Over the next three weeks, the PGA TOUR 2020-21 season will come to a close with the postseason tournament series known as the FedExCup Playoffs. So for the next installment of our Sustainability Spotlight series, we shed light on and dive into the sustainability successes and struggles of each of the three tournaments within this end of the year playoff series.

The FedExCup Playoffs

The structure of PGA TOUR’s FedExCup Playoffs can be a bit head scratching for the casual golf fan so if you’re interested in learning more, their FedExCup 101 is quite helpful. However, for all intents and purposes, we are going to use this space to share a story from each of the three tournaments that highlight the often delicate balance between golf courses and their surrounding communities and the unlimited potential when golf uses the power of its stakeholders to revitalize lives and regenerate communities.

THE NORTHERN TRUST

Liberty National Golf Club - Jersey City, New Jersey

August 19-22, 2021

In its 55th year as a TOUR sanctioned event, THE NORTHERN TRUST (formerly The Barclays) has rotated between the New York City and Boston areas since it joined as the first leg of the FedExCup Playoffs in 2007. This is the fourth year that Liberty National Golf Club has hosted the tournament, which also hosted the 2017 President’s Cup (a match play competition between American and Interntional teams). Liberty National GC has an interesting backstory and is the focus of this section of the Sustainability Spotlight. 

Liberty National is the dream and vision of billionaire owner and founder of Reebok, Paul Fireman. The land on which Liberty National sits is a former toxic waste dump located along the Hudson River and across from Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline.

Construction on the land for the golf course began shortly after Fireman’s purchase in 1998. However, remediating the site to mitigate the myriad of toxic waste and debris took nearly five years thanks to endless regulatory and environmental hurdles and 2 million cubic feet of fill to ensure the land's toxicity wouldn’t affect the golf course. Fireman spent an estimated $250 million to remediate and build Liberty National, making it one of the most expensive golf developments ever.

The course played host to its first THE NORTHERN TRUST (known as The Barclays at the time) in 2009 and opened to less than rave reviews with one anonymous golfer saying: “They took a perfectly good landfill and ruined it.” Due to the negative reviews and the likelihood the PGA TOUR wouldn’t return after the 2013 tournament if changes weren’t made, Fireman embarked on a redesign that did meet the standards of the TOUR’s best including Tiger Woods (one of Liberty National’s harshest critics). 

In 2019 Fireman announced plans to expand Liberty National through a second renovation by acquiring an additional 22 acres of property, all in the hopes of the golf course attracting greater attention as a high-profile venue for additional PGA TOUR championships, think major championships like the PGA Championship or U.S. Open. The only issue is the 22-acre addition would come at the expense of a migratory bird habitat known as Caven Point, an environmentally sensitive and protected section of the nearby Liberty State Park.

The acquisition and privatization of public lands soon became the focal point of the struggle between Fineman and the non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, Friends of Liberty State Park. To protect the park from privatized expansion, the ‘Liberty State Park Protection Act’ was presented to the NJ Legislature in January 2020 but was stalled when the state Assembly failed to hold a vote due to a lame duck session. The act “preserves Liberty State Park as a public urban green open space free of inappropriate privatization” and “would prohibit the [New Jersey] Department of Environmental Protection from considering any proposal to commercialize, develop, or privatize Liberty State Park”. 

Later that year, Fireman announced the suspension of his expansion plans for Liberty National Golf Club but the fight to preserve the Liberty State Park Protection Act continues. Fireman’s main point of contention was that the expansion would provide greater economic prosperity for the underserved community where Liberty National resides while providing recreational facilities, the establishment of a First Tee Program and dollars to assist with further toxic waste remediation within the interior of Liberty State Park. 

However, it was revealed through the Open Public Records Act that in 2017 Fireman offered the state $1 million and a 24-year land lease in exchange for the 22 acres. This provided Fireman’s opponents with the notion that this was merely a public land grab meant to serve only the club’s interests and had little to do with benefitting the surrounding community in the best way possible. The bid was ultimately rejected by the NJ Department of Environmental Protection because it “failed to demonstrate how the proposed rent was equal to the market value of the proposed use” as well as “the tangible public benefit of leasing the portion of the park to Liberty National.”  

Driving the Green Take: I share this story because it provides an example of how negative perceptions are developed that golf cannot co-exist within its communal surroundings. What were the net costs of this $250 million development beyond immediate economics? Today they would certainly be much greater than that already astronomical figure, especially when one considers the damage to golf’s perception and the loss of surrounding social and ecological value. 

What comes to mind here is the omission of the principle of the triple bottom line: people, planet and profit. It's only when all three of these aspects are maximized that true sustainability and regeneration can exist. This story also highlights the need for diverse partnerships that account for the interests of all stakeholders and more importantly, the need for the golf industry to defend and create protected habitats within our designated public lands.

The BMW Championship

Caves Valley Golf Club - Owings Mills, Maryland

August 26-29, 2021

Like THE NORTHERN TRUST, multiple courses across several states have hosted the BMW Championship including Illinois, Indiana, Colorado, Pennsylvania and now Maryland. The tournament was also rebranded in 2007 with the launch of the FedExCup Playoffs and was formally known as The Western Open, one of our country’s longest running golf tournaments having first been played in 1899. The Western Golf Association is the tournament’s operating organization and is the focus of this section of the Sustainability Spotlight.

Based in the Chicago area, the Western Golf Association (WGA) began in 1899 when 11 Chicago-area golf clubs formed the organization to promote their golf interests. Among other organizational initiatives, the WGA conducts six annual tournaments: four amateur events and two professional events - the BMW Championship and the Korn Ferry Tour’s Evans Scholars Invitational.

In 1928, the WGA obliged the request of famed local amateur golfer, Charles “Chick” Evans Jr. to administer a fund he established to send deserving caddies to college, thus creating the Evans Scholars Foundation. Funded by contributions from WGA Par Club members, the Evans Scholars Program “provides academic, professional and social resources that help students maintain a cumulative 3.4 GPA and 95% graduation rate.” The previous academic year saw 1,045 Evans Scholars enrolled in 19 universities and a total of 11,323 young men and women have graduated as Evans Scholars since 1930. 

Chick Evans got his first job as a caddie in 1898 at age 8 and grew to become one of the country's best amateur golfers. Evans won both the US Open and US Amateur in 1916 and was the only person to accomplish this feat until almost two decades later when the great Bobby Jones became the second and only other person to do it. Chick faced immense pressure to turn professional but a lack of interest in playing for money pushed him to instead create an escrow fund with his tournament winnings to finance college educations for needy caddies. Understanding that many caddies at the time came from underserved, low-income backgrounds while offering the same academic potential as anyone else, the Evans Scholars Foundation became the tool for him to see his dream for all kids to receive a fair chance come to fruition.

Driving the Green Take: One of the WGA’s recent caddie partnerships has landed right in my backyard of Washington, DC at historic Langston Golf Course. In partnership with the National Links Trust and the non-profit organization Golf. My Future. My Game., the WGA is subsidizing all caddie fees for this new summer program. This continued effort to grow the game and provide access for people of all ages and backgrounds gives hope for the future of the game in one of the Nation’s Capital’s most underserved communities.

The TOUR Championship

East Lake Golf Club - Atlanta, Georgia

September 2-5, 2021

The final leg of the FedExCup Playoffs is the TOUR Championship held at East Lake Golf Club in the suburbs of Atlanta. East Lake GC has been the permanent home for the TOUR’s final season tournament since 2005. The TOUR Championship’s primary charity is the East Lake Foundation and the amazing work the Foundation has done and continues to do for the surrounding community is the focus of this section of the Sustainability Spotlight.

The East Lake Foundation was established in 1995 as a means for transforming the Atlanta housing project of East Lake Meadows. Known as ‘Little Vietnam’ 30 years ago, East Lake Meadows was fraught with drug dealers, gunfire and a crime rate 18x higher than the national average. Parents knew the only way to keep their kids safe at night was to have them indoors by nightfall.

However, the vision and courage of local resident and legendary activist Eva Davis emerged to save and revitalize the community she called home. As she so succinctly declared in an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2003, “we tore down hell and built heaven.”

Davis partnered with the Atlanta Housing Authority and local real estate mogul Tom Cousins and used a $33 million federal grant (secured with the help of former President Jimmy Carter) to reimagine East Lake Meadows as the mixed-income community of the Villages at East Lake. In 1995, Cousins purchased East Lake Golf Club, which was built in 1904, at an auction with the intent of using the golf course to support the neighborhood's transformation. 

Together, Cousins and Davis created the East Lake Foundation, where Cousins supplied funding for the birth of the organization through $125,000 golf club membership fees and additional suggested donations of $200,000. Within three years, Cousins enticed the PGA TOUR to bring the TOUR Championship to East Lake Golf Club. The tournament’s presence brought additional financial resources that were used to advance the Foundation’s programs and initiatives.

One of those initiatives was the idea to create a cradle-to-college pipeline for the East Lake community. Situated across the street from East Lake Golf Club, the Charles R. Drew Charter School opened in 2000 as Atlanta’s first public charter school. Featuring a Project-Based Learning approach integrated with a STEAM framework, the Pre-K through 12 school serves over 1,800 students. Drew Charter’s first graduating class was in 2017 and featured a 100% graduation rate. For comparison’s sake, the graduation rate in 1995 for the East Lake Meadows was 30%! In staying true to the community’s revitalization and vision for the future, children living in the Villages of East Lake have top priority for acceptance at Drew Charter School to ensure all residents have access to quality education.

In 2009, Cousins started the non-profit organization, Purpose Built Communities, to use the success of the Villages at East Lake as a model and framework for revitalizing other underserved communities. Now Purpose Built Communities supports over 25 organizations across 15 states with pro bono consulting services. 

To date, the TOUR Championship has helped to raise over $30 million for the East Lake Foundation and a litany of other Atlanta-based nonprofits.

Driving The Green Take: It’s inspiring to see what courage, perseverance and shared goals for creating a better society can do for a community. I would be hard pressed to think that when Eva Davis and Tom Cousins first partnered to create the Villages at East Lake, they would imagine that in 2019, the Charles R. Drew Charter School boy’s golf team won the Georgia State Public School Boys’ Golf Championship, becoming Georgia’s first all-Black high school team and the first Atlanta public school to win the golf championship.