For the third straight year, Golf Magazine is proud to honor the men and women who have left their marks on the spor

Innovators need not reinvent the game. They need simply to improve it, whether it’s through creativity and commitment, kindness and courage, or just good old-fashioned clever thinking.

This year’s recipients represent all of these qualities and many more, from a putting teacher who helps players improve through the use of state-of-the-art gadgets, to the grounds crews that keep overplayed public courses ship-shape, to a golfer-cum-model who wants to give the LPGA some much-needed buzz

The Man of the People: Justin Timberlake, 28, giving a ‘green’ course back to his hometown of Memphis

“I love this game. I learned it playing on a course in Memphis, Tenn., called Big Creek. It was the first place my dad taught me how to hit a ball. A couple years ago, my dad told me that the course was going to close and become a development. He said, ‘What if we buy it?’ I started laughing, but he wasn’t. He was serious. I said, ‘If you’re serious, so am I. Let’s do it.’

“The course was a landmark in the community; we had to save it. I’ve put my heart and soul into the project. We renamed it Mirimichi. We wanted to refurbish it. I asked some questions, and we found out we could make it a ‘green’ course – the first course in the U.S. to be designated as a certified Audubon International Classic Sanctuary. It was important to try to reuse water, to zero out our ecological footprint.

“Before we opened this summer, we had three missions: Create an amazing sanctuary for the community, create an eco-friendly course, and create a public course [that would be] mentioned in the same sentence as Torrey Pines and Bethpage Black. This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of. It’s an awesome feeling to give this course back to the community.”

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