The Golf Heritage Society Gave Me a Reason to Return to En-Joie

My clubs stayed out of my hands Tuesday at En-Joie Golf Club. After walking several holes at Onondaga over the weekend, my back and foot had decided that playing in the Golf Heritage Society National Championship was a bad idea. I took a cart, my camera and a notebook instead.

The change of plans gave me more time to look around. En-Joie was where I went every year as a kid for the B.C. Open, back when one week in Endicott brought the PGA Tour into the Southern Tier. I left Central New York in 1996 to begin my golf career in Florida. Three decades later, I returned through an organization I knew little about before this year.

That was an unexpected gift from the Golf Heritage Society. Its 55th National Convention placed me near the beginning of my own golf story. On Monday morning, I returned to Canasawacta Country Club in Norwich before heading toward Binghamton Country Club. On Tuesday, the convention brought me to En-Joie. Earlier in the trip, coaching two young players from the area had already taken me back to Blue Stone Golf Course in Oxford and brought me through the gate at Onondaga Golf and Country Club for the first time. En-Joie carried a different kind of memory. I had been here before the job titles, awards, deadlines and business plans. I came here when watching Tour players still felt like looking through a window at another world.

Before En-Joie Came Canasawacta

Before I headed toward the Binghamton area Monday morning, I stopped at Canasawacta Country Club in Norwich. CCC was the course I grew up on and the place where the spark was lit that eventually pushed me into the golf business. En-Joie showed me the PGA Tour up close each summer. Canasawacta was where golf became part of my everyday life.

I left Norwich in 1996 and had returned to Canasawacta only once before this trip. Walking back onto the property for a second visit in 30 years felt different from revisiting a course I had merely played. This was the starting point. Long before I knew what my career would include, CCC gave me a place to become absorbed in the game and imagine staying in it.

This time, I also returned as a 2026 inductee into the Greater Norwich Hall of Fame. I am proud of that distinction because Norwich knew me before the golf industry did. To be recognized by my hometown, then stand again at the course where the work began, gave Monday morning a weight I did not expect.

Leaving Canasawacta for Endicott also restored the geography of those years. Norwich was home, CCC was the course, and the B.C. Open was the annual drive south to see the PGA Tour. The professional game did not feel abstract when it came that close.

A Course Built for Shoemakers

En-Joie’s history begins with a belief that golf should not belong only to people with money and leisure. The course opened in 1927 at the request of George F. Johnson, the owner of the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company. Ernie Smith designed it, and Johnson built it so company employees would have a place and enough time to play.

The early version of En-Joie fit that purpose. The club’s history says the fairways were flat and nearly treeless, and no rough was grown so workers would not lose golf balls. Endicott-Johnson even made balls that were played there. Nearly a century later, the Village of Endicott still owns the course, and Broome County has operated it since 2006.

That origin deserves attention because public golf can lose its own history in a hurry. Private clubs often keep minutes, photographs, trophies and carefully written accounts of their past. A busy municipal course is expected to open the doors, prepare the greens and get the next group to the tee. En-Joie has done that while carrying a professional tournament history most public facilities could never match.

The layout golfers see today has changed with the demands placed upon it. Michael Hurdzan renovated the course in 1998 and 1999, replacing the older flat, round greens with larger, undulating surfaces. The fairways had become narrower and tree-lined over time. En-Joie could welcome the public all season and still ask serious questions when the ropes went up.

When the PGA Tour Came to Endicott

The professional tournament began in 1971 as the Broome County Open. A year later, it became the B.C. Open, borrowing the name and familiar characters of the comic strip created by Endicott native Johnny Hart. En-Joie hosted the event through 2005.

The list of champions explains why the tournament mattered locally. Tom Kite, Calvin Peete, Jay Haas, Joey Sindelar, Fred Couples, John Daly, Hal Sutton, Fred Funk, Brad Faxon and Craig Stadler all won the B.C. Open. The event gave a smaller market access to players whose names otherwise arrived through television, magazines and the sports page.

For me, it was simpler. The PGA Tour came close enough to home that I could go see it. The B.C. Open was part of the calendar I understood as a young golfer in Norwich, less than an hour up the road. I did not know then where golf would take me. I only knew that the people playing it for a living showed up each year at En-Joie, and I wanted to be around the game.

The course and the tournament also carried a distinctly local story. In 1974, En-Joie assistant professional Richie Karl won the B.C. Open in a playoff over Bruce Crampton. Long before golf debated pathways and access with today’s language, a club professional won a PGA Tour event at the course where he worked.

The run ended at En-Joie in circumstances the property could not control. Flooding from the Susquehanna River covered the course with water, mud and debris in 2006, forcing the final B.C. Open away from Endicott. The PGA Tour event disappeared after that season, but professional golf did not stay away for long.

The DICK’S Open arrived in 2007 on PGA Tour Champions. Many of the players returning to En-Joie had competed there during the B.C. Open years. That continuity remains one of the best parts of the event. A child who watched a player in his prime could come back years later and see him compete on many of the same holes.

Padraig Harrington won three consecutive DICK’S Open titles from 2022 through 2024. Dicky Pride won the 2026 event in June, beating Harrington in a playoff. The tournament, operated by Broome County Community Charities, reports more than $21.1 million in charitable contributions since the organization began supporting professional golf in the county in 1971.

The Organization That Brought Me Back

Before this year, I would have associated the Golf Heritage Society primarily with collectors. That description is accurate, but incomplete. The organization began in 1970 as the Golf Collectors Society, founded by noted golf historian Joseph S.F. Murdoch and Robert Kuntz. Its membership now includes historians, writers, architects, superintendents, artists, amateur golfers, PGA and LPGA members, and people who simply care about where the game came from.

I have learned that the objects are often the introduction, not the whole conversation. A club, program, ball, postcard or photograph gives people a reason to ask who owned it, where it was used and why anybody saved it. The answer usually leads back to a person or a golf course.

En-Joie is a strong example. A B.C. Open program might look like an old piece of tournament merchandise until someone recognizes Johnny Hart’s artwork, remembers a champion or explains what that week meant in Broome County. An item from the DICK’S Open can connect the current PGA Tour Champions event to a professional golf tradition that began on the same property 55 years ago.

The GHS convention makes room for those exchanges. Members play golf, attend educational sessions, trade and study memorabilia, and spend time with people who have followed obscure corners of golf history for decades. The public trade show on Wednesday is the easiest way for someone outside the organization to see what that work looks like.

I wish I had understood the Society better years ago. My career has always involved people, instruction and the business of the game, but this work has pushed me to pay closer attention to the evidence golf leaves behind. It has also made me reconsider the places I thought I already knew.

A Different View of Home

This Central New York trip has kept putting an older version of my golf life in front of me. Canasawacta was home, the course where I grew up and first saw a future for myself in golf. Oxford was a course I had not seen since my senior year of high school. Onondaga was a club I knew by reputation but never had the chance to enter as a junior golfer. En-Joie was familiar, yet returning with the Golf Heritage Society changed what I noticed.

Returning as a reporter, I noticed layers I had missed as a child. Johnson’s public-golf idea was still there beneath the Tour history, the flood recovery and the everyday work of preparing a course for local play. Approaching its 100th anniversary, En-Joie remains a working public course where people can book a tee time.

Canasawacta had already put the beginning of my golf life back in front of me Monday. At En-Joie a day later, GHS helped me understand how those annual B.C. Open trips fit beside it. The course where I grew up and the Tour event I watched were never separate stories. Together, they help explain why golf became more than something I played.

Until this week, my B.C. Open memories and the larger history of En-Joie occupied separate places in my head. The Golf Heritage Society connected them to Canasawacta and to the career that began after I left Norwich in 1996. The organization sent me back to familiar ground with better questions than I had as a kid.

On Wednesday, the convention’s trade-show tables at Tioga Downs will be open to the public. Someone may walk in carrying an old B.C. Open program, a tournament badge or a club whose story has gone quiet. I hope they bring it. There is a fair chance it knows something about En-Joie that the rest of us have forgotten.

PGA of America Golf Professional Brendon Elliott is an award-winning coach and golf writer who serves as Athlon Sports Senior Golf Writer. Read his recent “The Starter” on RG.org, where he is their Lead Golf Writer. To stay updated on all of his latest work, sign up for his newsletter or visit his MuckRack Profile.