Major Contributor

Totton Heffelfinger, former USGA and Hazeltine president, helped forge major championship golf in Minnesota.

Magazine

Major championship golf in Minnesota would have gone the way of the stymie were it not for Totton P. Heffelfinger.

Heffelfinger was the visionary behind Hazeltine National Golf Club, founded in 1962 for the express purpose of bringing the U.S. Open back to Minnesota for the first time since Bobby Jones won that title at Interlachen Country Club in 1930. 

Heffelfinger, a longtime Minikahda Club member and president of the United States Golf Association (USGA) in 1952-53, realized that the state no longer had a course tough enough to challenge the long-hitting new breed of top golfers, nor a club with enough space to handle the infrastructure demands of modern crowds and television coverage.

A new course was needed, and Heffelfinger—strong-willed, tirelessly forward-thinking and deeply connected, both socially and politically—was determined to make it happen. 

Heffelfinger was born into wealth as the second son of Peavey Grain president Frank Totton Heffelfinger. Totton was Frank’s mother’s maiden name; Totton Peavey Heffelfinger disliked his given name and insisted on being called Tot. He grew up in a 23-room mansion on Lake Minnetonka named “Highcroft,” graduated from Yale and became a second lieutenant in the Navy Aviation branch of the Army. Then he joined his father’s company and his country club. 

A skilled amateur player, Heffelfinger absorbed the rich golf culture at Minikahda and joined the long tradition of Minikahda members giving back to the game. After serving as a Navy commander in World War II, Heffelfinger became deeply involved with the administrative end of the USGA, ultimately becoming the organization’s youngest president in 1952. 

A Bold Vision 
It was during this time that Heffelfinger devised the idea of building a new championship golf course. Working with golf course architect Robert Bruce Harris, he located a 350-acre parcel of land on the edge of Hazeltine Lake in Chaska and brought his plan to the Minikahda board of directors. He suggested the club could build a second course for major tournaments, or even sell its current location on Lake Calhoun and move the entire operation to Chaska.

“The time to build more golf courses is now, before the problems of land become too great,” Heffelfinger said at the time.

The members of Minnesota’s second-oldest golf club gave the proposal thoughtful consideration and turned it down. Twice.

Undeterred, Heffelfinger put together an investment group to buy the land. “I felt that this was just too good a thing to let drop,” Heffelfinger said.

Heffelfinger’s group, put together as a subsidiary of the Peavey corporation, executed the options on the Chaska land, but more financing was needed. Two more groups—one headed by Minneapolis banker Robert Fischer—ultimately were brought in to get the project off the ground.

Fischer was friendly with Robert Trent Jones, the most prominent golf course architect of the era, and invited him to inspect the Chaska property. Jones was enthusiastic about the site, and Heffelfinger agreed to sever ties with Harris and bring Jones aboard as a founder of the new club. 

Socially, the club was a ground-breaker. There was no pool or tennis court, and there were no restrictions on who could be a member—unlike most Twin Cities golf clubs at the time, where Jews were not admitted. 

The course that opened in 1962 was a nascent brute, with severe doglegs on more than half the holes, all with the intent to lessen the advantage of long drives.

“We hope within a few years to bring the National Open here,” Heffelfinger said. “This will be the finest course in the middle west, the golfing mecca of our area. It will be a championship course adaptable for big-time tournaments and for membership play.”

Indeed, the U.S. Open did come just eight years after Hazeltine opened—and by everyone’s estimation but Heffelfinger’s, the course was not ready. The late Warren Rebholz, a club president at Hazeltine and a 20-year executive director of the Minnesota Golf Association, acknowledged that Heffelfinger’s friendship with USGA executive director Joe Dey was the primary reason the immature course was selected. 

“In those days, golf associations were funny things in that, if you had an executive director who’s strong—and Joe Dey was—he pretty much ran it and the executive committee kind of stamped what he did,” Rebholz said.

The late Dave Hill is still remembered for his caustic comments about Hazeltine during the playing of the 1970 U.S. Open, but he merely vocalized what most of the players—including Jack Nicklaus—privately thought about the course’s multiple blind tee shots. It took several renovations over two decades for the USGA to return the Open to Hazeltine. 

Changing Hands  
Robert Fischer (pictured at right) succeeded Heffelfinger as club president in 1972 and pushed for changes that Heffelfinger thought were unnecessary.

“He thought the course was fine, and he thought the criticism was unreasonable,” says Mackenzie. “I would say he was fairly defensive about it, and when the club undertook to make some changes, he was not entirely happy that the club elected to go in that direction.”

“It is fair to say it created a division within the club and, unfortunately, a division between Tot and myself that never was completely reconciled,” Fischer wrote later. 

Yet Heffelfinger continued to advocate for his golf course, including urging his friend Jack Nicklaus to revisit Hazeltine after one extensive round of renovations. Nicklaus declined the invitation, but included Heffelfinger in his Captain’s Club, a group of  “statesmen” who select the annual honoree of Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament.

“I was on the [Hazeltine] board in 1976, and he still came to meetings,” Mackenzie says. “He was honorary chairman of the board, but by this time his mental acuity had slipped a little bit. He was physically unable to play a lot of golf, but he came to all the meetings, sat in and listened.”

In the late 1980s, the club hired Trent Jones’s son Rees to make some final improvements, and the Open returned to Hazeltine in 1991. The tournament set revenue records and the course was almost universally praised. Since then, two PGA Championships, a Ryder Cup and a U.S. Amateur have been played at the course—all great successes—and this year’s Amateur will be followed by another Ryder Cup in 2029.

Heffelfinger, unfortunately, did not live to see his creation redeemed. He died in 1987, after gradually giving up control of the club. He once predicted that Hazeltine would be known as the Augusta National of the Midwest, and while that did not happen, Hazeltine brought major championships back to Minnesota and continues to be the state’s venue for golf at the highest international level.

For that, Minnesota will be forever grateful to Tot Heffelfinger.