With weather allowing nearly year-round play, golf and metro Atlanta go together like peas and carrots. Alex Urban, executive director of the Tour Championship at PGA Tour, shared his 11-year career journey in the golf industry, the restoration of a historic golf course, as well as the importance of community engagement and charitable initiatives (such as the First Tee of metro Atlanta program) at the Peachtree Corners Business Association’s Business After Hours Speaker Series on July 25 at Hilton Atlanta Northeast.

“It is a busy time of the year for me,” said Urban referring to the PGA Tour Championship being held August 28 through September 1 at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.

Urban has been with the PGA since 2013, starting out on the communications team.

“I went to about 50 tournaments in four years. It’s a very fun job for guy in his 20s,” he said, adding that now that he’s a husband and father, he’s happy spending more time at home. “It was a blast. I went to a bunch of really cool places, and I’ve always loved coming to Atlanta.”

Urban has an undergraduate degree from Clemson University in political science and a master’s from the University of Georgia in public relations. The PGA Tour is the only company that he’s ever worked for. With his parents retiring to Greenville, South Carolina from Ohio and his wife’s family in Melbourne, Florida, Atlanta turned out to be the right place to put down roots.

PGA and PGA Tour

If you don’t know a lot about golf and its many tournaments, tours, championships, etc., you might not realize what a major impact it has around the world. First of all, PGA Tour and PGA aren’t the same thing. PGA Tour is for professional golfers in North America. Originally established by the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA of America) in 1916, the PGA Tour became its own league in 1968. Its original name was the “Tournament Players Division,” but it eventually became PGA Tour in 1975.

The PGA Tour schedule runs from January through August with events in the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Europe. The events take place at the same times and locations every year, ending with the championship in Atlanta.

“There are 47 events in the PGA Tour, but we have a tour central, like our minor leagues, called the Korn Ferry Tour. They have 30 tournaments. We have our PGA TOUR Champions. Of course, we also have the Mitsubishi Electric Championship, just a little bit north of here that they play at TPC Sugarloaf,” said Urban. “And so, all in all, there’s like 150 PGA tour events, if you include all those ancillary tours, so it’s quite a production.”

Area’s history with golf

“For those of you that don’t know it, East Lake is a historic golf club and home of the great first champion of golf — Bobby Jones,” said Urban. “He founded the Masters Tournament. He was very big in the 1920s and 1930s when amateur golf was really the pinnacle of the game — right before professional golf took over.”

At the time, Jones was enjoying ticker tape parades in New York City for winning the Open Championship. His origin story began in Atlanta at East Lake where he grew up learning how to play the game of golf. But as with most things, a golf course needs revitalization, even if it’s rooted in history.

“It has undergone a restoration this year,” said Urban. “So, once the last putt dropped from the tournament last year, they have basically replaced every blade of grass, every bunker, every green, to try to reach the goal of reverting it back to the old design features from the early 1900s.”

Updates and restorations

He added that a lot of golf courses are going through this right now. According to NBC Sports, Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, Medinah Country Club in Illinois, Omni La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California and Karsten Creek Golf Club in Stillwater, Oklahoma are among the top courses that are getting facelifts.

Urban said some of the changes are undulations in greens.

“There was a period in the 1980s and 1990s that was really, really obsessed with really fast greens. And the problem with really fast greens is that you can’t make them too slow, because the ball just rolls off the green,” he said. “So, you have to make them flat enough that the ball can actually stand still.”

He added that the fairways are now a little bit wider than they were in the past — making them a little less rough.

“The bunkering is different. It’s a little deeper. It certainly looks different,” he added. “What they’ve done is tried to match the design and the restoration work back to a photograph from 1949. The greens seem a lot larger. They’re a little bit more asymmetrical.”

Giving back to community

As much as metro Atlanta has given to golf, the PGA Tour wants to give back to this area.

“Volunteerism and giving back to the community is a huge part of what is central to the PGA Tour and what we do with the Tour Championship,” said Urban. “There’s not one that better exemplifies that than the Tour Championship and the relationship it has with the East Lake community and the Atlanta community as a whole.”

A prize of $25 million to the winner is a big draw for golf’s heavy hitters like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spaeth and Justin Thomas. But this culmination of the tour season would be nothing without the people behind the scenes who make it possible, Urban pointed out. And with an event this massive, many of those people do it for no money — just the love of the game, the pride of the city and the chance to do good.

Event volunteers

“We have 1,300 to 1,500 volunteers in any given year that help out during the tournament in all kinds of capacities,” he said. “We have people that hold their hands up to make sure that nobody is talking during back swings, to people who never see the golf course.”

Those are the ones that are helping with deliveries at the tournament office and guiding parking and things like that. There is also a need for hospitality talent management and groups to help with a computer system called ShotLink that plots all the shots on the course.

“Parking is one of our biggest challenges. We don’t have the luxury of big fields where we can park people right next to a golf course. We’re in a neighborhood. And we try not to be as disruptive as possible,” Urban said. “But even with all that, tournament week is my favorite week of the year. It is a stressful week, but we love what we do.”

Beyond the tournament

Beyond the tournament, however, is the impact on the community. The Tour Championship, like many golf tournaments, operates as non-profit charitable organization that is required to donate the profit it makes over expenses.

“So, in 2023 our last year’s tournament was a record year and we gave $6.96 million back to charities in the Atlanta area,” he said. “Most notably, the East Lake Foundation gets the majority of our dollars.”

Since 1999, that amount has been more than $54 million.

“That’s something that I think separates golf from other sporting properties and organizations; golf is a vehicle for charitable donations,” Urban said. “If you want to raise money for your organization, you almost always throw a golf tournament.”

A PGA tournament is kind of a larger version of that.

“We just sell a lot more tickets. And we sell more hospitality and have the best players in the world,” he said. “Ultimately, when you’re supporting the tournament through hospitality tickets or buying tickets, you’re supporting your community.”

And a lot of the money goes to the community near the golf course.

“East Lake was once one of the worst ZIP codes in the state in terms of crime, in terms of education,” he said. “Mr. Tom Cousins bought the golf course and wanted to use it as a vehicle to help raise money to help revitalize the community.”

Through the East Lake Foundation, the PGA Tour has helped to generate funds that have gone towards affordable housing, education initiatives and other worthwhile endeavors.

First Tee of metro Atlanta

Another noteworthy charity is First Tee of metro Atlanta.

“It teaches life skills to kids through the game of golf. It’s not necessarily meant to teach kids how to play golf, but some become quite good and get college scholarships,” said Urban. “There are First Tee kids now that are PGA Tour players.”

“First Tee teaches young ones that golf is a sport where you call your own penalties on yourself and you have to learn how to manage it. Children are taught how to manage anger and things like that,” he added.

“Being a part of the Atlanta community is really, really important to us. We’re still trying to spread the message about what we do from a community engagement standpoint and from a charitable aspect because I think that’s something that sports don’t necessarily do,” said Urban. “I think it separates us and, like I said, when you’re buying tickets to our event, you’re supporting the revitalization of East Lake, but now other communities and the First Tee and things like that as well.”