June 22, 2009

By Jim Sumner
theACC.com

Georgia Tech joined the ACC in time for the 1979-80 academic year and quickly found its challenges. Tech got beat on the basketball court, the football field, the baseball diamond. And the golf course.

The Yellow Jackets hired Homer Rice as athletic director in 1980 to turn around their moribund athletic program. He did just that, hiring such notables as Bobby Cremins, Bobby Ross, and Jim Morris. But he never made a better hire than golf coach William “Puggy” Blackmon.

Georgia Tech’s golf coach when Rice arrived was Tommy Plaxico, a physical education instructor and former Tech track star, an accomplished man in certain areas but not a golf specialist in a league that demanded specialization. After all, the competition included Jesse Haddock at Wake Forest, Devon Brouse at UNC, and Richard Sykes at NC State.

Bob McDonnell was a member of Plaxico’s last golf team at Tech. He says Plaxico was “a care-taker of the program. He didn’t recruit or teach much. He just sent us out there.”

Not surprisingly, Tech finished eighth and last in the ACC Championship 1979 through 1982. Rice decided he needed an upgrade. “I was in the market for a golf coach and I called lots of people. And Puggy Blackmon’s name kept coming up. He had a reputation as a good teacher and he was deeply involved with junior golf; he knew everybody. We needed that.”

There are lots of distinctive nicknames in sports. But not many people acquire those nicknames before they are born. Blackmon says that his parents were discussing a number of names for their soon-to-be-born child, when his mother asked her mother for her thoughts. “Well, he’ll probably have a pug nose, so maybe we should call him Puggy” was the answer. The nickname stuck. Blackmon says his third grade teacher insisted on calling him William, but other than that, it’s been Puggy all the way.

A native of South Carolina, Blackmon played collegiately at Carson-Newman, from where he graduated in 1973 with a degree in business administration. He was involved in golf-course development in the Southeast and worked with junior golf. Blackmon earned a Master’s Degree at Clemson in economics and coached the U.S. Junior team in Ireland in 1982.

Blackmon had to be convinced that Tech was in his future. He was about to take a golf-development job in Pinehurst when Rice offered him the Tech job. “They offered me $17,000 a year,” he recalls. “I could make five times that much in Pinehurst. I told Tech my wife would commit me if I said yes.”

Atlanta developer and Tech supporter Charles Brown agreed to hire Blackmon as a consultant for five years if he accepted the Tech job. That was the deal sweetener Blackmon needed.

Rice says he and Blackmon had a perfect relationship. “I wanted the right person. When I realized I had the right person, I left him alone.” Blackmon added a third responsibility. When he arrived in Atlanta he discovered that the local junior association was in trouble. He and his wife Gail “ran the organization out of our house.”

Blackmon assesses his style thusly. “I loved being outside the box. I don’t like to be stifled.”

McDonnell recognized Blackmon’s restless intellect right away. “Puggy came in and worked with us. He upgraded our equipment, started a fund-raising group, and improved our summer travel options. He was a high energy guy. His enthusiasm was contagious. Whatever we needed, he would help us get. [Sports psychologist] Bob Rotella came in a talked to us. Swing specialists came in and worked with us.”

Rice adds, “He developed a program interested in any technical thing that could help his team. He helped develop a motion analysis computer program that analyzed swings better than anything else.”

Blackmon’s key recruit was a Georgian named Bill McDonald. The top prepster in the country, McDonald could have gone anywhere to play college golf. But he cast his lot with Blackmon’s fledgling program.

Blackmon pulled out all stops to get McDonald. He chartered a helicopter, picked up McDonald at the Dalton Country Club and had the helicopter land on the 50-yard line, where he was met by Rice and school officials.

Blackmon says, “Much of what we did to recruit McDonald is against the rules today. In fact,” he laughs, “that recruitment may be the reason it is against the rules.”

“I knew Puggy from junior golf,” McDonald says. “He was personable and energetic. He had a dream to make his program special. Everybody thought he was crazy. I knew that going to Georgia Tech would put pressure on me. But I wanted that responsibility.”

McDonnell says, “It was an incredible coup. Puggy was the only reason we got Bill. That gave the program instant credibility.” The blue-chippers followed. Nacho Gervas, Jay Nichols, Charlie Rymer.

“We found out we could get it done if we listened to him. We started beating people who had been beating us. Then we were beating everybody.”

The championships followed. Tech finished fifth in the 1984 ACC Championship, after which Blackmon was named ACC Coach of the Year. That speaks volumes about where the program was. But Tech broke through in 1985, leading wire-to-wire to edge Duke for the title. McDonnell shot a 68-69-68-205 to become Tech’s first ACC individual golf champion, while McDonald came in third.

Georgia Tech finished 12th in its first NCAA team competition since 1947.

Blackmon quickly established himself as a player’s coach. McDonnell says, “You didn’t have to do it a specific way. We had the freedom to do what we needed, to find our way. Puggy didn’t have an ego in that way. There was no Puggy-way to do things.”

McDonald adds, “At a school like Oklahoma State, everybody had the exact same swing. It’s like they were robots. Puggy wasn’t like that.”

Blackmon says he was so busy raising money to improve the facilities and scholarship funding that he didn’t have time to teach and was glad to delegate. But the fund-raising paid off. Blackmon says that the golf program made money and its facilities were competitive by the end of the 1980s.

Tech finished second in the ACC Championship in 1986, 1987, and 1989 and became regular visitors to the NCAA Tournament.

Blackmon took the next step when he recruited David Duval, a national junior champion from Jacksonville, Florida. Blackmon says that Duval “had a different way about him. He had all the ingredients when he showed up and he had incredible tunnel vision. I never coached anyone like him.”

Blackmon gives an example of Duval’s fire. Duval finished second in the ACC Tournament as a freshman in 1990, one stroke behind Duke’s Jason Widener, while Tech finished fifth in the team competition, eight strokes off the lead. Tech’s Trip Isenhour, approached Duval to congratulate him on his individual play. Duval snapped at Isenhour “I didn’t win and the team didn’t win and if my teammates had played worth a damn and given me some help, we would have won.”

Blackmon says this sent a powerful message. “David really raised the bar. Second place wasn’t good enough anymore. His teammates may not have liked him but they sure respected him.”

Duval went on the become a four-time All-American. Tech won ACC team titles in 1991, 1992, and 1993, with Duval taking the individual title in 1991 and 1993. Tech was a potent force on the national level, finishing 6th in 1991, 5th in 1992.

Duval was second individually in 1992. Tech had its best chance in 1993 in Lexington, Kentucky. Stewart Cink had joined Duval and Tech led Florida for the team title going into the final round. But Duval drove into a bunker on the final hole and the ball landed in a footprint that had not been properly raked. The subsequent bogie left Duval one stroke behind Arizona’s Todd Dempsey, and Tech one stroke behind Florida.

Duval graduated after the 1993 season but Cink finished fifth and Tech sixth the following year. Blackmon says that Cink “worked and developed himself into a great player.”

Blackmon eventually wearied of the multi-tasking that defined his career at Tech. “I was just burned out,” he says. “It wasn’t anything Tech did or didn’t do. I just had to slow down. I needed a change.”

He left Tech for a lateral move to South Carolina, where he revived that school’s program. He stopped coaching following the 2007 season, becoming the director of golf operations at South Carolina. His head coach is none other than Bill McDonald. Blackmon also is Duval’s swing coach, helping the former number one player in the world regain his stature.

Blackmon coached Georgia Tech and South Carolina to 23 consecutive NCAA Championship appearances. He never got that NCAA title but says he doesn’t lose sleep over it. “I would have loved to have had one. We came as close as you can come. But I always thought that my satisfaction came more from what they did once they left college.”

Almost all of Blackmon’s players graduated, many with high academic honors. He emphasizes that his wife Gail shared the journey. “We treated our players like we treated our children. It was a family affair.”

McDonnell says that Blackmon is “the most energetic person I’ve ever seen. He’s an idea person. How do you make something better? He’s extraordinarily loyal. You can always count on him to be there. He’s a great coach but a better friend.”

McDonald agrees. “I’ve modeled much of my career on what I’ve learned from Puggy. The most important lesson is to manage people as individuals. Do not try to put a square peg in a round hole. He’s an innovator. He’s started tournaments, brought people to the game. His vision and passion for the game of college golf and for the kids he’s coached has made him like another part of my family.”

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Jim Sumner's articles on southern sports history have appeared in the ACC Handbook, the ACC Area Sports Journal, Blue Devil Weekly, Inside Carolina, the Wolfpacker, Baseball America, Basketball America, and other publications. His latest book, Tales From the Duke Blue Devils Hardwood, was published in 2005. In his bimonthly column "Looking Back... by Jim Sumner", he will examine the rich history of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

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