (Cherry Hills has a thriving caddie program and the club has its own scholarship program for caddies and employees, named for Arnold Palmer.) He knows many of the servers and bartenders. When Manning got into Augusta National some years ago, one of his first guests was Mr. Cole.

Even if you haven’t met Clayton Cole, he might seem familiar to you, the super-organized club-pro lifer with an unhurried manner and deep and enduring relationships in the game. (You’re hesitant to say there’s a type but when it’s a positive, why not?) Kevin Hammer’s father is a club pro. In the club pro community, Hammer noted in a recent interview, rules count, as do punctuality, appearance and manners — cornerstones of a civil society.

More than a few club pros have found that their members will share intimate issues from their lives in ways they can with few others. Many club pros are experts in concealing judgment. They’re the grownups in the room. (You’ll never meet a young head pro, even if the pro’s birth certificate says the person is a young head pro.) Early in Clayton Cole’s career, when he was one of Warren Smith’s assistants, Smith gave his eventual successor this pearl: “We like all our members — we just like some more than others.” Now how’s that as a useful swing tip when you have 300 dues-paying bosses? “When a member comes to his club, he wants a break from work and really anything chaotic in his life,” Strange said. “A lot of that falls to the head pro.”

The senior Tom Strange, Curtis’s father, grew up caddying with Dow Finsterwald and died (screw you, cancer) at age 38, before he had a chance to become a Warren Smith or a Clayton Cole himself. Tom Strange could flat out play. Finsterwald, of course, could too — he won the 1958 PGA Championship and later was a legendary Colorado club pro. (Talk about an unhurried manner.) Finsterwald spent decades as the director of golf at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, though you can be sure his preferred title was head pro. All the old-school pros liked that title and to this day many still do, no matter what it says on their business cards. Arnold Palmer’s father was the head pro at Latrobe. Butch Harmon’s father was the head pro at Winged Foot. Davis Love’s father was the head pro at Charlotte Country Club. The Smith Cole honors pros, teaching pros, assistant pros, head pros and touring pros, current and retired.

Enter Curtis Strange last year, Brad Faxon the year before that, Ben Crenshaw this year. For Crenshaw, the Smith Cole is his second major this year, in a manner of speaking. Last month, he was a special guest at The Langley, an event that remembers the life and times of Jim Langley, the legendary head pro at Cypress Point, who shared the course record there as a two-armed golfer (63) and has the one-armed course record (81) all to himself. Crenshaw was the honoree at the 2022 Memorial tournament, where he made casual and delightful public remarks about different golfing figures in his life, including Harvey Penick, the legendary head pro at Austin Country Club, for whom Warren Smith was an assistant. 

When club pros of a certain ilk get together, there’s a lot of family tree talk. Claude Harmon begat Butch Harmon, Dick Harmon, Craig Harmon and Billy Harmon, all golf pros, but also (and less literally) Dave Marr and Jackie Burke and Davis Love Jr. and Jack Lumpkin, among other notable golf pros who worked under him as assistants at Winged Foot. As a baseball scout is measured by how many future major leaguers he signs, head pros are often measured by how many of their assistants become head pros, or top teachers or touring pros or do some other lofty thing in the game. Harvey Penick’s tree is a sequoia. Ben Crenshaw has his own limb on it, as does Tom Kite and Kathy Whitworth and Mickey Wright and enough names to fill a slender phone book. Penick came to Cherry Hills for summer stints when Smith was the head pro and Cole was one of his assistants.

Manning will surely bring a light touch to his interview with Crenshaw because light touch is his thing. If you have seen him at the Weekend Update desk on “Saturday Night Live,” or with Eli when they do their ManningCast, you know that. Asked about his golf handicap recently, Peyton said, “I’m currently a 6.8, which is a 6 at altitude, which I think should be about an 11 at sea level. My friends on the East Coast don’t see it that way.” Peyton is all touch.

It was Manning’s idea to have one pro come in as a sort of special guest, and Brad Faxon was the first one. “Two things made the decision to play in the Smith Cole easy, and the first is that the invitation came from Peyton,” Faxon said recently, by way of text. “And it gave me the chance to bring a good friend — Paul Salem, a seven whose game travels well — to play three straight days on one of the best courses in the country in an event with a tremendous field.”

Faxon appears to have a budding career as a writer. On he went from there:

“When you get to the side of the clubhouse and look down the hill at the short par-4 first hole, you can’t help but think about Arnold Palmer driving that green in the final round in the 1960 U.S. Open. You’re wondering how he could do that with a wound rubber ball and a wooden driver with a steel shaft? How could you reach the green, and hold it?

“The course is hugely underrated. There’s so much variety from one hole to the next. Each hole points you in another direction. There are options on every tee. The greens are some of the trickiest and hardest to read anywhere. The deeper you get into the course, the more you appreciate how good it is.

“Playing it again in ’24 brought back a lot of memories from a practice round at the ’85 PGA, when I played with Lee Trevino, Tom Watson and Hubert Green, who won that week. It was my second year on tour, and they were so much better than I was. A different league. The range is one thing. Up close, on a course like Cherry Hills, is another. You can really see where you stand, and what you have to do to get better. I left Cherry Hills in ’85 with the deepest respect for the course and for this game — and that was after shooting 78-82. I missed the cut by 13. I played a little better in ’24. Thankfully, the Smith Cole doesn’t have a cut, and I had a partner.

“After playing in the Smith Cole, I found I had an even greater appreciation for the course. Every hole has its own personality. Cherry Hills is a course where the more you play it, the more you love it. I’m sure the people who play in the tournament every year say the same thing.”

In the end, it always comes back to the people.

Last year, Fred Ridley played in the Smith Cole 50 years after he won the 1975 U.S. Amateur. A few months before that event, in May 1975, Ridley drove from central Florida to Columbus, Ohio, to take a series of lessons from Jack Grout, Jack Nicklaus’s lifelong teacher. Ridley had played at the University of Florida and had finished one year of law school and was intent on giving serious amateur golf one more shot. After several days, young Fred Ridley asked Mr. Grout what he owed him. Grout said, “Well, you’re going to have a busy summer of golf, going to all these amateur events. It’ll get expensive. How about $25?” What Grout gave Ridley over those May days, Ridley used all through the summer of ’75, as he drove it long and in play. In a manner of speaking, what Grout gave Ridley, the lifelong amateur has used ever since. In a manner of speaking, you could say the Smith Cole honors Jack Grout and thousands of other club-pro lifers like him.

When Ridley was the captain of the 1987 Walker Cup team, Bill Loeffler was on his team, as the 1986 U.S. Mid-Am champion. In team photos, Loeffler stands out, the only person on the team with a mustache, a particularly luxuriant one. Loeffler, a Denver native and a Cherry Hills member, plays in the Smith Cole every year.

“Does Bill still have that mustache?” Fred Ridley asked Clayton Cole upon seeing him at Cherry Hills.

Loeffler had shaved off his soup strainer years earlier, but he had a trick up his sleeve. He got himself to a Halloween shop near his house, bought himself a gag Inspector Clouseau mustache, attached it between his nose and upper lip and presented himself to his former captain. The next photo, mental or otherwise: people laughing.

“It all goes back to the people,” Peyton Manning said the other day. “The people you get to know. The members of Cherry Hills, and the people you get to know from around the country, too. You build relationships. You can build a friendship that just never goes away. I think golf has a kind of magic and power to it. That’s what it is for me. The Smith Cole is a perfect example of that.”

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com