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Over lunch from Bossy Beulah’s Chicken Shack – the Queen City’s self-described “best chicken sandwich” – Ike Grainger III smiles at the sight of a young girl barely taller than her golf bag hustling to the practice tee of the Learning Center at the First Tee of Greater Charlotte in North Carolina.
“Now that,” Grainger, 75, says quietly, “is what keeps both me and the game young at heart.”
As he and a friend sit watching from a picnic table in the open air pavilion next to the former pro shop at the Dr. Charles L. Sifford Golf Course at Revolution Park, the young lady quickly tees up a ball and gives it a mighty swat, sending it flying into a pale blue winter sky.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Grainger is moved to say. “We have a lot of great kids out here just like her.”
Charlotte’s First Tee chapter opened in 2003, a year before Grainger was asked by chapter chairman Mac Everett – the corporate dynamo who ran the Wells Fargo Championship for 16 years – to join the board and spearhead a capital improvements campaign. That campaign raised $2.5 million to create a permanent home for First Tee kids at Revolution Park’s renovated clubhouse, where PGA Tour pioneer and Charlotte native Charlie Sifford was once a regular. A few years later, he headed up a similar capital campaign that transformed terrain around the old golf shop into a spectacular full-scale learning area.
“I figured if anybody could help us raise the necessary money to do the project right, and oversee the creation of a great First Tee program, it was Ike,” says Everett. “Not only did he have the construction expertise and understanding of what it would take to make this a first-rate facility, he had the passion and heart to make it happen. Hundreds of generous folks participated, but Ike is the reason this place got built. Service is in his bloodstream.”
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