The Unlikely Story of the PGA Tour and the LPGA Landing in the Lava Fields of Utah | Golf news and tour information

When Mormon families were sent to southern Utah in the 1860s to raise cotton crops during the Civil War and build the town that became St. George, they faced a threatening obstacle. They and their cars were stopped by the craggy black lava left there by the eruptions of the Santa Clara Volcano. No one knows when the last currents occurred, but the pioneers soon realized that it would be better to live with this extraordinary piece of nature rather than fight against it.

This story must have touched Patrick Manning deeply. He is managing director of Reef Private Equity, a company for which he leads real estate development. Manning was living in the Florida Keys at the time and was asked in 2004 to visit a remote piece of land to assess its feasibility. He needed a map. He admits he had never heard of St. George and didn't know what state it was in. More than 5 million people a year visit the Greater Zion area, but their ultimate destination is the same – the spectacular national park, which is just 30 minutes from the city.

Like the Mormons 165 years ago, Manning's first impression was one of awe – the black of the lava amidst the scrubby desert, the red hue of the mountains in the distance, and the way the light made everything magical. Imagine adding rich greens to the palette. From that first day he had a vision of what it could become. “I looked at my wife and she didn’t know what was going on,” Manning recalled in a recent telephone interview. “I had this crushing, overwhelming feeling that we should sell everything and move here.”

They did, and 20 years later, Manning and his partners at Reef are about to accomplish one of the boldest achievements in hospitality and professional golf. “Nobody in the history of the world has done this,” Manning said of the double thing that will happen this week — opening a resort that will ultimately cost $2 billion while also hosting your first PGA Tour event . And not just any tournament, but the long-awaited first in your state in 60 years.

“People keep using the word 'impossible' and asking, 'How did you do that?'” Manning said. “We had a lot of support.”

First ball will be hit Thursday in the Black Desert Championship, the third of eight PGA Tour FedEx Fall Series events that will determine the status of Tour players who finished outside the top 50 at the 2024 FedEx Cup. The venue is the Black Desert Resort Course, dramatized by the aforementioned lava fields and opened in 2023 to rave reviews; It was ranked No. 2 among public courses in Golf Digest's 2023 ranking of the best new golf courses in America.

Manning believed he had one of the most beautiful and unique facilities in the country, but was also confident (naive?) enough to believe that he could simply call the leading professional golfers and tell them that they needed to hold tournaments in Black Desert. The initial responses from the LPGA Tour and PGA Tour were essentially, “We don’t just run tournaments for people.”

Undeterred, Manning arranged for both tracks to send representatives to look at the whole thing, and as he has repeatedly reported on PGA Tour Vice President Steve Wenzloff's visit, they spent hours inspecting the 18 holes, at which point Wenzloff said, “That “It’s amazing.” There’s nothing like that on tour. You have it if you want it.”

“And of course,” Manning said, “we embraced it.”

The four-year deal with the PGA Tour announced in July 2023 was not the only deal Black Desert negotiated. Just over a month earlier, the resort and the LPGA agreed to a five-year agreement to host a women's Tour event for the first time in spring 2025. The only other venue that hosts both men and women is the Ritz Carlton Resort's Tiburon Golf Club in Naples, Florida, which hosts the LPGA's CME Group Tour Championship in November and the mixed's Grant Thornton Invitational in December PGA Tour LPGA teams host.

Originally designed by Tom Weiskopf and completed by Phil Smith after his death, the floor plan was completed months before the rest of the resort was built. In fact, Black Desert's original agreement with the PGA Tour was that it would first take place in 2025. But as the tour reconfigured its schedule, it pushed developers to be ready for October 2024. “At first I said, no, we can’t do that,” Manning said. “We will not have a resort built to accommodate the players. But they kept asking.”

Manning accommodated the tour's needs, moved up some of the schedule, and an army of construction workers completed 200 of the 800 planned guest rooms at the resort to house the players. There are also seven restaurants available to them and their families, including an 11,000 square foot sports bar. In a year there will be a spa, a water park and a family promenade.

“These are them making things a reality,” said Marty Gorisch, the executive director of the Farmers Insurance Open in Torrey Pines, who has served as a valuable adviser to the Black Desert group, which does not yet have a title sponsor other than its own company and had never hosted a major golf tournament before. “This resort, if you hear the story, should never have happened. They believed and made it happen.”

Gorsich has worked on the Farmers Open for 12 years and met dozens of business leaders from the golf world. He's never dealt with anyone like Manning. “Without Patrick, this wouldn’t have happened,” Gorsich said. “He recognized the opportunity a long time ago, stuck with it and proved himself.

“And he’s always humble,” Gorsich added. “He doesn’t walk around beating his chest. He asks, 'How can we do it better?'”

Manning believes that mantra will extend to LPGA players next spring when the women's Black Desert event runs April 30-May 3, the week after the year's first major, the Chevron Championship Houston, will be held. He said Black Desert will send eight planes to transport players free of charge from Houston to St. George and then provide free lodging on the resort property.

“We are committed to showing women the kind of love that men experience, and at the highest level,” Manning said.

First things first; The PGA Tour event is coming up this week. There seem to be legitimate concerns about local attendance, considering that while St. George is growing rapidly, it has a population of about 107,000. (The resort is officially in the town of Ivins, population 10,000.) The nearest major city is Las Vegas, 120 miles away. The state's largest metropolitan area, Salt Lake City, is 300 miles north.

That would seem to put the event on a desert island sort of level, but Manning reported that the “vibe in Utah was outstanding” and that corporate and ticket sales were brisk, with a total of 10,000 people expected to be in attendance each day. Organizers have announced that Friday and Saturday are sold out. This for an event that doesn't feature most of the players featured in the game.

But that doesn't seem to matter to fans who have waited six decades for the PGA Tour to return to Utah (despite hosting every iteration of the Korn Ferry Tour since 1990). The last man to win here was Tommy Jacobs, who defeated Don January in the 1963 Utah Open Invitational. St. George's more modern connection is his native son, Jay Don Blake, a former Tour winner who is 65 and received an exemption into this week's tournament to make his 500th Tour start.

Observers of professional golf can cite many examples over the decades of host locations – many of them for the event once dubbed the “Silly Season” – that were short-lived simply in search of quick recognition and the sale of rooms and Real estate was. Gorsich admitted he initially had some of these thoughts about Black Desert. “But when you hear them talk about the stages of development,” he said, “it’s different. Patrick has a home here. All Reef partners are from Utah. This is not a build-and-sell development story. They’re really intentional about how they do things.”

In Manning's case, he arrived in the desert, saw those black fields and saw in them a future that few had.

“We did this for Utah State,” he said. “They’ve been trying to get the Tour here for 30 years. They just couldn't do it. The fans wanted the PGA Tour; The state wanted the PGA Tour. We did this for them.”