This story first appeared in the Spring 2025 edition of Northern Ohio Golfer Magazine, the official print publication of the Northern Ohio Golf Association. NOGA members who provide a mailing address in GHIN receive a copy mailed to their home twice per year. Not yet a NOGA member? Join for 2025 now!
Todd Franko is one of those guys you like as soon as you meet him. Burly, with a quick wit and a charming manner, the smile rarely leaves his face. And wow, can the man spin a yarn.
By trade, Franko was a newspaper man, a journalist for 35 years, working at small-town papers across the Midwest: Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, upper New York. His last stop was at The Vindicator in Youngstown as the paper’s editor.
Now, he runs golf tournaments. A series of golf tournaments, actually, for both juniors and adults of all skill levels, primarily across the Youngstown area. The events are called The Greatest Golfer, and he’s killing it with 350 adults and 120 kids playing every summer.
How that came to be is one of those captivating Franko yarns.
“So, being a weird newspaper guy, not the most conventional, I was always looking for content opportunities that were outside the box. I bumped into a golf tournament run by a previous newspaper I worked at in Indiana. But the event was only for scratch guys. I thought, well, this is OK, but if I ever do this, I’d want to do it for people like me who are 10, 12, 14 handicap.”
“Later, I was at The Vindicator, the daily newspaper in Youngstown. Trying to think of new things to cover – which I did to my old boss almost every other day, drove him crazy – I pitched the idea of a golf tournament for Youngstown. And funny enough, if it wasn’t for the digital sales boss, our internet sales guy in charge of auto dealerships, jewelry stores, and realtors, Greatest Golfer probably never gets approved at The Vindicator.”
“The big boss wasn’t a golfer. His only experience with golf was his ad sales team taking two weeks off when the LPGA event came to town. They would go socializing with sponsors and disappear from the office. So he absolutely hated golf.”
“But the digital sales guy on our team said, ‘If we can build up this database of golfers and we can directly connect with them as opposed to trusting them just to read our paper, we can really market jewelry and cars.’ If not for that guy, Greatest Golfer might never happen. That was the lightning that struck in our office, because the big boss was a ‘NO’ at first.”
“Next step, we convinced three golf courses to participate. My partner at the Vindicator and since Greatest started, Ted, said, ‘Let’s talk to Dennis Miller, a PGA pro at Mill Creek, 36 holes, Donald Ross.’ So we met Dennis and explained what we wanted to do: bring a Valley championship that pulls in from the region and celebrates Youngstown. Dennis said, ‘I get it. Let’s go to John Diana at Trumbull CC to get a private course involved. Then let’s go to Ed Muransky, who owns The Lake Club. Big Ed gets behind these kind of ‘pro-Youngstown’ things.'”
That was the winter of 2009. The event was on its way.
But what about the name? A tournament with the name “Greatest Golfer” certainly is unique. That was by design.
“I’m the idiot who came up with the name,” explained Franko. “Again, out of the box. We’re sitting in the newsroom, and all the expected names got tossed out: Youngstown Valley Golf Championship, Amateur Golf Classic, very traditional stuff.”
“I got pissed. I’m listening to ‘My Father’s Oldsmobile’ getting pitched from across the table. This was when Google and Yahoo were taking off, and I wanted a unique name like that. Why would we not want to come up with something that?”
“The ‘Greatest’ idea came from an 18-week feature we ran called ‘Greatest Holes of the Valley.’ I said, ‘Why wouldn’t we build on that and call it ‘Greatest Golfer’? Once I had that thought, I was like a dog with a bone with that name. I think they accepted it just to shut me up.”
“That first year, 2010, we were polling every player who signed up, how they found us, why they registered. I asked the fifth guy who signed up, a younger guy, why he wanted to play. He said, ‘Who doesn’t want to be the Greatest Golfer in Youngstown?’ That’s when we knew we had guessed right on the name.”
Greatest Golfer had 97 entrants for the inaugural event. The tournament was played over two weekends, with 18 holes at Mill Creek, 18 holes at Trumbull, then a cut, with the top finishers playing The Lake Club in the finale the following Sunday.
It was highly successful, but the committee immediately knew it needed to make an adjustment.
“One of our committee guys said, ‘We need to get this to a Friday, Saturday, Sunday.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Golfers are going to take off a day of work to play this on a Friday?’ But like Field of Dreams, we built it and they came. That very next year, we moved it from September to August, made it a three-day event, and haven’t looked back since. 97 players the first year, 160 in year two. Year three, we got to 250. The next four years, we hung at the 300 level.”
Then, things changed significantly for Franko. In August of 2019, the Youngstown Vindicator closed, a casualty of the internet. A Warren-based newspaper group acquired the Vindicator brand. The two sides discussed Greatest Golfer as an asset for many months, but Todd, the driver of the golf events, wasn’t moving to the Warren paper. Ultimately, the Warren group didn’t want to deal with a golf tournament. By winter, with no qualms from either side, Franko took over and rolled out “The Greatest Golfer” as his own venture.
The transition from a newspaper-promoted tournament to a Franko solo production took some sponsor convincing over that winter. However, the core funding providers stayed loyal to the community-centered event.
Then, a globally unexpected event hit: COVID.
Just as Franko started operations for his new version of The Greatest Golfer, now he wasn’t sure if any golf tournaments would be played at all. The Greatest Juniors always started in May. He thought the August tournament might happen if he could get the Junior series rolling. But getting a Junior sponsor to commit with the uncertainty of COVID and the chaos in the economy was no small ask.
He pitched the guys at Joe Dickey Electric to be the junior sponsor, to trust that he could launch and manage the series successfully. They agreed. That backing gave him the momentum to push on. After plenty of worry and lots of finagling, the junior series launched. Kids signed up and played.
The Greatest Golfer championships followed that August, with a record 340 players.
Sponsors are key to the success of Greatest. At The Vindicator, the tournament had 14 sponsors. With more flexibility as a Franko-run business, the sponsor count is up to 40, including Farmers National Bank. The Youngstown community greatly supports the tournament and junior series, and Franko remains well-known: he IS Youngstown’s Greatest.
“I think sponsors like the stories we tell. Most of us, once we finish high school football or high school baseball, we’re done with sports glory. The Greatest Golfer is a chance to be back in the headlines because you won a golf tournament at age 60. That kind of juice appeals to sponsors. So, telling that community story and showing the faces of the people who compete with us keeps the sponsors active and engaged.”
“The Greatest Golfer is about showcasing golf in the Youngstown community,” concluded Franko. “Sometimes we get a little chip on our shoulder since our city isn’t as big as Cleveland or Akron. Greatest is our way to run a big-time golf event that brings together 14 divisions of players – 320 to 350 at a time – to the best courses in our region. That gives a lot of people an enjoyable tournament experience.”
The Greatest, indeed.
