At the best clubs, the most confident ones, the line between members and employees is not thick and rich, like one you would draw with a brand-new Sharpie. It’s porous, more like a line you’d draw with a Sharpie on its last legs.
And so it is at the National Golf Links, off the beaten path in Southampton township, on the South Fork of the East End of Long Island. There are caddies, clubhouse and pro shop employees there who know the club members almost as if they were family members. And there are club members, some of them captains of industry (to use a quaint and fading phrase), that find promising young employees on the club’s employment rolls. Nelson Doubleday, once a prominent book publisher and owner of the New York Mets, knew this territory. Jimmy Dunne has worked this fertile soil for years. Mike Bloomberg, in his own way, has, too. A company is only as good as its employees. All the better business schools teach that.
And a golf club and course is a good setting for bosses to see for themselves if a person has the gift of confidence, the willingness to go above and beyond. Who wouldn’t want to hire a person with those qualities? People who took the refrain (“Do it!”) from a 1975 dance-craze disco hit (“The Hustle”) and turned it into a life motto.
Enter Kevin Williams, aka Big Kev, a huge, athletic and beloved kid doing the hustle, NGL-style. All through the 1990s — first as a student at Shoreham-Wading River High School in Suffolk County, then through his four years at Boston College — he worked as a caddie at National. Sometimes he’d drive to work with his father, Mike Williams, a high school math teacher with a summer job working in the NGL pro shop. Big Kev had the math gene, always helpful for a caddie. He had the never-say-die attitude, as the best caddies (and athletes) do. In high school, he was the captain of his golf team, his basketball team and his baseball team. Good grades, too. Excellent grades. He played golf at B.C., the Jesuit school in Boston’s Chestnut Hill section.
Big Kev studied and played golf at Boston College.
courtesy
This kind of thing has been going on for a long while. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was a kid caddie at Brae Burn Country Club in the Boston suburbs named Peter Lynch. Young Peter caddied for the president of Fidelity Investments, D. George Sullivan, paid his Boston College tuition with the money he made caddying, later went to work for Fidelity and became one of Wall Street’s greatest investors. Lynch once said of Sullivan, “Outstanding person, big tipper, bad golfer.” Lynch had the hustle gene — and the math gene. This kind of thing still goes on today. We only hear about it later, when somebody pulls an ace out of the river.
Big Kev had a regular loop at National, Barry Van Gerbig, the former Seminole president. As a rich-kid socialite, Van Gerbig used to pick up Ben Hogan in a house he rented in Palm Beach, Fla., and bring him to Seminole to practice. One day Hogan said to him, “The things you have, this life you have, you haven’t earned it. It’s time for you to become your own man.” Those sentences informed the rest of Van Gerbig’s life. Van Gerbig liked Big Kev. Kevin during one of his BC summers, had an internship lined up at Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street firm.
The internship fell through as the ownership of the firm changed hands in the late 1990s. Van Gerbig called his successor as Seminole president, Jimmy Dunne, to see if he had a summer position for him at Dunne’s firm, Sandler O’Neill. Dunne did. One day that summer, at a firm outing at Deepdale Golf Club on Long Island, Big Kev shot 73. There was a joke at Sandler O’Neill in those days that the job application form listed a blank for your golf handicap. In any event, golf is good for sales and always has been. Dunne told the kid, “When you graduate from B.C., if you want a job here, you’ve got one.”
You may call this the old boys’ network at work. It is. It is also the way of the world. This all goes way beyond golf and Wall Street. When Charles Blair Macdonald was trying to get National Golf Links off the ground, he called on some of his rich friends in Chicago and asked them to write a check and join his club. Seed money. One of the first in was Robert Todd Lincoln, well-heeled president of Pullman Palace, manufacturer and operator of railway cars. Robert Todd Lincoln did not come from a golfing family. His father was President Lincoln.
Kevin Williams graduated from Boston College, magna cum laude, in 1999. That summer, he started full-time at Sandler O’Neill, selling bonds. The next year, right before Christmas, he proposed to his high school girlfriend, Jillian Volk, as they both sat on Santa’s lap at Macy’s. They set a wedding date for the following December.
He proposed to his high school girlfriend, Jillian Volk, as they both sat on Santa’s lap at Macy’s.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a perfect back-to-school Tuesday across the Northeast, Jimmy Dunne was playing in a U.S. Mid-Amateur qualifier at Bedford Golf & Tennis Club. Mike Williams, veteran math teacher, was in his classroom. Kevin Williams was in the Sandler O’Neill office on the 104th floor of the South Tower at the World Trade Center. Kevin called Jillian with the devastating news, that the North Tower had been struck by an airplane. But he was fine. His building was being evacuated. A few minutes later, the South Tower was struck. The rest of the day was chaotic. The rest of the week, the rest of the year. The aftershocks are being felt to this day.
At one point, on that awful Tuesday, Mike Williams called Jimmy Dunne and said, “They found Kevin!” Later he called Dunne back. “They did find a Kevin Williams. Just not our Kevin Williams.”
Mike Williams made 30 or 40 trips to the site of the rubble of the Twin Towers in the coming months, searching for any remnant of his son he could find. He and Dunne talked daily.
The Williams family had two funerals for their eldest son, the second more than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, after a partial recovery of Kevin’s once large and hugely vibrant body. “The second was harder than the first,” Mr. Williams said Wednesday afternoon. And the first was impossible.
Mike and his wife, Pat, were at National Golf Links on Wednesday afternoon. When Sept. 10 arrives, they often are. They play a casual five holes, from 14 tee to the house. For years, they would then drive to New York City and take part in 9/11 remembrance services. But for the past few years, they have changed their pattern. They found the day, as it unfolded in Lower Manhattan, to be just too much. Too much celebration of this, that and some other thing. And not enough focus on the lives lost and the evil behind those deaths. They spend Sept. 11 each year in Montauk, on the easternmost part of the south fork of Long Island. It’s like the end of the earth out there, rugged and beautiful, not for the faint of heart.
The Sept. 11 attacks claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people, 66 of them Sandler O’Neill employees. Two of those 66 came out of the National Golf Links caddie yard, Kevin Williams and John F. McDowell, who went by Axe, from the dorsum of his nose, so thin you could cut paper on it. In the club’s Taj Mahal caddie shack, there’s a tribute plaque to both men. “But as the years go by, fewer and fewer people knew the guys or even fewer know their story,” the club’s caddiemaster, Billy Muller, said the other day. He was choking up, remembering Big Kev and Axe and the day that claimed their lives.
The wee uphill walk from the sunken 16th green at National to the elevated 17th tee is as lovely as any walk in golf. The green at 16, a par-4, is a gift, in the shape of a punch bowl. When the pin is in the middle of the green even a mediocre second shot can wind its way near the hole and leave you with a semi-makable putt for birdie. The 17th tee is another gift, an elevated tee with a spectacular bay view on a short par-4 where a weak pop-up tee shot can still go well over 200 yards and leave you with a pitch shot into the green. You can play those two holes in eight shots. You really can.
National’s sunken 16th green.
L.C. Lambrecht
Every time Dunne walks from 16 green to 17 tee, driver in hand, he taps a small round sunken stone with the head of driver, titanium on poured cement. If the club gets a little scratched, he doesn’t care. If a little spark comes off the sole of the club, that’s only fitting. There’s a cross on the top of the stone, drawn in such a way it looks likes medieval. Three letters: K-E-V. They look Roman, the way they are drawn. Big Kev. Pat and Mike Williams stopped at the stone on Wednesday afternoon, took a photo, did some gardening.
The baseball field at Shoreman-Wading River High School was renamed Kevin Williams Memorial Field more than 20 years ago. It gets awards, for being the best-maintained baseball field in Suffolk County. The Williams family does a lot of the work themselves. The Kevin Williams Foundation has sent thousands of underprivileged kids to summer sports camps. Jimmy Dunne has been a major supporter of it, among other National members.
Mike made the K-E-V tribute stone. He took a wonton soup container, put some 9/11 dust in its bottom, poured cement into it, drew the cross and the three letters as the cement was hardening, removed the plastic shell and buried the cylindrical monument, planting it on a bed of Titleist Professionals.
For Jimmy Dunne, every day is a 9/11 Remembrance Day. The day just gets more attention when the actual day, Sept. 11, rolls around each year. Wednesday night, at a small dinner in Midtown Manhattan, Dunne, in response to a question, found himself talking about Kevin Williams. He gets similar questions from time to time. When Dunne gave the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame in 2021, the first several minutes of it — emotional and impromptu — were about Big Kev.
Mike and Pat Williams have two grown children, a daughter, Kelly, and a son, Jamie, now in their 40s. Kevin would be 47 today. Mike didn’t make the stone tribute alone. Jamie was beside his father the entire time, including the planting of it. Jamie was a caddie at National Golf Links, too. He has worked at Dunne’s old firm, now called Piper Sandler, for years. Mike, in his retirement from teaching, still works at National Golf Links, coming in for tournaments and outings. He and Jimmy Dunne talk all the time. A longtime employee and a longtime member. They talk about the Yankees. They talk about golf. They talk about field maintenance and course maintenance. What they’re talking about, really, all the while, is Big Kev.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.
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