Tom Moore: Palmetto Golf Club’s pro emeritus devoted to growing game of golf (2024)

Having a conversation with Tom Moore can be a challenge at Palmetto Golf Club in Aiken.

Not in terms of getting a hold of him, or having the conversation itself.

No, the difficulty lies in how many people want to come up and greet him when they see him. Professional players, members of the club, long-time guests, long-lost friends, first-timers – if they show up to the club, they want to talk to him.

He's not called "Mr. Palmetto" for nothing.

"It's nice that they feel like I've done something that everybody respects," he said, then cracked a joke about his retirement as Palmetto's head golf professional and general manager in 2012: "Plus, I made the front page of two newspapers and didn't kill anybody. That's probably a first. I've been very fortunate in my life. Coming here, I think, was just meant to be."

And just think, the plan was to only be at Palmetto for two or three years.

That's all Moore had in mind back in 1982 when he came over from Augusta's West Lake Country Club to take a job at a Palmetto Golf Club that had declined from its glory days.

It was a great layout that was oozing with history, but in rough shape. He couldn't believe the decline it had suffered, and he intended to help restore that glory.

"Whenever I interviewed for the job, I went in there for the final job interview and said, 'You know, it's pretty sad that a historical place like this is having windows knocked out and is in terrible shape,'" he said. "I said, 'If you hire me and give me a chance, we'll bring it back.' They did. I wasn't sure when I left the interview if I was gonna be hired or not."

Palmetto did indeed take that chance, but Moore still only intended for it to be a couple of years before taking a better job elsewhere.

Then Palmetto's history hooked him.

"Two or three years went by, and that's where I got into the history of the golf course," he said. "A lot of it was just accidental. I've got one of the best ball collections, probably, in the country, and that's accidental. We'd have a heavy rain, and people would bring a ball in and say it washed out into the fairway.

"It looked like something that should be thrown away, and I'd stick it in a drawer. Then the drawer got full, and I dumped it in a box. Then people would come up that were either members there in the early part of the century and would say, 'Well, I've got this, and if you don't want it, I'm gonna throw it away.' I just started accumulating this stuff."

There were opportunities to leave – to historic places like Atlanta's East Lake Golf Club and Atlanta Athletic Club, but he just couldn't part with Palmetto.

Joe Inman, who spent more than a decade on the PGA Tour, once approached Moore and said some of the board members at Atlanta Athletic Club told him they were interested in offering Moore the job there. Moore said thanks, but no thanks.

"He says, 'I told them that's what you were gonna say,'" he said. "I would've probably made more money, but it didn't matter. My life has been basically here."

The money never mattered. Davis Love Jr. once told Moore he wasn't charging people nearly enough for lessons – he should've been charging two or three times more, but that wasn't Moore's concern. The way he sees it, his job is to get people to play golf.

"My intent is to get every young kid – it didn't matter what their abilities, if they had a chance to have a college scholarship or be a pro later – I just wanted to give them the opportunity to play," he said.

Love tried to lure Moore to Texas for a job back when Moore was at West Lake and had started a strong junior program there, but the timing just wasn't right.

"I told him that my wife is from South Carolina, and if I went to Texas and got offered the job at Palmetto, she'd probably leave me," he joked.

Junior golf is a passion for Moore, who didn't have many junior golf opportunities growing up at Camp Lejeune. The first tournament he played in was the North Carolina Amateur Championship, and he wasn't sure back then if there even was a junior championship.

He and his brother picked up the game as kids, then their father eventually joined them, and they'd play with a friend any day they were able to – regardless of the weather.

He started up a junior program upon taking the job at Palmetto, and it grew quickly.

"It got to where it was so big that the biggest traffic jam in Aiken at 8:30 and at 12:30 was around the parking lot at Palmetto with mothers coming to pick up their kids," he said.

That growth was unsustainable considering the size of Palmetto's facilities. He said he easily could've gotten 200 kids to sign up, but they had nowhere to put them. So he called up the head pros at the other area clubs and told them to all start up their own junior programs so they could accommodate Aiken's budding young players.

Through his junior programs he instructed future PGA Tour pros like Kevin Kisner and Scott Brown, future club professionals, future college players, future high school players, and plenty of kids who didn't follow the game any further – it didn't matter the skill level, he wanted to get them involved and help them out.

He's implemented plenty of other changes at Palmetto, where he's been the pro emeritus since retirement. The club used to shut down during Masters week until Moore arrived – so he opened it up and made $50,000 that first week, and from there business has continued to improve.

His pride in Palmetto means he's not going to spend much time talking about himself and his achievements, like how he oversaw a complete overhaul of the club to bring it back to national prominence.

The course improvements, the rebuilt greens, the bunker restorations, the upgrade to the pro shop, the history room full of artifacts that would leave any golf fan in awe – he's quick to deflect the credit, saying that none of it would be possible without Palmetto's members and the support they give.

It's hard to pick a favorite notable visitor or piece of history. There's just too much of it, and Moore found that out once he started digging through the club's history after being hired.

"Actually, until I got to Palmetto, I appreciated the history and stuff like that, but once I got to Palmetto, then all of a sudden the history was there," he said. "I kept on getting more inquisitive about it. Once you find something, then you look and you find something else."

So many of his findings ended up in the 1992 book "Palmetto Golf Club: The First 100 Years," and in 2011 he was the recipient of the Thomas Hitchco*ck and William C. Whitney Award at the Palmetto Amateur in honor of his significant contributions to golf in the Aiken area.

He sees the history of golf in America and Palmetto to be synonymous with one another, and many feel that way about the club and Moore.

An Aiken Standard letter to the editor received in 2019 tells the story of an encounter between a former resident and two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw at the PGA Tour's AT&T Byron Nelson tournament.

The man introduced himself to Crenshaw, and Crenshaw asked where he was from. When he replied "Aiken, South Carolina," Crenshaw immediately responded "home of Palmetto and the nicest man in golf, Tom Moore."

Yep, that's Mr. Palmetto.