Editor’s note: In recognition of the inaugural Giles Invitational being contested at Virginia’s Kinloch Golf Club starting today, GGP+ presents this updated story focusing on legendary amateur Vinny Giles and his career. The original version was published on Sept. 19, 2024.
Vinny Giles had done just about everything he could in golf as one of the last great career amateurs. He won the U.S. (1972) and British (1975) Amateurs in his competitive prime and later built a successful sports management company.
So when C.B. Robertson approached Giles about building a golf course on about 750 acres of rolling terrain and virgin woods around a 70-acre lake he planned to develop just outside of Richmond, Virginia, Giles couldn’t pass up the chance to add to his legacy in the game.
“I will tell you, it’s probably the most fun thing I’ve ever done,” Giles said of his role in co-designing Kinloch Golf Club with local architect Lester George in Manakin-Sabot, Virginia.
Kinloch – about a half mile down the road from Hermitage Country Club, where Arnold Palmer picked up his last professional victory in the 1988 Crestar Classic – has become a staple on top-100 lists since it opened in 2001. It played host to the 2011 U.S. Senior Amateur and last year’s U.S. Mid-Amateur.
This weekend it welcomes 60 elite mid-amateurs and 30 senior amateurs in an inaugural 54-hole event that pays tribute to the club’s inspirational co-founder – the Giles Invitational.
“It’s a little over the top,” said Giles, who lobbied for calling it the Kinloch Invitational but at least talked them out of dubbing it “The Vinny.”
The inaugural Giles Invitational offers the chance to retell the inimitable story of Marvin “Vinny” Giles III, one of golf’s great characters who at age 82 remains as unfiltered as his cigarettes. Giles is the last of his kind – a supremely gifted champion who opted to remain a lifelong amateur despite the undeniable talent that could have made him a tour star had he chosen that alternate route.
Giles was a three-time all-American and 1966 NCAA runner-up at the University of Georgia. He considered the idea of turning pro after graduating.
“After Georgia and having some success and playing well in a couple of U.S. Amateurs and finishing second in the (1966) NCAA against what was going to be the next crop of professionals, I thought I was pretty good,” Giles said. “I mean, I thought I could beat my peer group on the right week.”
As a young married man, however, he and his wife, Key, didn’t relish the idea of living out of motels and chasing the sun.
“I quite honestly wasn’t sure that I’d enjoy that life,” he said. “I just loved playing golf and I didn’t want it to quit being fun. … I wasn’t sure I was made out for it. My only regret is that I never proved to myself whether I was good enough to play at that level. Outside of that I have no regrets at all.”
Giles went to law school at Virginia instead, and in 1973 fell into founding a sports management company, Pros Inc., with his partner Vernon Spratley. In 1975 they happened to sign the top three qualifiers from Q-School – Gary Koch, George Burns and Jerry Pate, “and it kind of put us on the map.” He went on to represent friends through the years such as Lanny Wadkins, Tom Kite, Davis Love III and later Ernie Els.
“He said, ‘I understand you’re a good player.’ I said I don’t know if I’m a good player or not. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got a guy on my team, he’s my best player and he says he can’t beat you.’” – Vinny Giles
A whole life in golf sprung from a game he fell into by sneaking on as a kid between groups at Oakwood Country Club in Lynchburg, Virginia, before honing his talents at Boonsboro Country Club, where his family became members.
As a 19-year-old college dropout from North Carolina in 1962, Giles won the Virginia State Open. Little did he realize the door that would open for him when he got a phone call out of the blue in March 1963 from Howell Hollis, the golf coach at Georgia.
“He said, ‘I understand you’re a good player,’” Giles recalls. “I said I don’t know if I’m a good player or not. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got a guy on my team, he’s my best player and he says he can’t beat you. … If you’ll come down here next week, I’ll give you tuition and books for the spring quarter, and I’ll give you a full ride starting in the fall. I said, ‘Well, that’s very nice. Thank you, sir.’ And just kind of waved it off.”
He mentioned the call later to his family at the dinner table, and Marvin Giles II did not wave it off.
“He looked over his little half-rim glasses after I told the story, and he says, ‘Son, how fast can you pack your damn bags? I’ve been paying this tuition and these fraternity bills (to UNC) and I haven’t seen any results.’ So five days later, I’m on a train going to Athens, Georgia. I don’t even know where Athens, Georgia, is. Never heard of it.
“So I get off a train in Gainesville (Georgia) because it’s closer than Atlanta and it’s cheaper to get there and I didn’t have a car anymore. I went to the train master, and I said, ‘Sir, what time is the next train going to Athens?’ He said, ‘Son, don’t no trains go to Athens.’ No problem, I said, where’s the bus station? He said, ‘Don’t matter; don’t no busses go to Athens, neither.’ So here I am standing on whatever highway goes between Gainesville and Athens with five little pieces of luggage – a Sunday bag, a shag bag, a couple little suitcases and a hanging bag – and I’m hitchhiking to Athens.”
It worked out pretty well for his golf game. “To be honest with you,” he said, “from a golf standpoint probably the best thing that ever happened to my game because I got some top-level competition and we’re playing $2 Nassaus every day for beer money. And I learned a heck of a lot down there. Really, it was critical to getting better playing golf.”
Giles’ career résumé backs up that assertion. For an eight-year window from 1965-72, the U.S. Amateur went to a stroke-play format instead of the match play that has decided every other national championship before or since. The principal character of that stroke-play era was Giles, who prominently featured as the winner or runner-up in half of them. He signaled his aggregate prowess by finishing as co-medalist at Canterbury in 1964, the year before the USGA switched to stroke-play. But he also reached the semifinals in 1973 the year they reverted to match play.
“The record I’m most proud of is from ’67 through ’73 I had one finish in the U.S. Amateur that was outside the top three,” said Giles of a seven-year stretch that went 2, 2, 2, T6, 3, 1 and T3, his win coming in 1972 at Charlotte Country Club by a stroke over Ben Crenshaw and Mark Hayes. “I tied for sixth when Lanny Wadkins won in ’70.”
Giles always preferred stroke play as a better way to determine a national champion, though he was no slouch at match play either. He played on four Walker Cup teams (1969-75) – three of them winners – and captained the winning U.S. side in 1993. Even in his lone team loss – the 1971 upset of a loaded U.S. squad by GB&I at St. Andrews – Giles featured in a day-one singles win over Michael Bonallack by holing his desperate pitch from off the road on the Road Hole of a tied match.
“I had basically no chance,” Giles told Golf Digest. “I tried an explosion shot, but it was just a blind stab. The ball took one bounce, hit the flagstick and shot down into the hole. Shocked, Michael dropped his putter, then missed his [4-foot] putt. And I went on to win 1 up. The headline in The Scotsman newspaper the next morning called my shot, ‘A most dastardly act.’ Perfect reporting.”
The name Marvin “Vinny” Giles III is etched on trophies of amateur tournaments with names such as Dogwood, Porter, Crump, Coleman (senior), Fox Puss and various directionals (Southern, Eastern and Northeast).
At the next year’s amateur dinner at the Masters, the R&A secretary presented Giles with the flagstick and flag from the Road Hole – the only memento of his decorated career that still hangs in his family room.
Giles competed for the U.S. on three Eisenhower Trophy teams (1968, ’70 and ’72), winning all three in Australia, Spain and Argentina. At age 32 he won the 1975 British Am in an 8-and-7 romp over Mark James (the future Ryder Cup captain) at Hoylake and hoped to become only the fifth golfer to complete the double and win the U.S. Amateur that same summer at his home course in Richmond, the Country Club of Virginia’s James River course. But Giles got ousted early, “the victim of an aching back, a serious case of ennui and the good play of a 23-year-old from Pittsburgh, Stan Price” as Sports Illustrated put it, spilling more ink on Giles’ defeat than on the winner (some guy named Fred Ridley).
The name Marvin “Vinny” Giles III is etched on trophies of amateur tournaments with names such as Dogwood, Porter, Crump, Coleman (senior), Fox Puss and various directionals (Southern, Eastern and Northeast). He lifted six Virginia State Amateurs from 1962 to 1987 and three times proved he could beat his home state’s best pros as well with Virginia Open titles (1969, ’74 and ’93).
In 2009, just four months shy of his 67th birthday, Giles won the U.S. Senior Amateur when he buried a 17-foot birdie putt on the 18th green at Beverly Country Club to beat John Grace – becoming the first player to add that title to wins in the U.S. and British Amateurs and the oldest to lift the trophy since 69-year-old Lewis Oehmig in 1983. He thrust a fist pump that Tiger Woods could admire.
“I don’t react that way very often on the golf course,” Giles told the Chicago Tribune. “But at 66, quite honestly, I didn’t think I had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning this tournament. These 55-year-olds, they’re kids.”
Now 82, Giles’ competitive days are behind him. He calls himself “lazy as hell” and unmotivated by the lure of super-senior flights. “That’s one of the drawbacks of having been lucky enough to play decently when I was younger, there’s not much sense of accomplishment if you beat a bunch of 75-year-old people,” he said. “I just decided my golf would be fun and pretty much just what I guess you’d call social golf.”
Giles played in nine Masters (making three cuts) and two U.S. Opens (making both cuts) and won low-amateur medals in each of them as well as the U.S. Senior Open. The Masters – which came of age on TV with Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in Giles’ formative years – was probably his biggest competitive motivation.
“My biggest goal, and the only goal I remember having early on, was I wanted to play in the Masters,” said Giles. “When I finished second in the U.S. Amateur in ’67, I remember going down the 70th hole and looking at a leaderboard in Colorado Springs, and I was two shots out of the lead … and the next guy was about five shots out of the lead. My first thought was, ‘I’m in the Masters. I can go in the tank from here and still get in the Masters.’
“The first year was like going to Disneyland.”
In April 1968, he was so anxious to get to Augusta National that he drove down the Thursday before and played golf all day long for a week before the tournament started. “Must have played the par-3 course 50 times,” he said. “It was like going to camp or a really fancy family vacation.”
“Back then, they had some of these old guys in red coats who would announce what was going on. I’ll never forget, because I knew the man – Leo Beckman, a pro from down in South Georgia – and on 10 tee he says, ‘Leading the Masters at this time, a young amateur from Virginia.’ My throat got a little dry.” – Vinny Giles
His enthusiasm carried into the tournament, when playing with Doug Ford in the first round he birdied 1, 5 and 8 to make the turn in 3-under.
“Back then, they had some of these old guys in red coats who would announce what was going on,” he said. “I’ll never forget, because I knew the man – Leo Beckman, a pro from down in South Georgia – and on 10 tee he says, ‘Leading the Masters at this time, a young amateur from Virginia.’ My throat got a little dry. Front nine, I hit six greens and shot 3-under. Back nine, I hit eight greens and a fringe and shot 2-over. But that was just so much fun.”
The fun ended when Giles had a front-row seat to one of the most devastating endings in Masters history – Roberto De Vicenzo signing for a higher score than he shot and missing out on a playoff with Bob Goalby. Giles, as low amateur, was seated in the Butler Cabin beside both of them in the most painfully awkward moment in the history of that post-tournament television tradition. Giles said, “I don’t think I’ll forget any of the shots ever,” but most etched in his memory are those moments sitting next to a crushed De Vicenzo and equally emotional Goalby as the reality of what happened settled on them all.
“I’m sitting in Butler Cabin just having the time of my life and the next thing you know it’s just deathly silent,” he said. “Just doom and gloom. It was just so sad.
“I was sitting right there when (De Vicenzo) came in, and he was totally shell shocked. He muttered under his breath. His first comment was ‘What a stupid I am.’ And his next comment, I don’t think many people heard, he said something to the effect of ‘but in my country, what you shoot is what you get.’ How in God’s name Tommy Aaron could have put a 4 down [instead of birdie 3] on the 71st hole I never will know.”
Fifty-seven years later, Giles is the namesake of a new tournament that seeks to carve a place among the elite amateur events. “If we’re going to do this and Vinny’s name is attached to this event, it can’t fail,” said Andrew Black, the director of golf at Kinloch. “It can’t just be one of those things where it lasts for three to five years and then it’s gone.
“Obviously, he and Lester George worked their magic, putting the golf course, the club together. But we wouldn’t be here without him. Anything we can do to treasure that and cement that in stone – his name, his legacy – it’s the right thing to do.”
Giles is justifiably proud of Kinloch, especially its welcoming reputation for exuding Southern hospitality to members and guests and its specialty fried peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The Kinloch layout is rich with risk-reward chances, drivable par-4s, well-placed hazards, wide fairways and green speeds that rival Augusta National and Oakmont when firm.
This weekend the invitational field is loaded with past USGA and U.S. Mid-Amateur winners including reigning champion Evan Beck, Nathan Smith, Matt Parziale, Trip Kuehne and Drew Weaver as well as elite seniors like Mike McCoy, Gene Elliott, Louis Brown, Rusty Strawn, Doug Hanzel, Bob Royak, Paul Simson and Jeff Knox.
Beyond establishing the Giles Invitational as a fixture on the mid/senior am circuit, does Giles have even bigger hopes for Kinloch down the road?
“I don’t think we’ve got enough to handle a U.S. Amateur,” Giles said of Kinloch’s future championship aspirations. “I think it’d be a good venue for a (U.S.) Senior Open. And way down the road, after I’m long gone, I would love a Walker Cup. Kinloch could do a great job of making people feel very, very comfortable for an event like … if they wear out their welcome at all those old, old prestigious clubs like Seminole, Cypress [Point], Pine Valley, Oakmont and the Merions of the world.”