RANDOM WIKIPEDIA TOPIC(S): 1987 PGA Championship + E. Power Biggs

What do a concert organist and a professional golf tournament have in common? Absolutely nothing. There are very few 'golf albums', and the once that do exist sound desperate. David Barrett's The Music of Golf, for example, sounds like an emasculated Bruce Hornsby piped through an elevator. I triple dog dare you to purchase and listen to the entire album, than write a review as a warning to others. No one else has ever done this, and the album has been out since 1996. Even listening to the 30 second samples on iTunes, especially The Power, makes me want to hammer golf tees into my ear holes. I imagine the lite synth-piano would also make Edward George Power Biggs turn over in his grave.

The most noticible thing about Edward George Power Biggs (aside from his name) is his tragic resemblance to TV personality Bill O'Reilly. But luckily Biggs died long before political (and I use that term loosely) blowhards were made popular on 24-hour news (and I use that term lightly) channels. Biggs preferred to be called E. Power, keeping people guessing about what the E stood for. It certainly wasn't 'Electric', since Biggs despised electronic instruments and encouraged churches and concert halls of his day to instal organs built before hydroelectricity, in the tradition of the Bach and Handel eras.

Biggs emigrated to the United States from the UK at the height of the Great Depression. He used the skills acquired at London's Royal Academy of Music to work with various orchestras and eventually established his own Sunday morning radio program. He went on to commission a master builder from the Netherlands to install a 3-manual tracker-action organ (don't ask) at Harvard University, where he recorded Bach Favorites. I can't help but imagine the kids of the 40s, the same kids who would grow up to become hippies and vietnam soldiers, making fun of their parents for listening to this stuff:

Kid A: My father is listening to a man play with his organ.
Kid B: (Snicker) Oh yeah? What's his name?
Kid A: Biggs. (Through barely contained laughter) E. Power Biggs.
Kid B: (Louder snicker) What's the E. stand for?
Kid A: You don't want to know.
Kid A & Kid B: (Hoots of laughter)

There is virtually nothing linking Biggs to golf, other than the obscure fact that he shares a birthday with Kirk Alan Triplett. Triplett has won a few PGA* tours, but in 1987 he had only been pro for two years and DNP (that's Did Not Play in PGA slang) the historic championship in Palm Beach Gardens. The reason the 1987 PGA Championship was historic wasn't because the final winning score was one of the highest (re: worst) at 287 strokes. It was because it ended in the fourth ever sudden-death. Sudden-death is a playoff method used by the PGA when a championship game ends in a tie. The golfers must play 3 more holes and the player with the lowest stroke total of these three wins the game. Coincidentally, the first official PGA Championship sudden-death playoff occurred between Lanny Wadkins (winner) and Gene Littler (loser) in 1977, the same year that E. Power Biggs died.

The only other tie between golfing and organ music I could find in my dubious google research library was the Count. For those of you who grew up in a closet, the Count is a purple Muppet vampire with OCD and the metaphysical power to cause lightning strikes when he laughs. He has to count everything he sees, hence the name. The Net Generation might know him best from the viral video The Count Censored, which has over 4 million hits on YouTube at present.

*As an aside, The Professional Golfers Association had a hell of a time acquiring PGA.com. When they finally decided to join the twentieth century and build a website (in 1996), the more tech-savvy Potato Growers of Alberta had beaten them to the domain name. After some intense legal negotiations (also known as a suitcase filled with 26,000 US greenbacks) the golfers won. No sudden-death playoff was needed.

[references: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=5120, http://champexhibit.pgalinks.com/index.cfm?year=1987, http://www.pga.com/pgaofamerica/history/1980-1989.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_O%27Reilly_%28political_commentator%29, http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/The_Number_of_the_Day, http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-music-golf-a-month-sundays/id6428378, http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_nr_n_0?rh=n%3A5174%2Ck%3Ae+power+biggs%2Cn%3A!301668%2Cn%3A85&bbn=301668&keywords=e+power+biggs&ie=UTF8&qid=1262491056&rnid=301668, http://pipedreams.publicradio.org/articles/biggs/e_power_biggs.shtml, http://www.organlibrary.org/collections/biggs.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Nelson, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGA_National_Resort_%26_Spa, http://www.historyorb.com/birthdays/march/29, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_Triplett, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_death_%28sport%29#Golf, http://www.masters.com/en_US/info/faq/index.html, http://champexhibit.pgalinks.com/index.cfm?page=history_main, http://www.hickoksports.com/history/pgachamp.shtml, http://www.spudinpei.com/?page=potatoes]

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