"I’ll never let this club be about the money," he says. "Some of these wealthy guys come into a club and think they ought to get extra privileges, but that’s not the game we’re playing here. I was raised with that [at River Oaks], and I know where that goes. You don’t win with that." As a big supporter of true amateur golf, Burke also likes his members working. He’s not impressed with "golf bums," guys who retire early and come to the club every day to play golf and cards. "A lot of them wind up living inside a bottle of bourbon," he said. Another of Burke’s pet riffs (for more, consult his recently published memoir, It’s Only a Game) is about the purpose of clubs. Rural churches in Texas functioned like clubs, he says, because they were built around a "like interest." Says Burke: "Those farmers got lonesome reading the Bible all by themselves, so they came together once a week to do it." Sure, Champions is a lively place, especially in the late-December tournament pitting half the locker room against the other in teams captained by Burke and Elkington. But drinking and socializing are not the "like interests" Burke wants Champions to focus on. Golf is.
Many political scientists argue that the best and most efficient form of government is a benevolent dictatorship, which is essentially what Champions is. Burke has a controlling share—58 percent—of the club’s common stock, but allows himself to be overruled by the club’s nine-member board. (He hated their decision to put yardage markers on sprinkler heads in the fairways but went along with it.) Over lunch one day, I asked him what, if he were king not just of Champions but of all golf, he would do to improve the game. A member at the table said, "What do you mean, ’if’?" Burke laughed at that, but answered seriously: "It’s the money that’s ruining the game. Too much fancy this; too much fancy that; laser rangefinders. It takes people away from the essence of the game. Look here: We’ve got hundreds of acres out there on the Cypress course, with eighteen holes scattered around, each four-and-a-quarter inches in diameter, and the object is to see who can get the ball into each of those holes with the fewest strokes. That’s all there is to it. That’s the game. Why mess it up?"
The club championship itself is a match-play event for sixteen players—the defending champion and the top fifteen from the two-day qualifier. But the qualifier is also a stroke-play tournament, and this year the back-nine finish had made-for-TV drama. In the first round in the rain at Jackrabbit, no one had even broken par, but on the second day at Cypress, the players were flexing their muscles. With four holes left (and tied at even par for the tournament), McGlohn and McKinney, playing in the same group, were both three under for the day. Each drained a birdie putt of ten feet on fifteen to go four under. After pars on sixteen, McKinney pulled his tee shot on seven- teen into the woods, and despite another birdie on eighteen, couldn’t catch back up, because McGlohn finished par-birdie. McGlohn had shot—had had to shoot—a sixty-six to win. "Good round, Captain," Burke called from his cart near the final green.
Two weeks later, in the match play finals, both McGlohn and McKinney lost in the first round. "We’ve got a lot of great players at Champions," Burke deadpanned. All of the quarter- and semifinal matches went down to the wire. Only in the thirty-six-hole final was there a runaway: Sandy Pierce, the former Texas A&M standout, shot seven under over the first twenty-six holes to defeat Stephen Marland, the transplanted Brit, twelve and ten.
The question of what happens to Champions after Jackie Burke joins that big nineteenth-hole celebration in the sky is hard to ignore. So much of the club’s character derives from Burke’s personality that things are bound to change. He has five children by his first wife; of these, Mike is the most involved in golf—he and McKinney helped found The Medalist, an organization that sponsors tournaments for low handicappers at upscale daily-fee facilities across Houston (and soon, Las Vegas and Atlanta).
But Mike doesn’t possess the golf authority or bigger-than-life personality that his father does—and probably isn’t eager to step into the role his father plays, anyway. ("Dad says it’s like running for mayor every day," Mike told me.) Jackie’s forty-three-year-old second wife, Robin (with whom he has a teenage daughter) is an elite national player; last year she made the semifinals of the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur. But it’s hard to imagine her as the full-time mayor of Champions, either. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anybody in that job but Jackie Burke Jr.
But for now, that question must wait. Today, at Champions Golf Club, what matters is the game—the game, and the pitter-patter of little feet.
