Illinois Golf Hall of Fame to honor 3 new inductees Friday
Illinois Golf Hall of Fame members will be welcoming three men who come from three different time periods and have three entirely different golf backgrounds.
H. Chandler Egan, Leon McNair and Jim Sobb are the inductees of the 16th Illinois Golf Hall of Fame class and become the 80th, 81st and 82nd people inducted into the hall. The Illinois Golf Hall of Fame will celebrate this group of inductees in a ceremony and dinner Friday.
Sobb, a Palatine native, is one of the most awarded golfers in state history. He was a two-time Division II All-America golfer at Western Illinois, and after graduating played and won many state-sponsored tournament events.
He is a three-time Illinois PGA champion (1995, 1999 and 2000) and a four-time Illinois Match Play winner (between 1990 and 2011). In 2011, he also won the Illinois Senior Match Play, becoming the only golfer to win both titles in the same year.
He was the Illinois PGA Player of the Year in 2000 and the Illinois PGA Senior Player of the Year in 2007. He is currently the director of golf at the Ivanhoe Club near Mundelein.
Like McNair, Sobb was a former member of the Illinois Golf Hall of Fame selection committee, "and I know what is involved in the painstaking task that goes into it. I was thrilled and speechless when they called me," he said from Monterey, Calif., where he was playing in the Senior PGA Professional National Championship earlier this month.
Sobb said winning the first Illinois PGA Championship in 1996 at Kemper Lakes at the age of 39 was the highlight of his playing career, and his continued winning is a result of his indulgence in his greatest personal pleasure.
"I just love to compete,'' Sobb said. "I just look forward to playing the next round of golf."
Leon McNair is being inducted for his long service in Illinois Golf's charitable history. He was a co-founder of the Illinois PGA Foundation, and today works with the Wadsworth Golf Charities.
He is a former member of the Illinois Golf Hall of Fame selection committee, but retired from that position in 2005.
"I am happy with the timing of this, and I am very excited about it,'' McNair said. "Back in the day, we worked to provide college scholarships, then we expanded into providing grants for junior programs so they could get their participants on the golf course.
"Today, we are working with the Illinois PGA, which is involved with First Tee, to get kids on the golf course, so they are teeing it up and learning the nine core values of golf, including perseverance, courtesy, respect and sportsmanship."
McNair and Ben Wadsworth are working today to create short courses around the country. Short courses are 3-, 6- and 9-hole courses that are less expensive than full round courses and provide an opportunity for younger players to get onto the course.
H. Chandler Egan, who was raised in Highland Park, was one of the nation's best amateur golfers at the earliest period of the history of the game in the United States. He won the U.S. Amateur in 1904 and 1905, won the Western Amateur four times between 1902 and 1907, and won the intercollegiate indi-vidual title in 1902. He was the runner-up in the 1904 Olympic Games and was runner-up in both the U.S. Amateur and Western Amateur in other years.
Egan moved into course design after his playing career, and was involved in the remodeling of Pebble Beach, helping to improve 16 of the 18 holes with Robert Hunter in 1928.