When Rich McClintock, the general chairman of the 1990 U.S. Amateur at Cherry Hills, phoned fellow member Kathy Walker to ask if she was interested in being the event’s championship director, she said yes.
She then hung up and asked her husband, Buzz, “What’s the U.S. Amateur?”
That was Kathy Walker’s introduction to golf, but she more than compensated for her late start.
Walker may not have known golf, but she had spent 15 years at Frontier Airlines, where she’d ultimately become the company’s director of sales and advertising—until an ownership change diverted the flight path of her career.
Walker rewarded McClintock’s and the club’s confidence, raising close to a half-million dollars through nontraditional methods, including two tournaments that allowed the public to play the course. The USGA approved, and the tournament ran flawlessly.
Three years later, for the 1993 U.S. Senior Open at Cherry Hills, she would again serve as championship director, this time sharing the responsibilities with fellow member Rick Collier as Jack Nicklaus captured his last national championship.
After the Senior Open, Walker’s former Frontier colleague Gail Godbey asked her to run the first five Colorado Women’s Opens. Begun in 1995, the event moved to Valley Country Club in 1997 and attracted World Golf Hall of Famer Kathy Whitworth and LPGA and Colorado Golf Hall of Fame inductee Pat Lange.
Walker’s reputation for running tournaments also caught the attention of energy executive George Solich, who in 1995 had founded the Energy Cup Matches. At first a “homegrown” event, according to Solich, the biennial Ryder Cup-style competition between oil and gas executives from Colorado and Texas quickly “got so big, I hired her to organize and run it. She became a big part of the Energy Cup.”
After coordinating volunteer services at the 2005 U.S. Women’s Open at Cherry Hills, Walker played a big part in the 2012 U.S. Amateur there, reprising her role as championship director for another successful USGA event. And two years later, with Solich as general chair for the 2014 BMW Championship at Cherry Hills, he put her on the executive committee to provide support for corporate apparel sales at what the PGA Tour named its Tournament of the Year.
The apparel connection came about because Walker had developed a corporate and promotional division at Tehāma, the high-end golf clothing line founded by Clint Eastwood and Denver’s Nancy Haley. Tehāma soon became one of the favorite apparel lines in the promotional products industry and the corporate market.
And guess what? Now the woman who didn’t know anything about golf plays it as often as she can.
