Magic Happened: Chapter 7

The JDC’s Driving Force

“I got close to people when I won the tournament a couple of years in a row there, and that instilled in me how important the volunteers in the communities were to a golf tournament. That was very, very helpful to me when I became commissioner.”

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Although it’s kind of him to say, Deane Beman likely had an inkling volunteers were professional golf’s true driving force even before he tamed those slick Crow Valley greens.

Still, if Quad Citians helped deepen the future commissioner’s understanding of the vital role volunteers would play in his vision for growing the TOUR even a little, he is, of course, more than welcome.

The fact is, few major sporting events rely quite so heavily on long, arduous, dedicated and donated hours of communal labor as does any professional golf tournament.

Sure. A major road-racing event like the Quad-City Times Bix 7 might give pro golf a run for its volunteerism. A one-of-a-kind, seven-miles-long tribute to the QC running community, the Bix is fueled by its own legion of volunteers, and annually supplies evidence that, for Quad Citians, there is no hill too steep to climb.

The fact that these two huge volunteer-intensive endeavors annually take place within weeks of one another speaks volumes about the strong sense of community that drives the Quad Cities.

Today’s John Deere Classic enlists a weeklong volunteer workforce of more than 2,200 people, most crisply dressed in a JDC polo and cap.

The numbers have increased from several hundred in the earliest days at Oakwood, where not every group of golfers could be provided a standard bearer, where marshals presided over multiple holes at a time, and when the tournament’s fleet of courtesy cars amounted to 12 used vehicles of various makes and models.

By the late 1980s, the volunteer force had grown to a community of 1,000 or so supporters who kept the Hardee’s Golf Classic on the tee. Numbers dipped when the HGC became a fall event in 1990, but the hardcore volunteers redoubled their efforts, and the arrival of the tournament’s first official director and professional staff reduced many of the most burdensome demands.

When the move to the larger and grander Deere Run upped the ante again, proud Deere employees and retirees answered the call and the numbers grew to 1,500, then 1,700, and surpassed 2,200 in July 2019.

These days, volunteers don’t have to do the heaviest lifting at TPC Deere Run. The virtual city that emerges each summer across the property’s 400 rolling acres is erected weeks in advance by 40 well-orchestrated teams of paid vendors who participate in buildouts at multiple TOUR events each year.

Massive double-decker skyboxes fill the skyline of this golf-centric virtual city. The cityscape is dotted by dozens of air-conditioned hospitality suites. Patrons enter the golf course through a massive entrance pavilion and exhibition center that leads to The Family Zone. That’s where “Quiet Please” signs are forbidden, and kids can loudly test their golf skills via swing simulators, or their STEM skills through games powered by John Deere robotics and simulator systems. Above and behind the 18^th green grandstand, an expansive merchandise center sells a wide array of souvenirs and fashionable JDC apparel. Inside the lower level of the clubhouse, imported walls and contemporary office furniture make a modern Media Center within an area you couldn’t guess serves as the Deere Run cart barn the other 51 weeks of the year.

From identical fonts on signage to precise paint color on rope stakes, every inch of this JDC City echoes Deere & Company’s long-established commitment to brand excellence and, in every possible way, explains why the tournament and Deere were honored with the Best Title Sponsor Integration awards for the 2018 and 2019 PGA TOUR campaigns.

A half-century on, the John Deere Classic is every bit the polished, five-star corporate experience Beman envisioned for the 21^st Century PGA TOUR.

Still, without the indispensable support of its indefatigable corps of volunteers, JDC City could not open its gates.

Assistant Tournament Director Andrew Lehman grew up in a small town in western Iowa and dreamed of working in Major League Baseball while living in a metropolitan setting. He found his big-league job with the Classic instead and can’t imagine a community anywhere of any size with more team spirit.

“I thank my lucky stars every day that we live here,” the father of a young family said. “Some of these volunteers are coming out on tournament week and giving 100 hours. Never ask for anything. It’s incredible. Hard to replicate.

“It’s not just us,” he added. “We have a volunteer base of 2,000 people but there are hundreds of our volunteers giving their time to 3, 4, 5 or 10 organizations. It’s simply amazing. People are just so generous with their time.”

Every JDC volunteer is asked to commit to two half-day shifts in exchange for lunch, tournament access, and an invite to a pretty great volunteer party the week prior to the event. Most sign up for multiple days. Many commit to a full week of service, often encompassing 10 or more hours a day while making use of vacation time away from their day jobs.

Thousands have returned year after year after year for this labor of love. Hundreds have been doing so for 10 to 20 years. Dozens have been doing so for 30 or 40 years or — in increasingly rare cases — more.

Stan Leach was a youthful Moline school teacher when he accepted an invitation to join a handful of friends volunteering at the second QCO in 1972. Today, he is long retired from his career as an educator and is one of three former Quad Cities mayors who still annually slip into an often sweat-stained, frequently mud-spackled and typically well-worn, pastel-colored t-shirt that ranks among the world’s most hard-earned uniforms.

Those t-shirts proudly declare their wearer a JDC Grunt, and they are available only for the cost of a week or more of sun-up-to-sundown, do-it-all dirty work.

“Everybody and their brother wants a Grunt shirt,” said Pat Huys, a lead Grunt for as long as the appropriately descriptive name has existed. “We only have so many of them made, and we’re pretty protective of them. We don’t want them all over the place.”

Both the name and the t-shirts were introduced early in the Oakwood era, likely by Don Schick. A serial volunteer for sporting events in or around his native Moline, Schick was one of a dozen or so strong, young backs who helped erect the tournament’s infrastructure for the cash-strapped QCOs and QCCs of days gone by.

“The early days at Oakwood, you’d have one tent with a yellow and white top next to another with a red and white top,” remembered Huys, who was mayor of Coal Valley when he earned his first Grunt t-shirt in 1982. He has worn the colors proudly ever since even while serving as tournament chair in 1993. “One night we went to the pro-am show over at St. Ambrose, then I went home and changed clothes, and five of us spent the whole night putting tents up before they could tee off for the pro-am on Wednesday morning.”

Although the buildup and teardown now are the work of paid laborers, Huys and members of his 40-plus group still start working out of the Grunt Dome west of the fourth tee on Friendship Farm Road four to five weeks before the tournament — longer in the case of former mayor No. 3, Moline’s Don Welvaert, who runs cable and sets the electrical outlets for the entire, fully wired temporary city that Deere Run becomes.

For the rest of the Grunts, there are between 1,700 to 1,800 signs to install across the width and breadth of the property; dozens of trailers to be directed to their appointed positions; more than 120 porta-potties to strategically station; a pair of refrigerated trailers packing thousands of pounds of ice apiece to park; and coolers to be stocked with water, Coca-Cola and Powerade and then set out at every tee and volunteer station.

Then comes tournament week and the 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. days of dedicated, passionate “grunt-itude” begin.

“People ask me why are you doing that? If you never experience it, you can’t know,” said Scott Schick, who followed his father to Oakwood as a boy and has honored his dad’s legacy of volunteerism in innumerable ways since Don’s death in 2007. “My dad just had a spark for it. Loved doing it. Loved the crew we hung out with and the different guys and gals we got to know. It’s always been like a second family to me. It’s something I kind of grew up in and just continued from there.”

Scott is among many second-generation JDC volunteers, and, of course, the Grunts are not alone in expending endless hours of energy, effort, and elbow grease to make it possible for some of the world’s best golfers to display their talents between the Deere Run ropes.

Paula Burnett joined the scoring committee in 1980, became committee chair four years later, and delivered her second daughter, Kate, five hours after watching Curt Byrum sink the win-clinching putt in 1989. A year later, Paula continued her volunteer role while her mother delivered Kate to Oakwood for feeding three times a day, just as she had done for Kate’s older sister, Callie. “By the time we got to Kirby, the littlest, we just set up a playpen in the back room at Oakwood,” Paula said.

Ultimately, the only number that matters at the end of a PGA TOUR round is the one on the card each competitor signs for in the official scoring trailer. That has been the rule almost since Old Tom Morris was young. Still, volunteer scorekeepers did provide the numbers that shone bright red on the large electronic Nabisco leaderboards strategically located around Oakwood starting in the mid-1980s — Beman’s first step into big corporate sponsorship.

Scoring committee volunteers still provide the numbers that beam from high-definition Deere Run scoreboards, big and bright enough to light the way for a final threesome of golfers racing up the home hole in the gathering dark. (See: Tournament Saturday, 2016.) Today, though, the scoring team also shoots the lasers from the ShotLink towers that measure every Thursday-through-Sunday shot and feed real-time statistical information to golf fanatics around the globe.

Clearly, it is a bigger job in a world that’s grown smaller, but the tight-knit volunteer bonds formed in an instant have sustained over decades.

Since moving to North Carolina in 2003, Paula Burnett has returned with her husband, Curt, every July to work alongside her “family” on the scoring committee. “It’s just kind of a labor of love for all of us,” she explained. “It’s a giant family reunion. I can’t wait to see everybody here.”

Cris Nelson joined the transportation committee in 1977 when that fleet of 12 used cars wasn’t coming from the top-of-the-line inventory of multiple local dealerships. Pros were not provided courtesy cars for their driving needs in those days. The vehicles instead were utilized to shuttle players from the airport to their hotels and, occasionally, to the golf course. Used shuttle vans for volunteers had neither air conditioning nor power windows.

“We shuttled the volunteers back and forth to the parking lot at Oakwood, driving down a gravel road with the windows down because we had no air conditioning and it was always like 100 degrees,” Nelson remembered. “And all the gravel dust was blowing into the vans. But it was fun. Oh my gosh.”

Nelson didn’t miss a single day of tournament volunteering for 40 straight years. Recently retired from the player registration committee, her love for the tournament is carried on today through the volunteer participation of her children and grandkids.

Steve “Arkie” Lovell followed Nelson onto the transportation crew in 1979. Like most volunteers of the Oakwood era, he took pride in the tenacious nature of The Little Tournament That Could while enjoying the camaraderie that grew in the trenches among the Quad Citians who fought the good fight.

“Back then, we were younger and we just loved what we were doing and it was kind of a little family,” he said. “A little dysfunctional at times, like any family. But we just had a lot of fun.”

Today, Lovell oversees an armada of more than 200 golf carts that traverse the ups and downs of the grounds at Deere Run. He accepted the new role of cart czar made necessary by the tournament’s move to a larger outdoor arena in 2000, and his crew has grown from an original 15 to 20 to a committee of 70 that keeps the carts charged and ready at “Arkie’s Place” in the staging compound situated to the east of the 15^th tee.

“Some days, you’ll come down here and you won’t find three spare carts,” said Lovell, who logs 12- to 14-hour days during tournament week while also sleeping on-site in an RV. He stays ready to spring into action in the event the charging golf cars need unplugging during an overnight thunderstorm, proper golf attire optional. “I’ve been up at 2 in the morning, run out there in my skivvies and shut all the power down,” he said.

Arkie’s carts rarely venture inside the ropes that wind around the Deere Run fairways. That’s the domain patrolled by the largest group of JDC volunteers. The marshals are chaired by longtime volunteers Bill Anderson and Harvey Green, and their numbers have swollen by necessity from 250 at Oakwood to more than 800 at Deere Run.

Chicago native Green signed up as a marshal in 1979, a year after becoming a Geneseo High School teacher. “I came to the tournament the year before,” he said, “and the people inside the ropes looked like they were having more fun than anybody else.”

They often still do, even if the challenges of marshaling across what Green called the “hills, dales, and ravines” at Deere Run can be taxing. Interestingly, Green and Anderson have found the necessary additional help from two civic organizations that started at about the same time as the Jaycees. “We have a lot of Rotary and Kiwanis clubs working with us,” Green said.

Marshals supply crowd control, hold up those ubiquitous "QUIET, PLEASE" signs and serve as forecaddies when golf shots stray from the fairways. It can be an active assignment, but because each group of marshals is assigned just a single hole, they don’t experience near the same number of ups, downs, and oh-my-aching-hammies that Diane Lowe’s standard bearers endure walking the full length of the course.

Standards bearing the scores of players in each pairing have grown considerably lighter since Lowe walked Oakwood two shifts per day after accepting a cousin’s invite to assist the Jaycees in 1975. But if you think the Bix 7’s Brady Street incline tests the no-hill-too-steep mettle of Quad Citians, try hauling a six-foot pole topped by a mini-chalkboard-sized sign up the daunting slope separating Deere Run’s third tee from its green.

Lowe’s corps of nearly 150 standard bearers don’t let that hill nor the countless other climbs and descents along the route spoil their good walk. A younger Lori Catour’s first experience at Oakwood in 1980 “was too much walking,” she said. Yet, she took up the standard again 15 years ago at Deere Run and has kept coming back for more.

Catour said the standard she most enjoys upholding, however, is the reputation QC volunteers have gained on TOUR for being the most welcoming anywhere. “I like that we’re nice people,” she said. “That’s always nice to hear.”

Dave Engstrom was an Oakwood member in the mid-1980s. He remembered seeing his longtime friend Leach and the Grunts hard at work, preparing the course for another Quad Cities Open. “And I’m thinking ‘Why would you want to spend so much time doing that?’” he said.

He figured it out quickly after accepting Leach’s entreaty to join the Grunts. “Once you get involved, you understand everything,” Engstrom said. “It’s a group that gets together once a year, and it’s like we’ve never missed a beat. It’s still that same way, and still a lot of the same people.”

Engstrom has remained heavily involved 23 years beyond a time-consuming stint as tournament chair, most recently by leading an honorary observers program that invites avid JDC supporters inside the ropes to follow select groups for a tournament round.

Here’s food for thought: If Engstrom were to invite his friend Stan to spend an afternoon inside the ropes as an observer this year, Leach would match in half a day the total hours of golf he said he has viewed in his previous 48 years as a volunteer.

“I just don’t have time,” Leach explained. “Too many things going on and I’m a general fixer-upper.”

While it might be presumptuous to think the volunteer corps at other PGA TOUR events are any less dedicated than the folks described above — not to mention the thousands of other Quad Citians with stories like theirs — it would be preposterous to think any group anywhere else could possibly have done more to help their event survive and thrive.

So, yes. Of course, Beman factored the commitment and irreplaceable value of volunteers like those who drive the Deere when he determined at the dawn of the 1980s that rewarding volunteers in a significant way was going to be essential to making professional golf a fifth major league.

“Once the money got big,” the commissioner told Schupak in Golf’s Driving Force, “I didn’t think volunteers would continue, in many cases, to take their weeks’ vacation to help the players come into their city and get rich.”

The commissioner found that conundrum’s solution on a visit to the Byron Nelson Classic in 1978. Schupak writes that while touring an East Texas youth camp funded by the tournament’s proceeds, Beman witnessed “the importance of the tournament to the community” and “the nexus between professional golf and charitable endeavors became clear to him.”

A year later, the commissioner proclaimed that charity would be the leading money winner on TOUR. And by 1994, it was — and by a lot. Charitable dollars generated across the TOUR that year totaled $30 million, or $29.5 million more than was generated in 1971.

The 1994 Hardee's Golf Classic contributed a not inconsequential $285,000 to that sum, but only through the dogged determination of one executive board member who two years earlier had assessed how the tournament was faring in meeting the charity component of Beman’s vision. He found it lacking.

“How blunt do you want it?" Steve Jacobs said more than two decades later. "We didn’t make squat for money. There wasn’t a lot of money going to charity because there was not a lot of money being made.”

Thus, Jacobs raised his hand when 1993 tourney chair Glenn Blair proposed a fundraising project that might help the HGC donate a modest amount of money, maybe even in the five figures, to a few charities that year.

In its initial year, Birdies for Charity instead helped the tournament generate $384,000 for local 501(c)3 organizations.

The most remarkable piece of this improbable John Deere Classic story had only begun to take flight.

(This content, first published in 2021, is shared with the permission of the Quad City Golf Classic Charitable Foundation. Please consider a donation to Birdies for Charity.)