Silent backers happily cheer on their champ
They were lost in the crowd standing under the bleachers behind the 18th green at Sugarloaf -- just a handful of men among hundreds straining to get a view of the PGA Tour rookie capping his first career victory.
Zach Johnson certainly couldn't see them there when he retrieved his ball from the cup and heaved it into the bleachers. The ball bounced off a few hands and laps before slipping through the seats toward discarded cups and sandwich wrappers.
Mike Valant reached his hand out, and the ball fell right into it. After the six years Johnson spent climbing through golf's minor ranks to this breakthrough moment, his winning golf ball found its way into the hands of one of the initial investors from his Iowa club who helped make it all happen.
"Think about that," said Flip Klinger, another of the eight men from Elmcrest Country Club who financed Johnson's professional dream. "Of all the people there, Mike had to be standing in the place where that ball fell through. He still has that ball at home."
Johnson never tells the story of his career without mentioning a group he affectionately calls "my investors." Without their support, he never could have afforded to pursue a life on the Prairie Tour. He never could have improved through the mini-tour toil. He never could have earned his way onto the PGA Tour. He never could have won the Masters.
"That's ironic that they were here this week," Johnson said of his Cedar Rapids, Iowa, cheering squad who joined his father as witnesses of his first PGA Tour victory at the 2004 BellSouth Classic. "It wasn't all of them, but it was a good chunk of them. It started out as a business and turned into a business family."
That business family began in 1998, after Johnson graduated from Drake and decided -- to his mother's chagrin -- that he wasn't ready to get a real job. He wanted to keep playing golf to see if he could make a life out of it. The one problem? He was broke, and golf costs money. So he sat down over lunch with his father and two Cedar Rapids club pros at the Irish Democrat to come up with a plan.
"You have to give it 100 percent and go for it," Dave Johnson said. "If we can raise enough finances we can take some of that pressure off of you so you don't have to worry about it. That's where a lot of the guys fail."
After the lunch, Zach Johnson and his father went to Klinger's law office for advice on creating a contract.
"They came in here, and Zach said, 'Mr. Klinger, I don't have any money, and I don't know how I'm going to pay you,' " Klinger said. "I told him, 'Zach, when you get to the Masters I want a ticket.' He said 'if' and I said, 'No, when.' "
So with that chuckle they set up a contract that was brilliant in both its simplicity and its unselfishness. They would sell shares to club members and family friends for $500 each. The contract lasted one year. The sponsors would be paid back from Johnson's winnings. The most profit the investors would get above their initial investment was $4,500 -- split among however many investors there were.
"So the sponsors were never going to get rich off this," Klinger said. "We didn't own a piece of him. Everybody wanted to let Zach follow his dream. We're just a bunch of old farts along for the ride. We're living vicariously through Zach Johnson and enjoying watching this kid crawl up the ladder. We learned there were such things as the Prairie Tour. Where do you start? We found it fascinating that these things existed."
The contract was so simple and creative that Johnson gets asked often by aspiring pros to share his plan, and Klinger happily photocopies a blank draft and sends it to whomever asks.
"I take no pride in draftsmanship," he said.
Initially there were eight investors -- Klinger, Craig Hotchkiss, Lonny Feddersen, Jay Peterson, Dwight Kuster, Loren Coppock, Cal Ernst and Valant -- who raised $22,000 among them. Over the five annual contracts that were drafted, about 22 sponsors bought shares. Johnson covered their investments every year except 2000, when he made up only 90 percent.
"We kind of joked about it because the economy was dropping at that time," Johnson said. "So they said I was a good investment and always wished they put more into it."
After 2003, when Johnson earned his PGA Tour card after leading the Nationwide Tour with a record $496,882, he joined his investors at their annual January lunch at Elmcrest to pass out the checks with their modest dividends. He wasn't sure what to say next.
"You don't have to say anything," Hotchkiss said. "We know you're on your own."
And that was it. They'd funded Johnson's dream and turned him loose to pursue his fortunes on golf's most lucrative tour. The families who invested in Johnson's dream didn't get rich, but Johnson enriched their lives nonetheless. Instead of pride of ownership, they bask in the pride of relationship.
"It's such a small state, and we have big fish in a small pond," Johnson said. "We never dreamt that I'd be one of the big fish, but maybe there was some potential that they grasped hold of and supported me the whole way. Some of these guys were friends anyway, so they wanted to see it happen.
"They aren't investing their money in me now, but they are still invested in me. I can say honestly, if I was one of them I would be the same way."
Johnson pays them back with his success. They talk about it every week when they gather with friends for lunch in the Eagles Nest restaurant at Elmcrest. They show up in places such as Atlanta and Silvis, Ill., to watch the elite golfer they helped launch. Some of them went all the way to Ireland to see him perform in the Ryder Cup.
And some have made it to Augusta National. When Johnson got his invitation for the Masters in 2005, one of the first people he called was Klinger.
"He said he had a Monday-through-Sunday ticket for us," Klinger said. "I told him he didn't really have to do that, and I could go another year. But my wife and I went down for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and saw him in his first Masters."
Just as Valant still has the winning ball that fell into his hand, Klinger has pictures on his office wall of their winner, Johnson, with them in Augusta.
