AT&T Byron Nelson hits home for TOUR rules officials

When Mike Stiller was a teenager, he used to go to the AT&T Byron Nelson and follow Justin Leonard or one of the other PGA TOUR pros who played out of the Vaquero Club where he worked as a caddie.

After he graduated from James Madison and scored a job with the Northern Texas PGA Section, Stiller could sometimes be found working as the calligrapher at the scoreboard outside the pavilion at TPC Four Seasons, which was hosting the tournament at the time.

This week, Stiller is back at the AT&T Byron Nelson for the first time since joining the TOUR rules staff in 2015. He’s the advance man, which means Stiller arrives the previous week and interfaces with the on-site tournament staff as well as the course superintendent, assuring everything is ready for the event.

“This is something I've been looking forward to for a long time,” says Stiller, who is sharing duties with the retiring Brad Fabel this week. “... This is a pretty special event for me, no doubt.”

Working with Stiller this week are two other former employees of the Northern Texas PGA Section – Jordan Harris and Mike Peterson. Harris will set up the front nine at the new host venue, TPC Craig Ranch, while Peterson handles the final nine holes.

Like Stiller, both are working the Byron Nelson for the first time since leaving the NTPGA and joining the TOUR – Peterson in 2005 and Harris in 2017.

“It's kind of neat to see us come through the ranks like that and get to this level,” Peterson admits.

And there are actually two other TOUR rules officials who have NTPGA ties: Drew Miller is a former intern while Harold Geyer, a tournament director on the Korn Ferry Tour, worked there for 12 years.

Peterson started the pipeline, so to speak.

He went to New Mexico State and earned a degree in business administration in a program that specialized in golf management. Internships with the Southern California and Colorado PGA sections, as well as the PGA of America, stoked Peterson’s interest in running golf tournaments.

“It's always different,” he says. “You're always going to different places, new golf courses, new cities or states. ... And I was never a good enough player to compete at any sort of high level like that. But it was a way for me to be involved at the highest level, tournament-wise.”

There was another pull for Peterson, who took a job at the NTPGA as director of tournament operations right out of college.

“I fell in love with the Rules of Golf,” Peterson says. “It was kind of like a puzzle to me. You had questions that people would ask you -- the juniors would ask you questions, the parents, that sort of stuff and it just was neat to try and figure out what the answer was.

“It could be complicated at times, but it just was a big puzzle to me and I kind of liked the way it worked. So that just got me really interested in it.”

Stiller and Harris have similar backgrounds.

Stiller’s first job was picking range balls so he could practice at the club where his swing coach worked. When his family moved from New Jersey to the Dallas area, he became a fixture at Vaquero, caddying and working odd jobs there. Stiller interned at the NTPGA and did so well he was offered a job before the second semester of his senior year at James Madison. He started two weeks after he graduated in 2008.

“Working for the Northern Texas section really was an honor because it's ... known for being one of the very prestigious sections not just because of the quality of the tournaments and the programs that they've put on and conducted and run, but because of the people and, and the history of the people that have worked there,” Stiller says.

Peterson had already left to work for the TOUR by the time Stiller went to work at the NTPGA. But he remembers when Peterson would stop by the office to say hello and talk golf with his former co-workers.

“I always kind of looked up to him like, oh, this is really cool,” Stiller says. “It's a PGA TOUR referee coming to just to say hello -- like, how cool is that? And so, him just kind of being around kind of got me thinking maybe someday down the road, this could happen.”

Harris studied professional golf management at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He learned after his first internship at a small private club in Indiana that he didn’t want to sell shirts and give lessons for the rest of his life. He was drawn to the operational side of the competition, though.

“My director asked me what I liked about the internship, and I said, hey, it was a great golf professional that I worked for,” Harris recalls. “He got me involved in tournaments. I did scoreboards and picking hole locations and all that stuff. I really enjoyed that.

“And he said, well, you need to go and try a section of the PGA of America and see what you think about that. At the time I had no idea what a section was. ... And I just flat out asked him, I said, well, if I'm going to try this, I'd like to go to the best one. So, what's that? Where's the best section?”

Harris’ advisor suggested the NTPGA, which is known for a junior golf tour that helped nurture the likes of Jordan Spieth, Scottie Scheffler and Will Zalatoris – Thursday's Featured Group at TPC Craig Ranch – as well as an extensive roster of other events, including stages of the TOUR’s qualifying school and various Monday qualifiers. Harris was hired as an intern in 2008 to work with Stiller and Geyer, who would leave to work for the TOUR in '10.

“We worked together that summer and I fell in love with it,” says Harris, who was later invited back to do a seven-month internship and hired full-time. “I loved, loved everything about tournaments and got really involved with the rules and wanting to learn more.”

“It was us traveling and working together an entire summer, whether it was going out to Midland to run a section championship or all the tournaments we ran here in Dallas,” Stiller recalls. “It was basically the three of us. ....

“But that was a cool summer. I mean, looking back on it, it was really neat just to have all of us doing the same thing together and sure enough, just years later, we're all out here doing it again.”

Peterson, Stiller and Harris give the NTPGA’s executive director, Mark Harrison, a lot of credit for helping them grow as referees and tournament officials.

“Mark’s got a wonderful golf mind and ... he did a really good job of just pushing us and always thinking about how we can do things better,” Harris says. “And he really mirrored our set-up philosophy around the PGA TOUR’s set-up philosophy.”

Stiller also appreciated the way Harrison put his employees in a position to succeed.

“What Mark has really done, I think personally, at that section is really given the staff there that works for him the platform to really take off and do whatever they want to do,” Stiller says. “I respect Mark completely and wholly, but one particular reason that I really, really appreciate about him is that if somebody expressed him what they wanted, if they wanted to leave the organization one day and move on to something different or something bigger, he had their back 100%.

“So, when I told him that this is something that I wanted to do he did everything in his power to make that happen and support me 110 percent. And that's something I would never forget.”