The Significance of East Lake
Golf's Most Accomplished Competitive Membership and Most Accomplished Charity.
Dear Subscriber:
Reconciling the P.G.A. Tour’s charitable giving alongside the size of their competitive purses, while an obvious pondering, is not an easy one for which to find even sketchy data. Professional athletes, via the organizations that represent and organize them, use charitable giving to justify most of what they do and the revenue they collect. “If it weren’t for us, [fill in the blank] might never have happened”, “[someone] might never have been able to walk”, “[a hospital or orphanage] might never have been built” ….
The P.G.A. Tour proudly and openly refers to their $3.93 billion of charitable giving since 1968—when they split away from the P.G.A. of America (the club professionals) and formed their own purely-competitive, professional organization. That comes to an average of $70 million each year for 56 years. The 2025 numbers are still coming into focus for their charitable giving, while competitive purses are estimated at $400 million.
There is murmuring that the tour is transitioning toward taking a greater role in their competitive events’ management, as well as the charitable giving that results from each event. Some anticipate this will mean an increase in tour revenue and a decrease in charitable giving. We shall see.
If the tour’s traditional support for charities wanes as increased player payouts debouch, the righteous ground of the P.G.A. Tour’s not-for-profit status erodes, as will the valuable support of event volunteers. It must be added, that this comes in the wake of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia working its magic on the traditional, television golf audience by filching players from other professional tours with enormous sums of contractual appearance fees and purses. Money.
All of this disappointing reflection makes the prodigious success of what has taken place at East Lake even more impressive in that the work and charitable giving there have changed one of Atlanta’s worst neighborhoods into a thriving community.
Despite what may be happening elsewhere among their many tournaments, the P.G.A. Tour deserves a nod for holding their season-ending championship at East Lake 23 times - the past 20 consecutively. East Lake is now billed as the permanent home of the Tour Championship.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the credit due Tom and Ann Cousins, the Coca-Cola Company, and the Southern Company for assembling and sustaining the continued support of the East Lake community generally and the Tour Championship specifically. More details follow below.
The last century’s most important golf and neighborhood restorations took place simultaneously five miles east of downtown Atlanta in the mid 1990s. This fact becomes clearer and more prominent as time passes. The fact that Scottie Scheffler won $25 million there last month understandably captured the golf news cycle, but the event’s contribution to building the community is more impressive.
Well prior to September’s championship, East Lake’s competitive legacy accumulated for more than a century. That legacy is but one of the three truly significant elements that have raised East Lake to such prominence in the world of golf.
Sixty years before the establishment of the P.G.A. Tour, East Lake was where Robert Tyre (Bobby) Jones learned to play — where he played his first and last rounds.
Thirdly, and the element of greatest importance at East Lake, is the breathtaking charitable success of Golf With a Purpose that transformed the neighborhood surrounding the Club “from a war zone to a national model”.
The Tour Championship, Bobby Jones’ history, and Golf with a Purpose have each contributed to the frequent and truly extraordinary events that have taken place here - on and off the course.
“When there is really a force for good ...”
The East Lake neighborhood was within the Crim Cluster, one of 20 comprising the Atlanta Project. By the early 1990s, it was made up of 650 public housing units and was so ravaged by poverty, drugs and violence that it was nicknamed “Little Vietnam”. Taxi drivers sometimes refused to drop newcomers there in broad daylight because of the danger. Even Atlanta’s mayor said it was the only part of the city where she would not go alone, without police protection. The Atlanta Project was attempting to pay special attention to the education of inner city youths and the revitalization of the city’s major crime and poverty areas, but at East Lake it was not working.
In 1994, Thomas G. Cousins, a widely-respected Atlanta real estate developer whose family had been East Lake members for many years, was blessed with the idea of re-generating the entire East Lake community by razing the public housing and replacing it with single family townhouses and apartments while also providing schools, a grocery store, a YMCA, playing fields, limiting new tenants to those with a job and no criminal record, and then using the golf club as a central hub in the vocational and recreational rebuilding of the community’s youth. “I knew that [just] housing would not be the answer,” Mr. Cousins said. The entire community needed to be rebuilt - education, services, recreation and safety provided.
To begin the work, Mr. Cousins and his wife, Ann, created the East Lake Foundation and then convinced 100 corporate donors to contribute $200,000 each toward that goal. They referred to their work as Golf with a Purpose. It was work that the community and the city could not afford to be without.
The result was Villages at East Lake—their website describes the villages in this way:
Our homes are nestled among the conveniences of a perfectly planned community; including a grocery store, bank, Drew Charter School, East Lake Family YMCA, as well as the East Lake and Charlie Yates Golf Courses. Residents are drawn to The Villages of East Lake because of its recreational amenities, superior educational opportunities, and largely to become part of a vibrant supportive community.
Their charter school provides cradle-to-college classes and guidance. The results in reading levels, high school graduations, and college admittance rates are stunning.
Mr. Cousins now works to apply this same approach in other communities around the United States. After 50 years of failed government attempts (our words, not his) to break the cycle of poverty in America, it is reassuring to hear Mr. Cousins reflect on what was learned at East Lake.
“We learned that we can change neighborhoods,” he has said. “There are so many serious problems in our country that don’t have to be there. When there is really a force for good - something good happening -miracles will happen.”
East Lake’s Members Unrivaled Competitive Golf Achievements
The ascent of golf as a widely popular sport is inextricably woven within the fabric of its great clubs, and the notoriety of such clubs is founded on the competitive performances that have taken place on their courses and/or been achieved by their members.
With regard to members’ competitive achievements, East Lake is without peer.1
Its members dominated competitive golf more than those from any other membership in the history of the game. They won more than 50 regional, national and international championships within a 31 year span - including 17 national championships.
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