Schupak: Golfweek mourns loss of Jeff Babineau, its longtime man out front

On Tuesday morning, I burst into tears when I read the news.

Jeff Babineau, who spent nearly two decades at Golfweek, had died unexpectedly of natural causes at age 62. He as much as anyone was the man out front at Golfweek, the heart and soul of a team of golf sickos that set out to cover the golf landscape for serious golfers.

Babs, as he was affectionately known by (almost) all, was more than a boss. He was a mentor, a trusted confidant and a dear friend.

We had shed tears before. Actually, he was the one doing the crying as he had to lay me off during the height of the recession in 2008. He later told me it was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, and I believed him. Babs was loyal to the core and every time we’d see each other he’d eventually repeat the same refrain: he was going to do whatever he could to bring me back. After a while, it started to feel like lip service and I lost hope along the way but about 18 months later and just a few weeks after I cleaned out all the Golfweek gear from my closet, he called and asked me, “Are you ready to come home?” and even offered a raise. I said I was going to need a few new shirts but I was in. He never gave up on me and I always had his back from that day forward.

I was making out just fine as a freelancer but returned for the people. Golfweek was one big family. Former colleague Jeff Rude, was attached at the hip with Baboo, as he called him, for much of their tenures beginning with the time they were sitting next to each other at the 1998 U.S. Women’s Open and Rude let him know about an opening and offered to put a good word in for him. Babs joined Golfweek soon thereafter and would assume the editor position at a critical time in 2008, taking one for the team when he was needed. The editor role wasn’t really his thing and when Rude left a hole as our back-page columnist, Babs was a perfect fit to return to a regular writing role where his talent shined brightest.

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Along the way, he showed me the right way to do the job. I remember at my first Masters in 2009, I was assigned to write a sider on Chad Campbell and I was watching the drama unfold on the final holes in the media center and he walked over to my desk and in what for him was a stern voice said, “What are you doing here? Get out there and find Chad Campbell’s family. You need to be in position to get his caddie.” He never had to tell me that twice.

Some lessons I learned just listening to his stories. I remember him telling me about the time as a still-green reporter, he was covering a marathon in Orlando and after a late night of carousing, he’d overslept and the winner already had finished. So what did he do? He found the last person to finish the race and wrote a tearjerker that captured the essence of competition. I think it may have even won an award but the lesson was that sometimes you have to make lemonade out of lemons. He wrote plenty of stories on Tiger and Arnie, a personal favorite, but he had a nose for a good story and he sent me to far-flung locales such as Singapore and Israel to tell them. He was blessed with great curiosity. One time, he looked at the field at the Valero Texas Open and he said, “Go find out who this kid Martin Piller is.” I hunted down a wide-eyed Texas native who was making his PGA Tour debut and marveled at the food in player dining and the free dry cleaning. Babs loved it.

Nobody took the time to send a compliment on a story of mine he liked or to call out a bad take and notify me of a typo. [He tattooed in my brain to never call a Donald Ross course old; “They’re all old,” he pointed out, you don’t need to say it.” Once I caught a rare brain fart by him, where he misnamed Matt Fitzpatrick as Matt Fitzgerald and it’s possible he just read all my stories until he could get me back and tell me that instead of Keith Mitchell, I had accidentally typed Kevin Mitchell, the former baseball player!]

In more recent years, when he became a freelancer for hire, I got to play editor to some of Babs’s copy and he made my job easy. His words lyrical, the copy always clean.

He was proud of his Cape Cod roots (Shout out, Dennis Pines Golf Course) and rooted for his beloved Boston sports teams. With me being from New York and bleeding pinstripes, we had an endless sports debate and I always treaded carefully needling him because he had the sharpest wit and the quickest comebacks – not to mention Boston had been on a pretty strong run.

The Golfweek crew in those days often shared a house at majors and we’d go to dinners post-round and parties as a crew. We’d tee it up when we could, both of us playing our sweeping draws, part of a work-hard, play-hard philosophy we all adopted. In the days of weekly print issues, it was an unspoken expectation that everyone at Golfweek stayed in the media center together on Sunday at majors until the wee hours of the morning and closed the place down.

Now it can be told but if there was a guiding light in producing Golfweek’s ever-popular Forecaddie, it was Babineau. His voice and his humor made this section the first thing readers turned to when an issue arrived. The first time I contributed an item that made the cut was a proud moment, topped only by the time he told me he was leaving producing it in my capable hands while he flew over early to attend the British Open. In 2015, he took two of his sons to St. Andrews and teed it up with them before tracking down the story of the day. He cared about his colleagues, arranging a Wednesday ground pass to the Masters so Dan Mirocha could walk the course with his father at their first Masters. He attended the funeral of the father of Beth Ann Nichols and filmed my dad accepting an award from ING on my behalf at the 2023 PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando.

“Your dad did a nice speech the first time for you and I was mad I didn’t video it. At least when you won the second I had another shot. Had you won a third, he may have gone with Seanor’s ‘Ode to the copy editor,’ ” Babs cracked in a text sent along with the video, a reference to the time Golfweek’s former editor Dave Seanor used the GWAA Writing Awards dinner as a chance to pay homage to a lost art.

Then at the PGA Championship in May, where we broke bread for what ended up being the last time, he snapped a picture of me in the media center during a break in press conferences in which I was holding my young daughter in my arms and my face lit up in laughter. When you covered more than 100 majors and a dozen Ryder Cups like Babs did, you’re going to miss Father’s Day and a bunch of other special family occasions, but he knew what was important and lived for his three boys and wife, Jane.

I texted him on his 62^nd birthday, Oct. 16, “One year closer to shooting your age,” and he joked that he was one year closer to senior pickleball. Unbeknownst to me my daughter grabbed my phone as she’s known to do and FaceTimed him, and he laughed at my chatterbox of a daughter. He wrote, “She’s a cutie! We have two on the way in December. One granddaughter and one grandson. Can’t wait!”

Re-reading that yesterday set off another round of crying. Gone too soon. Next week we would’ve walked holes at the PNC Championship near his home in Oviedo. Life is short and tomorrow isn’t promised. I’m grateful for the impact he made on my life: a great writer and mentor and a better man. I’ll remember his great big smile and his distinctive laugh that colleague Brentley Romine loved to imitate.

Even on the day of his passing, he seemed to be with me. I went to lunch at a deli I’d never been to before. I scanned the menu and there it was, a sandwich called Babs best sub. My order was made.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: For nearly two decades, Jeff Babineau was the heartbeat of Golfweek