Longtime Vail-area head golf professional to be inducted into Colorado Golf Hall of Fame
Tom Apple has worked in the Vail valley for more than 50 years
Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily
The first time Tom Apple traveled west of the Mississippi was for the 1969 NCAA Division I golf championships in Colorado Springs. The Penn State senior glanced around the Broadmoor Golf Course and had an epiphany.
“I figured if everything in Colorado is like the Broadmoor, I’m coming back,” Apple said. The Pennsylvania-born golfer did — and never left.
“Tom is a wonderful ambassador for golf,” said 18-time PGA major champion Jack Nicklaus, a close friend. Nicklaus designed the course at the Country Club of the Rockies in Edwards, where Apple has spent the last 41 years as head professional. In honor of his sterling career as a local golf pro, Apple will be inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame on Oct. 3.
“You don’t normally find that somebody has a tenure as long as he has at a golf course. People move on,” said good friend and world-renowned golf coach David Leadbetter. “He’s a real pillar of the community … Not many people don’t know Tom Apple.”
“This award is so well-deserved,” Leadbetter said. “He’s brought so much to the Colorado area and particularly the Vail Valley. In all probability, it’s long overdue.”
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Apple is the first person from the Colorado Mountain Region to be elected into the hall.
“Tom’s reputation, his accomplishments as a PGA Professional and his transformative impact on Vail golf qualified him as an excellent candidate for induction,” Colorado Golf Hall of Fame executive director Jon Rizzi said in a press release. Apple received more than 67 percent of the vote required for induction from the 36-member board of directors.
“His passion for teaching is matched only by his dedication to the game and support of the local community,” Nicklaus added.
Growing up in golf
Apple learned how to play golf from his father at the ripe age of 5 back in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He started competing the following year and became a caddy shortly after. While he also excelled at basketball, football, tennis and baseball, Apple always gravitated to golf.
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“It was just me versus the course,” he explained. “I really loved the game.”
After winning the 1964 high school state title, Apple earned a scholarship to Penn State, where he studied marketing and was the top golfer on the nationally-ranked team for two years. After graduation, he gave his pro playing career a shot. Apple couldn’t consistently top the mini-tour food chain, however, and thus decided to start as an assistant professional at the Scottsdale Country Club in 1972. A year later, he joined the Vail Golf Club, one of the few 18-hole courses between Vail and Salt Lake City at the time.
“Mountain golf was in its infancy then,” Apple said.
Apple began working with former President Gerald R. Ford and his family. He also befriended Bud Palmer, the first captain of the New York Knicks. In 1975, Palmer, along with Fred Green and Art Kelton, offered him the head professional job at EagleVail, the second course to open in the valley. The following year, Ford hosted the first Jerry Ford Invitational Golf Tournament.
Apple — who co-hosted and played in all 20 tournaments during the event’s two-decade run — enjoyed rounds with the likes of Bob Hope, Clint Eastwood and Bobby Knight. Apple said Eastwood “loves golf” even though he isn’t especially prolific. He described Knight as being — predictably — “intense.”
“But a great guy, very competitive and very fun to be with,” Apple said.
More than 50 golf professionals, along with many pros fresh off playing The International at Castle Pines, would venture up to Vail for Ford’s invitational. Apple said the event catalyzed the ski town summer recreation boom.
“It was one of the most iconic pro-amateur events in the country,” he said. “That exposure and having these people — from celebrities to politicians to golf professionals — being in the Vail Valley for three or four days every August really put us on the map.”
In 1984, Apple became the head pro at the Country Club of the Rockies. Ford became one of the first members, often playing his weekly rounds with friends Leonard Firestone and Kaiser Morcus. The former president — and college football star — was powerful, so Apple concentrated on chipping and putting in most lessons.
“There was no pretension with President Ford. He was just a very outgoing individual and a good athlete,” Apple said. “He loved golf. He was strong; he could hit a five-wood 220 yards.”
Of the more than 10,000 lessons Apple has given, it’s the ones with juniors — not sessions with stars — that he remembers most. Using his childhood teachers as a model, Apple always hoped to inspire young golfers. He was instrumental in starting the Vail Valley Junior Golf Association and taught his two daughters, standout volleyball players at Vail Mountain School, to love the game of golf along the way. Over Father’s Day weekend, they flew him out to California to play a few rounds. Apple proudly stated his four grandsons and one granddaughter also play — even the 1-year-old.
“They have wonderful children and great husbands, so it’s certainly a true blessing in my life,” he said of his daughters. “The fact they like golf is just icing on the cake.”
A true teacher
Apple conducts 250-300 lessons in Florida and Colorado each year. When it comes to instructing, he often says, “I can’t make anybody better, but I can teach them how to get better.”
“If someone really wants to learn the game and become proficient and they have the desire to work and practice — I love working with them,” Apple explained. “That means they need to do their reps, they need to practice, they need to follow up on what we do in our lesson.”
Throughout his half-century of work, Apple has mentored 19 individuals from assistant professional to head professional status. Joe Kamby cut his teeth with Apple when he joined the Country Club of the Rockies staff as an outside service member in 1997.
“He truly showed me everything I needed to succeed,” the Sonnenalp Golf Club assistant professional said. In addition to managing people and relating well across departments — from board members to course maintenance and food services — Kamby said Apple ingrained in him the art of “treating every person in front of you like the most important person around.”
“From ex-president Ford, a Country Club of the Rockies member, to any other less-notorious member, to the guy in the locker room shining shoes, Tom made them feel seen and went out of his way to strike up a conversation,” Kamby said before adding that Apple is also a master at name recollection.
“And he knows everyone,” Kamby continued. One winter, Kamby joined Apple for the annual PGA Show in Orlando. Walking through the cavernous convention center, Kamby quickly learned it was going to be hard to conduct business with any vendors.
“Literally every 10 steps, he would be stopped by someone to say hello and catch up,” Kamby stated. Everyone loves to see (him) and chat with him. His ability to make conversations about them instead of him stands out.”
One individual Apple counted as a close friend was Nicklaus, whom he’s played with “a half-dozen” times or so. When the Country Club of the Rockies opened its front nine in 1984, Nicklaus and Apple gave it a test run. They were playing even — using similar clubs off each tee — until the par 5.
“He stands up and hits it 50 yards by me,” Apple remembered. “I say ‘Jack, what was that?’ and he says, ‘I really didn’t have to hit hard until now.'”
The lesson — sometimes you have to stay in the fairway and make golf shots and other times you have to let it rip — has stuck with Apple, even as his beloved sport has moved from finesse to force.
“The game has changed a little bit now; the new mantra is hit it as hard as you can,” Apple continued. “But the greatest players in the world still know how to play the game as well as just hit it far.”
While his brush with some of the greats in the golf world is notable, Apple’s real influence and legacy has been the broad reach of his extensive coaching tree.
“Golf spread throughout the West because of Tom,” stated Tom Connell, former PGA Director of Golf at Denver Country Club. “He was integral to golf in the mountains of Colorado and the creation of the West Chapter of the PGA.
“I can think of a dozen or more off the top of my head whom Tom had such an influence on in their careers,” added Kamby.
His Country Club of the Rockies golf shop also received a top-20 national ranking from Golf Digest 12 different times. In 1995, he was the Colorado Section PGA private merchandiser of the year, an award he also won within the West Chapter in both 1997 and 2014.
“When I think of Tom Apple, love and dedication to Vail Valley golf, teaching excellence, and golf shop merchandising come to mind,” said Clayton Cole, renowned PGA golf professional at Cherry Hills Country Club from 1991 to 2007.
Apple’s local notoriety remains visible, not just on the greens but on Pepi’s “Wall of Fame” in Vail, the Fiestas’ menu — Kamby said the Tom Apple Combo is “a must-try” item — and the aisle named in his honor at Village Market. He also gives back to the community through his charity golf tournament, The Vail International Pro-Am, which started in 1988.
The year prior, the Country Club of the Rockies hosted the Jack Nicklaus International Cup matches.
“A lot of the tournament players from all over the country got in touch after the event and said, ‘We’d love to come back to Vail,'” Apple said. He and Pete Seibert got to work and organized the first Vail International Pro-Am, which has morphed into one of the longest-running elite pro-am tournaments in the country. The event brings 30 of the top clubs in the country to Eagle County for a week and has raised over $600,000 for charities like First Tee of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, YouthPower 365 and Can Do Multiple Sclerosis.
“That’s my baby. I love the event. I love the guys,” Apple said. He plans to host it again this fall but knows he won’t be able to do it forever.
“As long as we have people really wanting to come to the event, I’m taking it year by year at this point,” Apple continued. “I’m probably going to teach until I drop.”
Leadbetter, who still coaches a few PGA pros and writes for Golf Digest, feels he hasn’t worked a day in his life. He said Apple probably feels the same way.
“It’s just a passion we have,” Leadbetter said. “You can certainly see it in Tom. I mean, he just has this enthusiasm from a teaching standpoint to really help people. And that’s what it’s all about. … that’s why he’s such a perfect fit here for the longest time.”
Apple will join amateur standouts Jon Lindstrom and Robert Polk and superintendents Rollie Cahalane and Lance Johnson as the newest members of the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame. Their plaques will be displayed at the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame Museum, located at — appropriately — The Broadmoor. And while the award is a well-earned and well-cherished career capstone, Apple humbly deflects the attention.
“You know what it means? It means I’m old,” he said with a laugh before listing off some of the names of those who made it all possible: Connell, whom he met when he arrived as a young assistant pro in 1973, Cole, a fellow hall of famer, Green and others. It goes without saying: the accolades aren’t what Apple cherishes the most.
“I loved where I was,” he said. “And who I was working with.”
