Sports: David Fay, Director of U.S.G.A., to Retire at End of Year

David Fay, whose 21-year tenure as the executive director of the United States Golf Association, the sport’s governing body, has been characterized by an encyclopedic knowledge of the rules, a wry sense of humor and decidedly populist sensibilities, announced in a statement Friday that he would retire at the end of the year.
Fay drove many initiatives aimed at bringing the 116-year-old U.S.G.A. into the 21st century, including the successful staging of the United States Open at public golf courses and a 20-year effort to expand the sport’s global appeal by returning it to the Olympic Games.

Though he had given no public hints he was preparing to leave the U.S.G.A., which he joined in 1978, Fay pointed to his 60th birthday two months ago as a factor.

“When one is a cancer survivor, milestones like this take on extra importance, and sharpen perspective,” Fay, who was found to have stomach cancer in 1986, said in a statement. He added in a telephone interview: “We’ve got good people in place. Thankfully, the institution lives on. So long as the game is in good shape, people care about it, we’re going to be all right.”


Fay also became an enthusiastic proponent of expanding the United States Open rotation to golf courses open to the public, a concept previously limited to the 1972, ’82 and ’92 Opens at Pebble Beach Golf Links.

His efforts were rewarded in 1999 when the Open was played at the resort-owned No. 2 course at the Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina, and then went to a state-owned facility in 2002 in the first of two United States Opens to be played at the Black course at Bethpage State Park in Farmingdale, N.Y.

The Open will next be played at a public site in 2015 when Erin Hills in Wisconsin will host. Chambers Bay, outside Seattle, is the 2017 Open site, the first in the Pacific Northwest.

Things change. Fay’s answer, for now, is the Sept. 12, 1942, cover of The New Yorker, which he had e-mailed to a reporter. The cover illustration depicts a group of office-bound men in suits on one side of the commuter tracks looking, some askance, some longingly, at a lone commuter on the opposite platform. Dressed in golf togs and holding his bag of clubs, the man has his eyes on the horizon, in the direction of some distant golf course.