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 ...