Write-Up Provided by the Rick Pledl (pledl@mailbag.com) and Wisconsin.Golf
The Wisconsin Section PGA recently announced plans to recognize a few key individuals in the state golf community who are not PGA of America members but nonetheless have made significant contributions to the game and the section.
The Wisconsin PGA annually presents a slate of awards to members, but these honors are different.
The trio of honorees – Gary D’Amato, Mark Olsen and Mike Warren – have contributed in vastly separate ways, representing the many corners of Wisconsin reached by PGA members and their efforts to promote the game here.
D’Amato, the longtime state golf writer, has been named an honorary member of the Wisconsin Section PGA. Honorary members are nominated and elected based on their deep contributions to the Wisconsin PGA and impact on golfers statewide – or thanks to their direct involvement with the section office in West Allis.
D’Amato, who lives in Caledonia, will be recognized at next spring’s WPGA Special Awards Reception.
The WPGA also recently announced the creation of a new Distinguished Service Award that will aim to honor individuals who display outstanding service to the WPGA and the game of golf. And the identities of its first two honorees – Olsen and Warren – were also released.
Olsen, of Pleasant Prairie, and Warren, who lives in Cross Plains, will be honored at the WPGA’s Fall Meeting later this year.
D’Amato’s Honorary Membership was unanimously approved recently by the WPGA Board of Directors, leading to a surprise announcement.
“It wasn’t anything I expected, or thought would happen, but of course I’m tremendously honored and humbled,” D’Amato said. “I have such great respect for the section and everything those men and women do to promote golf in our state.”
Still, D’Amato said he was apprehensive recently when a couple of WPGA officials pulled him aside to tell him about the honor.
“At first, I thought, uh oh, what did I write that they didn’t like,” he joked.
D’Amato recalled writing stories about Bobby Brue, Manuel de la Torre, Rich Tock and many other legendary state PGA professionals over his career, as well as key golf events like the 2004 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits.
As mentioned, WPGA Honorary Memberships are awarded to individuals based on their statewide impact, or through direct efforts at the section office level, but Joe Stadler, executive director of the WPGA, thinks D’Amato checks both boxes.
“Gary was really pushing for golf at a time when newspapers didn’t want to cover local golf anymore,” Stadler said of D’Amato in those pre-Tiger Woods golf boom days of the early 1990s. “The feeling was that not enough people were interested in golf, but I would argue that’s exactly why people would buy a paper – local news.”
Stadler added: “He’s just been so supportive of our members. If there’s anything we ask of him, he usually does it for us, even the little things.”
That included a four-year stint on the WPGA Board of Directors a few years ago as an at-large, or independent, board member, another carve-out by the WPGA for non-members who can help the section.
“He was on the board at a time when we were talking about trying to market ourselves better, and he was obviously a big help with that,” Stadler said.
D’Amato has written about the game of golf in Wisconsin since 1980, when he began covering local golf for the Racine Journal Times, prior to his long career with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel as golf beat writer. Since 2018, D’Amato has written for Wisconsin.Golf. A multiple-time award winner in the prestigious Golf Writers Association of America writing contest, D’Amato is also currently president of the GWAA, although his two-year term will expire in April.
D’Amato is a three-time Wisconsin sportswriter of the year and a member of the Wisconsin Golf Hall of Fame. He has authored, or co-authored, 10 books on a variety of sports topics, including golf, with his 11th, a golf coffee table book, coming out soon. He has also covered 11 Olympic games, winter and summer, back in his newspaper days, as well as all four men’s golf majors.
D’Amato joins Thor Lundgren, Bob Hornung Jr. and Rob Hurab as current WPGA Honorary Members. Previously, individuals such as Herbert V. Kohler, Bill Sixty and Arnold Walker served as Honorary Members of the section.
D’Amato also continues to serve on the Wisconsin State Golf Association Hall of Fame Committee.
Returning to Olsen and Warren, Stadler thinks they’re exactly the sort of people the WPGA wants to identify for its new Distinguished Service Award, which will continue to be presented to deserving individuals in coming years.
While Honorary Members like D’Amato are considered to have a deeper, statewide impact on the game and its players, the new Distinguished Service Award seeks to recognize individuals whose contributions to the Wisconsin PGA are perhaps a bit narrower but still vitally important.
“They’re both very deserving,” Stadler said.
The WPGA Distinguished Service Award was created recently as WPGA officials considered Olsen and his many contributions to the game in southeastern Wisconsin.
Olsen, a talented and lifelong amateur player himself, is being recognized for his decades of organizing golf tournaments in Kenosha County, as well as coaching the game on the high school and college levels.
“Running tournaments and clinics and things like that – in every case it requires the help of PGA members at various courses,” Olsen said of his connections to the Wisconsin Section. “And they have always been helpful and supportive of what I’ve been doing. I really have a great deal of respect for the PGA community wherever they are doing their work.”
Now a volunteer assistant coach at UW-Parkside under head coach Carly Werwie-Swartz, Olsen spent 17 years as head coach at Parkside, which competes on the NCAA Division II level. The Rangers practice every day at the Mark Olsen Indoor Golf Center.
Olsen also is about to begin spring practice for his 57th season as head coach of the boys golf team at Westosha High School. He also coached the girls team for a few seasons.
Several of the players Olsen coached over the decades have gone on to careers as Wisconsin PGA professionals, such as Andy Hansen, Andrew Troyanek and Keith Buntrock, and he continues to serve as a mentor to many of them.
Olsen operated junior golf tournaments in Kenosha County beginning in the early 1970s, long before junior golf was fashionable, because as a high school coach he wanted his players to have competitive options in the summertime. In the 1970s and ‘80s there were a couple big golf tournaments in Wisconsin, like the State Junior Championship, operated by the WSGA, and the State PGA Junior. But there wasn’t much else.
But for decades Olsen was operating his own junior events, three per summer at Kenosha-area courses. Those junior events are no longer held because of the emergence of the Wisconsin PGA Foundation Junior Tour, which now hosts hundreds of junior events annually all around the state.
“When the Wisconsin PGA started expanding their junior events, it really wasn’t necessary for me to do that any longer,” Olsen said.
Olsen was also the driving force behind the Kenosha County Open for about 30 years after the local newspaper stopped running the event. That tournament is still going strong, as is a separate Kenosha County Senior Open, which Olsen founded about 30 years ago.
“He’s done a lot to keep the Kenosha County Open going, which impacts a lot of professionals in that area,” Stadler said. “And he’s a great guy.”
Warren, now retired, was a golf sales representative in Wisconsin for more than 25 years, promoting varied brands such as Ashworth, Allen Edmonds, Maui Jim, Lorente and Certifresh Cigars.
“He serviced accounts all around the state,” Stadler said of Warren. “In addition, he was a big supporter of our Junior Tours forever. He provided gifts that were given to host professionals. He sponsored some section events for a number of years, and he volunteered at a lot of junior events.”
Warren also served as president of, and primary driving force behind, the Wisconsin Golf Sales Association from 2011 to ’22. In addition, Warren and his family also provide funding for an annual scholarship through the WPGA Junior Foundation, for a deserving junior golfer.