The scene is quintessential country club.
Several hundred golf-crazy youngsters have turned out for tournament play on carefully manicured courses; the staff is attentive, the clubhouse nearby promises locker-room comforts and refreshments later.
And Joe Jemsek, looking natty on the first tee in a navy blazer and a Cog Hill Golf Club hat, is doing what he does best: delivering a private-club golf experience to public-course players.
Jemsek owns the four Cog Hill courses in Lemont and the two courses at St. Andrews in West Chicago. He leases and operates 18-hole Glenwoodie in Glenwood and Pine Meadow in Mundelein. Sportswriters routinely dub him ”a living golf legend,” but that is only one of many accolades acquired during Jemsek`s nearly seven decades of total immersion golf.
The list is long for the last three years alone.
In 1989 he was one of eight inaugural inductees into the Illinois Professional Golf Association Hall of Fame; he also received the Chicago District Golf Association Distinguished Service Award.
In 1988 he became the first public golfer and the first PGA professional to be appointed to the United States Golf Association executive committee. That same year he was named by Golf Magazine as one of the sport`s ”100 Heroes,” in such company as Jack Nicklaus, Robert Trent Jones and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1987 he was named Illinois PGA Golf Professional of the year and received the Western Golf Association Gold Medal of Appreciation.
On this bright August morning, the legend is less visible than the man. Jemsek stands 6 feet 1 inch, but he looks even larger as he works the crowd. He is everywhere at once, into the pro shop to check stocks, shaking hands with a lanky college student who stops him on the cart path (”Sure, I know you, son. How`s your handicap?”), picking up a marker from the parking lot
(”This could give a guy a flat tire”).
He is also giving the young entrants in the Met Sizzler tournament a championship welcome. He checks the starting times with Carol McCue, long-time executive director of Chicago District Golf Association, now on Jemsek`s staff.
”Are we running late here, Carol?”
Five minutes off schedule, she explains, because an earlier league was a half hour late starting.
He grumbles.
He spies a young starter staring dreamily into space and nails him:
”You`re not busy. Here, you can bag some tees, and how about picking up that paper over there?”
He is deeply offended by litter in all forms. He constantly picks it up himself and nags his employees to do the same: ”Hey, Miss America, what are you waiting for? Do you see that pop can over there? Pick it up. Make like your boyfriend is coming.”
”Ladies, will you give these guys a lesson in cleanliness and pick up that stuff?”
”The main thing I`ve found about the public,” he says, is ”if it`s clean, they won`t drop anything. If it`s dirty, they`ll drop it everywhere.” Jemsek is 76, and he has had some health problems in the past, but this morning he outpaces his young staff. His day began hours earlier, at 2:45 a.m., when he customarily rises and walks for exercise. He lives alone now, a widower, in his home on the grounds of St. Andrews, and he often starts the coffee for the daybreak golfers there.
Almost every day he commutes from West Chicago to Mundelein to Glenwood to Lemont to visit each course. He often returns home at 10 or 10:30 at night. McCue said, ”He knows everything about the operation of a golf course. He will say, `They haven`t picked up the parking lot for an hour,` or `We`re running out of Coke someplace.` It`s like he has eyes in the back of his head.”
Initially, his drive for success may have been fueled by his humble origins, McCue said, ”but now it`s just liking people and liking the game.” After she joined Jemsek Golf six years ago, McCue learned something new about her long-time colleague: ”He`s never wrong. Sometimes you could almost wring his neck, but he`s right.”
He also has an elephant`s memory, she added. ”Wherever we travel, he knows people. They come up to him and say, `I knew you 20 or 30 years in Argo,` or wherever. He can talk to those kids the same way he talks to professionals, and then he can turn around and talk to Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer, and they`re old friends, too.”
Back at the first hole, a threesome is teeing off, and Jemsek watches intently.
”Good shot, pro,” and then to McCue, ”Hold that one; I want to check his amateur status,” and as they head down the fairway, ”Okay, boys, good luck.”
”Anything we can do to make golfers out of these kids is okay,” he explains. Golfers today are customers tomorrow, and as Jemsek often says, ”I never saw a bad customer. You know why? How`d you like to have nobody?”
”Joe listens to people, and he watches carefully. He knows his customers as well as any businessman in the country,” said Dennis Davenport, current executive director of Chicago District Golf Association, who was at Cog Hill to help with the tournament. ”All these kids will be coming back here for the next 30 or 40 years to play golf.”
Contrary to the image of golf as an elite sport played at exclusive clubs, Davenport said that 8 out of 10 golfers play on public courses.
Jemsek spotted that market potential 50 years ago.
”He upgraded the standards for everybody,” Davenport said. ”He redefined what a top-quality public golf operation ought to be. Long before anybody really thought it would work, he was giving them that atmosphere in the clubhouse, the services and amenities. It raised some eyebrows when Joe started doing this. It cost a lot of money, but it came back to him many times over. He still invests back into the game and the players.
”Joe is probably the best thing that has happened to golf, particularly public golf, in the modern era. Certainly in the Chicago area,” Davenport added.
Many of the private-course extras that Jemsek first introduced to public players were eventually adopted by competitive daily-fee courses. He was the first to fertilize fairways and water greens, to cut the fairways with the costly Tri-plex mower used by private courses, to offer daily fee players more than a hot dog and pop when he added full food service at St. Andrews, to let players wear spikes onto the clubhouse carpets, to add continuous cart paths for all-weather play.
After he leased Pine Meadow and spent $3 million to renovate it, Jemsek added a caddy program in 1986. He believes it is the only one in the country on a public course. About 60 youngsters caddy there currently.
Caddies cut into golf cart receipts, but Jemsek is committed to the program. That`s no surprise, considering that he first swung a golf club as a caddy.
”I grew up around 63rd and Harlem,” he says. ”I used to hop a freight to get to the golf course where Midway Airport is now, because it was 3 cents on the street car. I was 7 years old when I first started caddying.”
Joe was the second of eight children born to a struggling Russian immigrant couple. The family name was Demchuk, later changed to Jemsek. Eventually the family moved west to Argo, but when young Joe first heard of caddy opportunities at Acacia in La Grange and Cog Hill in Lemont, he hitchhiked to work, mostly in the dark hours before sun-up and after sundown. ”I worked hard,” he recalls. ”I did all the jobs. I caddied for one of the owners, Marty Coghill. He was a left-hander, couldn`t hit a ball out of a phone booth, and I helped him a lot. Once on the eighth hole, a par 3, he hit a halfway decent shot. He was going to chip one in, and I tried to straighten him out. He wouldn`t listen. I finally told him, `You gotta listen. Now try it my way.`
”So he walked to the tee, and he said, `Son how would you like to own this place?`
”I said, `I will, someday.` I was 13.”
Ed Wallace grew up in Argo-Summit and recalls watching Joe and his brothers practice hitting balls across a field along the 59th Street railroad tracks. He said, ”Joe became caddy master at Cog Hill and started this system of A caddies and B caddies. The A caddies had red caps; the B caddies had green caps. If you became a good caddy, you got to wear a red cap.”
By 17, Joe had moved up through the ranks, past caddy master to assistant pro to full pro. Times were hard, and he hustled to peddle golf lessons. A classic Jemsek tale relates how he made up a lot of signs to post on trees about 20 yards off the fairways of Cog Hill. The signs read: ”If you`re in here, you need to see me for a lesson. Signed, Joe Jemsek.”
His lesson prices soared after he won a driving contest in the 1934 World`s Fair. Atop a 630-foot skyride, Jemsek hit an average 501 yards in three drives into Lake Michigan.
Over the bar in the Cog Hill clubhouse, an old photograph and a framed Wilson driver commemorate that spectacular performance.
”When I won that,” he says, ”I was getting $2 a half hour for lessons, 6 for $10, you know. Afterwards-how far do you live from here?-I had a line that long waiting for lessons at $5 straight, no 6 for $25 either.”
When the Coghill brothers refused him a pay raise, Jemsek defected to St. Andrews. Two years later he married Grace Hough, whose family owned St. Andrews. That same year, at 26, he raised $50,000 to purchase the 36-hole club, which was in receivership, and he took out a $50,000 mortgage for the remainder of the price.
The Jemsek golf empire had teed off, but its first shot hit the rough:
that winter the emperor had to take a non-golf job to cover expenses.
By the `50s, Jemsek Golf was shooting par again. He pioneered television golf and a national Golf Day with celebrity players, and most important, he made good on his promise to Marty Coghill.
”After my dad bought Cog Hill in 1951,” said Frank Jemsek, president of Jemsek Golf, ”he started talking about building another course there. He wanted it to be the first championship public course, and people in the business thought he was nuts. Lots of smart people thought my dad was just going to go down the tubes with that.”
Even the course architect scoffed. He passed the assignment along to a beginner in his firm, and the No. 3 Cog Hill course was nearly completed before the designers realized that Joe Jemsek meant business, good business.
The architect, Frank said, promised a great course next time around, and when land became available, Dick Wilson designed the award-winning Dubsdread as the fourth Cog Hill course.
”My dad would hear guys talking about how they`d like to play Medinah (a private course in Itasca). It was one of my dad`s favorite courses, and being a professional, it was easy for him to play. He wanted to build a course like Medinah for the public course player,” Frank said.
Dubsdread opened in 1964 and has been ranked in the top 100 courses in the U.S.
Championship public links like Dubsdread are being eyed with new interest by tournament planners following the PGA`s embarrassment this month preceding its annual tournament held this year at Shoal Creek Country Club. The Birmingham, Ala., club and the PGA came under fire for the club`s exclusionary racial policy. The tournament was played after Shoal Creek accepted one honorary black member and took steps to admit another black to membership.
The Butler National Golf Club in Oak Brook, home of the Western Open, does not allow women members and just how that policy will affect future tournaments is unclear.
Peter de Young, tournament director of the Western Golf Association, said, ”At this point, we`re checking all the options. I`m not going to rule out any golf course in Chicagoland that would welcome the Western Open.
”Joe is Mr. Golf of Chicago. Dubsdread is a great facility, nationally acclaimed, and we`d love to play a golf tournament there sometime. But right now we`re still at Butler.”
Great as it was, one thing about Dubsdread bothered Joe Jemsek and planted the seed for his next course. Frank said, ”My dad thought enough people weren`t smiling when they left No. 4. He wanted to build another course that was difficult if you wanted that, but where you could be pleased with yourself when you came off.”
It took 21 years, but nobody ever said Joe Jemsek is not persistent.
”He`s like a bulldog,” said Frank. ”He never gives up.”
The site Jemsek wanted was a Mundelein property owned by the Archdiocese of Chicago. Jemsek called at the archdiocesan office to inquire about leasing it. He was turned down. The next year he asked again and was refused. And the next, and the next and the next.
”Then he got tired of it,” said Frank, ”and he`d send me down every fall.”
Twenty times the archdiocese said no, and on the 21st appeal, it agreed. Pine Meadow opened in August, 1985. In 1986, it was voted the best new public course in the country.
But Dubsdread is Jemsek`s first love, and when he heads east of the Cog Hill clubhouse to show it off, the golf cart picks up speed. He pauses at the driving range to tell a young pro a tip he learned from Bobby Locke and at a tee to alert a starter to a candy wrapper on the ground.
”Sometimes they hate to see me coming,” he says. ”I want everything perfect, you see.”
The sun is warm, the birds are singing and Dubsdread looks like golf heaven.
”It`s like your children,” says Jemsek, who besides his son Frank of Burr Ridge also has a daughter, Mary Ann Hinckley of Walnut Creek, Calif.
”Your own are always beautiful.”
He heads back toward the clubhouse, skirting the pampered bent greens and reminiscing about Cog Hill in the 1920s, when he was the age of the youngsters in the Met Sizzler.
In those hungry days growing up on the Southwest Side, did he ever imagine all this?
”Oh hell yes,” he says.
And of all his achievements-the golf courses, the accolades and awards, the recognition-what makes him most proud? The answer sounds familiar.
”I`m most proud to have so many fine customers. I never saw a bad customer yet. You know why? How`d you like to have nobody?
”Whenever I go to my clubs, my customers nail me and complain about this and that. But you know the last thing they say? `See you next week, Joe.` ”
