WILLOWBROOK, ILLINOIS | Nick Sherburne was a young teen when he started playing golf. His home course was a historic nine-holer in the town of Downers Grove that is best known as the site of the original Chicago Golf Club, which Charles Blair Macdonald, the father of golf in America, founded in 1892. And the youngster fell hard for the game.
When Sherburne turned 16 and could legally drive a car, he expanded his golf horizons by taking a job at Cog Hill, a 72-hole public golf facility some 15 miles to the south that hosted the Western Open on its Dubsdread Course, also known as No. 4, for 16 straight years starting in 1991.
“I was there from 1998-2000," recalled the now 42-year-old Sherburne. "I worked the range and bag drop and I got to play golf for free on courses 1 and 3.”
He also helped out with the Western Open, and Sherburne remembers watching the tour vans for the major golf equipment manufacturers driving onto the facility so they could tweak the woods, irons and wedges of the PGA Tour players who were competing.
“I asked my boss, head golf professional Jeff Rimsnider, about those vans and wondered why Cog Hill did not do the same sort of thing for our players,” he said. “Jeff told me that most of them either did not have the time or money to spend on a club fitting or did not appreciate how much one might help their games.”
Soon after, Sherburne purchased his first new set of golf clubs. “They were Titleists, and I paid half with my own money and borrowed the rest from my grandmother, who made me pay her back with interest,” he said. “Then, Jeff fit me for them.”
Thus was born a fascination with golf clubs and the fitting process. And it led Sherburne down a path that soon had him working for a local club-fitting outfit called EJL Custom Golf that by 2009 he'd come to own in full. A year later, when he was only 27, he co-founded a new enterprise that has since become the pre-eminent club fitter in the game.
Its name is Club Champion, and it was born from the idea that proper fittings are just as valuable to recreational golfers as they are for tour professionals and elite amateurs.
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