Coming to Big Sky Country – Old Works to host 2025 PNGA Senior Men’s Amateur

by Tom Cade, Editor

The PNGA will conduct its Senior and Super Senior Men’s Amateur Championship at Old Works Golf Club in Anaconda, Mont., on September 16-18, 2025. It will be the first championship held in the state since the Montana State Golf Association (MSGA) partnered with the PNGA earlier this year.

The first time a PNGA Championship was held in Montana was in 1913, when the PNGA Amateur was held at Butte Country Club. The winner of that championship was future PNGA Hall of Famer A.V. Macan. In 1947, while serving as the PNGA executive secretary, Macan donated the trophy to the PNGA to be used as the perpetual trophy of the PNGA Amateur. The trophy still bears the Butte CC logo, and continues to this day to be that championship’s perpetual trophy.

The PNGA Junior Boys’ Amateur was held at Yellowstone Country Club in Billings in 1995, and is the only other time a PNGA Championship has been held in Montana, until the Seniors and Super Seniors tee it up at Old Works next year.

The course has already developed a reputation of hosting significant local and regional events. It was the site of the 2023 Montana State Amateur, as well as that year’s Men’s Senior and Super Senior Amateurs. In August of this year, Old Works hosted the Montana Cup Matches, a Ryder Cup-style competition between the state’s best amateurs and the PGA professionals of the Yellowstone Chapter of the Rocky Mountain Section PGA. The club has also hosted several collegiate events.

“The fairways are wide and generous, while the greens are guarded by bunkers and are very big,” said Todd Lupkes, the course’s general manager. “Very challenging if the player doesn’t play the right tees, and we can stretch it out to 7,700 yards if we want.”

Lupkes has been at Old Works since the spring of 2020, after several years at Palouse Ridge in Pullman, Wash. Palouse is managed by CourseCo, Inc., and when they took over management of Old Works in March of 2020, Lupkes saw an opportunity to take the Jack Nicklaus design and make it shine.

“We’re in the process of re-grassing the fairways to Kentucky bluegrass, and the rough to Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass for quicker green-up after the long Montana winters,” Lupkes said.

First held in 1965, past champions of the PNGA Senior Men’s Amateur include a stable of Pacific Northwest Golf Hall of Fame inductees, such as Tom Brandes, Pat O’Donnell, Chris Maletis, Kent Myers, Ken Forster, Dr. Jack Lamey, Dr. John Harbottle, George Holland, Erv Parent, and Carl Jonson.

The PNGA Super Senior Men’s Amateur has been conducted since 2010.

Although the MSGA became one of the PNGA’s member associations on January 1, 2024, the state had already played a role in the PNGA’s long history. Opened in 1899, Butte (Mont.) Country Club was one of a handful of established clubs in the region during that era. The club was invited to attend the PNGA’s founding meeting on Feb 4, 1899, but they did not send a delegate, so is not considered one of the PNGA’s six founding clubs, but the club would host several PNGA events during the first part of the 20th century.

The annual yearbooks published by the PNGA in the early 1900s regularly included Montana as having clubs as members of the PNGA.

Old Works, which last year completed a remodel of its clubhouse and now includes a new restaurant and renovated pro shop, is a championship golf course that has earned recognition in Golf Digest on multiple occasions as one of the 100 greatest public courses in the U.S., as well as consistently being ranked as one of the 10 best courses in Montana. On top of being a true destination for players from all over the Northwest, it’s an ideal fit for a PNGA Senior and Super Senior Men’s Amateur, as it provides the ability to test players in all facets of the game and offers great flexibility in yardage with multiple teeing options.

“I think players will be excited to travel to a new venue,” said Nate Schroeder, PNGA director of championship. “It will be a great opportunity to compete at a golf course that most have heard about but haven’t had an opportunity to visit until now.”

The course’s par-5 sixth hole was featured as one of the “Great Holes of the Northwest” in the March 2024 issue of Pacific Northwest Golfer magazine.

Designed by Jack Nicklaus, the site on which Old Works Golf Club was built had been a large-scale copper smelting operation that began in 1884. Capable of processing 3,000 tons of ore daily, it eventually closed and lay idle until 1983 when it became a Superfund cleanup site. In 1989, Anaconda citizens formed a group to promote the construction of a world class golf course on the site. Through cooperation between the community, ARCO, state and federal agencies along with Nicklaus, ground was broken on May 26, 1994, and the course opened in 1997.

As one of the largest Superfund waste areas in the U.S., the site was also one of the most challenging to design. Nicklaus’ first signature design in Montana incorporated many historic relics of the copper smelter, from the flue and oven remains, to fairways that border and wind their way between black slag. The slag, a by-product of the copper smelting process, is also featured in all the bunkers on the course, providing a stunning contrast to white bunker sand found on other courses.