Winged Foot Golf Club

By Sam Weinman – The Journal News

November 10, 2005

MAMARONECK – Much of what you need to know about Tom Nieporte can be encapsulated in his daily commute, which takes close to three hours round trip, and would drive most men crazy. But Nieporte isn’t most men. Every day during the season for the past 27 years, the Winged Foot Golf Club head pro has made the same drive from the family home in Bayville, on Long Island, to Mamaroneck. Somehow, to him, it never seemed like much of a chore.

“I enjoy it,” Nieporte said. “I think about the day’s work or I listen to a baseball game. But it doesn’t bother me. Some people don’t like it. But I do.”

Surely there is something to be learned from a man who displays such remarkable patience, but with Nieporte, that would be just the start. Few figures in golf inspire as much affection as the 77-year-old Winged Foot pro, who was recently named the winner of the 2005 Bill Strausbaugh Award from the PGA of America. The award is given to a pro who has been an exemplary mentor to his assistants and has served his community. By that measure, Nieporte’s selection was an obvious one. Run down the list of notable head pros in this area and there is a good chance they worked for Nieporte – from Rick Vershure at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale to Bobby Heins at Old Oaks Country Club in Purchase, to Darrell Kestner at Long Island’s Deepdale Golf Club. Go beyond this immediate area and it includes a PGA Tour player (now playing the tour, Michael Allen worked for Nieporte in the mid-1990s) as well as a PGA of America National Teacher of the Year (David Glenz, the head pro at Crystal Springs in New Jersey, was under Nieporte in the late ’70s).

All are pros who had the advantage of putting a name as reputable as Winged Foot on their resumes. Mostly, though, they just had a front-row seat to Nieporte.

“The ultimate golf professional,” Kestner said.

“Without a doubt, the nicest man I’ve ever met,” said former assistant Paul Alexander, now the head pro at Brae Burn Country Club in Purchase.

“The most wonderful, caring man,” current assistant Alicia Dibos said.

In almost three decades overseeing the golf operation at Winged Foot, Nieporte’s impressive crop of assistants has become an extension of a family that also includes nine children and 27 grandchildren. But as much as they might credit Nieporte for their success, the pro is quick to argue otherwise.

“I’ve had some outstanding assistants,” he said. “But they were all outstanding before they got here.” The same might be said of Nieporte. In 1977, more than a dozen years after leaving the PGA Tour to spend more time with his growing family, Nieporte was enjoying a fruitful tenure as the head pro at Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, Long Island. At the time, he had said the only way he’d leave Piping Rock was if an opportunity arose at a place like Winged Foot. Sure enough, after Winged Foot’s longtime head pro Claude Harmon announced his retirement, Nieporte was lured to Mamaroneck to be the fourth head pro in Winged Foot’s history.

“Every day I come to work I feel blessed to follow in the footsteps of champions,” Nieporte said. “You work at a club where there are kings and presidents and all kinds of professional athletes and businessmen. I don’t take for granted that I’m the head pro here.”

Curiously, Nieporte had an early chance to eliminate his epic commute, almost buying a house just outside the Winged Foot gates on Mamaroneck Road in the late ’70s. At the time, the house was $60,000 – a bargain by today’s standards – but as the club’s new head pro, Nieporte had reservations. For instance, with so many Nieporte children, there would always be a handful of cars in the driveway. The neighbors might begin to wonder.

“They’d think we were wild,” Nieporte said with a laugh.

The reality was different, but Nieporte’s apprehension underscored how seriously he viewed his new position. He was a top player in his prime, winning three times on the tour, including the Bob Hope Classic in 1967, when he was already full-time at Piping Rock (it was the last time a club pro won a tour event, a mark that likely won’t ever be broken). Yet shortly after arriving at Winged Foot, Nieporte, even with exempt status on the Senior Tour, decided his days as a serious competitor were over.

“I was itching to play but I knew right then that I didn’t want to get into a situation where I jeopardized my job. People would ask if I was a touring pro or a club pro,” Nieporte said. “The reason it wasn’t a big deal was because I had already played so much.”

Indeed, Nieporte had already secured two lifetimes’ worth of stories from his time on the tour, traveling the countryside with some of the game’s greats, and at least on one occasion, flirting with a major championship. In 1964, he found himself in the last group of the PGA Championship at Columbus Country Club alongside Bobby Nichols and Ben Hogan. He birdied the first hole the final day to pull into a tie for the lead, but couldn’t hold on, and ended up fifth.

“I think I was more interested in watching Ben Hogan play than I was in my own game,” Nieporte said.

Even now, the links to his past are ever present. Several times a year, at Winged Foot member-guests or at the Anderson Memorial, Nieporte thrills contestants at pre-tournament dinners by conducting interviews via teleconference with some of the game’s biggest names. The club staff sets up a phone and a microphone, and Nieporte gets everyone from Arnold Palmer to Byron Nelson to call in and answer questions.

“The people just eat it up,” Winged Foot assistant Bill Van Orman said. “Not many people can do that, but that was his gang. That’s who he was running with on tour.”

To some it might be heady company, but Nieporte hardly thinks of it that way. If anything, those who know him best say his longevity among such a high-profile membership like Winged Foot’s is that he treats everyone in and outside the club the same way.

“I don’t think it’s in his mind that one person is more powerful than the other,” said Dibos, a native of Peru who spent nine years playing the LPGA Tour before Nieporte lured her to Winged Foot. “Everyone is equal – no matter where they come from or what they have.”

For someone whose first U.S. Open at Winged Foot came as a player in 1959 – so in awe of his surroundings, Nieporte said he duffed his first three tee shots – a chance to preside over the fifth Open at the club next June might be a fitting way to conclude his career. But Nieporte isn’t in a hurry to retire, and there’s no rush to see him go. He might not teach as many lessons as he once did, and his days making headlines as a player are long over, but he remains beloved just by driving to work each day and being Tom Nieporte.

“My whole time here I’ve never heard him use a four-letter word or even heard him say something negative about someone,” Van Orman said. “Sometimes I wish he got mad just to see what it would be like. But that’s not who he is. I wish more people were like him. It’d probably be a much better world.”