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The Tradition returns to Shoal Creek

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© Heather Durham Photography

© Heather Durham Photography

© Heather Durham Photography

© Heather Durham Photography

Regions Tradition

In order to put on the Regions Tradition golf tournament at Shoal Creek, it takes hundreds of thousands of efforts, both large and small.

David McElroy, a tournament volunteer for more than 20 years, was in Tuscaloosa selling paper supplies recently, when he noticed that one of his customers was wearing a golf shirt — so he struck up a conversation.

“You know we’ve got a major championship coming through Shoal Creek this year,” said McElroy, who has been selling paper supplies with the same company for 32 years. “The Tradition. Are you interested in being a volunteer?”

“Maybe,” the customer said.

“Are you interested in a free round of golf?” McElroy asked.

“Absolutely,” the man said. His customer became just one of the approximately 1,000 volunteers the tournament relies on every year. From keeping score with every group of golfers to standing guard inside the rope at every hole, volunteers are everywhere during tournament week.

Birdies for Charity

McElroy knows firsthand how important the volunteers are. Every volunteer, he says, is money saved that can be donated to Children’s of Alabama. When he first volunteered in 1990, his daughter had already undergone 38 surgeries for a host of life-threatening conditions. But because of generous doctors at the hospital, she now lives a healthy if not totally independent life in the Pacific Northwest.

Over the past 5 years, the Regions Tradition has raised around $3.3 million for charity, most of which goes to Children’s of Alabama. So McElroy’s customers know that, even though he lives off of getting their commissions, there is one week during the year when he will be slow to respond: golf tournament week. It’s not for his daughter, he says, but the next one.

“As many times as we went to the hospital with my daughter, there has always been someone who is in worse shape than she’s been in,” McElroy said. “That’s why it’s important to support Children’s, because there by the grace of God go our kids.”

The Tradition has been a big fundraiser for other local nonprofits such as the Vestavia Athletic Association, which has employed an army of coaches and students to raise money the last few years. The tournament picks up the tab on all the credit card transaction fees and promotional materials, so each team can keep all the money it raises.

The Vestavia nonprofit Wish 2 Enrich is using the tournament as one of its two main fundraisers, in its first year in existence. Its founder Zach White sold his after-school soccer business last year so that he could focus on helping needy children get scholarships for enrichment activities.

It took a huge leap of faith to start the charity, White said, and he still is putting all the money toward scholarships rather than his own salary. But he grew up without his father and often relied on his coaches for adult guidance. So he has set a goal of raising $25,000 for the tournament, or $1,400 for each of his board members, in the hopes that his organization will continue to serve more and more children. 

The Birdies for Charity fundraiser covers only a small part of the yearly budget for Homewood’s Community Grief Support Service, but it’s so well organized that the money practically raises itself, said Lisa Harrison, the administrative director. Her organization provides group counseling to the bereaved.

“The people that we serve are very devoted after they leave,” Harrison said. “We help them through a really difficult time, and so we find that they are very loyal and give back.”

The tournament also brings significant economic activity to for-profit companies in the greater Birmingham area. More than 80,000 people will show up to the tournament, and outsiders will book nearly 10,000 hotel rooms over the course of the week, most of them along the Highway 280 corridor, according to the Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau. 

These visitors will spend money on food, rental cars and clothing, totaling up to more than $10 million and generating more than $1 million in tax revenue. It’s the eighth-biggest sporting event in the city, just behind local NASCAR events and just above the SEC regional baseball tournament, according to David Galbaugh, director of sports sales and marketing at the Greater Birmingham CVB.

In addition to helping raise money for charities, volunteers perform important functional duties at the tournament. One year, for example, a heckler had gotten so out of hand at the 15th hole that play had to stop. It turned out that the heckler was upset that his sister had gotten an unfair divorce settlement from one of the golfers at the hole.

So one of McElroy’s volunteers called for backup. “We need security now because it’s starting to get to be fisticuffs,” McElroy remembered the volunteer telling him. “Needless to say, the police were called and the golfers went on to finish their round.”

Many volunteers are golf enthusiasts who want to be near their golf heroes, such as Fred Couples, or a celebrity such as Nick Saban or Bo Jackson. For $50 they get to keep their volunteer uniform, four free tickets and free food and drinks throughout the event. For $95 they can also get a free round at Alabama’s most famous golf club. 

The future of Shoal Creek

After the tournament is over, Shoal Creek will take on another big challenge: redoing its greens. The club hasn’t redone its greens in 40 years, so it will update them to meet the PGA’s modern standard and give the course better drainage.

This will give the membership a bit of a rest after five years in a row of tournament organizing, according to Mike Thompson, the president at Shoal Creek. But it also means that starting this summer, the course will be closed for six months. “We hate to take the golf course away from the membership for six months,” Thompson said. “But then hopefully we have another great 40 years.”

The Tradition is moving to Greystone Golf & Country Club for the next three years. Shoal Creek will not host another major tournament until the U.S. Women’s Open in 2018.

That will be the biggest tournament at the course since the PGA Championship in 1990. The club was criticized then by William Bell, now Birmingham’s mayor, for its lack of black membership. It then received national scorn when its founder, Hall Thompson, Mike’s father, admitted to a local reporter that the club discriminated against blacks. Thompson apologized and the club quickly admitted its first black member, but Shoal Creek did not receive a major professional golf tournament again for 20 years.

Although it doesn’t release the racial demographics of its current membership, the club abides by rules that forbid discrimination and has moved on from that controversy 25 years ago, according to Thompson. In 2010 Thompson gave an interview with Golf magazine, which stated that three of the approximately 425 members were black, one of whom was Condoleezza Rice.

“We would’ve never had the [US Junior Amateur tournament] in 2008 if we had not moved on,” Thompson said. “All the major golf entities are happy with our membership. We fully comply with all the rules and we’re happy to do so.”

The tournament drew 1,300 volunteers back in 2011 because locals were so pleased to have a major golf event returning to the area after a 20-year absence, according to Wes Quattlebaum, one of the co-chairmen for the tournament this year. Just five years later some of that enthusiasm has waned, and it takes a supreme effort just to recruit 1,000.

“You’ll start the year with zero volunteers in November and see that goal number of 1,000 folks and wonder how we are going to get to that number,” Quattlebaum said. “It’s a lot of hard work by a lot of folks.”

The successful return of the Tradition over the past five years is another sign that Shoal Creek has paid the debts of its past, according to McElroy.

“I think Shoal learned its lesson the hard way,” McElroy said. “But they also learned that by doing things together you can find solutions to your problems. And cooperation works a whole lot better than defiance.”

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