Cary Cozby figured it was just another work message about the Senior PGA Championship that popped into his inbox in March.
Cozby, 52, the 2016 PGA Professional of the Year, couldn’t have been more wrong. This email invited him to compete in the championship as the host professional at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“My first tournament I ever went to as a kid was the 1977 U.S. Open and I came here with my parents and some kids that I was same age and friends with and in fact one of my best friends, he’s here, we came here in ’77 he’s here following today and tomorrow, but so Southern Hills has had a special place in my heart and my family forever.”
The Cozbys are one of the great golfing families. Brothers Chance, executive director of the Thunderbirds and host of the Waste Management Phoenix Open, and Craig, a two-time University of Oklahoma All-American, a three- time state junior champion and a sales representative with Ping, will be part of a large family contingent along with mom, Karole.
“Very cool week for Cary, our entire family and the membership at Southern Hills,” Chance Cozby said. “I told him to enjoy the walk and go play some good golf.”
Adding to the family affair and enjoyment of the walk is that Cozby will have his 13-year-old son, Banks, on the bag.
“I’m about to go to bed,” Banks told Fox 23 News. “He just comes rushing in there and he just shows me the email, and I get bright-eyed and all that.”
Banks just finished the sixth grade – or at least he was supposed to on Wednesday.
“He played hooky. We figured he may learn more doing this,” Cozby said.
All that’s missing is father Jerry, the 2012 Golfweek Father of the Year, who died in August. The patriarch of the family played for two junior-college national champions at Odessa (Texas) College in 1960-61 before transferring to Lamar and spent 41 years as head pro at Hillcrest Country Club in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He was elected to the PGA Hall of Fame.
“He would be over the moon about this and I know he’ll be looking down and happy that all of us are here together,” said Cary, who teared up.
An All-American at Oklahoma, Cozby has been the director of golf at Southern Hills since 2015. This is his debut at the Senior PGA Championship. Expect him to be a crowd favorite, especially from the member tent to the right of the seventh green.
“Hopefully I can get my nerves under control, heartrate somewhere south of 150 a minute,” Cozby said. “Other than maybe my son being born, it’s the coolest thing I’ve done.”