The past two weekends, a high percentage of American sports fans, particularly golf aficionados, focused their attention on the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. First, it was the 3M Championship, a stop on the PGA Senior tour at Blaine, Minn., and last weekend, it was the 84th PGA Championship at the Hazeltine National Golf Club in nearby Chaska.

The latter tournament captured even more attention because it offered golfer Tiger Woods a chance to win the Masters Tournament, U.S. Open Championship and PGA Championship all in the same year, a very rare accomplishment.

The Hazeltine course is relatively new, having been opened in 1962. Over the years, it has played host to the U.S. Women’s Open, the U.S. Open, the PGA, the U.S. Senior Open and many state and regional golf championships. The PGA tournament will return to Hazeltine in 2009, and the prestigious Ryder Cup will be played on the course in 2016. And there is a strong possibility the U.S. Open will return to the Twin Cities area within a few years.

Approximately, 50,000 spectators lined the course every day during the four-day tournament, and television carried the event to millions of viewers throughout the world with announcers and players touting the course and the Twin Cities.

It was a huge success.

Why write about some golf tournaments in Minneapolis? Because the building of Hazeltine and its founders’ dreams about the development of Minneapolis offer a good example of what can be done to develop and promote an area and elevate it to a higher level of excellence.

It was during the so-called “Kennedy years,” the early 1960s, that a group of wealthy Minnesotans decided they wanted to elevate their community, distinguish themselves from cities like Des Moines and Omaha and become a “big league” city.

A man by the name of Totton Peavey Heffelfinger, who had been president of the U.S. Golf Assn. in 1952-53, gathered some fellow Minneapolis leaders, and they announced their intention to establish Hazeltine as a course for major golf championships.

This announcement was made in 1961, only two months after the Minnesota Twins played their first game in Minnesota after moving from Washington, D.C., and three months before the Minnesota Vikings would play their first game. The vikings, by the way, were put together by a small group of Minneapolis investors.

This desire to develop excellence was not limited to the baseball and football fields and a golf course; the world-renowned Guthrie Theater was opened two years later.

As noted by some during last week’s PGA championship, the goal, idea or driving force behind each of the four projects, individually and collectively, was to make the Minneapolis area something special to the nation and to the world. The men behind Hazeltine said if they built a truly outstanding course, championship golf would come to Minnesota.

They had the vision to realize that to attract a championship tournament, they needed to build in an uncongested area with great acreage surrounding the course where there would be ample space for all the services, crowds, television equipment, parking, corporate “villages” and VIP accommodations that are part of the scene at a national championship tournament.

From the outset, all planning was focused on how to develop something special that would set Hazeltine apart from the average, the normal, what someone would expect in Des Moines or Omaha.

Now the Twin Cities, in fact the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, has another feature that sets it apart from the would-be competitors: the Mall of America, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. There were many doubters at the outset, but the mall is the state’s No. 1 tourist attraction, drawing more than 40 million visitors a year.

The point of all this, in this writer’s opinion, is that Hazeltine and Minneapolis have demonstrated what can be accomplished by dreamers and individuals with vision and courage.

What must Lawrence, Kansas University and the state of Kansas do to distance themselves from the ordinary, the common, the average? It is this writer’s belief that “excellence” will be the difference between those cities, those businesses and those universities that move to the forefront and are looked to as leaders, rising above entities willing to settle for mediocrity.

Lawrence, KU and the state of Kansas all have the opportunity to be leaders, to set themselves apart, but it will require people of vision and leadership. Are there people with these qualities in Kansas and are they willing to take on visible leadership roles?

Are those in government offices, state and local, willing to aim high and provide the environment needed for visionaries, dreamers and leaders to exercise their skills?

What if Minneapolis had had people such as those who put together the Vikings, the Guthrie Theater, Hazeltine and the Twins, people who had the financial means and drive, but all their entrepreneurship had been stifled by unimaginative governmental bodies and those opposed to dreamers’ efforts to distance themselves from other cities like Des Moines and Omaha?

Lawrence has every opportunity to become America’s finest university city, but it isn’t going to happen with a complacent, lackadaisical attitude or with constant bickering among residents. Maybe there is a sufficient number of Lawrence residents to defeat efforts to build Lawrence into a truly outstanding university community. Maybe leadership is lacking in the Governor’s Office for the state to rise to a higher level. What needs to be done by the state, leaders of the Kansas Board of Regents and university presidents and chancellors is to have the state’s system of higher education recognized as one of the best in the country. Something is lacking.

Are there people in Lawrence, at the university and in the state who can help transform Lawrence, KU and the state from good to very good, from average or slightly above-average to excellent?

The folks in Minneapolis have shown it can be done. Why can’t it be done in a relatively comparable manner here in Lawrence, at the university and in the state as a whole?

As the late Kansas City and Midwest Research Institute leader Charles Kimball used to say: “Kansas has the opportunity to be a lighthouse on the prairie.” Or as the late KU Chancellor Franklin Murphy used to say: “There will be a vast forest of universities in the trans-Mississippi west, but in that forest will be a few giant redwoods. KU can be one of the redwoods.”

These men could inspire, lead and encourage citizens to try to excel. Are there similar individuals today in Lawrence, the university, Topeka or elsewhere in the state? If so, it’s time for them to step forward, or this area is likely to fall far short of its potential.