Champions Tour: The most entertaining pro-am stories

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Several players on the Champions Tour recently sat down with media official Phil Stambaugh to share their favorite stories from the countless pro-ams they've played in. Some are funny, while others are just downright unbelievable. Read on for these stories in the players' own words.

Loren Roberts

I actually have two. The first one happened in Milwaukee about 1987 or '88. I'm in the pro-am and my amateur on the 7th hole, cold heels one with a 3-wood from the middle of the fairway, and I'm standing over in the left. I see it coming and I try to jump over it and it hits me right in the ankle and my ankle absolutely blew up. It just swelled up. I had to go in after nine holes. This was Wednesday. They had to ice it down. I was barely able to play the tournament. The funny thing about it was that he felt awful but he never even said a word to me. He felt so embarrassed and felt so awful he never said a word to me. As for the other good story, I got paired in a pro-am one year in Flint, Mich., and I looked at my card, and I just thought that amateurs, they'd forgotten to put their handicaps on there. I had two guys that started this golf club company. They both had listed themselves as scratch golfers and they had these golf clubs they were trying to market with these huge baseball bat-sized grips. Every club was the same length. They went out and played with this stuff and neither one of them broke 100, and they had listed themselves as scratch players. So I shot 4 or 5 under on my own ball and that was also our team score.

Phil Blackmar

I was playing a pro-am down in Florida, and I had this guy that was probably 80 years old on my team. He's so old and weak that he can hardly hold on to the club. On the first hole, he gets up and takes this little half swing and rolls it to the end of the tee box. He rolls the next one about 15 yards and then hits his next shot another 15 yards. This goes on for awhile and finally we get to the tee at the third hole and he says, "Pro, pro, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Help me out here." The guy has a 14 mile-an-hour clubhead speed, he's 80 years old, and can hardly stand up. I had to figure a way out of this and be very nice about it. I told him he had a very individualistic swing and we probably needed to spend some time on the range rather than do it here on the golf course.

David Ogrin

One year at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, I'm playing with Ted Schultz and his partner, B.J. Thomas. My partner is Stan Smith, the professional tennis player, and he's also a pretty good golfer. It's a really bad windy day at Pebble Beach, and we are just getting our heads handed to us. Neither Ted nor I are going to make the cut, or our pro-am teams aren't going to make the cut either. We get to No. 7, the little hole down the hill, and I hit first, and I hit a pretty good 7 iron. It comes down to the front bunker, so no big deal. Stan gets up, and he said "If David hits 7, I'm going to hit 6". Stan makes this beautiful golf swing, and he strikes it perfectly. Just as he hits it, the wind totally lays down and everybody in the green, they just look straight over their heads as Stan's ball sails 45 yards over the green and lands near a sea lion out beyond the green. I think he was done after that.

Scott Hoch

I got two good ones. The first one is unique and I'm not sure it will ever happen again. I played with three presidents in a pro-am. As the defending champion of the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in 1995, I played with George Bush Sr., Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Bob Hope. That was pretty unique. Even Arnold Palmer said he had never done that before. He's only played with them individually. My other pro-am story happened to be when I was defending champion at the USF&G Classic in New Orleans in 1983. I'm playing with President Gerald Ford and apparently one of our other amateurs had earned his spot through USF&G for selling the most insurance or whatever. He must have told them that he played golf and he really didn't. He goes in and buys all of his equipment in the pro shop that morning, and we get to the tee, and he whiffs it three times on the first tee. We didn't hear much from him the rest of the day.

Jim Thorpe

I played with a guy at the Canadian Open in 1982 that had never played golf before. On the first tee, he hits the top of the ball and it goes straight down into the ground, probably an inch, and pops straight up in the air. He reaches over and catches it in his right hand. I thought that was pretty cool.

Jeff Sluman

All of the years of playing in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in the Bill Murray group. I can sit and talk for hours of the fun we had and stuff like that. That to me was one of the tournaments that I never wanted to miss because of that. I knew I was going to have I call it a working vacation. If I played well, fine. If I didn't, we were still going to have a ton of fun. You know, you wish in a lot of ways every pro-am could be like that. Bill played with Scott Simpson and I always played in the group with somebody else. It was just 24-7 fun.

Fulton Allem

It had to be at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am one year. I was playing with the president of Exxon, and his ball was lying in the fairway but it was very wet at Pebble that year. On the second hole, he tried to hit a 3 wood on his second shot and he topped it. The ground was so wet that the ball went into the turf and had so much spin on it that it actually bounced backwards two feet. I had never in my life seen anybody hit the ball to go forward and it ended up going backward before it ever went forward.

Donnie Hammond

We were in Greensboro and it had to be sometime in the '80s when this happened. An amateur had hit his drive in the right rough and he then hits this low worm burner that hits one of the cardboard trash cans and the ball ends up in it. Three holes later, this same amateur sculls a greenside bunker shot on this par-3. The ball hits the sign behind the green that says No. 14 and then does a Michael Jordan, ricocheting off the sign right back into another trash can. Everyone in the group just looked at each other and didn't say a word. Unfortunately, his game resembled those two shots the rest of the day.

Brad Bryant

My best pro-am story happened a few years ago in Baltimore at Hayfields Country Club. It was pouring down rain, and my group was making the turn. I mean it was pouring down rain, and we came off of the 18th green, and the clubhouse was right there on the way to No. 1. I looked at my partners and I said, "Just so you all know, we don't have to play." They all said "Then let's go to the clubhouse." We ended up having a three-hour lunch. It was beautiful.

D.A. Weibring

I think it was the sometime in the late '80s when we were back in Las Vegas for the pro-am format. I remember the first hole clear as day. Chuck Fairbanks was my celebrity partner. I had three other amateurs from different areas of the country. One was an East Coast guy, fast moving. One was a West Coast guy, a guy who looked like he came right out of Bermuda Dunes or Indian Wells. He had played all of the Bob Hope tournaments. My third guy, besides Chuck, was from Denver. He was quiet and very reserved. Before we started, I talked to all of them and let them know we were playing for a million dollar purse. I told them I would do whatever I could for them, but my round counted. They said they all understood where I was coming from. Best ball, let's have a good time. On the first hole, I caught a flier on my second shot and my ball went over the green and stopped down in some trees. I ended up chipping the ball short and then chipping it again four feet from the hole. Now I've got a four-footer for bogey on the first hole. Meanwhile, one of my amateurs, the guy from California, two-putts for a par and makes 4 for 3. The guy from Denver, the real quiet guy, lags his putt up about four or five feet from the hole and the guy from New York picks up his ball and tosses it back to him. He says, "That's good, we've got our 4 for 3." That's when everything broke loose. The real quiet, reserved guy from Denver didn't like anybody touching his ball and, as he raised his voice, he came walking towards the guy from New York with his fist cocked. While I'm over my four-footer trying to make my bogey, Chuck Fairbanks, who is a big guy, walks in between the two of them and grabs both of them. The guy from Denver was going to pop the other guy and Chuck almost picks both of them up off the ground and says, "Boys. We've got to calm down here, we've only got 17 more holes to enjoy one another's company." Needless to say, it was a very quiet second tee. I thought we were going to have a fight on the first hole.