Starting point: Former pro golfer Johnny Pott was born in Cape

Johnny Pott remembers the last time he set foot in Cape Girardeau, his birthplace.

It was 40 years ago, on a spontaneous visit for a solemn moment.

"I played a practice round at Bellerive for the U.S. Open, and I just had the urge to drive down," Pott recalled Friday. "I really wanted to do some driving and see the cemetery and see where my grandparents are buried. I just took off and found the cemetery.

"I think maybe I had a cousin living there at the time."

Pott shot back-to-back rounds of 80 at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis County and missed the cut for that U.S. Open, which was part of what he calls "a great life in golf."

It began here in Cape Girardeau in November of 1935.

It included a national college championship at Louisiana State University, a 16-year stint on the PGA Tour and three appearances in the Ryder Cup matches before a second career as a designer, developer, marketer and manager of golf courses.

Pott, who currently lives in California, is an owner and a senior vice president for design and construction with Landmark Golf Company. He has been involved with courses such as PGA West in La Quinta, Calif.; Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif.; and Oak Tree Golf Club in Edmond, Okla.

"There's a lot of pride in what we're doing," said Pott, 69. "We've built golf courses that would be a challenging venue for anyone who would come along. I have worked with many people to achieve things that have stood the test of time."

Pott was born for the game. His father, Ben Pott, was a golf professional who was working on a construction job temporarily in 1935 in Cape Girardeau, where he had been raised. Within months of Johnny Pott's birth, the family moved back to the South. He grew up in Brookhaven, Miss., and won the state high school golf championship in 1952.

Pott was an up-and-coming amateur star on his most famous visit to see relatives in Cape Girardeau in 1955. He was the national medalist while playing for the LSU team that won the National Intercollegiate Tournament earlier that year.

The Southeast Missourian newspaper chronicled his accomplishments to that point and reported in the July 13 edition on an exhibition match Pott and his father played with B.I. Howard and U.I. Pettigrew at the 2-month-old Jaycee course. A crowd of 100 spectators watched on a Tuesday afternoon.

Pott set the course record, which previously had been par, by shooting a 3-under 32. He eagled the fourth hole and birdied three others during his round.

"I was a pretty good golfer at that point," Pott said.

He turned professional in 1957 and played through the 1960s, when the PGA Tour was beginning to take off with Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.

"I made those guys famous," Pott said. "They needed someone to beat. I was kind of a bridesmaid."

Indeed, when Pott left the tour in 1972, he held a record with 17 runner-up finishes. But in fact, he won five tour events, including the 1968 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach in a playoff with Bruce Devlin and Billy Casper, and the 1960 Dallas Open (now the Byron Nelson Classic).

He played on three victorious Ryder Cup squads - 1963, 1965 and 1967. He was 4-0 during a 23.5-8.5 victory against Great Britain in 1967 at Champions Golf Club in Houston. He was 1-2 in 1963, including a loss in foursomes while teamed with Arnold Palmer.

Pott's best finish in what are now known as the four majors was a tie for fifth in the 1961 PGA Championship, when he earned $2,208. He had eight other top 20 finishes in 32 majors.

"When I played, the majors weren't that special," Pott said. "I never played in the British Open because it didn't matter much when I played my best golf in the 1960s. When Nicklaus started winning all these tournaments, then there was a lot of significance from the people who wrote about golf.

"Because I never won one of those events, it was like I never played the game."

By the same token, Pott was playing golf to open other doors. He had helped bring corporate outings to the PGA and was on the tour's committee to develop the relationship with television in the late 1960s.

"When I played, if you played more than 15 years, you were a tour bum," Pott said. "We did it to get better jobs. No one retired from the tour."

In 1971, he went to work with fellow PGA Tour players Ernie Vossler and Joe Walser Jr., who had started Unique Golf Concepts Inc. Pott was project director for Marsh Island in Ocean Springs, Miss., and supervised the design, construction, marketing and management. The course was one of the first designed by Pete Dye.

Unique Golf Concepts was acquired by Landmark Land Company in 1974. Pott directed a project in La Place, La., before moving in 1979 to California to be project director for Carmel Valley Ranch in Carmel.

He became marketing director at PGA West in his current hometown of La Quinta in 1984. The course, host of the Bob Hope Classic, had secured more than 500 memberships prior to opening day in 1986.

"We worked with the PGA of America to invest and to get members," Pott said. "It was fun and demanding and very successful. We oversold it before the course opened."

He has since worked on bringing the first Jack Nicklaus course to Latin America, the Ocean Course at Cabo Del Sol in Mexico; and developed for Landmark several other courses, including the Las Vegas Paiute Resort and The Golf Club of California.

He corresponded in the company's behalf a few years back with Dalhousie Golf Club in Cape Girardeau, which eventually opted to work with O.B. Sports as its marketing and management partner.

Pott had been so successful off the course that by the time the Senior Tour came along in 1990, when Pott was 54, his game was no longer in shape to compete.

"I went from playing every day for 30 years to a couple of times a month," Pott said. "My game started hurting. By the time they had the Champions Tour, I had a good job and hadn't played much golf.

"I was still in golf," Pott said. "I worked with people I played on the tour with, and we were involved with doing some very special places. As ex-tour players, we felt we knew what the golf public wanted and we knew what the top players wanted."

Many of his courses have been rewarded by hosting major events, such as Ryder Cup, tour events and the Senior PGA Championship. Oak Tree in Oklahoma will host the Senior PGA Championship in 2006.

"I may have to come out of retirement to play in that one," Pott said.

He has been married for 46 years. He and his wife, Mary, have four children, one of whom is -- of course -- a golf professional.

"My wife plays more golf than I do," Pott said. "My children have been raised around a golf course. It seems like we've always lived around the golf course."

Because that's where Johnny Pott is at home.

Johnny Pott's victories 1960 West Palm Beach Open 1960 Dallas Open 1962 Waco Turner Open Invitational 1963 American Golf Classic 1968 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am

From the Southeast Missourian July 13, 1955 "Although Pott's putting and approach shots were brilliant, it was his driving which impressed spectators most. On the No. 3 hole, some 280 yards away, he drove to the green. His drives were consistently between 275 and 300 yards long and always took the surveyor's line toward the pin.

"He made an eagle on the par four fourth hole, and birdies [sic] holes 3, 7 and 8. This would have given him a 5 under par score of 30 except for one of his gargantuan drives going in a ditch followed by the ball rolling in and out of the cup on hole 5, and then three-putting the sixth green, giving him bogies on both these holes."