By Timothy R. Olsen ’09, MBA ’18

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Whether it’s a pair of game-tying free throws, a fourth-and-goal stand, or stepping up to the plate in the final inning with your team trailing, the pressure of sports biggest moments can rattle even the most veteran competitors.

That’s why during the 1980 NCAA Golf Championships, few would have blamed Utah State University’s Jay Don Blake for fading after a hot start. Sure, he held a 2-shot lead after the second round, but nobody really expected the St. George native to be a factor in a field loaded with future PGA Tour and Major Championship winners like, Bob Tway, Hal Sutton, Corey Pavin, and Mark Calcavecchia.

The national media couldn’t even get his name right, confusing it with Joe Don Baker, a moderately-known actor of the era. Former Aggie coach Dan Roskelley, who traveled with Blake to the event, remembers the confusion.

“They didn’t know who Jay Don Blake was. It sounded like Joe Don Baker, and I was Dan Ross Kelly,” the longtime coach recalls with a laugh. “It sounded like all we had out West was guys with three first names.”

With play readying to resume at the conclusion of a third-round rain delay and Blake nowhere to be found, it would have been easy to assume that maybe he’d cracked under the pressure. Afterall, Utah State wasn’t exactly known as a golf powerhouse pumping out national-champion caliber players.

As it turns out, though, Blake was fine. He was just using the break in action to catch up on some sleep.

“I ended up just going into the pro shop, went over in the corner, and laid down on the floor underneath a clothing rack they had in there and fell asleep,” he recalls. “I guess they stressed a little bit because it took them a little while to find out where I was at.”

While those looking for him may have been stressed, the Aggie golfer showed no signs of trouble himself. Due to another rain delay, he played the final six holes of his third round the following morning, finishing with a 1-under 71 and a two-shot lead over Sutton heading into the final round that afternoon.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

It’s February in Cache Valley. It’s dark, and the temperature hovers somewhere between cold and frigid as snow swirls through the empty parking lot of the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum.

These are not ideal golfing conditions.

But inside the not-quite-decade-old building, a consistent thwack, thwack, thwack echoes through the cavernous, empty halls. Blake is getting in work. It’s a new routine for the prep star from Southern Utah who’s not used to weather like this.

“As a golfer, it wasn’t the best place to perfect your game,” Blake recalls. “But I had an opportunity to do the best I could and see how it worked out, and just kind of progressed from there.”

Years later on the PGA Tour, that same sound — the song made when a golf club’s sweet spot connects with the ball before it rockets away — caught the attention of one of the game’s legends.

“I remember down in Palm Springs, the first time I kind of ran into Arnold Palmer I was hitting balls right by him. He turns around and says, ‘Hit another one.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, why?’ And he says, ‘Just hit another one. I want to listen.’

“I was hitting driver and I hit another ball and he says, ‘How come your ball sounds different when you hit it than mine does when I do?’ He was just kind of slyly giving me a compliment about how aggressive I was hitting the ball and how solid I was. So, for him to turn around and give me a little sly compliment … I walked away with a big old grin on my face.”

That memory is one of Blake’s favorites from the thousands he’s amassed during a professional career that’s spanned five decades and 500 career starts on the PGA Tour. That journey, however, began many years earlier, on a tiny, 9-hole golf course in his hometown.

RED ROCK ROOTS

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Southern Utah golf scene was decidedly less robust than the fourteen courses that now adorn the desert landscape.

Opened in 1965 when Blake was just 7 years old and Washington County’s population hovered somewhere around 12,000, Dixie Red Hills Golf Club, a charming 9-hole course in the heart of St. George, was the first course in the area.

It’s also Blake’s favorite. He admits that’s the nostalgia talking, but he ranks it No. 1 out of the hundreds of golf courses he’s played over the years — ahead of even Augusta National and Pebble Beach.

“People probably think when I say it, it’s kind of a joke, but I’ve always said Red Hills,” Blake insists. “It’s just kind of where it all started.”

The youngest of LaVer and Ilene Blake’s eight children, Jay Don spent his spare time at the Red Hills course picking up balls on the driving range, parking golf carts, and cleaning clubs for what he calls the “privilege of playing golf there.”

And while the course has left its mark on him, he’s certainly left his mark on it.

He’s the low record-holder, playing the par-34, 9-hole course twice for a score of 57 (11-under par). It’s also where he recorded his first hole-in-one on the 105-yard, par-3 sixth hole — one of the course’s signature holes where players must hit over water and land their ball on a small green with the clubhouse in the background.

As Blake developed, he expanded his game beyond the confines of Southern Utah, competing in regional tournaments as a member of the Utah Junior Golf Association.

“I had to drive to Salt Lake all the time, me and my mother would drive me up there,” Blake remembers. “We only had six or seven tournaments during the summer. So, to get recognized and established, I didn’t really have a whole lot of things that could really make me stand out as an individual.”

There were U.S. Junior Amateur events at the time, though they weren’t quite the hyped spectacles they are now. However, his family didn’t have the means to travel to those nationwide events. But the tournaments he did travel to, he made the most of.

Those trips often included nights spent sleeping in the family’s sedan, rather than a motel room, and mornings getting ready in a service station bathroom. A quick brush of the teeth, a clean shirt, and a tournament victory.

A CHANGE OF COURSE

As Roskelley tells it, Utah State landing the most prolific golfer in the history of the state of Utah was a bit of timing and luck. The head golf coach from 1980 to 2001, he helped recruit Blake as an assistant to Dean Candland in the ’70s, but there was a series of events that landed Blake on the Logan campus.

In the mid-’70s, BYU’s golf team was a national power with a top-5 NCAA finish every year from 1975–1982. This included runner-up finishes in 1976 and 1980, and the program’s only NCAA championship in 1981. So, it’s no surprise that Blake was on the Cougars’ radar during a standout prep career with the Dixie Flyers.

In fact, Blake remembers having conversations with legendary BYU head coach Carl Tucker about attending the school and had even been sent papers for enrollment. However, this was during his junior year in 1976 and when the Cougars realized he had another year of high school left, they pivoted.

“My senior year when I was trying to figure out where I’m going to go, I communicated with [BYU] and they got back and said, ‘We’ve gone a different direction.’ So, they pretty well kind of lost interest in what they had with me.”

Blake’s open recruitment coincided with a decision by Utah State to strategically invest in golf.

Roskelley says he wasn’t in the meeting, but he remembers athletic director LaDell Andersen — who coached the USU men’s basketball team to five NCAA tournament appearances between 1961–1971, along with the program’s lone Elite-Eight trip — identified golf as a sport where the Aggies could potentially develop a national brand with minimal investment.

“We went down and got some players out of California and increased the amount of money we were spending on the program by quite a lot,” Roskelley remembers. “We had a good team for several years there.”

Along with those Californians, they also offered Blake a full-ride scholarship to trade in the red rocks for snow-capped mountains. To the newlywed from humble beginnings who saw USU as an opportunity to get an education, ease his family’s financial burden, and pursue his golf dreams, it was an easy decision.

“I have no, have no regrets going to Utah State. I had two of the greatest supporters in Dean Candland and Dan Roskelley. Those guys supported me and did all they could to give me the opportunity,” Blake says. “I have all the gratitude for those guys and giving me the opportunity, and Utah State, to give me the opportunity. I have all kinds of gratitude with that.”

FINDING HIS FOOTING

Blake, who prior to committing to the Aggies had never been further north than Ogden, admits that at the beginning, his college experience was a bit overwhelming. Somewhat reserved, he says he initially felt like an outcast with so many golfers from California on the team. He also wasn’t sure how his game would stack up to those year-round players.

As he recalls, it took him a year or so to really settle in.

“I kind of started to feel more comfortable, and going to some of the tournaments I started getting in the hunt a couple times,” Blake says. “And then once you step over that hurdle and get one of the wins, then you feel like you’ve really made some good progress.”

Once he found that groove, he didn’t let off the gas. Incredibly, he won more than half of the collegiate tournaments he competed in (15-of-29), including a dominant stretch of 11 wins in 13 tries. He was named an All-American in 1980 and 1981 and was also named the College Player of the Year in 1981.

Roskelley says that unlike most golfers who “smack a lot of golf balls on the range,” Blake’s unique practice method set him up for success. Essentially, he’d go to the course and play seven balls at a time. He’d tee off seven times and then play each of those balls from where it ended up.

“You can only play a few holes and probably couldn’t have anybody behind you, but that was his method of getting in practice,” Roskelley says. “I’d never heard of that before, but it makes all the sense. I think that’s the reason why he was such a great chipper and putter.”

Following a runner-up finish in the 1981 NCAA Championship, Blake turned pro and officially qualified for the PGA Tour in the fall of 1986. His best season came in 1991 when, at the age of 33, he recorded his first PGA Tour win at the Shearson Lehman Brothers Open. He recorded five other top-10 finishes that season and led the tour in putting.

Though that 1991 victory proved to be Blake’s lone PGA Tour victory, he spent 15 consecutive years ranked among the Tour’s top-125 golfers. He amassed five second-place finishes, two third-place finishes, 36 top-10s, and more than $10 million in career earnings across both the PGA Tour and PGA Champions Tour (where he added three more wins). He was also inducted into the university’s Hall of Fame in 1995.

However, one of the most meaningful numbers of Blake’s career is 500. That is how many career starts he made on the PGA Tour. The last of which came in his own backyard in October 2024, at the age of 65, in the inaugural Black Desert Championship — the first official PGA Tour event in Utah since 1963. It’s a moment he won’t soon forget.

Under the guise of adding additional footage for a video project Blake was involved with — The Greater Zion Golf Story: Desolation to Destination — he and his wife Marci, who celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary this year, were summoned to the Black Desert Resort in the spring of 2024.

They arrived before sunrise, got mic’d up, and then headed out onto the course. From there, though, Blake recalls things seemed rather unorganized. He says they went from hole-to-hole, ran through a series of seemingly random shoots, and kept finding excuses for things to do.

“I said, ‘Marci, this is the weirdest thing. They are so unorganized, so unprofessional. Something’s going on,’” Blake remembers with a smile.

Stall tactics are what was going on.

The folks at Black Desert were gathering as many of Blake’s four children, 10 grandchildren, and extended family as possible together on the putting green. As Blake and Marci pulled up, they noticed a crowd on the putting green, but preoccupied with the faux photo shoot, they didn’t notice who the crowd was.

“As I stand up [out of the golf cart] and turn around towards the putting green, I’ve got all my grandkids running towards me,’ says Blake, who still gets emotional at the memory. “They come running, jump up and give me a big old hug and then hug Marci. We’re all hugging each other and I’m like, ‘What the heck is going on?’”

Patrick Manning, Black Desert Resort’s managing partner, cleared that confusion up in short order, awarding Blake a sponsor’s exemption to make his milestone 500th start on the same ground he remembers climbing around lava rock on as a child.

“You couldn’t dream it … I mean, that’s a story you couldn’t even think or even make it up,” Blake reflects.

SEIZING THE TITLE

As the afternoon sun burned its track across the Columbus, Ohio sky that last day of May, 1980, it finally seemed like the pressure might be getting to the unknown Utah State University golfer.

On Ohio State University’s Scarlet Course, Blake was 2-over through his first 13 holes and his two-shot margin over Sutton had evaporated. The Centenary product, who would later go on to win the 1980 U.S. Amateur tournament, had already carded a 1-under 70 during his final round to finish the tournament at 5-under-par. That left him with a two-shot lead over Blake who only had five holes left to play.

Roskelley says this is when fate, in the form of BYU once again, intervened.

“I remember talking to Jimmy Blair. He was playing for BYU at the time, and they played earlier and he asked me, ‘Does [Blake] know Sutton’s already in with that score?’ And I said, ‘No,’” Roskelley recalls.

“From the past way we’d dealt with each other, he usually didn’t want to know everything else going on. He just wanted to concentrate on his own game, but Jimmy said, ‘No, go tell him,’ so, I did. I don’t think I’d have ever done that on my own volition, but he convinced me.”

Whether that break in protocol provided Blake with extra motivation or not, he closed with a pair of birdies, including a 12-footer on the 18th hole — along with a 25-foot par save on the 17th — to force a playoff with Sutton. After the pair recorded pars on their first three playoff holes, Blake knocked in a 10-foot birdie putt on the fourth playoff hole — his 28th hole of golf played that day — to secure the improbable championship win.

Longtime Deseret News sports writer Mike Sorensen was on hand to cover the BYU team and remembers the stunning upset.

“These [golfers] were getting the best of everything — golf balls, new clubs — and I used the same set of clubs all through high school and all through college. We never got products,” Blake says. “We had to just go out and earn it.

“I look back at it and I think I’ve benefited from it because I made the effort to have the opportunity, instead of having it just handed to me.”

For a university that boasts only nine total national championships all time, three team and six individual, Blake’s feat — which nearly five decades later is the most recent individual title and the only one outside of track and field — is a true Aggie underdog story.

Even if the memory of that day has faded for some.

“I’m kind of a has been at my age,” Blake jokes. “I mean, I’ve even got a lifetime membership for all the [St. George] city golf courses and they still want to make me pay.”