Maybe Graciela Sees It From Heaven, This Huge Guitar Made of Trees - WSJ.com

GENERAL LEVALLE, Argentina—Pilots often stare in disbelief when they make their first flight over this hamlet on the verdant pampa. There, on the monotonous plain below, is a giant guitar landscaped out of cypress and eucalyptus trees. It is more than two-thirds of a mile long.

Maria Emilia Perez

Argentinian Pedro Martin Ureta's tree guitar is some two-thirds of a mile long.

Behind the great guitar of the pampa, and its 7,000-odd trees, is a love story that took a tragic turn.

The green guitar is the handiwork of a farmer named Pedro Martin Ureta, who is now 70. He embedded the design into his farm many years ago, and maintains it to this day, as a tribute to his late wife, Graciela Yraizoz, who died in 1977 at the age of 25.

"It's incredible to see a design that was so carefully planned, so far below," says Gabriel Pindek, a commercial pilot for Argentina's Austral Lineas Aereas. "There's nothing else like it."

Born to a ranching family with deep roots here, Mr. Ureta was something of a bohemian as a young man. He traveled to Europe and hobnobbed with artists and revolutionaries. After coming home in the late 1960s, the then-28-year old became captivated by Ms. Yraizoz, who was just 17 and dazzlingly pretty.

The local priest almost refused to perform the wedding, the farmer recalls: He didn't think Mr. Ureta seemed sufficiently committed to loving Ms. Yraizoz "all the days" of his life. But Mr. Ureta proved extraordinarily devoted to Ms. Yraizoz, their friends and children say, and the union was happy, if brief.

"My mother was a doer," says Mr. Ureta's 38-year-old daughter, Soledad, one of four children produced in the marriage. "She helped guide my father. She sold clothes. She helped oversee work in the fields, and did weaving on a big loom."

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Maria Emilia Perez

Pedro Martin Ureta and his son, Ezequiel, in front of a plane that is about to fly over the Uretas' guitar-shaped ranch.

One day while traveling in a plane over the pampa, Ms. Yraizoz noticed a farm that, through a fluke of topography, looked a bit like a milking pail from the air, her children say. That's when she started musing about going one better and designing the family's own farm in the form of a guitar, an instrument she loved.

"My father was a young man, and very busy with his work and his own plans," says his youngest child, Ezequiel, who is 36. "He told my mom, 'Later. We'll talk about it later.'"

But Ms. Yraizoz didn't have much time to wait. One day in 1977, she collapsed. She had suffered a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, a weakening in the wall of a blood vessel that eventually burst. She died shortly thereafter, carrying what would have been the couple's fifth child.

Today, Mr. Ureta says his wife's passing turned his life in a more philosophical direction. ¨I stepped back for a time,¨ he says. He read about Buddhism. Mr. Ureta says a line by an Argentine folk guitarist and writer, Héctor Roberto Chavero Aramburo, stuck in his head: "I galloped a lot, but I arrived late all the same."

Says Soledad: "He used to talk about regrets, and it was clear he regretted not having listened to my mother about the guitar."

Ureta family

Pedro Martin Ureta's late wife, Graciela Yraizoz, who died in 1977 at 25.

A few years after his wife's death, Mr. Ureta decided to comply with her wishes about the design of the farm. Landscapers he consulted were predictably nonplussed, so he took on the job himself. "You just put a guitar in front of you and begin to take measurements and study proportions," he says.

His giant guitar is an unusual example of what's known as land art, in which forms are built into the natural environment, said Nancy Somerville, chief executive officer of the American Society of Landscape Architects. One famous example is Spiral Jetty, a 1,500-foot-long structure of mud, rocks and salt crystals built by artist Robert Smithson in Utah's Great Salt Lake.

Using trees, as Mr. Ureta did, rather than with rocks or shrubbery, is a "pretty tremendous undertaking," Ms. Somerville said, due to the time and care needed to cultivate them.

Most of the guitar, including the figure-eight-shaped body and star-shaped sound hole, is formed of cypress trees. For the strings, Mr. Ureta planted six rows of eucalyptus trees, whose bluish tone offers a contrast visible from above.

Planting the guitar was a family affair. "All of us kids would stand in a row, three meters apart," says Soledad, and then the farm hands "would plant a tree on the spot where each of us stood." The children would "re-form the line in a new position, and they'd plant more trees."

Getting the saplings to grow was a tougher. Hares and wild guinea pigs devastated the fragile plants. "I had to plant and replant and I almost gave up," the farmer says. Finally, Mr. Ureta hit on an inspiration. He got some scrap metal and jury-rigged protective sleeves around the young trees.

When the trees finally began to shoot up, ¨It was the closest thing possible to having my mother alive," says Maria Julia, a 39-year-old daughter.

While he was nurturing the trees, Mr. Ureta was also raising four children. A field hand named Raul Coronel helped with some of the cooking. "The food may not have been great, but there was always lots of it," says Mr. Coronel. Every day, Mr. Ureta drove the kids about 10 miles to school in his pickup truck. When the pickup got stuck in the mud during rainy season, he used a horse to pull it out.

Today, the oldest son, Ignacio, 42, is an engineer; Maria Julia is a pharmaceutical sales representative; Soledad is a special education teacher; and Ezequiel is a veterinarian. There are nine grandchildren.

Mr. Ureta waited a long time after his wife's death before getting involved in a serious relationship, his children say. In the 1990s, he began seeing Maria de los Angeles Ponzi, who runs the town pharmacy. They haven't married, but have an 11-year-old daughter, Manuela. Ms. Ponzi says she appreciates the beauty of the tribute to her partner's first wife.

Mr. Ureta himself has never seen his great guitar from the sky, except in photographs. He's afraid of flying

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Amazing.

Solar Updates Marines' Arsenal - WSJ.com

A company of U.S. Marines recently conducted a remarkable three-week patrol through southern Afghanistan, replacing hundreds of pounds of spare batteries in their packs with roll-up solar panels the size of placemats to power their battle gear.

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Associated Press

Marine Lance Cpl. Dakota Hicks connects a radio battery to a solar array in Sangin District, in Afghanistan.

By allowing the troops to recharge their radios, GPS devices and other equipment, the green technology freed the Marines of India Company from constant resupply by road and air. And by carrying fewer batteries, they carried more bullets.

The Marine Corps is addressing a paradox confronting military planners: Modern U.S. forces are more lethal than any in history, but they also gobble up more energy. That lengthens vulnerable supply lines and overloads soldiers and Marines in the field.

India Company, a component of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, is the first combat unit to be equipped with a new package of portable, front-line solar gear developed by Navy scientists. It's a boots-on-the-ground example of the Marine Corps' new blueprint for energy use. The Corps wants to cut per-Marine fuel use in half by 2025.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has pushed biofuels for fighter jets, hybrid-electric drives for Navy ships, and renewable-energy systems for Marines on the move. The Marines are part of the Department of the Navy. Mr. Mabus aims for half of the Navy's energy to come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2020.

Batteries make up as much as 20% of the weight of the 100 pounds of gear a Marine infantryman typically carries. A Marine uses four times as much fuel as his counterpart did in the early 1990s—due to, among other things, laptops and other electronic gear that use electricity pumped out by portable generators.

Some 30% of all fuel trucked into Afghanistan—at great risk—goes to power those generators, at a time when roadside bombs remain the most dangerous weapon faced by allied troops.

While the U.S. military has been seriously studying renewable energy since at least 2001, the impetus for change was the high casualty rate on fuel convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Mabus told Congress last year that one U.S. servicemember is wounded or killed for every 24 fuel convoys.

In 2006, while toughfighting raged in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Zilmer, then commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, requested renewable-energy gear for forward bases.

"We used to joke that there was a generator for every man, woman and child in Iraq," now-retired Gen. Zilmer said in an interview. "And we did not have any material solutions to the issues we had out there."

His request to the Pentagon went nowhere, but a similar appeal in 2008 prodded Navy scientists into action. This time Marine leaders were more gung ho about alternative energy. Col. Bob Charette, a former F-18 pilot, opened the Marine Expeditionary Energy Office last year to transfer the Navy's energy-saving ideas to Marines on the battlefield.

"The Marine commandant made it clear—he'd rather have an 80% solution today than a 100% solution somewhere down the road," Col. Charette said.

In less than nine months, scientists at the Office of Naval Research cobbled together a solar-and-battery combination small enough to be transported on Humvees, big enough to power the gear at a combat outpost, and rugged enough to withstand tough field conditions.

It also created smaller solar panels for individual Marines. Each can be unfurled to recharge equipment at the base or on the march. Some bits were jury-rigged, including power meters bought at Home Depot.

"The whole approach was, what is out there, available now, that can be used absolutely as soon as possible?" said Cliff Anderson, program manager at the Office of Naval Research.

India Company was chosen last summer to pilot the project precisely because it was due to deploy in Sangin, one of the deadliest zones in Afghanistan. Use of the solar gear means helicopters don't have to ferry extra batteries to the Marines, and trucks don't have to convoy more fuel for generators.

Col. Charette said the gear "has surpassed our expectations." Keeping extra batteries out of packs means the Marines can move faster and farther than before. Fuel use is down at the company's patrol bases, because the solar equipment replaces generators, the military says.

For some platoons at remote outposts, solar power is all there is, said Maj. Sean Sadlier, the Marine expeditionary energy liaison officer at Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan.

The next step will be a bigger system to meet power needs of larger formations, such as India Company's parent battalion. Senior Marine officers believe those could be in place this summer

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Very Cool.

Calcavecchia takes 3-shot lead at Shoal Creek | The Wire | The Blaze

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Mark Calcavecchia opened a three-stroke lead in the Regions Tradition, shooting a 7-under 65 on Friday to run his bogey-free streak to 35 holes at Shoal Creek.

Calcavecchia birdied Nos. 10-12 to pull ahead and added another birdie on the par-5 17th to reach 11 under. He had a chance to get to 12 under, but missed a birdie putt a few inches on No. 18

The 13-time PGA Tour winner, seeking his first Champions Tour victory in the 50-and-over circuit's first major of the year, hasn't made a bogey since opening the tournament with a double on the first hole.

Kenny Perry was second, matching Calcavecchia with a 65.

Jay Haas — whose son, Bill, is contending in the PGA Tour's Wells Fargo Championship — and Michael Allen were tied for third at 7 under. Haas had a 68, and Allen shot a 67.

First-round leader Tom Lehman (71) and Tom Pernice Jr. (66) were 6 under.

Calcavecchia, with wife Brenda working as his caddie, is once again chasing a major title. He was second in the British Open last year after 36 holes, but dropped to 73rd with closing rounds of 77 and 80.

"I didn't handle that too good," said Calcavecchia, the 1989 British Open winner. "That was a just a tad bigger tournament than this one.

"I'm sure I'll be nervous. You want to get off to a good start. That's where you want to be. You don't want to be sneaking up on anybody from six shots behind, although that's happened before, too. But it's always nice to be out in front."

Perry, who asked swing coach Ron Green to come up from Mobile on Wednesday, actually had to get over jitters from the second straight day with big names Nick Price and Tom Watson.

Birdies on two of the first three holes helped.

"That seemed to kind of take the edge off me a little bit," Perry said. "I always looked up to Tom Watson. I was nervous (Thursday) playing with Tom Watson, even though I've played a lot of golf with him. (He) and Nick Price are just great men, guys I've looked up to and I was actually a little tight (Thursday). When I birdied 1 and 3, it really loosened me up right out of the gate and I was able to just continue on."

Perry was 4 under over the final nine. He hit a 5-iron to 20 feet of the hole on No. 17, then eagled the hole to take sole possession of second.

"I need a lot more rounds like that," Perry said.

But his biggest shot might have come two holes earlier when he hit a driver through the fairway and into the woods.

"My only shot was to hit a sand wedge to the left front and then I made about a 50-footer for birdie," he said. "It's a putt you don't even think about making much less two-putting, and it went right in the middle, so you know it's kind of your day."

Lehman had two bogeys after a bogey-free first round.

Pernice had four birdies in the final nine holes after entering the day at even par.

This is Pernice's first Champions Tour major.

"I was a little gun-shy (Thursday), had a lot of mud on the ball" from Wednesday's rains, Pernice said. "Fairways are starting to firm up, so a little more of a green light, and I felt better with my swing as well."

via theblaze.com

Good.

GOP, White House Talk Deal on Debts - WSJ.com

GOP leaders and the White House are discussing a deal that would enact strict deficit targets and some spending cuts to win Republican votes for lifting the ceiling on how much the federal government can borrow.

The deal would defer contentious decisions about Medicare, Medicaid and taxes until after the 2012 elections. If such an agreement were reached, it would allow both sides to assure financial markets and the public of their commitment to reducing the deficit and then use next year's campaign to lay out their competing visions for the future of major government programs.

"We're not going to get a grand slam agreement. We're not going to get a big, comprehensive agreement, because of the political parameters," Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee told reporters Wednesday. "My hope at this moment is to get a single or a double."

Mr. Ryan's outline is strikingly similar to those administration officials have been using privately, an indication that any compromise is likely to include the elements he described:

• Cuts or mandated limits on government spending programs that must be approved each year, such as for defense programs and regulatory agencies. This type of expense accounts for 39% of current federal spending.

• Cuts or limits on so-called mandatory spending, such expenses for farm subsidies, food stamps, federal employee retirement, student loans and housing subsidies that don't require yearly appropriations. Mr. Ryan suggested a deal could exclude, for now, the biggest of these expenses: Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs and Social Security.

• Targets that would aim to bring the deficit below 3% of gross domestic product by 2015, a goal that would require more spending cuts or tax increases than the legislated cuts would achieve.

• To enforce the targets, automatic and credible spending cuts would be required if the Congressional Budget Office says policies in place won't meet those goals; the administration wants both automatic spending cuts and tax increases.

Republicans would then be free to tell voters they can reach those goals in the coming years almost exclusively by cutting spending on benefit programs. Democratic candidates could argue that some tax increases, particularly on upper-income Americans, also are needed to close the budget gap.

"I'm hoping the debt limit is the opportunity to get a down payment on some spending cuts, to get a down payment on some spending reform to put the crisis off," Mr. Ryan said, speaking at a breakfast hosted by Bloomberg News.

Mr. Ryan's formula echoes one that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been describing.

"It's the right time, and it's the necessary time, to build a bipartisan consensus on fiscal reforms that will...get our debt on a path where it's falling as a share of the economy," Mr. Geithner said Wednesday in remarks to the Investment Company Institute. "The challenge we face is to try to lock those reforms in with a set of clear, explicit targets...complemented by an agreement on spending savings where we can identify that."

Mr. Geithner said this approach was necessary because "we're not going to solve in two months" thornier issues, such as taxes, Medicare and Medicaid.

The Treasury estimated this week that if the debt ceiling, now at $14.294 trillion, is not raised, a range of payments would be stopped, limited or delayed on Aug. 2, including Social Security and Medicare checks, tax refunds, interest on the debt and unemployment insurance.

The Treasury says its borrowing is growing by $125 billion a month. At that rate, it would need a $1.5 trillion debt-ceiling increase to get through one year.

Striking a deal by early August is "a reasonable time frame," Mr. Ryan said. But aides to other senior Republicans cautioned that an agreement on the framework that Mr. Ryan and Mr. Geithner have described would require substantial negotiation over key details. Republicans, for instance, want legislated caps or targets for government spending as a percent of GDP, not deficits. Democrats and the White House, in contrast, want limits on debt or deficit limits, which leaves open the possibility of raising taxes.

Both sides face political challenges. Republican leaders have to satisfy spending foes among their rank and file. President Barack Obama, meanwhile, faces resistance from liberals who fear he is too willing to cut social spending to get a deal.

Administration officials are urging Congress to raise the debt ceiling before financial markets get nervous. "We're not seeing a reaction in the market to date from these [debt ceiling] issues but we are very vigilant," Mary Miller, assistant Treasury secretary for financial markets, said Wednesday. " We want to make sure that the market is as confident as we are that Congress will act."

Republican congressional leaders, though not all their rank-and-file members, say they will raise the debt ceiling in time. The issue is what to attach to it.

"If it's just tinkering around the edges, I don't think that's going to fly," Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said earlier this week. "It's got to be real, substantive, game-changing changes in the law in order for conservatives and Republicans to support increasing the borrowing authority."

Earlier this year, Mr. Ryan defined the contours of the fiscal debate with a deficit-reduction plan that relied entirely on spending cuts and a reshaping of Medicare and Medicaid. After that, Mr. Obama scrapped his February budget and offered an alternative plan with fewer spending cuts and significant tax increases. At Mr. Obama's instigation, Vice President Joe Biden, accompanied by top Obama administration economic officials, will meet Thursday with six lawmakers aimed at fashioning a deficit-reduction compromise.

In a letter to Mr. Biden Wednesday, Republicans asked the White House to specify how much of a debt-limit increase it wants along with a more detailed deficit-reduction plan. "We believe a detailed proposal from the President will be key to the success of the working group," they wrote.

Conversations between administration officials and key Republicans have been taking place outside that forum. A separate bipartisan group of senators, dubbed the Gang of Six, has been working on a compromise deficit-reduction plan, but has yet to produce it.

A deal that would only force later action would be a blow to antideficit hardliners, who don't want to put off tough choices until after the election. The administration sees a specific target, sometimes known as a "fiscal rule," as a significant signal to financial markets that politicians are capable of managing government finances responsibly.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an antideficit group, said talk of budget-process legislation is reminiscent of the December 2010 deal in which White House and congressional Republicans agreed to accept either other's tax cuts: "Let's both agree to do something that doesn't hurt.'

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Be careful...

The Digital Solution: Why Smartphones Can See More Than We Can - WSJ.com

If you're tired of looking at the world through the same lens all the time, try adding a few virtual objects.

This week, rather than do my usual product testing, I decided to offer a peek into one of the most exciting trends in technology: augmented reality. AR, as it's commonly known, is about as close to magic as we can get without visiting Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

That technology the networks use for the first-down line in football? It's called augmented reality and as WSJ's Katherine Boehret reports, it's being used in places you wouldn't have thought.

Not to be confused with virtual reality, which substitutes a simulated world for the real thing, AR takes a live view of the real world and/or a real object and adds computer-generated graphics or sounds that appear as if they're right in the scene. The resulting visual can look convincing enough that people reach out and try to touch the AR object.

Built for AR

Most smartphones are now built with the technological requirements for AR—including a camera, accelerometer, compass and GPS—so developers are quickly building AR apps that take advantage of these devices. The technology started showing up in apps in 2009, and now hundreds of them use AR.

AR games add objects to real-life places and scenes, like ghosts in Ogmento Inc.'s Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary that appear as if they're on the actual street that people are on, viewed through the people's iPhones.

Viewdle's Social Camera uses AR for social networking as it identifies people in photos by comparing their images to tagged photos of friends in Facebook. Google Goggles uses image recognition to provide information about real-life objects including books, artwork, wine and menus, which can be translated into a language you can read.

AR: It's All Around You

You may not realize it, but basic forms of AR are at work in our everyday lives. Some cars, like the 7-series BMW, offer heads-up displays that impose data onto the windshield of the car so drivers don't have to glance down to read things like current speed.

Armchair quarterbacks appreciate AR every time they see the National Football League's first-down yellow line, visible only to the television audience. And some sporting events now include advertisements that appear on TV as if they're painted on a field or basketball court.

Physical Object Attraction

Each of the developers with whom I spoke about AR's future agreed: Computer vision is the central element to creating AR apps.

Computer vision describes a device's ability to see, meaning it can recognize an object, extract information from that object and do something with that information.

AR apps that rely mostly on GPS do more guesswork than object recognition. Google Goggles, for example, takes advantage of GPS for local search when someone uses an Android phone to pan around and see points of interest identified on the screen, like businesses. An app called Layar uses GPS and helps people with things like finding the closest drugstore or getting extra points in a game by walking to a certain place.

One example of a device that uses full-fledged object recognition is Nintendo's 3DS hand-held game, which comes with six AR Cards. With the naked eye, these cards look like small rectangles the size of playing cards with question marks printed on them. When viewed through the 3DS's two outward-facing cameras while playing AR Games, the cards come to life with things like boxes that unfold, a dragon that pops out of the box and bull's-eyes that must be shot using buttons on the 3DS.

Hallmark Cards Inc. is getting in on the AR action. Some of its greeting cards come with instructions to hold the card in front of a Mac or Windows PC webcam, which makes the characters drawn on the card appear animated on the computer screen.

Interactive Advertising

The AR Magic Mirror app uses the iPad 2's cameras to impose objects on images of one's face, including masks, hairstyles and marks. The app quickly analyzes the size of one's face and different objects can be selected to appear as if they're being worn in real life.

This app comes from Total Immersion, a company known for the way it incorporates AR into online and print ads. One online ad includes an interactive driving game that made users feel like they were driving the Volvo S60 through whatever their iPhone or Android camera displayed as AR obstacles fell into the road. In another campaign, people printed out a PDF of the Olympus PEN digital camera, held it to a webcam and saw animated demonstrations of the camera's features, as if the camera—not a piece of paper—was in their hands.

Effortless Socializing

The Viewdle Social Camera, a free app for Android devices, suggests names of people in photos taken by an Android smartphone by comparing their faces to a database of friends tagged in a person's Facebook account. Viewdle works completely on the smartphone so images don't need to be slowly uploaded to a remote server each time a face is identified. No one is automatically tagged in Viewdle photos; rather, it suggests who it thinks the person is, and the phone's owner approves this suggestion. The photos can then be shared from this app via Facebook, Flickr, email or MMS.

Viewdle's future plans sound exciting: Devices with enough processor power, including some that are out now, will be able to display photos captured on the smartphone with each person's most recent Facebook status update shown in bubbles above their heads.

Geek Alert

If you aren't too keen on walking around holding your device up in front of you so you can play AR games or use AR apps, Vusix Corp. designs glasses with AR-visualization capability. But if you wear these glasses, don't expect to get a date anytime soon.

From greeting cards to animated advertisements to mobile gaming, augmented reality is well suited for the smartphones people carry every day and we can expect to see much more of it in coming months and years

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Cool.

Touching a Teddy Bear Makes Lonely People Feel Less Lonely - Ideas Market - WSJ

People who feel the pain of social rejection often retreat from human interaction—which, of course, is a self-defeating move—but touching a teddy bear may counteract the tendency, a new study finds.

The study had two parts. In the first, researchers gave 181 undergraduates a personality test, followed by bogus results. Some subjects were told they’d been diagnosed as “the type who will end up alone later in life.” Others were told they were almost certain to have “rewarding relationships.” (There was also a control group that was told they were accident-prone, or not accident-prone.) After this spot of cheery or depressing news, participants were asked to evaluate a teddy bear, which, they were told, was being considered for sale.

Half the participants were encouraged to hold the bear as they evaluated it, while the others could only look at it from a few feet away.

After that, all participants were offered the chance to volunteer for more studies, which would involve more time interacting with people in a lab setting. People primed to think about future social exclusion who had touched the bear volunteered for twice as many experiments, on average, as people primed to think about exclusion who did not touch the bear.

The second part of the study involved more forceful social rejection. Ninety-five undergraduates were brought into the lab, in groups, and asked to express a preference for a partner. Some students were (falsely) told that no one had picked them, others (falsely) that everyone had. The teddy-bear exercise followed.

Among the socially rejected students, the subjects who touched the teddy bear acted more cooperatively in a subsequent strategy game requiring coordination.

The authors conclude by saying that it’s not the teddy bear, per se, that mattered, but touching an anthropomorphized object, which seems to supply some of the benefits of human touch.

So: Can consolation robots be far behind? The authors mention the possibility. (Future studies will have to determine whether they have to be soft and fuzzy.)

“Touching a Teddy Bear Mitigates Negative Effects of Social Exclusion to Increase Prosocial Behavior,” Kenneth Tai, Xue Zheng and Jayanth Narayanan, Social Psychological and Personality Science (forthcoming)

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Cool.

Deane Beman: The Man Who Groomed the Game of Golf | Golf Journal by John Paul Newport - WSJ.com

When Deane Beman took over as its commissioner in 1974, the PGA Tour was a middling collection of tournaments, many hosted by celebrities like Bob Hope, Jackie Gleason and Dean Martin, flimsily synchronized by a headquarters staff of 27. The total purse that year was $8 million. On television, golf was less popular and less lucrative than bowling.

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Photo by PGA TOUR Photo Services/PGA

Beman, with Bob Hope and Gerald Ford in 1982; after his tenure, corporations mattered more than celebrities.

Over the ensuing 20 years, Beman reinvented virtually every aspect of professional tournament golf. Almost all of the signal attributes of today's prosperous PGA Tour—the corporate title sponsorships, the emphasis on charitable giving, the network of Tournament Players Clubs where many events are staged (including the Players Championship the week after next at the famous island-green TPC Sawgrass course in Florida)—were his innovations. When he retired in 1994 at the young age of 56, total annual Tour prize money had grown to about $100 million, on its way to $276 million last year.

How Beman pulled this off is the subject of a new book by Adam Schupak called "Deane Beman, Golf's Driving Force: The Inside Story of the Man Who Transformed Professional Golf Into a Billion-Dollar Business" (East Cottage Press). It's as much a business narrative as a sports book, and all the more fascinating for it.

"I was not a commissioner that was loved," Beman told Schupak. "I do believe I was respected. But I wasn't trying to run a popularity contest. I was trying to break new ground."

That he did, redirecting his considerable ambitions as a player (he was a two-time U.S. Amateur champion and won four Tour events in five seasons as a pro) into hacking his way through the thickets of golf's entrenched interests.

The Tour, when he took the job, was still partially controlled, through representatives on the board and various contractual relationships, by the PGA of America, the organization of club and teaching pros from which it had nominally gained independence only five years earlier.

One recurring subplot in Schupak's narrative is Beman's ultimately successful, 17-year push to disentangle from the PGA, since the interests of club pros and Tour pros didn't always mesh. Among his craftier tactics: officially changing the Tour's name, for seven months starting in August 1981, to the TPA Tour, for Tournament Players Association.

He also faced resistance from many of the players he worked for as commissioner. By a combination of luck and behind-the-scenes maneuvering, he defused a player revolt, midway through his tenure, led by Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. The top-tier players believed that some of Beman's initiatives, such as building courses and marketing the Tour as a brand unto itself, exceeded his authority and were robbing them of their ability to make money independently.

Meanwhile, lower-tier pros complained that the structure of the Tour prevented all but a handful of players from making a decent living. Beman drove through reforms. He increased the number of players who automatically qualify for tournaments each year to 125 from 60. He also formed what are now the Nationwide Tour and the Champions Tour.

The evolution of the television model under Beman's stewardship is also a good story. The networks didn't offer more golf in the 1970s partly because it was so expensive to produce, unlike arena events that could be covered with a handful of stationary cameras. With the expansion of corporate title sponsorships in the 1980s, however, Beman was able to offer the networks a package with all production costs covered and a large percentage of the ads (often 40%) presold to the sponsor. The networks initially objected to using the sponsors' names in referring to the events, but Beman took care of that, too. He changed the name of, for example, the Nissan Los Angeles Open to simply the Nissan Open. The networks (and print media) then had no choice but to use Nissan's name whenever they spoke about the tournament.

In an interview this week, however, Beman pointed to the two developments he thinks were the most significant of his tenure. The first was reorganizing the Tour as a not-for-profit association instead of as a for-profit corporation in 1979. According to estimates the Tour provided to Schupak, that switch has yielded $500 million in benefits over the years.

The second was recognizing that tournament volunteers and the charities they support were the key not just to the Tour's future success, but to its survival. In 1979, the Tour's policy board passed a resolution mandating that all tournaments be run for charities.

"The tournaments had to stand for something. People weren't going to give up their vacation weeks to volunteer if the only purpose was for golfers to come in from out of town and leave a week later with a lot of money," Beman told me. If the Tour had to pay for all the man-hours required to run a tournament (directing parking, marshalling the fairways, working the scoreboards), there wouldn't have been much remaining money to leave with, anyway. Through the end of last year, Tour events had raised $1.6 billion for charities, most of them local.

This charitable work has proved effective, too, in attracting corporate sponsors, who value the association. "When you come down to it, it's the culture of the game and the players that is golf's most valuable asset, much more than the tournaments themselves or the television contracts," Beman said. He said that he tried to protect that tradition above all else, even as he commercialized professional tournament golf and transformed it from a minor-league sports enterprise to the big time

via online.wsj.com

A great leader.