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Utah Golf Association Gold Club Award
Alexander Celebrated with UGA’s Highest Honor
By Kurt Kragthorpe
Dick Alexander was a UGA executive director, Utah Open tournament director and Salt Lake City golf director. Add it up, and his career in the game gave him major influence in the Salt Lake Valley and beyond.
“I believe it is not hyperbole to state that few people have done more to promote the game of golf in our state,” longtime golf administrator Dave Terry wrote in nominating Alexander for the 2019 Gold Club Award that honors him posthumously.
Alexander, who died in January at age 72, is perhaps best remembered for his operation of the Utah Open at Willow Creek Country Club in Sandy in the 1980s and ’90s. Working for University Hospital as tournament’s organizing group and beneficiary, Alexander turned the Utah Open into a major event that attracted many top players from outside of the PGA Tour, in the days prior to what is now known as the Korn Ferry Tour taking hold as a developmental circuit.
The Utah Open’s stature was such that Utah-based PGA Tour golfers would come and play at Willow Creek if they were eliminated in The International, a Colorado tour stop that once had a first-day cut.