"I collect golf decanters and have ones from the GGO from 1972 to 1981. Is that all that were made for the tournament?"
1982 Another “Great Week”
One of the most often asked questions regarding the decanters is “how many decanters are there, ten or eleven?” The answer may not be simple. There are eleven decanters or are there ten decanters and one impostor? Ten of them were sold containing bourbon at local ABC stores. One of them was not. To answer this riddle let’s first get to know the bottle in question.
The bottle is 11” long by 2 7/8 and its base that then tapers to 2”. The bottle is in the form of the 18th green at Forest Oaks Country Club. It comes complete with a sand trap on either side of the green. Each trap has its own rake decal detail. The green displays the GGO golf club logo and a three-dimension ball stands where the logo’s ball normally rest.
The bottle’s stopper looks like a knob from a bathroom drawer and reads the year “1982”. Under the stopper is a decal that reads “Greater Greensboro Open”. The same decal is repeated on both the right and left sides of the decanter. The decanter also has three other decanters that read “The Great Week”, the same theme used on the 1981 commemorative decanter. The decal at the end of the bottle has the tournament’s date that year of “March 29-April 4”. This bottle provides no other information about the event. One interesting detail to point out about this bottle is the green felt that is glued to its base. It is the only decanter to have this finishing touch.
In 1981 there was a problem with broken seals and leaking bottles. According to 1981 Assistant General Chairman Bobby Bain, “The bottles were produced on a limited basis, and readily sold out each year. In 1981 however, the ABC Board didn’t sell out their allocation and took a financial loss. They decided to cancel the program that year.”
In the article entitled “Spirited Collector” Jim Schlosser details the demise of the decanters.
The year before, (1981) the ABC system had taken a bath on the GGO bottles for the first time. Many had arrived cracked and leaking and couldn’t be sold. The bottle failed to sell out.
With that, the ABC system said “punt, cancel and let’s not do this again,” recalls Bobby Bain, who was the assistant GGO chairman in 1981 and tournament chairman in 1982.
Troy Vincent, a 34-year veteran of the ABC system, started working for Greensboro’s ABC in 1970. He retired in 2004. He says that he stayed out for 30 months and then got bored with the situation and went back to work for the ABC as a part –time employee. He had this to say about the trouble with the 1981 Greater Greensboro Open decanter.
I think they (were) having some problem with, I don’t know, with the mold or something, the way the bottle was made and a lot of them came that was broken. The ball or top was off or something like that. I think that was the last year. I don’t know that ‘s the reason they quit but they had got a large shipment of them that was messed up. I think that had something to contribute to them stopping, I’m not sure.
A Jaycee named Dave Macron and his father created the last decanter, the one in the form of a fairway. In 1982 Macron submitted a design to the Greensboro Jaycees and agreed to pay the club $5,000 for the rights. According to 1982 GGO General Chairman Bobby Bain, “The venture was at best a breakeven for him”. The bottle was sold empty and unlike the previous ten decanters, never contained bourbon. The decanter was not well received and the GGO series ended.
Which leads the GGO commemorative bottle collector to the following question, “Should the 1982 bottle be considered as part of the complete collection of Greater Greensboro Open decanters?”
Apparently Smith Barrier did not think so. The 1982 decanter was omitted from his 50th Anniversary article entitled “In the Beginning-The Story of the GGO from Day One”. Barrier wrote, “But nobody, honestly, realized it would lead to a GGO Bottle Collection with 90-proof bourbon (1972-81)”.
It is true that this fairway shaped bottle does not meet many of the requirements that the other bottles had to match. It was not sold in ABC store in Greensboro, but instead was sold at the Allgood Construction located at 114 Winola Drive.
This bottle never contained whiskey from the Ezra Brooks, Glenmore Distilleries Company, Daviess County, or Old Hickory Distillers Company. It was also not an official tournament sponsored decanter, although the bottle's designers produced the bottle with the permission of the Greensboro Jaycees. Unlike the majority of the other decanters, it did not sell out. In fact the original price of $19.95 was cut in half to $9.95 plus tax a week before the start of the Greater Greensboro Open.
For these reasons, the decanter’s collector might not consider the 1982 fairway bottle to be truly part of the complete set. It is important to understand that this bottle was an attempt at keeping the decanter tradition alive and if for no other reason, the 1982 decanter should complete the set.
Any collector of the Greater Greensboro Open decanters at some point will be asked to name their favorite bottle. It is of course natural to compare and contrast the 10 different ABC issues and their distant cousin the 11th empty bottle sold at the Allgood Construction Company.
(March 27, 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the Greater Greensboro Open decanters. To celebrate this anniversary "A GGO Thing" is now on sale on Amazon.com for only $9.00.)
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