Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Who might be the next Webb Simpson, the newest U.S. Open winner? Could he be among the 150-plus golfers who will descend upon Chenal Country Club's Bear Den Course in mid-July? The odds say it's likely another major golf winner will be lurking in the field. Simpson was a two-time winner of the Southern Amateur Championship during an illustrious amateur career.

The first name on the permanent Southern Amateur Championship trophy, created in 1922, is Robert Tyre Jones Jr., better known as Bobby Jones, maybe the best amateur golfer the game has ever known. Jones won both the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur, as well as that British Open and Amateur events in his historic "Grand Slam" year of 1930, before he retired from the game.

On the other end of that list of winners on the trophy, one finds the name of Webb Simpson in both 2005 and 2007.

Simpson, the Wake Forest University product, saw his professional star begin to rise last year as he won two tournaments, including the Deutschbank as part of the FedEx Cup series in the fall. His 2012 season had been spotty, though, until he survived when everyone else around him faltered Sunday at The Olympic Club in San Francisco to win the U.S. Open.

The prestigious Southern Amateur will be played over four rounds of stroke play at Chenal's Bear Den course July 18-21. With both the Southern Am coming to Chenal this summer and the venerable Western Amateur scheduled for The Alotian Club next summer, Buford McCarty, the executive secretary of the Birmingham, Ala.-based Southern Golf Association, was led to say back in early February that Little Rock “could well become the amateur capital of the world right here, real quick.”

“The Western is quite a feather in your cap. To have both the Southern Amateur and the Western in back-to-back years, that’s a heck of an achievement,” McCarty told a gathering at Chenal in February.

In a survey that ranked an estimated 3,000 amateur golf tournaments worldwide, McCarty said, the Southern Amateur places in the top five U.S. tourneys and in the Top 10 internationally.

Former major championship winner who have won the Southern Am, along with Simpson, include Ben Crenshaw, Bob Tway, Hubert Green, Justin Leonard, Texarkana Country Club's Bill Rogers, Mark Brooks and Lanny Wadkins. Memphis' Casey Wittenberg, who was in contention for a while at Olympic over the weekend, won the Southern Amateur in 2003.

The first Southern Am was contested in 1902, predated only by the U.S. Amateur (run by the United States Golf Association), the Western Amateur and the North-South Amateur, which also started in 1902.

“These kids who are going to be here in July in Chenal, one of those in two or three years could be the next Webb Simpson of the [PGA] Tour,” Jay Fox, executive director of the Arkansas State Golf Association, said in March, before Simpson became today's household word. “Fans will have to pick out some players to watch. To get something like that in Arkansas is a real feather in [Wyn Norwood's] cap and in Chenal’s cap. They played it at Shoal Creek [outside Birmingham] two years ago. This is a big, big deal for the Southern to be at Chenal and the Western Am to be at Alotian.”

Norwood, a Chenal club member and the departing golf coach at UALR, is a Southern Golf Association board member instrumental with bringing the event to Little Rock, according to Buford McCarty.

Little Rock’s Alex Carpenter, a rising senior at Abilene Christian College, won the Southern Amateur at Shoal Creek in 2010. The Southern Am winner receives an invitation to Arnold Palmer’s PGA event at Bay Hill for the following year, and Carpenter came one shot shy of making the 36-hole cut in 2011.