Let’s go back to May 19, 1968. War was escalating in Vietnam. President Lyndon Johnson had just announced he would not run for reelection. Mickey Mantle was limping through his last season with the New York Yankees. James Eastland and John Stennis, two Democrats, were Mississippi’s two U.S. senators. A promising young quarterback named Archie Manning was finishing spring training, preparing for his first varsity season at Ole Miss.

Yes, and in Hattiesburg, B.R. “Mac” McClendon, a rookie playing his first professional golf tournament, won the first Magnolia Classic, defeating 53-year-old Pete Fleming in a nine-hole, sudden-death playoff at the Hattiesburg Country Club. 

McClendon, fresh out of LSU where he was a three-time Southeastern Conference golf champion, won a not-so-grand total of $2,800 for his efforts. He birdied the ninth hole, his 45th of the day, at dusk, as car lights shone brightly from the parking lot just behind the green.

Few, if any, of us present that damp spring evening in Hattiesburg would have ever believed the little tournament with such humble beginnings would endure for 57 years, but it has.

Fast-forward to Sunday’s breezy, cloudy afternoon at the Country Club of Jackson in the final round of perhaps the final Sanderson Farms Championship. Steven Fisk, a 28-year-old Georgian, fired an 8-under-par 64 with birdies on the final three holes to win the tournament that began so long ago as the Magnolia Classic. First prize this time? Just over a million bucks. The late Mac McClendon surely wouldn’t have believed that.

Just as had happened 57 years before, Sunday’s final round came down to a two-man shootout. Fisk and South African Garrick Higgo trading birdies until Fisk birdied the final three holes with a remarkable display of grit and pinpoint accuracy. 

“I know I’m good enough,” Fisk said immediately afterward. “I knew I could do it. It’s a lifelong dream, honestly. Sometimes you doubt yourself, but I just knew I could do it. Nothing was going to stop me from doing what I wanted today.”

A former Georgia Southern golfer, Fisk turned professional in 2019, but his early professional career was slowed – and threatened, really – by a condition in his left hand called carpometacarpal bossing. If that sounds serious, it was. The injury required surgery and then a change in his golf swing to prevent further problems. Fisk persevered.

Perseverance has also been the story of the Magnolia Classic, turned Deposit Guaranty Classic, turned Southern Farm Bureau Classic, turned Viking Classic, turned True South Classic, turned Sanderson Farms Championship. The event’s  57-year-history has included tournaments at three different golf courses, in three different Mississippi cities, and with six different sponsors. It has endured not only the sponsorhip losses, but also a 100-year flood, two lesser floods, a couple hurricanes, a tornado, a pandemic and a half dozen recessions. In 2005, before so much of that happened, Mississippi’s only PGA TOUR tournament had endured so much that a Sports Illustrated deemed it “the little tournament that could.”

The late Robert Morgan, a Hattiesburg businessman, championed the tournament through its first 40 years and a move from the Hattiesburg Country Club to Annandale in Madison. Then, Joe Sanderson, the Laurel poultry magnate, saved the event and oversaw the move from Annandale to the Country Club of Jackson where the tournament had seemingly flourished until now. 

But Sanderson sold his company in 2022 and the new owners have decided not to continue sponsoring the event beyond this year’s tournament. A new sponsor has not been found, which could spell the end of the “little tournament that could.”

That would be a blow to several Mississippi charities and especially Children’s Hospital. Since 2013, the event has raised nearly $19 million for Children’s of Mississippi and $2.75 million for other Mississippi charities. Said Steve Jent, the tournament’s executive director, “All I can say is that we’d like to find a title sponsor for next year. We want to keep it going.”

Steven Fisk knew little of any of that before he came to Country Club of Jackson for the first time this week. He has quickly learned to adore the tournament which he called “a first-class event on a great golf course.”

Asked about the likelihood of this being the last Sanderson Farms Championship, Fisk, spoke for many when he replied, “If this was the last one, that stinks…”