MIA Students Revive Local Golf History With Documentary

The Tony Lema Tournament was once the biggest event on Marco Island. Though few on the island remember it today, the tournament once drew some of the biggest names in the country, including Richard Nixon, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and others, during the 1960s and 70s.

For an evening, a group of students from Marco Island Academy (MIA) brought the tournament back to life through a documentary, using never-before-seen historical footage donated by the Sarazen and Stackpoole families. It is called Two Legends, One Tradition, focusing on Tony Lema, Gene Sarazen, and the era when Marco Island was being developed into a premier resort destination by the Mackle Brothers up through the 1980s.

MIA seniors Alexander Rodriguez, Samuel Zocco, and Bella Shymske, writers with the school’s newspaper The Wave, have worked for hundreds of hours over several months to put the documentary together, interviewing those like Bradley Stackpoole, who caddied the Tony Lema Tournament when he was younger, and those familiar with the legacy of Tony Lema and Gene Sarazen.

The film debuted at the golf tournament in honor of Sarazen, the 14th annual MIA Squire’s Pro-Am Fundraiser at the Eagle Lakes Golf Club in Naples on Sunday. The event is among MIA’s most important fundraising events, relying on the money to fund its operations. Many sponsors partnered for the event, including Rene and Tish Champagne, Rose Marina, Oliverio Investment Group, and many others, generating over $1 million in revenue.

With many sponsors present, along with the Sarazen and Stackpoole families, MIA wanted to present the film as a surprise to showcase what the students were capable of thanks to the financial support for their education.

“I think sometimes in the media, there can be so much about ‘this is what teenagers are like’, or ‘this is what they’re drawn to,’ and there’s that whole screenager movement. But working with kids every day, you get a different optic of them, and they’re so smart, and they’re just really, really capable,” said MIA Principal Melissa Scott.

“I feel really lucky that we were chosen to be part of it, and I want to make sure that we do Gene’s legacy right … I want to make sure everyone knows these are real people, they weren’t just names, and so I want to make sure that we’re respectful and kind to their memories and legacies.”

Gene Sarazen was a famous golf professional who made a name for himself by winning seven major championships over his career. He later came to Marco and became a community figurehead before his death in 1999, with direct involvement in founding the Lema Tournament. The MIA’s charity tournament carries his nickname, The Squire, in his honor.

In the documentary, interspersed with interviews, there was a large amount of colored Super 8 Camera footage from the Marco Island Tony Lema Tournament that’d never been seen publicly. The tournament, which ran from 1967 to 1980, was held in honor of Lema - who was the prominent professional golfer to live in the area - after his passing in a fatal plane crash in 1966. The tournament was so popular at the time that it was considered something of an unofficial holiday on Marco Island, with children being let out of school to attend.

The footage features prominent Marco Island resort locations from the time, along with the Marco Island Inn as it appeared in 1971. Additionally, some of the footage features the Mackle Brothers, along with Gene Sarazen and Evel Knievel, who was present that year and had a large number of Marco Island children caddying for him.

Bradley Stackpoole first reached out to the academy with the footage, wanting them to make a project. Stackpoole, who was born on Marco Island, discovered footage his mother had left in storage, including numerous videos depicting the island during its early years. Though he considered sending them to a university to archive and make a documentary about, Stackpoole instead donated the digitized footage to MIA’s journalism program.

“I wanted to more or less take it back to where it started. And if a university can do it, why can’t, with today’s technology, a high school do it?” Stackpoole said.

After receiving the footage, the students said they spent hundreds of hours poring over it, along with vintage memorabilia and magazines from the time, to put together a timeline and narrative for the documentary.

“The information you learn from this was like really shocking, just to know how much things have changed over time,” Rodriguez said. The students also added that through their work, they learned more about the people behind the famous names across the Marco Island area, which had otherwise felt abstract until now.

“I think one of the biggest things for me was actually humanizing the people behind it, so you hear the name Gene Sarazen and understand that he’s connected with Marco Island but without going in-depth and learning the story itself, he’s just a name, and then he kind of became a person as you work through it. Same thing with Tony Lema and every other golf pro or celebrity that was at the tournament,” Shymske said.

The seniors said they would carry forward the skills they learned putting the film together into their future career prospects. The MIA journalism program isn’t finished yet, however, with English Instructor Keith Scalia noting that they had even more footage that they could work into other documentary projects in the future. Tish Champagne, president of the Marco Island Historical Society’s board of directors, said that she hoped to potentially feature them at the museum and on CBS Sunday Morning in the future.

“It’s not only important to Marco Island; every time at the museum that we have stories being told, events that we bring people in to tell stories about Marco Island, that’s Florida history too, and we pack our auditoriums. There’s so much history here, so this is not just for Marco; it’s really for Florida and beyond,” Champagne said.

Upon debuting the video to the room of over 100 guests, the students were given a round of applause, with some, like Scott and Rene Champagne, having emotional reactions to the film. Those present were very complimentary of the work they’d done and were anticipating future projects from MIA.

Mary Ann Sarazen, Gene Sarazen’s 89-year-old daughter, also expressed her admiration for the student’s work. Having donated some of her own footage to the project as well, she said she felt it was a loving tribute to her father and the history of the island.

“I thought it was very, very well done,” Sarazen said. “I’m a historian, and I’ve been involved in following the history of Dad, and you have to; people are always asking questions. So I try to keep track of his career and what he won. And I feel the job they did was absolutely lovely.”

The evening concluded with a raffle for various prizes, and several awards were given to the teams with the best scores in the tournament. Continuing the family legacy, Sarazen’s son tied the tournament’s co-founder, Terry McCreanor, with a score of 13 under par. McCreanor’s team won on a tiebreaker and received festive nutcrackers.