Showcase at Cedar Crest

[Phil Young]

On Golf Channel this afternoon and the two days that follow, is live coverage of the Showcase at Cedar Crest, a wonderfully conceived amateur golf tournament that is being played on the Cedar Crest golf course, a public course in Dallas, Texas. This the first of a two-year commitment by both Southwest Airlines who is backing it and Golf Channel who will show it live both this and next year and hopefully on into the future.

The Cedar Crest golf course was the original Tillinghast-designed course for the Cedar Crest Country Club that would go bankrupt during the depression and be forced to sell the club to the City of Dallas. What was the site of the 1927 PGA Championship is now a run-down municipal course that the City of Dallas will not put the resources into to restore the once great course back to what most of it originally was. I say most because several holes were lost a few decades ago when the original club house burnt down and a new one was built on the site of those three holes.

Despite that very negative sounding introduction, this is a tournament all on here should either watch live or record and watch it later. You will see the best 44 African-American college players, 22 men and 22 women, compete on a course whose potential will jump out at you.

The tournament came about when a group of Dallas businessmen came together and formed the I Am a Golfer Foundation and have raised a great deal of money to both restore the course and maintain it into the foreseeable future. The City has turned down this offer, despite how this would renovate, not just a golf course, but an entire community. As of today, the city has said they will reconsider this during the coming year.

Take a look at least at a portion of it and you'll be quite impressed as to its potential...The club, Ira Molayo the head professional who runs the entire facility, in addition to helping a large group of public players improve in both their play and love of the game, and who kept the facility open during the entire Covid crisis by paying the employees who maintained the course and those in the clubhouse out of his own pocket, and the public players who call it their course, all need our help and support.

If and when you might have a moment, look up the I Am a Golfer Foundation website, along with the Cedar Crest Golf Course website, and consider how you might be able to help them and encourage the  city of Dallas to allow a restorative renovation that won't cost the city a single penny to take place!

[Paul Rudovsky]

Cedar Crest may be the best example of the phrase "great bones" I have ever played.

[Joe Zucker]

The I Am a Golfer Foundation has been running the Dallas Amateur Championship (played at Trinity Forest) for several years now.  They run a great tournament with all of the qualifiers for the main championship held at Cedar Crest in the early part of the summer.  In both stages of the tournament you'll meet people who are part of the foundation and deserve the support.  It seems like a great organization. 

[mike_beene]

Cedar Crest is one of the best chipping courses I have ever played. As a kid it cost $50 to get a pass to play the Dallas public courses. Cedar Crest, Stevens , Tennison were really pretty good.I think my favorite was Cedar Crest. It really looks nice on TV.

[Greg Clark]

On Golf Channel this afternoon and the two days that follow, is live coverage of the Showcase at Cedar Crest, a wonderfully conceived amateur golf tournament that is being played on the Cedar Crest golf course, a public course in Dallas, Texas. This the first of a two-year commitment by both Southwest Airlines who is backing it and Golf Channel who will show it live both this and next year and hopefully on into the future.

The Cedar Crest golf course was the original Tillinghast-designed course for the Cedar Crest Country Club that would go bankrupt during the depression and be forced to sell the club to the City of Dallas. What was the site of the 1927 PGA Championship is now a run-down municipal course that the City of Dallas will not put the resources into to restore the once great course back to what most of it originally was. I say most because several holes were lost a few decades ago when the original club house burnt down and a new one was built on the site of those three holes.

Despite that very negative sounding introduction, this is a tournament all on here should either watch live or record and watch it later. You will see the best 44 African-American college players, 22 men and 22 women, compete on a course whose potential will jump out at you.

The tournament came about when a group of Dallas businessmen came together and formed the I Am a Golfer Foundation and have raised a great deal of money to both restore the course and maintain it into the foreseeable future. The City has turned down this offer, despite how this would renovate, not just a golf course, but an entire community. As of today, the city has said they will reconsider this during the coming year.

Take a look at least at a portion of it and you'll be quite impressed as to its potential...The club, Ira Molayo the head professional who runs the entire facility, in addition to helping a large group of public players improve in both their play and love of the game, and who kept the facility open during the entire Covid crisis by paying the employees who maintained the course and those in the clubhouse out of his own pocket, and the public players who call it their course, all need our help and support.

If and when you might have a moment, look up the I Am a Golfer Foundation website, along with the Cedar Crest Golf Course website, and consider how you might be able to help them and encourage the  city of Dallas to allow a restorative renovation that won't cost the city a single penny to take place!

I think it is unfair to say the city of Dallas has not put resources into Cedar Crest.  They paid for a $3M renovation of the course in 2004 by DA Weibring.  Sympathetic restorations of classic GCA's was not yet quite the rage it is now.  It became the first course in the area to use grey water to irrigate, and they believe this ultimately caused the greens to die and roughly $1M was spent in 2015 to regrass them (with some work on tee boxes and bunkers), along with paying the staff during the shut down.  The greens were again regrassed this year to a similar expense.  Poa was blamed this time.  Stevens Park also has had a regrassing of greens since it's renovation.  It seems whoever is in charge of the keeping of greens for the city is having issues.


The City of Dallas has renovated all six of its public courses over the last roughly 20 years.  Some (Stevens) were better than others, but all were improved from what they had become.  I understand that you (and I) wish that the money at Cedar Crest was spent to have a more proper Tilly restoration, but I'm not sure that would be money well spent at this time.  The course as it stands is fine, and provides good value for golfers when the grass is alive.  Those six public courses gross $4.2M a year according to a recent D Magazine article.  Not sure how much sense it makes for the city to pump a bunch more money into a renovation at Cedar Crest, no matter how much us GCA afficianados would like it.  They just need to figure out how to keep the grass growing.

I enjoyed watching some of the event, and I've enjoyed my few trips to play Cedar Crest.  It's a bit of a hike from the northern suburbs.  The only way I see a full restoration happening is if something like the East Lake Foundation is replicated in southern Dallas.