From dirt roads to landlines. She’s attended every Heritage tournament since the first one
Betsy Geary stands out in the RBC Heritage crowd. She steals onlookers’ glances when she walks by — even competing with PGA greats for the attention.
She’s wearing head-to-toe red plaid. It’s similar to what she wore at the very first tournament in 1969, when she made her own volunteer uniform. Then, it was called the Heritage Classic and she’s been to every single one since.
“They gave us the material,” she said. “The girls were given that and you had to go get your skirt made.”
Fifty-four years, and 54 Heritage golf tournaments later, a lot of things have changed, according to the 86-year-old Hilton Head resident.
When Hilton Head hosted the first Heritage, the red-and-white stripped Harbour Town Lighthouse light house wasn’t finished, and “Harbour Town was just a little sandy beach,” according to Geary.
Geary moved to Hilton Head full-time in the mid-60s and lived on the same street as Hilton Head developer Charles Fraser, who she refers to as “Charlie.”
As one of the original Sea Pines Plantation property owners and country club members, she said she remembers Harbour Town Golf Links, the course that Heritage is played on, being designed in 1967.
“When we would go in (the country club) for lunch with the kids, there was Charlie and Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus designing and drawing the course,” she said.
She and her five children would watch the course being built, too.
“It was a dirt road down to Harbour Town,” she said. “We’d go down and watch them pushing all the dirt around. There were no houses around the course.”
Once the course was finished the first Heritage was set for Thanksgiving weekend because Charlie wanted it to be a family event, Geary said.
“We had the worst temperature,” she said. “It was cold and it was rainy and you went, ‘This isn’t going to work. It can’t be Thanksgiving.’ And that’s why we moved it up to March and April.”
Technological differences
About five years before the first cell phone was invented, and decades before the golf tracking technology used today, Geary was part of a group of volunteers in charge of tournament communication.
“At that time, we’re dialing phones and we had about five phones we put at different holes,” she said, explaining that she helped roll out and lay the telephone line between holes. “I thought it was fun.”
For the leaderboard, volunteers manually changed handmade wooden boards with tile letters. Letter by letter they would update the board to what they heard from someone on the other end of the telephones.
It was a process that took about 15 to 30 minutes, and had to be done every time the golfers finished a hole, she said.
“Now every shot that is made by every player, every minute, on this course, is recorded around the world instantly,” she said. “And it took us about a half an hour to get somebody’s score changed on the hole.”
She said that no one really knew who was winning until all the players, who often stayed with local islanders, sunk their last putt.
“The one who stayed with me wasn’t very well-known,” she said.
At that point, everyone would wait for a volunteer to hand-paint the final scores to see who made the cut, and then who won.
What about the skirt?
Geary said that the atmosphere was much different back then because not many people knew of Hilton Head at the time.
All of the spectators could drive their cars right up to the tournament instead of navigating the current multitude of buses and parking lots, she said.
She said there wasn’t much media at the first tournament and that it started to get “really busy” about five or six years later.
Does she have a favorite tournament?
“I can’t say,” she said. “I guess probably when Palmer won the first one. He hadn’t won anything for a year. You have to know, nobody’s ever heard of Hilton Head, and our first tournament, the No. 1 most-popular player in the world wins our tournament.”
She said she plans to keep attending Heritage for as long as she can.
“Of course, I love it,” she said. “But you know, it isn’t like it used to be. I’d go out and we all just knew everybody. It wasn’t international. We didn’t have many tourists.”
As for her first volunteer uniform, it’s still a skirt, just not one a person can wear.
“That uniform would probably [become] the skirt to a Christmas tree many years ago,” her son, Peter Geary, said.
