The Oklahoma Kid
On a warm, sunny day late last May, Bryan Karns sauntered over to a gaggle of reporters standing atop a small bluff in front of a field of American flags. They were there to speak with Lt. Col. Dan Rooney – founder of Folds of Honor – who was soon arriving to announce a partnership with PGA HOPE.
While they waited, they found a young championship director who spends his career behind the scenes, yet has a knack for stealing the show. He answered on-the-record questions in a casual, off-the-record sort of way. He didn’t hesitate or glance over to a publicist behind the lenses of his Ray-Ban Wayfarers. He gave time to each journalist, giving the scrum a one-on-one feel. And when the media time was done, he disappeared on his golf cart – presumably off to court another group of dignitaries somewhere on this 320-acre palace he calls home.
You see, here’s the thing about people who hold the title of “Championship Director” for the PGA of America. These are the guys and girls who have the golden ticket - a conspicuous “All-Access” logo on their credentials, sporting hats and shirts that you’ll never find in a souvenir shop and jetting around world-class courses in their topless Club Cars while the golf world graciously takes in the fruits of their labor. They’re golf royalty when it comes to the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup.
It sounds badass – and much of it is – but there’s another side to this job you need to know about. What that All-Access badge or the media recognition or the rubbing of elbows with some of the most powerful people in golf don’t reveal is the tireless (and often tiresome) work they put in over the last two years and beyond. They don’t show the double-wide trailer they call an office tucked away in the back corner of some of the most coveted acreage in the country. And they don’t offer a glimpse into the scheduled moves across the country every two years to start over and do it all again.
That's why here and now, Bryan Karns is the luckiest man in the world.
You see, Bryan is an Oklahoma kid. Diplomas from Stillwater High School and Oklahoma State University hang on his wall. His wife is an Owasso Ram. And for someone who’s spent an entire career moving his family to Chicago and Washington D.C. and Louisville (twice) and Rochester, New York and French Lick, Indiana, it’s nice to be back home.
Golf wasn’t necessarily in the stars for Bryan growing up. He did play junior golf at Stillwater Country Club, a 1966 Donald Sechrest design. In 1994, his dad brought him to Southern Hills for the 76th PGA Championship.
“That was a pretty seminal moment for me growing up,” Karns said.
His closest connection to the game growing up came from his uncle, Lynn Blevins. Coming from a generations-deep Oklahoma State family, Blevins was the oddball – signing with the University of Oklahoma to play golf. That set up a career in the game – first coaching, then managing golf courses, then coaching again. His stops have included Regis University, Rogers State University, the University of Florida, the University of Iowa and his very first job – coaching his alma mater for three seasons beginning in 1979.
“He’s always been a PGA professional so it’s cool for me to have always had a connection to an actual PGA pro.”
But Karns was never good enough to play competitively (his words). An amateur sportsman in his younger years, golf just wasn’t a natural fit. When he enrolled at Oklahoma State University, though, he knew a career in athletics was calling his name. At the time, the school didn’t offer a sports management or sports media program, so Bryan studied the next best thing – journalism.
“My first real experience working in sports was as a sophomore at OSU. I had a deal with a couple of local papers. When their teams would come play in Stillwater, they would call me and I’d go out to take a few photos and write a recap for them.”
That initial experience led to a position with the university’s century-old newspaper, The Daily O’Collegian. Whatever high he was riding from seeing his byline in the school paper, it was swiftly and certainly squashed with his first assignment.
“I started out on the beat for Mike Gundy’s first spring and first season as head football coach. And that was a nightmare season. As much as I was a homer, it became increasingly difficult to write objective storylines.”
(In 2005, Oklahoma State finished dead last in the Big 12 Southern Division and suffered seven defeats in their last eight games, including a loss to the Texas Longhorns after leading the eventual national champions 28-12 at halftime.)
“It’s such a cool thing to me though,” Karns remarked. “If you’re an O’Colly writer, the access you get and confidence you get for being able to walk into a press room or go up to an athlete or coach and ask questions – that’s huge.”
His time with the Daily O’Collegian led into a position as a student sports information director for the OSU Athletics media relations office. It was here that Bryan seriously began considering career opportunities in sports.
“As a student SID in the summertime, there’s not much to do and I was looking to add to my résumé, so I found an internship posting outside of the Classroom Building on campus advertising a hospitality internship with the PGA of America.”
By this time, it was 2007 and the PGA Championship was scheduled to be back at Southern Hills.
“Part of what was so incredible about ’07 was you’ve got Tiger winning and the energy and the atmosphere was just unreal. You know, whoever is going to win is great, but Tiger is just different. When Tiger is associated with your club, it just means a little bit more. When he won, somehow I ended up in the ballroom when he was doing his Champions Toast and that was when I knew that I needed to keep doing this.”
When he went back to Stillwater that fall, he knew he wanted to stay in touch. He worked his way into a year-long gig at the 2008 Ryder Cup at Valhalla, where a rag-tag bunch of Americans (J.B. Holmes, Kenny Perry and Anthony Kim, anyone?) pulled off a miracle over a world-class European team.
Following that eye-opening experience in Louisville, he returned home once more to finish his master’s degree at Oklahoma State before taking a job with the Tulsa Shock – the WNBA franchise relocated from Detroit. With legendary head coach Nolan Richardson at the helm and Olympic gold medalist sprinter former UNC Tarheel point guard Marion Jones coming off the bench, the Shock won six games in their first season…out of 34.
“That’s a great talking point when you’re talking to people from Tulsa. They’re like, ‘you remember the Shock?!’ It was a grind but it showed me here’s one extreme and then there’s the other when it comes to job satisfaction. I remember when I interviewed to get back with the PGA, the guy that hired me said, ‘If you can sell that product in Tulsa, you can probably sell anything.’”
During the second half of 2010, Bryan was hired on to work the 2012 Ryder Cup. Following the American team’s meltdown at Medinah, he returned to Louisville to begin working on the 2014 PGA Championship in a corporate hospitality/marketing role. It was on the grounds of Valhalla Golf Club that he decided to work toward becoming a championship director.
“If you go and talk to most people on our staff, their goal professionally is to become a champ director. And they come from all different backgrounds. You have to be willing to be out in front and speak publicly. Not everyone is totally wired for it, but that’s the goal.”
After a year of selling corporate hospitality, the PGA of America signed a deal with French Lick Resort in Indiana to host the 2015 Senior PGA Championship. Louisville was the closest market to the resort and the team had done so well selling out Valhalla that Karns got his shot. He successfully operated the event in a town of 1,500 people and earned the same role for the 2017 Senior PGA Championship at Trump National Golf Club in Washington D.C.
“Both of those events were totally different for several reasons, but both were great because it prepared me for so many things. In the spring of 2017, I was kind of at a crossroads. Once you get into the champ director role, you say ‘alright I’m happy to do a Senior PGA, but now I want to do a PGA.”
The timing for Karns couldn’t have been better. A week after Bernhard Langer squeaked past Vijay Singh at Trump National, the PGA of America announced that Southern Hills Country Club would host the 2021 Senior PGA Championship and a PGA Championship at some point by 2030.
“That really kind of served as a boost to me because I knew that I was going to be able to come home in a few years, and in the meantime, we got to go to Oak Hill in 2019. Rochester and Oak Hill are fantastic. One of the best memberships I’ve ever been around.”
After a successful two-year stint in New York, the Karns family packed up and moved home. Little did they know what was to come.
The Karns family packed up and returned to Oklahoma - and Southern Hills Country Club - after the 2019 Senior PGA Championship.
Tulsa was hoping for a PGA Championship sooner rather than later. When the 2021 Senior PGA was announced, the governing body also promised a PGA Championship by 2030. Karns, who had moved his family to Tulsa to start work on 2021, was realistic about Tulsa’s chances.
“I know everyone here wanted it to be as soon as possible, but everything was pointing toward 2030,” Karns said.
He arrived in Green Country with the PGA of America constituency for their customary initial site visit for the Senior PGA Championship in 2018. They met with Southern Hills general manager Nick Sidorakis, staff and members of the club to discuss logistics and planning. By the end of the visit, the championship team was able to put together a preliminary corporate budget. Southern Hills was so excited that Sidorakis mentioned the possibility of going on sale before the end of 2018.
“I said, ‘Nick, it’s way to early. It’s like, so early it’s absurd,’” Karns said.
The issue is hyping the event too soon and losing your leverage with the community before the event actually happens. Sidorakis asked Karns to trust him, though.
“I told him, ‘Nick, if you can line up ten meetings, I’ll come back down there.”
In a week, Sidorakis had a full itinerary for Karns. Ten meetings later, they had sold seven chalets and three suites.
“That never happens,” Karns said. “We had such tremendous corporate momentum.”
Over the course of the next year, it looked like Southern Hills was primed for one of the most successful events in senior golf major championship history. Then the world stopped.
There’s not much more to write about COVID-19 that hasn’t already been written. We remember the details vividly. On March 11, 2020 NBA superstar Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19. Within minutes, his team’s game against the Oklahoma City Thunder was postponed.
Within days, the entire world was shut down.
Planet earth was living in a scene from Contagion.
No one knew what was happening. No one knew if they were safe. No one knew if life would ever be the same.
The PGA Tour Champions shut down for five months. The 2020 Senior PGA Championship – scheduled for May of 2020 in Benton Harbor, Michigan – was canceled. Even into the first weeks of 2021, Karns and his team were scrambling in Tulsa.
“We got to January and were thinking this is brutal because everything we wanted to do from a tent standpoint, the City of Tulsa Health Department wouldn’t sign off on it,” Karns said. “There were also companies who were saying they couldn’t invite people because of their new corporate entertainment policies.”
Then January 6 happened. Call it what you want – we’re not here to get political – but there was an immediate backlash on properties owned by the former POTUS. Within 96 hours, the PGA of America announced that the 2022 PGA Championship would not be played at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. And that’s when Karns really got to work.
“The first moment (it was announced), I picked up the phone and called Nick (Sidorakis),” Karns said. “Here’s this perfect pivot. We can go to all these companies that have committed a record amount for the Senior PGA Championship and say, ‘if we were able to get the PGA Championship, would you commit?’ This would allow us to move a lot of hospitality to 2022 and give us an opportunity to offer some hospitality at the Senior PGA in the form of open-air structures and things like that. And within 48 hours we had enough commitments that when the potential venues were being evaluated, it was a no-brainer.”
By the end of the month, we would know the fate of the 2022 PGA Championship. Before Tiger’s wreck; before Phil’s triumph at The Ocean Course and subsequent self-imposed downfall a handful of months later, Southern Hills was once again in the spotlight of the golf world.
Karns shows off the Wanamaker Trophy during a football game at his alma mater, Oklahoma State University.
In the 14 months since that announcement, Karns and his team have pulled off the unthinkable. They successfully completed a Senior PGA Championship amid a throng of health and safety hurdles thrown their way. They planned an event in less than a year and a half that will bring in more than $140 million economically to the City of Tulsa. And they played the storylines to perfection.
Will Tiger return to the site of his 2007 PGA Championship victory? Will Phil defend his Wanamaker Trophy as the oldest PGA Champion in history? Will one of the Oklahoma boys shock the world and win in their home state?
However it plays out, you know Karns will be somewhere out there living his dream with a pair of Wayfarers and a soft smile on his face. Because no matter how many people show up or who holds the Wanamaker on Sunday evening, he knows that he’s home.
“You go to a lot of places out there and people are like, ‘yeah that’s my hometown, but I don’t get back much.’ I grew up in Stillwater. I went to Oklahoma State. For me, being able to take this and help grow that brand of being Oklahoman – that’s special to me.”
Karns celebrates with his wife, Ashlie, after a United States victory in the 2020 Ryder Cup.