Bloom [ Persona ] Thanks a Billion! February 2007

by Dan Shafer
Images by Russell Byrne

The AT&T Pebble Beach National ProAm is part of the largest charitable giving effort in professional sports. Dozens of local organizations benefit from the annual local tournament.

Few people would be surprised to hear that golf is about money. But they might be somewhat stunned to learn that it’s not only about the cost of golf or about the big purses bagged by the likes of Tiger Woods or Arron Oberholser, who was the 2006 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am tournament champion. The golf money that is perhaps most noteworthy in Monterey this time of year is the charitable giving that results from the proceeds of that famous tournament.

In this its 61st year of play, the tournament that began as the Bing Crosby Clambake has raised nearly $60 million for non-profit organizations in Monterey and the surrounding communities. And that money is part of a cumulative national PGA charitable giving total which last year topped $1 billion.

“That’s more than the NBA, the NFL, and Major League Baseball combined,” says Laurel Lee-Alexander, the woman who is charged with overseeing the awarding of grants to nonprofit organizations from the tournament’s proceeds. This is her fourth year as Director of Grant Programs for the Monterey Peninsula Foundation (MPF), the organization founded to administer grants from the tourney. Lee-Alexander has one of the most broadly-scoped jobs in the area.

“Our focus areas are deliberately broadly drawn,” Lee-Alexander says, “So we get an opportunity to work with and impact so many people from various walks and interests throughout the whole region. It’s one of my favorite things about this job.”

In 2005-2006, for example, the foundation awarded grants totaling just over $4.8 million to several dozen separate organizations in the categories of arts and culture, community and the environment, education, health and human services, and youth.

Some of the highlights of recent grants included:

• $100,000 to the Foundation for Monterey County Free Libraries’ literacy program.
• $25,000 to the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), a small grass-roots organization that helps individual farmers learn skills and become self-sufficient.
• $35,000 to Seaside-based Community Partnership for Youth to help fund an after-school mentoring program for at-risk youth.
• $15,000 to Rebuilding Together, which helps the group operate its well-known program assisting low-income and elderly homeowners and other nonprofits rehabilitate homes and buildings using volunteer professional and unskilled labor from the community.
• $9,500 to The First Tee of Monterey County based at Twin Creeks Golf Course in Salinas. This program, founded in November 2004, offers more than 30 golf and life-skills classes every week to young people. Pebble Beach Co., which is a key part of the AT&T undertaking, also manages the Twin Creeks course for the program, thus providing significant additional in-kind contributions.

One of the more unusual programs funded by MPF is a joint effort with two local philanthropists – Max and Susan Dunwoody. The foundation and the family team up on a program called Imagine College, designed to make the dream of a college education a reality for low-income students.

“We follow kids from elementary school through high school,” Lee-Alexander explains. “The meat of the program is helping teachers, the community, and parents to encourage kids to stay in school and do well so that they can expect to get admitted to college and perform well there.”

The program provides college scholarships as the final carrot in the multi-year process that currently focuses on kids in Seaside schools.

It’s Tournament Time!
Between November and March each year, the grant-making operations of the foundation are put on nearly complete hiatus as Lee-Alexander and the other 14 employees put their energies behind staging the hugely popular golf tournament. One of the primary tasks the foundation engages in is coordinating the activities of nearly 2,000 volunteers who converge on the tournament to handle an impressive variety of tasks.

“Some of our volunteers actually fly to Monterey at their own expense, stay in a local hotel at their own expense, and spend the entire time here volunteering and never even getting to watch a single golf shot,” Lee-Alexander says, shaking her head in astonishment. “When I first heard that, I found it hard to believe.”

In fact, a special group called the Forty Year Club is made up of 50 people who have volunteered for 40 or more years of service to the tournament. Several members are deceased, but the vast majority still volunteer year after year.

“Volunteers are the absolute backbone of this organization. Without their sustaining us, we just couldn’t pull this off.”

Lee-Alexander finds ways to parlay the volunteer support activities into further funding for the community. For example, she offers local non-profits opportunities to provide drivers to shuttle tournament attendees between the parking lot at Monterey Peninsula College and the tournament sites, paying the organizations for each hour of volunteer service provided this way.

“Many if not most of our volunteers never get to see golf during tournament week,” she says. She and the rest of the MPF staff are busy doing all kinds of chores during the months leading up to and immediately following the tournament.

“It’s a lot of late nights answering phones, making signs and running special events connected to the tournament,” she said.

“People will sometimes say, ‘Wow, what a great job. You get to go to all of those big parties like the Monday night celebration at Mission Ranch with all the celebrities.’ I say, ‘Sure, I get to go, but I’m working, not rubbing elbows with the big stars.’”

One of her favorite special events is the GoGirlGo.com Charity Shoot-Out that takes place each January before the tournament. Local charities recruit an amateur golfer to represent them in a qualifying event. The top four qualifying charities each pick a team of pro golfers to represent them at the charity event, where each charity carries the leaderboard for its team. Based on how their teams perform, the charities divvy up $40,000 in funds.

Another favorite activity for Lee-Alexander is the occasional chance to help a Make-A-Wish Foundation child’s wish come true by arranging for them to watch the tournament inside the ropes and meeting their favorite golfers and amateur celebrities.

“Last year, we had a young boy from Make-A-Wish who wanted to meet Dennis Quaid. When they met, Quaid asked the boy where he was from, and he told him he was from Austin. ‘Hey, my wife is from Austin,’ Quaid said, and the two just hit it off from there,” she remembers.

Not bad for a woman who doesn’t even play golf.

From Marketing to Fund-Raising
Lee-Alexander has been a Monterey Peninsula resident since 1993. Her first non-profit job was as director of development for the Food Bank for Monterey County. Prior to that, she had spent several years in corporate marketing.

She met her husband, the recently elected Seaside City Councilman and Seaside High School math instructor, Dennis Alexander, while the two were volunteering for the Monterey County AIDS Project.

Just before she was hired at MPF, she had spent three years as the Senior Program Officer of the Community Foundation for Monterey County. That organization raises, manages and distributes charitable funds and also provides training and assistance in grant application preparation and fund management.

Growing up, Lee-Alexander lived all over the world, including living in Europe during the late 1960s while her father was stationed there with the U.S. Army. Her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was nine years old.

“I really love this job,” she says enthusiastically. “It’s amazing to be able to be so involved in the community through grant-making. Even though it has to be a bit of an arm’s-length relationship, the fact that we provide grants in such a broad range of areas gives me a real opportunity to see a great deal of what goes on here and nearby.”

Lee-Alexander also enjoys the atmosphere and environment at the MPF offices in Ryan Ranch.

“When I was being recruited and interviewed, I heard the usual stuff you hear about how this is a people-oriented organization, but it turns out to be absolutely true,” she says. “This is like a family.”

Many members of the MPF staff are active volunteers in their own right, serving on the boards of, or leading the Del Monte Forest Foundation, Catholic Charities, AT&T Pebble Beach Junior Golf Association, CPY, the Monterey Jazz Festival, Girls Incorporated of the Central Coast, and Junior League.

The Tournament Itself
Of course, none of this workplace camaraderie, special events, or the remarkable charity work done by MPF would be possible without the event itself – the tournament known affectionately around the Monterey Peninsula as the “AT&T.” The event this year is being staged February 5-11, with the tournament itself being played February 9-11. It is one of a handful of tournaments that team up PGA tour players with amateurs, primarily celebrities from the worlds of sports, entertainment, business, and the media.

One thing that makes this tournament unique is the fact that it is played over three different golf courses: Pebble Beach Golf Links, Spyglass Hill Golf Course and Poppy Hills Golf Course. All of the players must play a round on each course, which presents some particularly difficult challenges because the three courses are significantly different from one another.

Fans who attend the tournament are often not so interested in the golf being played as they are in seeing and enjoying the antics of some of their favorite non-golf celebrities. Perennial favorites among the celebrity amateurs include Bill Murray, George Lopez, Kevin Costner, Craig T. Nelson, Huey Lewis, and Ray Romano.

It seems that this tournament is often marked either by record-setting runaway wins like Vijay Singh’s three-shot victory in 2004, or by close finishes featuring “lucky” shots and “choke” finishes. One of the better-known of the latter category took place four years ago.

Davis Love III, a local crowd-pleasing favorite, found himself one stroke up after 11 holes at Pebble Beach. At the Par-3 12th, he cracked a 5-iron to a place near the green where it caromed off the shoe of a press photographer. Love held his breath, and watched the ball bounce off the shoe and onto the green, leaving him a four-footer for a birdie that turned out to be the winning margin.

One of the most famous comebacks in the history of the tournament came in 2000 when a young Tiger Woods roared back from seven strokes down to Matt Gogel with seven holes to go to win by two shots as Gogel faded down the stretch (he three-putted the 18th.). Gogel made up for his famous collapse in 2002 by winning the tournament.

In all probability, Woods won’t play the AT&T this year. He hasn’t made the field the last few, making no secret of his dislike for the pro-am format.

But Lee-Alexander will be far too busy helping out and dreaming of the great work she and MPF can do for regional charities in the coming year even to notice his absence.

Now, that’s a real money shot! °