Golfweek great Ron Balicki to be posthumously inducted into Connecticut Golf Hall of Fame
Tim Schmitt- Longtime Golfweek journalist Ron Balicki will be posthumously inducted into the Connecticut Golf Hall of Fame.
- Balicki, who died in 2014, was renowned for his coverage of amateur and college golf.
- Throughout his career, he earned numerous awards from organizations like the Golf Writers Association of America.
- In 2010, he became the first non-coach inducted into the Golf Coaches Association of America Hall of Fame.
Ron Balicki joined Golfweek in the fall of 1983, when the Florida-based publication was still a scrappy start-up. In those early years, Balicki covered everything — from Ryder Cups, Open Championships, and U.S. Opens to local women’s state amateur events.
Balicki, who died in 2014 after a battle with cancer, once reflected on his career, saying he didn’t travel the globe simply to report on golf tournaments; he went to tell the stories of the people who played in them. That was his passion — and he excelled at it. Over the years, his work earned numerous national and state honors, including the Golf Writers Association of America’s Best Column award in 1998 for a piece on Scottish amateur Barclay Howard.
Now, posthumously, the longtime Golfweek employee will be honored on Dec. 4, when he'll be inducted into the Connecticut Golf Hall of Fame during the group's 2025 annual meeting.
From a release:
In the 1970s, Balicki began his career in the newspaper business, but it wasn’t until 1980, while working for the Florida Daily News, that he covered his first golf tournament. That tournament proved to be just the beginning, as only three years later, Balicki was hired to join the Florida based Golfweek. ...
Balicki took the amateur game by storm. He covered college events, state events, and premier summer amateur events. He went anywhere there was a story. He covered every NCAA Championship from 1985 until he could no longer do so. Balicki was a force. Players and coaches loved him, and so did his colleagues.
“Ron was an icon of the college golf game, and there wasn’t a better ambassador for what makes our dynamic so special,” Stanford University Director of Men’s Golf Conrad Ray told the Golf Coaches Association of America after Balicki’s passing.
Ron’s work garnered much recognition. He earned numerous honors from the Golf Writers Association of America, International Network of Golf, and from the Texas Golf Writers Association. In 2010, Balicki became the first non-coach inducted into the Golf Coaches Association of America Hall of Fame.
In the words of Balicki, when he accepted the 1998 Golf Writers Association of America award for best column, “Not bad for a Polish kid from the projects of New Britain.”