Part ego, part marketing: Black Desert gambling on eyeballs from PGA Tour’s Bank of Utah event
There’s a scene in the George Clooney movie “O Brother, Where are Thou?” where the mother of his seven children, who is on the verge of remarrying, says to him, “You’re not bona fide. You need to be bona fide.” And while those words most surely had nothing to do with the PGA Tour, they could just as well apply to two of its newest sponsors, Black Desert Resort, the host of this week’s Bank of Utah Championship, and Good Good Golf, which on Monday signed a multi-year deal to be the title of a new FedEx Cup Fall event in Austin, Texas in 2026.
While Good Good, which has built a large and younger audience of golf fans via YouTube that likes to buy its branded gear, and Black Desert, a fledgling resort in a remote corner of southwestern Utah, may not appear to have much in common, both of these title sponsors have sought out the Tour in search of greater credibility. They want to be “bona fide.”
Focus on Black Desert Resort
Let’s focus on Black Desert Resort, which is owned by Reef Capital and is in its second year of a four-year deal to host a FedEx Cup Fall event. The resort in Ivins, Utah, features 800 hotel rooms, a 45,000-square-foot convention center and a 15,000-square-foot spa and one Tom Weiskopf/Phil Smith-designed golf course (though more will be on the way).
At business school, they call it the purchase funnel: awareness, familiarity, consideration, purchase and loyalty. This deal was conceived to raise the resort’s profile through the telecast and ancillary media around it, with hopes of getting viewers to consider taking a vacation there. If they can get them on site, the odds of selling a property go way up. It’s a successful model that real estate developers have used dating back to the 1980s and 1990s for Senior Tour events and the Skins Game and as early as the 1969 RBC Heritage at Harbour Town, which put the Hilton Head Island, S.C. community on the map.
For Black Desert, the PGA Tour sponsorship has the appearance of being both an ego play and a marketing play. Jared Lucero, Reef Capital’s CEO, is a scratch golfer and it is the family sport. It never hurts negotiations with the Tour when the company CEO loves the game and Lucero isn’t the only member of his executive staff for whom golf holds a special place in their heart. Patrick Manning, Black Desert Resort’s managing partner, conceded that it hasn’t hurt his cause.
“It helps a lot, because I have big dreams,” Manning said. “I’m a visionary so having partners that are avid golfers helps a lot because they get behind things that if they weren’t golfers, probably don’t make a lot of sense.”
He downplayed the idea that ego triggered the Tour sponsorship deal but conceded, “We love to challenge the notion of ‘that’s impossible. You’ll never pull it off.’ That part maybe is ego, but it’s just fun.”
Black Desert isn’t just sponsoring a Tour event; it also began hosting an LPGA Tour stop earlier this year. Manning originally sought to title an Epson Tour event, the developmental circuit for the LPGA, for two years – the first at Shoulder Hollow Golf Course, a 36-hole mountainside complex in Park City, and then move it to Black Desert. That wasn’t an option because another Epson event at Copper Rock Golf Course in Hurricane, Utah, had exclusivity to the market. Manning proposed a simple solution: let’s make it a full-fledged LPGA event.
“And they started laughing and that’s how that all got started,” he recalled. “I’m like, I don’t know what’s funny, seriously, let’s make it a full (LPGA) tournament. And we did, and then I got really passionate about the women because I started to learn the disparity between the experiences that the men receive versus the women, and I knew that we could make a real impact for the women and that’s when I decided to fly them all in on private jets and really roll out the red carpet and let them stay at the resort for free, and eat for free.”
Course wasn’t done when calls to PGA Tour were made
When Manning called the PGA Tour to inquire about hosting a men’s event, the Weiskopf design hadn’t even been grassed yet. The Tour sent Steve Wenzloff, its senior vice president of design services and player liaison, to do a site visit and it wasn’t until they were standing on the 18th green that Manning could garner a clue whether the resort had a chance of bringing the PGA Tour back to Utah for the first time in 63 years. “He said, ‘Patrick, there are spectacular golf courses on the PGA Tour and there’s epic holes, but nothing is going to pop on television like this will,’ ” Manning recounted.
Within 30 days, Manning said, Black Desert inked a four-year deal in May 2023 to bring the PGA Tour back to Utah.
If the ego triggered the deal, the marketing play justifies it. “It’s big-time eyeballs on this region and on our resort,” Manning boasted.
It’s textbook marketing through the PGA Tour. The eyes of the golf world – Manning mentioned more than 200 countries and territories will be seeing the incredible contrasting red-rock outcroppings and distinctive black lava rock of Black Desert – will enjoy a week-long infomercial for a region that has been described as “Kona meets Sedona.” Other golf resorts, he said, can only offer the ‘buddy trip,’ but Black Desert is going to offer what he’s dubbed “guilt-free golf.”
“We want to be synonymous with the largest, most popular golf destinations,” Manning said, noting that more golf courses are planned in the future. “We’re going to have an incredible water park and we already have opened a world-class spa and we’ll have 15 restaurants and shopping and a concert venue so you can bring your whole family on your buddy trip, if you will.”
What’s next at Black Desert?
He envisions kids setting up shop at the water park and the non-golfing spouses enjoying the spa and the whole family meeting up later at the restaurants and then catching a concert or some other form of entertainment in the evening. “And nobody feels guilty because everybody had a blast doing whatever it is that they want to do,” Manning said. “That really is the vision for Black Desert: to be a premier top five golf destination in the United States that the whole family wants to go to.”
The real payoff down the line isn’t the resort being cash-flow positive, but rather the real estate associated with more than 1,000 residences to be sold that will secure the return on investment. But Manning welcomes one and all to come experience this picturesque region that is ascending into a golf destination.
“Whether you’re buying a residence here to have a home or second home at Black Desert, or you’re just coming in to buy a milkshake and have a cheeseburger, you know, everybody’s our customer,” he said.
