Photo by Jeff WilhoitPayne’s Valley is a new addition to Big Cedar Lodge’s portfolio of golf courses.
Culture
How Good is Their Game? Golf Handicaps from 22 417-land businesspeople
While our friends in Branson keep investing in the greens, we thought it would be fun to do our own investigation into the golf skills of some of 417-land’s most well-known business professionals.
By Savannah Waszczuk
Jan 2018
How do local businesspeople stack up on the greens? To find out, we headed to the USGA GHIN Handicap Lookup (ghin.com) to check the handicaps of some of 417-land’s biggest names. For you non-golfers, handicaps allow players of different abilities to compete fairly by calculating net scores based on a player’s number of strokes and historic performance—generally, the lower the handicap, the better the golfer.
Lee Haik,
James Décor:
33.1
Sharon Koechner,
U.S. Bank:
25.5
Marshall Kinne,
Med-Pay Inc.:
25.3
Eda Bates,
American National Property and Casualty:
23.4
John Morris,
Bass Pro Shops:
22.9
Terry Davidson,
Gorgeous Eyes Forever:
22.8
Karen Smith,
Springfield News-Leader:
21.1
Kim Lorenzen,
Macadoodles:
20.3
Jami Peebles,
independent consultant:
18.7
Robert Low,
Prime Inc.:
18.3
Jack Stack,
SRC Holdings Corp.:
16.4
Connie Huff,
The Larson Group:
15.9
Greg Henslee,
O’Reilly Auto Parts:
12.2
Bobby Allison,
Custom Protein Corp.:
11.7
Dennis Heim,
Heim, Young & Associates Inc.:
10.5
Rex Blackwell,
Blackwell’s:
10.4
Rick Ramsey,
Ramsey Building:
10.3
Austin Herschend,
Big Whiskey’s American
Restaurant & Bar:
9.2
Rick Beaman,
Hiland Dairy:
7.4
Kenny Ross,
Morelock-Ross:
7.1
Gary Metzger,
Simmons Bank:
6.3
John Paul Morris,
Bass Pro Shops:
2.9
Good news for these golfers: Soon, there will be more courses for them to perfect their swings and conduct a little business. One of the golf’s biggest names swung by Branson with major news in April 2017. Tiger Woods announced the first public golf course he would design in America would be a part of Big Cedar Lodge. This course is Payne’s Valley, a 19-hole championship course that is replacing the old Murder Rock Golf Club. Woods partnered with Johnny Morris in the venture, bringing Morris a step closer in his dream of making Branson a world-class golf destination—perhaps even catching the attention of the PGA tour. Also new as of August 2017 was Mountain Top, a game-changer of a destination sprung from a partnership between Gary Player and Johnny Morris. Player was quoted calling this Big Cedar destination drastically stunning, as it gives golfers the chance to tee off alongside beautiful rock formations and magnificent Ozarks views. Big Cedar has another course in the works for 2018—this one designed by big-time design team Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. Big Cedar declined to disclose how much green is being invested in these three greens, but regardless, we can’t wait to tee up.
