by Kent Jennings Brockwell Staff Writer
After practicing law for more than 20 years, attorney Frank Keasler Jr. has decided to chase another of his passions - golf.
While Keasler isn’t trying to get a spot on the PGA Tour, he is starting a national amateur golf tournament called the “Championship of Best Friends” he hopes someday will be closely tied to the Super Bowl.
As president of the new organization, Keasler has had to gradually phase out of his practice over the past year, but he said he won’t quit totally.
“It took me a good year,” he said. “After being a lawyer for 20 years, I had a lot of established relationships that I couldn’t just walk away from. To pursue something noble while placing others in peril is not consistent.”
Keasler will still attend to a few of his oldest clients and will remain a partner of his firm, Henderson Keasler, but said he is really looking forward to getting the new golf tournament off the ground. And with pro golfer John Daly as the tournament’s spokesperson, Keasler might be well on his way.
The new tournament was named the Championship of Best Friends because Keasler said friendship is a core value to the game of golf and this tournament will be a celebration of both.
“This is all about being on a golf course with your friends and getting people reconnected with one of the real driving attributes of golf which is getting to spend four hours with your friends,” Keasler said. “The one thing that crosses all lines, be it black or white, male or female, Jew or Gentile, we all have a best friend.”
The tournament, which benefits Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, is a Two-person team tournament that will be played in eight NFL cities during its first year: Jacksonville, Detroit, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix and
Pittsburgh. The first stage will consist of a round on one of 30 designated courses in their city.
The teams with the top 30 scores will advance to a playoff and the winners there will travel to California where each city champion will be placed in a foursome with a pro golfer and their best friend for the national championship.
After the national tournament, which will be played just before next year’s Super Bowl, the amateurs will be flown to Detroit for the Super Bowl. In subsequent years, Keasler said the event will encompass all of the NFL cities and will be broken down into a tournament structure similar to the NFL’s playoff system. For the national tournament in Miami in 2007, Keasler said other events, like a Best Friends fishing tournament, will be added. While this tournament has not been sanctioned by the NFL, Keasler said he believes it will be very soon.
“We presented this project to the NFL in February 2004 and they really liked it,” he said. “It is our hope that by 2007, this particular property will be a fully sanctioned event and called the ‘Super Bowl of Best Friends.’”
Keasler chose to revolve the tournament around the NFL and the Super Bowl because he said there is a huge overlap of golfers and football fans.
After doing some market research and talking to several golf pros around the area, Keasler said he thinks the Championship of Best Friends should be a very popular tournament. He said the tournament’s website, www.golfsbestfriends.com, has already received thousands of hits even though the tournament was released to the public just last week during a press conference with Daly at the TPC.
Keasler said he has received e-mails from individuals as far away as North Dakota and Scotland wondering how they could get into the tournament.
“There hasn’t been a new amateur nationwide tournament that really peaks the interest of American golfers since the Olsmobile Scramble, which started in the 1980’s,” Keasler said.