Jerry Pate

Jerry Pate is an American professional golfer and golf course architect, born on September 16, 1953 in Macon, Georgia. He grew up in Pensacola, Florida and played his college golf at the University of Alabama. As an amateur he won the U.S. Amateur in 1974, and in the same year he helped the United States to victory in the World Amateur Team Championship for the Eisenhower Trophy. In 1975 he played for the United States in the Walker Cup at St Andrews in Scotland, and won there too. He turned professional that year, and in 1976, his first season on tour, he won the U.S. Open at the age of 22. He took the Canadian Open in the same year and was named PGA Tour Rookie of the Year. Between 1976 and 1982 he won eight times on the PGA Tour. The 1982 Players Championship was the first to be played at TPC Sawgrass, and at the prize-giving Pate threw the man who had designed the course, Pete Dye, and the PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman into the lake beside the 18th green, then jumped in after them. In 1981 he was part of the winning United States side in the Ryder Cup. A shoulder injury cut his playing career short, but in 2006 he took a first win on the senior Champions Tour. Since retiring he has also worked as a golf commentator for ABC, CBS and the BBC.

His design work is carried out through his own firm, Jerry Pate Design. The company’s website presents it as a business Pate built out of a long involvement with golf courses that began in his playing days, and it now handles landscape and site design as well as golf courses. Old Waverly Golf Club at West Point, Mississippi was designed with the architect Bob Cupp and staged the U.S. Women’s Open in 1999. Kiva Dunes, near Gulf Shores in Alabama, was ranked second in Golf Digest’s best new public course category just after it opened in 1995. Ol’ Colony Golf Complex in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which opened in 2000, is the home course of the golf team at his alma mater, the University of Alabama. In 1997 he also founded a company supplying mowers and irrigation equipment to golf courses, today Jerry Pate Turf & Irrigation.

His connection with Asia runs through Japan, where he won the Taiheiyo Club Masters in 1976. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Jerry Pate.

See the other golf course architects here.