Well into his retirement and as a former PGA Tour player and member of the Tour’s executive staff, Duke Butler III has numerous options for his Saturday mornings.
He could play golf at the TPC Sawgrass (which he does at least two other mornings of most weeks) or any number of other courses near his Ponte Vedra Beach home.
Or, as a former PGA professional and teacher, Butler could be passing on his nearly five decades of experience to country club players for extra income.
But here he is on a gray, slightly chilly morning with intermittent rain falling, on the practice range at the Brentwood Golf Course on Jacksonville’s Northside, giving lessons to junior members of The First Tee-North Florida and the Moore-Myers Children’s Fund.
Butler worked first with Sami Arnold, a 13-year-old student at Somerset Academy whose dream is to play on the LPGA Tour.
He then helped 10-year-old Josiah Foster get his drives both in the air and straight.
By the end of the lesson, Josiah was doing both just fine.
Butler then worked with 16-year-old Lucas Pedrianes, a Stanton High student who was on the football team but has been advised by doctors to give up the contact sport and try something safer.
The left-handed youngster was having difficulty getting his iron shots airborne. But if he sticks with Butler, that shouldn’t be a problem.
“I’m a pretty good instructor, for the price,” said the 73-year-old, soft-spoken Texan and son of a Texas A&M professor. “I don’t charge anything. All they need to do is show me they’re interested in getting better.”
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Standing behind the range is Moore-Myers Children’s Fund founder Justine Redding, who started the nonprofit in 2015 to provide life skills training to underserved areas of Jacksonville. Moore-Myers works closely with the First Tee and on most Saturday mornings at Brentwood, the practice range and course are crowded with junior players.
“Duke could be teaching at a lot of places,” Redding said. “But he’s been out here every Saturday morning for the last two years. He doesn’t see color. He sees a child with aspirations and desires. As long as you want to learn, he wants to give back. He wants to elevate not only golf but these children.”
Monty Duncan, the general manager at Brentwood, is pretty sure Butler is getting as much as he’s giving.
“I think these kids give him the energy,” Duncan said. “He’s got a lot of experience to share and he wants to be out here, helping people.”
A rich golf life
Duke Butler III explains it very simply.
“I don’t like the word, ‘retirement,'” he said.
So, while a career as a club professional, teacher, tournament director and PGA Tour administrator might be over, he’s filling the hours and days with a burning desire to bring golf to as many people as he can.
Perhaps Butler wants to help because of those who helped him. His father, O.D. Butler Jr., introduced him to golf and he said among his fondest childhood memories was always getting a golf-related gift for Christmas, then hoping the weather in College Station was tolerable enough to try out the new putter or 3-wood.
Butler played on the Texas A&M golf team in the 1960s for Henry Ransom, a five-time PGA Tour winner and a member of the 1951 U.S. Ryder Cup team. After Butler graduated, he wanted to work as a teaching professional and with Ransom making a strong recommendation, Butler got a job at Baltusrol under Johnny Farrell, the 1928 U.S. Open champion — who hired him over the phone.
Butler took the job, got in his car and began driving to New Jersey. Halfway there, he remembered he hadn’t even asked Farrell what the job paid.
“I didn’t care,” he said.
Butler also played sporadically on the PGA Tour, entering Monday qualifiers and making seven cuts in 28 starts between 1974 to 1977.
Duke Butler III is a former Texas A&M golfer and the son of a professor at the school.
His best finish was a tie for 47th at the 1977 Kings Island Open in Ohio, for which he was handsomely rewarded with a check for $378.
“I had more desire than talent,” he said.
But he has one lasting memory of the PGA Tour: getting paired with Jack Nicklaus in Atlanta.
“He spent 18 holes trying to make me feel comfortable,” Butler said. “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life.”
Duke Butler III helps Lucas Pedrianes of Jacksonville with his stance during a recent lesson at the Brentwood Golf Club. Butler volunteers nearly every Saturday at the club, which is a First Tee affiliated facility.
Butler eventually returned to Texas and in 1978 became the director of the Houston Golf Association. The HGA ran the Tour’s Houston Open and the junior golf program in the city, and through that, he came to Ponte Vedra in 1992 to become the PGA Tour executive director of tournament administration.
Butler did that for 16 years, a period of time in which the Tour mushroomed with the launching of platforms such as the World Golf Championships, the Presidents Cup and the FedEx Cup. He left in 2007 and helped the Tiger Woods Foundation start the AT&T National, then was hired on to launch the Frys.com Open, now a staple on the Tour schedule as the first even of the wraparound FedEx Cup season.
Butler finally left that behind and retired (there’s that word again) six years ago.
It was then that while watching his daughter Sadie play in a North Florida Junior Foundation event, he noticed another player in her group: a tall, athletic 12-year-old named Tori Mouton.
Mentoring junior players
In addition to his service with the First Tee and Moore-Myers, Butler has been working with some of the top junior players in the area, such as Kylie Turner at Providence and Hannah Stevens at Fletcher.
But the first area junior player Butler worked with, except for his son Duke Butler III and his daughter, was Mouton.
Impressed with Tori’s physical and mental skills while watching her play in the junior event, Butler told her father Greg Mouton that she had a future in golf.
“We talked about Tori’s potential and while I was coaching Tori, Duke would help when I’d get stuck on her progress,” Greg Mouton said. “He recommended coaches I should seek for certain aspects of her game. When it came to equipment, he got me in touch with a great club fitter at the TPC Sawgrass.”
One key piece of advice that Butler offered Greg Mouton: apply for his daughter to enroll at Bolles, for both athletic and academic reasons. Bolles is where both of his children graduated and Butler wrote a letter of recommendation.
Fast-forward six years: Tori Mouton is a two-time region champion, has finished among the top-three in her last three district and region tournaments and last year finished second in the state Class 1A tournament. She won the 2019 First Coast Women’s Amateur and signed to play golf at North Carolina A&T.
The fact that Butler was an Aggie and Tori’s mother was a Texas Longhorn didn’t hamper the relationship.
“Duke has been an inspiration to both me and Tori,” Greg Mouton said. “He’s an angel amongst the golf Gods.”
Butler credits meeting Tori and Greg with giving him direction and motivation since his last full-time job in the golf industry.
“It started with my daughter, and then helping some of the girls she played with,” he said. “It’s evolved into helping pretty much anyone who asks me. It’s rewarding.”
Butler finds the most satisfaction in helping a young player turn a particular corner.
“I love taking someone who shoots 95 and turn them into a 75 shooter,” he said.
Starting a holiday tradition
Butler also joined the Jacksonville Area Golf Association after his 2015 retirement. It was in that capacity that he helped re-brand a First Coast summer golf tradition that shows all the earmarks of becoming a staple of the area’s busy Christmas season schedule.
The JAGA Father’s Day tournament was one of the oldest events on the association’s schedule, taking place in June, and usually at the Hidden Hills Golf Club.
But entries gradually fell off over the years, a combination of the quirky summer weather and many of the area’s top junior players competing on the Florida Junior Tour, American Junior Golf Association and other state and national events.
University of North Florida golf coach Scott Schroeder and his daughter Kaitlyn won the JAGA Family Championship last December.
Butler remembered the tournament fondly. He and his son won it in 2004.
“I thought [tournament director] Barney Poston and his wife did a very good job of hosting the tournament and we had an incredibly good time playing in it,” Butler said. “But it was sort of fizzling, for several reasons.”
In addition to being able to teach golf, Butler is a master of organizing and running golf tournaments. He brought the idea to the JAGA board of changing the tournament to a one-day scramble format, with any combination of relatives as teams, and take it to the renovated Jacksonville Beach Golf Club in May.
The new name: The JAGA Family Championship.
“Duke had the idea that it should be about making memories with your family through golf, and there are any number of ways to do that,” said JAGA president Jeff Adams. “We timed it for Mother’s Day weekend, which we thought would be a great date after The Players moved to March.”
The 2019 tournament had 76 players and as Adams said, “there was a great spirit behind it … everyone had fun.”
The 2020 tournament was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When the new date was announced for mid-December, a funny thing happened: entries have more than doubled to around 140 players in the last two years and Jacksonville Beach has agreed to host it again in 2022.
Former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman has played in the event with his wife Judy. Former Jaguars kicker Josh Scobee played with his son Jacob. First Coast club pros play with their children. The gross championship was won by University of North Florida golf coach Scott Schroeder and his daughter Kaitlyn for the second year in a row.
And the Butler family wasn’t about to let everyone else have all the fun. In addition to running the tournament with his son, daughter and wife, PGA Tour senior vice-president for customer relations Sheila McLenaghan, Duke IV and Sadie Butler played as a team.
“We got a break by rescheduling it, and we found out that college students were home, people had family in from out-of-town and Jacksonville Beach is a great place for the tournament,” Butler said. “It’s four hours of family bonding and a lot of great memories.”
What’s left? A “Second Tee”
It’s a life on the move for Butler: two rounds of golf per week with the TPC Sawgrass “Munchkins,” a group of former Tour executives, players and charter members of the club, teaching on Saturdays at Brentwood, working with other junior players, serving as a rules official at area tournaments … anything that puts him on a golf course or practice range.
Butler also is an informal publicist of sorts. If he hears of a hole-in-one, a friend shooting his age or other milestones, he gets word out to the local media.
“I love everything about the business of golf, particularly the people you get to meet, the places you get to go and the opportunity to impact young lives,” he said. “Golf was always a big part of our family and I’ve tried to keep that going with my family.
Adams said anything Butler does carries its own reward.
“He’s not looking for notoriety,” Adams said. “He’s got a great passion for the game and a strong sense of wanting to help people learn and play the game. He absolutely loves golf and it’s always going to be a huge part of his life.”
While Butler is enthusiastic about helping junior players and organizations such as the First Tee and Moore-Myers, he said there’s another step that’s missing.
“There’s only one problem with the First Tee … there’s no second tee,” Butler said. “It does a tremendous job of introducing golf and its life skills to kids but they still need places to play that will only cost them $5, $10. And once they turn 18 and graduate from high school, and aren’t playing college golf, the mentoring begins to diminish.”
Butler doesn’t claim to have all the answers but he knows who could — the same organization that launched The First Tee through the World Golf Foundation.
“The PGA Tour is the greatest, most influential organization in golf, and it has the resources to expand and assist underserved golfers who want to keep playing the game,” Butler said. “I believe the Tour can help those underserved youngsters who fall in the love with the game keep playing it for a lifetime.”
In the meantime, Butler will do his part … one free lesson at a time.