In the years when Marty Gorsich worked in the Padres’ corporate sales department, it was clear to him the distinction the club made between those who hawked seats and suites and those who managed the team or put on a uniform.
Most of the sales and marketing arm of the front office occupied the first floor at Petco Park. The on-field competitive engine was above on the second floor.
“I learned very quickly that I wasn’t going to be (General Manager) Kevin Towers,” Gorsich said. “We were all excited about what happened on the second floor, but we didn’t have as much control over that as we thought we did.
“We had everything to do with what happened on the first floor.”
That circumstance became an apt analogy in 2012 when Gorsich was hired by the Century Club of San Diego to lead the sales team for the city’s annual PGA Tour stop at Torrey Pines, the Farmers Insurance Open.
Gorsich, as well as executives at tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra, Fla., believed the Century Club needed to better understand its role. It wasn’t the tournament staff’s job to guarantee Tiger Woods would play every year, or the sun would shine every day, or that you could identify the winner if he walked past you in the grocery store.
What they could do is try to make coming to the tournament the best it could be. The food needed to be great, the alcohol in plentiful supply, the bathrooms nicer, the amenities surrounding the golf more comfortable and fun.
“The people here (at the Century Club) were open-minded to that,” Gorsich said. “Those folks were going to Padres games or the (Del Mar) racetrack. They were going to the Indian casinos.
“If you’re going somewhere, you know you’re probably going to spend some money, but if they give you a good experience while you’re there, then you have no problem, because it’s your entertainment dollar.”
From the beginning, Gorsich made his mark in the Farmers outside the ropes, and he’s never had more power than now. When Peter Ripa resigned as Century Club CEO and tournament director in July after eight years at the helm, Gorsich was quickly tabbed as his replacement.
His ascension brought the 45-year-old Gorsich full circle as a feel-good San Diego story.
He grew up in the hills above Mission Valley and attended the old University High School (now Cathedral Catholic), where his parents were teachers and Phil Mickelson preceded him by a few years in school.
Once an aspiring volleyball coach, Gorsich attended San Diego Mesa and UC Santa Barbara, and when he decided, at 22, that sales might be a better path, his first job was as a clerk in the Padres gift shop at the Mission Valley stadium.
“I wanted to be the best shirt-folder I could be,” Gorsich said with a laugh. “I told people I was using my college diploma as my shirt-folding square.”
Energetic and happy to pepper the front office with ideas, Gorsich got a marketing internship that led to a full-time job with the beloved team of his childhood. He worked 13 years for the Padres, and then a year for the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers before landing the Farmers Open position.
Gorsich’s first test as tournament director arrives in the coming week, when the Farmers Open begins with a pro-am on Wednesday and the four-day tournament that starts Thursday.
Yes, the biggest draw in golf, Woods, will return to Torrey Pines, seeking a ninth career victory on the grounds while anticipation percolates for the next triumph — No. 83 — that will crown Woods the all-time win leader in tour history.
Beyond Woods, the Farmers field is stellar, with the likes of Mickelson, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth.
But you didn’t see any billboards around town or commercials on television promoting those faces. A number of years ago, the San Diego tournament plastered Woods’ image all over town, and he didn’t enter.
“We can’t control Mother Nature,” Gorsich said. “We can’t control the field (of players); and we especially can’t control who’s going to make the cut. We don’t know who’s going to be on the leaderboard, and if we tell you that’s the reason to come, we’re making a promise we can’t keep.”
Gorsich, in fact, has experienced all the butterflies of the Woods roller coaster. Woods captured the 2013 edition of the Farmers — Gorsich’s first with the event. His next four Torrey opportunities: T80, missed cut, out due to injury, withdrawal.
Gorsich looks at four categories to devise strategic plans: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Upon beginning work for the Farmers, he surmised, “Our No. 1 strength was Tiger Woods; our No. 1. threat and weakness was Tiger Woods.
“Having Tiger was like having (Michael) Jordan on your team in the 1990s. He’s a transcendent figure. The business plan here was, ‘When Tiger goes away, we’ll put the new No. 1 on our billboard.’ But that’s not what Tiger represents.
“As much as there is a Tiger effect, we have to stand on our own.”
Not that Gorisch doesn’t appreciate the way Woods stirs couch potatoes into becoming ticket buyers. He said that when Woods committed to the Farmers on Jan. 9, traffic on the tournament website quadrupled. Fearful the site was being hacked, the new company managing it shut it down for a period, Gorisch said.
“As long as I’ve been here,“ Gorsich said, “the question is, ‘Is Tiger in? Is he playing?’ You say his name and everybody knows it. And in his resurgence, I think he’s made fans of people who weren’t fans before. He’s become more real.
“He’s overcome challenges, kept his head down, and I think he’s become softer and more likable. If you look at the Presidents Cup this year, he was the best golfer, and he was a leader in the way I’ve never seen him.”
Gorsich has his own leadership qualities. He’s a willing mentor and also hasn’t been afraid to take strong stands that weren’t very popular, either with Century Club honchos or the fans.
He said he once asked in a meeting if anybody thought about the quality of the portable bathrooms. Some people rolled their eyes dismissively, but he urged them to speak to their spouses on the subject.
“The next week,” Gorsich said, “they were very interested in talking about bathrooms because they got an earful.”
The tournament in his early days, Gorisch said, had weak concessions and didn’t accept credit cards. There were few sky boxes and sales opportunities went unfulfilled.
In one move that initially angered fans, a grandstand at the 18th hole that was free to spectators was removed. Gorsich reasoned that people who sat on the 50-yard line for football or behind home plate at baseball paid a for the privilege.
Changes such as those had a huge impact on the tournament’s bottom line in an era when the PGA Tour was closely watching the event’s finances, which in the early 2010s had drifted into red numbers.
When Gorsich started with the Farmers, he said there were eight suites at the 18th green and they didn’t sell out. This year, there are 28, and they’d all been purchased by October. The price tag for a private suite at 18, including food and beverage: $52,000 for the week. (A single-day badge in the public sky box at 18 is $400.)
There are similar successes in the sky boxes that have been built on the 15th, 16th and 17th holes, and fans always seem to pack the full-access hospitality area at the eighth green.
Always paramount in Gorsich’s decision-making is a poll taken several years ago in San Diego by the Scarborough research firm. Gorsich said that 4 percent of the respondents were golf ionate; 16 percent were golf interested; and 80 percent didn’t care much about the sport at all.
Time and again, Gorsich said he experienced that when he tried to woo his former Padres clients to buy in at the Farmers Open.
“Seeing the people that I knew and trusted, who needed an entertainment option, putting us in the box of the 4 percent, that was a real awakening,” Gorisch said. “How could we ask the corporate environment to embrace us when we were leaving so many of their guests on the sidelines.”
Gorsich said he believes many of the issues with that have been addressed, though there is much more work to be done. The Farmers Open, he believes, has become an example of the golf world listening and starting to get it right.
“There were a lot of hard decisions,” Gorsich said. “They’re not always right or perfect, but with where we’ve ended up, with how Farmers and the tour views us, they will gladly tell you that things have never been better.”
