Jack Druga’s life in golf began in the caddie yard. It seems only fitting that the back nine of that long life in this game will be played in support of youth caddying.
Druga, the PGA of America golf professional who recently retired from Shinnecock Hills Golf Club on Long Island, arrived at Oakmont in 1974. He was 14 years old, and he wanted to caddie to put some folding money in his pocket. At the time, most of the caddies were Pittsburgh steel workers, night-shift guys who were awfully intimidating. In time, Druga fit right in, and three years later he was the caddie of the year.
Druga caught the eye of head professional Lew Worsham, the 1947 U.S. Open champion. Worsham offered Druga the job of picking up the range after he caddied, and that enabled him to get serious about the game. He became a pretty good local amateur and earned a golf scholarship to Florida International University.
Upon graduation in 1981, Druga turned pro and worked as an assistant professional at Oakmont and Loxahatchee Club in Florida. He got his first job as a head professional in 1988 at The Creek Club on Long Island, and then worked at Loxahatchee and the Country Club of Fairfield in Connecticut. In 2007, he became the head pro at Shinnecock Hills, a job that he would hold for the next 15 years.
Coincidentally during that time, Druga’s nephew J.T. Surlis started looping at Southward Ho, a golf club an hour west of Shinnecock. Druga gave him a few lessons and a rangefinder, and he was off. As the years went on, Druga brought up the Evans Scholars program, as he thought his nephew checked most of the required boxes. Surlis won an Evans Scholarship, and, in the spring of 2021, he graduated from Northwestern University near Chicago.
Druga retired from Shinnecock on January 1 of this year, and he was looking for a way to give back to the game while staying connected to it. His nephew’s experience led him to the Western Golf Association, where he is now the vice president of development and a PGA Ambassador.
The Evans Scholars program is the largest and best-known youth-focused caddie scholarship program in the country, and it is the only one that funds full tuition and housing. It was started in 1930 by the great Chicago-area amateur Chick Evans. (It is because Evans spelled the word “caddie” with an “i” and “e” on the end that I do so throughout this column.) Almost 12,000 scholarships have been awarded. Today, the scholarship is valued well north of $125,000.
The Evans program is the primary recipient of charitable dollars from the PGA Tour’s BMW Championship. The tournament generated a record $5.6 million last year at Caves Valley in Maryland. It also raises funds from members of private clubs that have caddie programs. Importantly, alumni contribute nearly 40 percent of all donations annually, a staggering amount that speaks volumes about the outcomes of the program.
Bandon Dunes founder Mike Keiser, himself a former caddie and a member of the Caddie Hall of Fame, was instrumental in setting up a unique fundraising program called the Match Play Challenge. This is an annual effort whereby a group of donors called Match Play Partners make gifts of $50,000 that are pooled together to match all annual gifts of $2,500 or more. The success of this initiative spurred the WGA to think bigger as it relates to the number of available scholarships nationwide.
Recently, a decade-long strategic plan was approved by the WGA, the parent organization of the Evans Scholars Foundation. The plan calls for increasing the headcount of Evans Scholars by 50 percent, to 1,500 students living in community at leading universities across the country by 2030. The plan also calls for doubling the number of youth caddie opportunities in America. And that is where Druga came in.
Druga’s charge is to expand youth caddie programs from Boston to South Florida. And he is also determined to strengthen partnerships with PGA golf professionals through a newly created Ambassadors program designed to further ingratiate PGA of America professionals into the program.
For decades, the Evans program was thought to be a Midwestern aid initiative. However, that has changed, recently and quickly, as it has experienced tremendous growth on the East Coast. The WGA has partnered with the New York area’s Met Golf Association, and some 23 co-branded scholarship winners will come from its two caddie scholarship programs. The WGA also has partnered with other youth caddie scholarship programs, including Philadelphia’s J. Wood Platt Caddie Scholarship Trust, as well as Boston’s Francis Ouimet Scholarship Fund. Then there is the partnership with the New Jersey State Golf Association, whereby seven students have been awarded NJSGA Evans Scholarships. Some of them will be housed in a new Evans House at Rutgers University.
Druga has some impressive wins already. Old Marsh Golf Club in Florida will have its first Evans Scholar next fall, Jacie Goodman. As a freshman at Michigan, she will be the first female Evans winner from Florida. Seminole Golf Club delivered its second Evans Scholar this spring. And there are many other examples, too numerous to list here.
It's all a part of what Bill Kingore calls “a youth caddie renaissance.” As executive vice president, Kingore oversees the long-range planning and fundraising efforts for the WGA. Kingore is the architect of the Promise Campaign, launched in 2017 and designed to support the growth in scholarships. The original goal was to raise $200 million by the end of 2021; when they got to that amount in just three years, they added another $100 million to the goal. More than likely, they will exceed it.
The Evans Scholarship Foundation is just another of the countless ways in which golf steps up. The game always has, and it always will.
As for J.T. Surlis, he now works at Piper Sandler Companies, where Seminole club president Jimmy Dunne serves as vice chairman. Dunne grew up as a caddie at Southward Ho.
Caddie coincidences will take you a long way in life.
Top: Retired as Shinnecock pro, Jack Druga gives back as VP of development to the Western Golf Association.
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