Black Desert welcomes PGA Tour back to Utah in eye-popping fashion

IVINS, Utah — As a made-for-TV production, the PGA Tour loved the idea of staging an event at the Black Desert Resort in Ivins because of its “pop” value on the screen: A picturesque black lava field surrounding green fairways, white sand bunkers, all under a blue sky framed in red-rock desert mountains.
This place has so many color schemes going, producers had a real palette problem going in the production booth: Which scene to pick, what camera, which angle?
It all popped.
As owner Patrick Manning tells it, the PGA Tour picked Black Desert for this event before he’d even planted grass — it was that stunning of a scene for TV. It was also the late Tom Weiskopf’s last course design.
During Thursday’s opening round, Black Desert Resort and its course delivered, even among construction scars around a giant 791-room resort hotel and water park still under construction. There are 240 of those destination guest rooms sold to owners, 95% of them have been put in a resort-operated rental pool.
While this week’s Tour event didn’t attract many of the top names, it did have plenty of hungry if not anxious players in the 70s, 80s and 100s in the FedEx Cup Standings, hunting for points.
Locally, Mike Weir, the former Masters champion, Presidents Cup captain and BYU star fired a 6-under on his first nine to lead nine locals competing in the event. He then went from a T4 down the well with four bogeys coming in before carding a birdie on the last hole to finish at 3-under 68.
For St. George native Jay Don Blake, the Black Deseret Championship put a cap on his 500th career start. Blake, a former NCAA champion playing at Utah State, grew up in the Dixie Downs neighborhood a short distance from this spectacular resort and golf course where he lived in a trailer court.
Greater Zion and Black Desert Resort owner Manning surprised Blake with a sponsor’s exemption in the finishing minutes of an in-depth documentary on his life as a St. George legend.
Blake called Thursday’s first round an “emotional experience,” surrounded by family and friends. Black Desert had him enamored from the start of its build.
“When I first came out and played for the first time we were playing, I ended up — I pretty much kind of took in awe of what the golf course presented, the lava rock and the beautiful green grass and the sand traps. I knew in the back of my mind that I grew up just down the road a little way.
“It wasn’t until I think about the second time I played, I had a little bit more time to kind of stand up on some of those little lava rock peninsulas and look a little deeper down the valley where I grew up in a trailer park. And standing there, I may have stood on this same peninsula when I was a little kid. Used to come up in this valley right here, and there wasn’t anything out here, just the lava rock, sagebrush, and a few rabbits that I was chasing around.”
Blake has his own uniformed army at his first tee box, 30 to 40 wearing tan T-shirts with “Blake’s Birdies #500″ printed on the back. His wife Marci carried his PGA Tour bag, something she’d done for him as his caddie on the Nationwide and Senior Tour circuit. Blake was sitting at 3-over through 15 holes when play was halted for the day.
This is the first PGA Tour event in Utah since the Utah Open Invitational at The Country Club in 1963, when the Vietnam War was brewing and Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. At that event, former Senior Tour veteran Bruce Summerhays, father of current BYU women’s golf coach Carrie Roberts, was the low amateur.
Black Desert gave up a course record in the first round when Canada’s Adam Svensson carded an 11-under 60. Norway’s Henrik Norlander and Matt McCarty finished the day two strokes off the pace.
As wide as the fairways are and as big as most greens are built, there was plenty of trouble for some of the leaders like Harry Hall, who got to his finishing hole, the par-5 No. 9, and found his approach lodged in some sagebrush near lava rocks.
Hall, who was tied for the early lead at 7-under, spent almost 10 minutes trying to decide on whether to move some rocks and play his ball as it lay or take a two-club unplayable penalty to a sandy area. After lifting three rocks the size of basketballs to get a footing, his swipe with a sand wedge moved his ball six inches. He then reverted back to the unplayable penalty lie and hit his shot to 8 feet and made bogey.
Ben Kohles made the tournament’s first ace on No. 17, out 130 yards with a spin-back dunk. He finished 6 under par. Plenty of players who hit approaches short on that hole ended up watching their ball roll backward down a hill to a collection area 40 feet away from the green.
Weir and former BYU star and Utah Open champion Zac Blair led nine local players in the field with 3-under-par rounds of 68, good for a tie for 41st. Ogden’s Patrick Fishburn shot even-par 71.
BYU-bound Kihei Akina is in great position to become the low amateur at 2-under after 16 holes as play was suspended due to darkness.