February 2026 - Big Fish, Big Pond

Central Illinois native helms Players Championship
Photographs by Chad Dennis
This article appeared in the February 2026 edition of Chicago District Golfer.
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If there were a contest for best oice view in golf, it wouldn’t be a fair fight against Lee Smith. “My office used to be 1,600 yards from the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “Now I’m 400 yards from the Island Green at TPC Sawgrass.” Smith is one of the biggest fish in the golf industry, but it wasn’t always that way. Smith, whose roots in the game are Central Illinois through and through, rose through the ranks from assistant pro in the TPC network of courses to executive director of The Players Championship, the flagship tournament of the PGA Tour and dubbed the fifth major of men’s golf.

“The biggest message that I always try to pass on to young professionals starting in the business is, if you’re comfortable with your abilities, go be a small fish in a big pond,” he advised.

Smith speaks from experience. He grew up in Rantoul, a village in northern Champaign County, where his parents were both physical education teachers and enjoyed teeing it up together. His father was a club champion at the local public course, Brookhill Golf Course, and cut down clubs for Lee at age 4. In the summer, his parents would drop him and his younger brother at the course, where the employees served as de facto babysitters for the day. Before long, he was gassing carts and cleaning restrooms, an early introduction to the golf business. He became good enough at the game to play in junior college at Parkland College in Champaign and earned a scholarship to play at Southeast Missouri State University. When he graduated with a degree in sports management, he moved to Florida and tried his hand briefly on golf’s mini tours. He recalls playing with former PGA Tour winner Sean O’Hair, who was 17 at the time, and thinking, this kid is already better than me.

“That was the signal to go get a job,” Smith said.

At roughly the same time, Urbana Country Club’s head pro Kurt Wahl had an assistant pro leave and Smith jumped at the opportunity to begin a path to becoming a PGA professional. He spent five years there before returning to Rantoul and obtaining his first head pro job at Willow Pond Golf Club, the former Chanute Air Force base course, which became a municipal course when the base closed in 1993.

Then came the pivot point of his career. One year after he left Urbana, Wahl decided to get out of the golf business and Smith applied to replace his mentor. Only he didn’t get the job. He still remembers Wahl asking him, “Are you sure you want this job?” At the time, it seemed like a no-brainer to oversee a prominent Central Illinois club. Smith’s answer amounted to the rhetorical, “Why wouldn’t I want it?”

But in reflection, that simple question opened his eyes that maybe there was a bigger purpose in store for Smith. Maybe he wasn’t thinking big enough.

 Lee Smith's journey to TPC Sawgrass' famous island green and The Players Championship began at Brookhill Golf Course in Rantoul.

“Kurt wasn’t really asking about the job; he was trying to tell me, ‘You know, there’s more out there. There are bigger ponds, there are more opportunities,’” Smith said.

Smith spent one more year at Willow Pond and then took a job as an assistant professional at TPC Scottsdale in November 2003. During his interview, the general manager told him he’d have him ready for bigger things in the TPC network within 18-24 months. Just 13 months later, Smith was named head professional at TPC Summerlin in Las Vegas.

“The Urbana job would’ve been a little step up, but it wouldn’t have opened the type of opportunities that were still to come,” said Wahl.

Not getting the position that Smith thought was a dream job turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. Instead, he was head pro at a course that hosted an annual PGA Tour event. Asked if he thinks he’d still be at Urbana today had he been chosen for the job, Smith paused to consider and said, “That’s an interesting thought.” Maybe he would’ve landed a similar role shortly thereafter and progressed to a bigger job at one of the top clubs in Chicago, but Smith has no regrets. He spent four years at TPC Summerlin during the era that musician/actor Justin Timberlake hosted the Tour stop before being promoted to a loftier management role with greater responsibility at TPC Sugarloaf outside of Atlanta, site of the AT&T Classic, and then returned to TPC Summerlin as the general manager.

“He always was willing to bet on himself, and he had the initiative and drive to be a success in this business,” Wahl said. “Each time he’s stepped out of his comfort zone, he’s proven it was the right move.”

In 2017, Smith became the general manager at Liberty National in Jersey City, New Jersey, and that’s where he was first exposed to the PGA Tour’s championship management division, which hosted The Barclays, a FedExCup Playoff event at the time, at the course in 2019 and 2021. He made his second career pivot in June 2023, joining the PGA Tour in his current role.

“I had been in the club business for 25 years and I had kind of lost that ember to execute on a daily basis,” Smith explained. “I was really excited about the opportunity of spending 51 weeks of the year on making one special week as opposed to focusing on every single detail every day.”

From the start of his career, whether it be the ladies member-guest or a PGA Tour event, Smith’s favorite part of his job was creating a vision for what that event could be and executing it.

He’s no longer a guppy, but he’s never forgotten his original pond. When Urbana underwent a full renovation in 2024, it posted online that it was auctioning o the tee marker plates. Smith purchased the one from the third hole, a par 5 where he once made an albatross, and displays it proudly in his garage.

Good luck catching this big fish during tournament week in March. But to hear Smith tell it, being executive director of The Players Championship is more like being a conductor, and it’s his job “to keep the train on the tracks.”

“It’s always fun jumping on a train that’s already moving pretty fast,” he said. “The trajectory that this event has been on for the past 5-10-15 years in terms of growth and exposure and popularity is a fun thing to be a part of. My job is to keep the train on the tracks and then use my skillset and background and unique experience in the game from the club side to add a different perspective and element to the leadership.”

Adam Schupak is a senior writer at Golfweek/USA Today and once won the ‘A’ Flight club championship at TPC Sawgrass.

Footwear Fandom
Lee Smith has a sneaker collection that would make former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos, known for the sheer size of her stable of shoes, blush.

“It is a problem,” he readily admits.

It began about 15 years ago when he was working at TPC Sugarloaf in Atlanta and became a Nike Golf ambassador. Before long, he was asked to help the company’s grassroots efforts and was named to the Swoosh Elite team.

Whenever Nike launched a special themed shoe around a major, a pair would arrive at his door and he often reciprocated by purchasing a few extra pairs.

“That kind of started the vice that I live with today,” he says.

A few became many and he estimates he has at least 120 pairs in boxes that he’s never worn, mostly of the Air Jordan variety. Then he has the same number of pairs tucked away in his closet that he rotates through on a daily basis. But if there is a bright side to Smith’s sneaker fetish it is that he doesn’t have to worry about wearing them out.

“The nice thing about having 120 pairs in your rotation is that you only wear each about three times a year,” Smith says.
—Adam Schupak