BRADENTON, Fla. — It was three days before Christmas 2020 when PGA Tour officials arrived in Bradenton to survey The Concession Golf Club as a candidate to replace Mexico’s Club de Golf Chapultepe as a temporary host of this year’s World Golf Championship tournament.
Concession golf course superintendent Terry Kennelly, though, didn’t wait for the PGA Tour to officially award the East Manatee County private club hosting duties. He began formulating a plan on how to make The Concession up to PGA Tour-quality, which included a meeting with Concession president Bruce Cassidy.
“I said, ‘We need to act like we’re going to get it,’ ” Kennelly said. “Because with the short notice, we can’t sit and wait until it’s official. And I gave him basically my game plan of what I thought we needed to do and then we just started going.”
By the time the tournament was officially relocating for one year to The Concession, Kennelly, his staff of 25, when including himself, and 35 volunteers had 45 days to prepare the course up to PGA Tour standards.
Growing some grass in spots and replacing the sand from the 73 bunkers were the main areas Kennelly and his team focused on. To deal with the bunkers, Leibold Irrigation was brought in.
“The bunkers needed some help,” Kennelly said. “They weren’t awful. But the thing with these guys, these tour players, is the bunkers, specifically, they have to be consistent. When I say consistent, I mean they’re so good the average player the bunker’s are probably fine. But say it’s tied here at 18 and the guy is in the bunker and he gets a fried egg lie. You just don’t want to see that. So that’s when we decided to basically refurbish the bunkers. We took the bad sand out and put good sand in. I’d call that a fresh coat of paint.”
PGA Tour senior tournament director Steve Rintoul, who spends his time in Tampa and Anna Maria Island when not on the road, was at The Concession to look at the course as a possible host site this year back in December.
While the No. 1 aspect is the course itself, other factors such as player amenities, the clubhouse, in non-COVID-19 times the spectator parking, area hotel situation, etc. all are examined to see if a place is a viable candidate or not.
“When I heard it was actually The Concession, I just said, ‘Guys, there’s no question we can play there,’ ” said Rintoul, about The Concession first being in the running. “Just put the ropes up, hang a few scoreboards and let’s go play. That was basically my reply.”
After giving the course a thorough look, the PGA Tour later decided to award The Concession hosting duties. That was due to how well the golf course was, although Kennelly wasn’t always expecting to be involved with golf as a career.
Growing up in Temperance, Michigan, which lies north of Toledo, Ohio along the Michigan-Ohio border, golf wasn’t Kennelly’s first passion.
He had baseball aspirations.
“I had a baseball scholarship in college and I had aspirations, like every other kid, I wanted to be a pro baseball player,” Kennelly said. “Obviously, that didn’t take off. So I got a degree in criminal justice, but the whole time all I’ve ever done is work on a golf course.”
Kennelly’s older brother was in the golf course industry first, and currently serving as superintendent at Baltimore Country Club. Picking up summer gigs, which included working the 1986 PGA Championship that Bob Tway won at Inverness Country Club in Toledo, led Kennelly down the path of grabbing a turf grass degree from Michigan State and beginning a full-fledged career into golf.
A conversation with his dad about what he was going to do with his life also pointed Kennelly into the golf course direction.
Kennelly, who credits his older brother for the impact with golf, also worked the 1993 PGA Championship at Inverness that Bradenton resident Paul Azinger won, and later held posts at Maryland’s Caves Valley Golf Club, Congressional, where the U.S. Open was held in 1997 and the U.S. Senior Open was contested in 1995, Naples National, Quail West in Naples and Delray Dunes in Boynton Beach.
While the superintendent at Delray Dunes on Florida’s east coast in the early 2000s, Kennelly was approached by friends of his that work for Jack Nicklaus to relocate to Florida’s west coast for a new course Nicklaus was building with Tony Jacklin.
That course, The Concession, ultimately landed Kennelly and he’s been there for the past 16 years.
And while the course has hosted various college tournaments, including the 2015 NCAA Men’s and Women’s Division I national championships, nothing is as big as this week’s World Golf Championships-Workday Championship at The Concession, a tournament featuring the top 73 players in the world — Patrick Cantlay withdrew before the first round to drop the field to 72 — that is expected to see a global television audience of 800 million.
“I gave my owner 50/50 odds we could pull it off,” Kennelly said. “If you had told me 30 days ago this is what we would have had, I wouldn’t have believed you.”
And what he has is a golf course that golf’s best players have raved about this week.
