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Profiles of
Key People
This chapter is devoted to those who have integrally helped shape the Alabama Golf Association and amateur golf in the state, be it with their play on the golf course in state championships or their impact away from it administratively or in some other way. It is far from an all-inclusive list, as space constraints must dictate, as well as the fact that features have been written on many other difference makers elsewhere in this book, be it stand-alone stories or cumulative stories about their play in state championships.
In no particular order thereafter, but there is no other person to start with than Bob Phillips.
Bob Phillips
Bob Phillips would serve the AGA with distinction from 1937 to the year
of his death, 1977. There is no telling the course the AGA would have taken without Phillips’s unerring hand on the tiller.
Not an athlete on the field of play,
he wrote about sports with distinction
as the sports editor of the Birmingham Age-Herald from 1931 to 1950 and as executive sports editor of the Birmingham Post-Herald from 1950 to 1973. A graduate of Sewanee, he also covered football
and baseball, but golf was his first and enduring love. He was probably best known for his column On the Roof.
Phillips was inducted into the Birmingham Golf Association Hall of Fame in 1965, part of their inaugural first class, and was a charter inductee of the Alabama Sports Writers Hall of Fame. He was also a charter member of the Monday Morning Quarterback Club and served
as the treasurer of the organization for twenty-nine years. He was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, Media category, posthumously in 2005.
He served as secretary-treasurer of the AGA for forty years until his death,
Bob Phillips