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Back from Greensburg
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Editor’s note: This column is an adaptation of a post from the magazine’s blog, “From the Desk of GCM.” For a full account of Editor Scott Hollister’s Greensburg experience, access the GCM blog.
Wow.
After spending time in Greensburg, Kan. (the small, southwest Kansas town that was virtually wiped off the map by a massive tornado back in May) with members of the Kansas GCSA during a volunteer work day at the town’s nine-hole golf course, Cannonball GC, that’s about all I can come up with to describe what I witnessed, both on the golf course and during a tour of the devastated town.
Wow.
I know I’m supposed to be a professional wordsmith who should be able to come up with a better way to describe experiences like this. But right now, I’m struggling to process everything I saw and did into a narrative that gives the day its proper due. Right now, “wow” is the best way to describe the Sept. 20 efforts of the 40 or so volunteers who gave up a day on their own golf courses to prepare this little country layout for the upcoming fall by verticutting, aerifying, topdressing and overseeding its greens and tees.
Event organizer and GCSAA Class A member Matt Miller, superintendent at Carey Park GC in Hutchinson, Kan., and a group of volunteers spent Sept. 19 getting a head start on the work, staging some equipment at Cannonball and even completing the verticutting of the course’s greens and tees.
Even though golf might seem well down the priority list in a town that has seen such devastation, the course, overseen by superintendent Gerald Morehead, has become a beacon of normalcy for both residents and relief volunteers in the months since the tornado, offering them a place to get away from their day-to-day heartaches, if only for a few hours. Every Greensburg resident I talked to made it painfully clear just how important the golf course and the work of the Kansas GCSA was to the overall health and well-being of the community.
The event of course garnered media attention in that part of the Sunflower State, and keep your eye out for an upcoming show on the Discovery Channel that will include footage from the work day as a part of a broader feature the cable network is producing on the recovery of
Greensburg.
It also was yet another example of something I’ve seen time after time since becoming involved with superintendents — their willingness to roll up their sleeves and help. Wow.
In honor of its 50th anniversary, ClubCorp, which owns and operates nearly 160 private clubs worldwide, held the ClubCorp Charity Classic Oct. 19 in what was dubbed the world’s largest one-day charity golf and dining event. To raise funds toward a variety of charities, ClubCorp country clubs opened their doors to the public for the first time ever for the event, which included 50-foot putt and longest drive contests. Hole-in-one prizes were donated by Ace Adventures resort trips, KSL Resorts and JetBlue Airways, among others. ClubCorp also held a virtual auction to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, the PGA Foundation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure and ClubCorp’s Employee Partners Care Foundation. Golf rounds fell 2.7 percent nationwide on a same-store basis in August 2007 versus August 2006, according to a survey by the National Golf Foundation. The year-to-date figure fell 0.8 percent through August, though the premium public sector shows slightly positive growth. Severe weather in the Midwest was the main cause cited for the drop. The hardest hit region was the lower Midwest, which fell 8.6 percent. |
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