No reader will peruse the latest bulletins from The European Tour with a keener eye for the small detail as well as an appreciation of the bigger picture than Kenneth D Schofield CBE. Neither will anyone be prouder of the successful story behind The European Tour than this man.
When Ken Schofield came to the tee as the Executive Director of The European Tour on January 1, 1975, he inherited a schedule of just 17 tournaments with official prize money of €599,000. This may not have been chickenfeed but neither was it much to crow about either. Thirty years to the day later, after stepping to one side, confidently conceding the honour to his close friend and colleague George O’Grady, Schofield can look back on a season in which 47 events were played on The European Tour International Schedule with record total prize money of €120,480,464.
Along the way, Schofield has helped popularise golf via his determination to internationalise the game through evolution not revolution. This broad minded and expansionist policy has met the aspirations of the Tour’s Members, delivering a dynamic and diverse Tour and one that transcends not just national but continental borders.
This in case you have not followed the story from the start has strengthened the Tour’s position in a fiercely competitive marketplace and with that the staff at Wentworth Headquarters has grown from ten since they moved to Surrey in 1981 to more than 120.
Now this administration delivers approximately 100 tournaments with total prize money on The European Tour, The European Challenge Tour for the “Stars of Tomorrow” and the fast-expanding European Seniors Tour of in excess of €120,000,000.
There have been many milestones. The move to Sunday finishes; the successful introduction of the All Exempt Tour; the arrival of Volvo as the Tour’s first and only overall corporate sponsor; the advent of the Tour’s own television company – European Tour Productions – and significant arrangements with Sky Television and The Golf Channel; the birth of The European Challenge Tour and The European Seniors Tour; and the breaking down of the barriers which muted the opportunities of European players to compete in America and, specifically, the Major Championships on American soil.
In 1980 European Tour Members occupied six spots in The Masters, the US Open and the US PGA Championship. In 2004 that number had grown to 102.
The trick Schofield had to pull off was to provide these opportunities and to keep maximising the incentive at home; he overcame this challenge with typical assurance. Quite simply, Schofield increased the opportunity for European Tour Members to travel and thus provided the chance to play all year round by following the sun. Critics, and inevitably there were some, suggested he had redrawn the boundaries of Europe so that the old continent embraced much of everything outside North America.
By seizing on the apparent geographical absurdity, however, these same critics actually identified the scale of his success. Co-sanctioned tournaments on other continents increased playing opportunities and provided freedom of choice. Crucially, however, Schofield recognized that European Tour Members also needed to compete in the United States where three of the four Majors are hosted.
Only in this way could familiarity breed success on the grandest of scales and the success of his mission is contained in the fact that during his time European Tour Members have won 32 Major Championships while, perhaps more importantly, The Ryder Cup appears to be on almost permanent display on this side of the Atlantic. Once he had got Europe’s finest over there, however, he had to find ways of making sure they came back over here.
So whilst acknowledging that he had no right to force the players to stay in Europe, Schofield encouraged his team to enhance the challenge in their own backyard so that the majority remained enthusiastically loyal.
The key to this was that The European Tour as a body should compete on a tournament level with the rest of the world, and specifically America, at the start and end of each year, just as they did in the summer months, and by creating The European Tour International Schedule he took the decision to boldly go where few Europeans other than perhaps Vasco da Gama and Marco Polo had gone before.
These then are the broad facts concerning the outgoing European Tour boss. Who, however, is the man? Well, more than anything else, he has been an eternal source of ‘can do’ optimism for European golf.
He has been reaching for the stars - even occasionally arguing with a few of them – ever since he became Executive Director of The European Tour in 1975, his tenure at the top of the world’s second largest golf circuit without any real parallel in the cut-throat arena of high-octane professional sport. That he has not only survived but prospered is a tribute to the consistency and intelligence of the main board but it is also an eloquent testimony not only to Schofield’s natural inclination to indulge in the hardest of graft, but to his vision and imagination.
When he started in this job The European Tour was more duckling than swan. Thirty years ago prize funds were modest and public interest, for the most part, was lukewarm at best. Yes, it was a kind of jungle out there back then. The professional season meandered through five months and many players returned to clubs to sell tee pegs and arrange starting times for members within hours of finishing a competition.
Now it is still a jungle. But it is a lucrative one, a year-round, 24/7 operation that embraces most of the planet and that can swiftly make a young man a millionaire. Remember also, however, that this same young man can be even more quickly broken if he loses form or suffers injury. In professional golf, as in any competitive game, the rewards are high but the penalties may be terminal.
Schofield always has understood this. He wanted to be a professional himself. Only in his case it was football that posed seductively on a distant horizon. He nearly made it, too, but when push came to sliding tackle he did not quite cut the mustard.
So, naturally, he went into banking and it was from this financial background that he was headhunted – except that it wasn’t called ‘headhunting’ back then, more ‘fancy a pint after work, Ken?’ – to join the original supremo (and possibly the world’s nicest bloke) John Jacobs at the rather cramped office contained within The Oval cricket complex in London.
Now Schofield has stepped aside, applause ringing in his ears. It is the end of a memorable era although, reassuringly, the line of succession is maintained by the elevation to the top job of his long-time deputy, George O’Grady, and without whom Ken says he could not have achieved as much.
“We are a team,” is his simple accolade to the Englishman. I specify O’Grady’s Englishness because Schofield is a Scot. In my view, the best kind, inasmuch as his dad was not only English but Lancastrian. Better still, he was a Mancunian.
This Anglo-Scottish gene pool has meant Schofield has a rare appreciation for games other than golf. Indeed my own experience is that he is a walking compendium of sport, a man entranced by the games other people play and whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the facts embroidering these things suggests that he may now make a very good living touring pub quizzes across the land.
So there you have it. If, whilst wandering over some spectacular piece of real estate at a European Tour event this year, you come across a stocky, still (mostly) dark-haired guy, who is staring out across a fairway with a nostalgic tear in one eye, then please tap him on the shoulder and say ‘Well done’. Then ask him what he thinks of the current Scotland football and rugby teams.
Well, it’s only a game after all. And, anyway, K.D.Schofield will probably have a detailed answer to hand. Prepare to take notes.
Bill Elliott
*A full version of this tribute appears in The European Tour Yearbook 2005.
