Yesterday I played in the Spare Key Golf Benefit at Willingers Golf Club in Northfield. Spare Key is a Bloomington-based non-profit organization that “provides assistance to Minnesota homeowners with critically ill or seriously injured children by making a mortgage payment on the family’s behalf, allowing them to spend time with their child.”

The driving range and silent auction for the event opened at 10:30AM, with a shotgun start at 1PM. The club was selling food for lunch before and a buffet dinner was included afterwards (that I had to skip out on). The silent auction has some nice items, including rounds at Hazeltine and Legends Club, a signed Y.E. Yang flag from the PGA and a diamond pendant from Tiffany & Co.

After nine years of working with the Tapemark Charity Pro-Am, I always find it interesting to see how other charity golf events are run. This event was a more traditional, one-day golf scramble with a shotgun start, so it’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

I’m not a big fan of scrambles for several reasons: 1) I like to play my own ball, 2) play is always so slow and 3) we never score well when handicaps aren’t used. Our round took a little more than five hours and we played terrible, finishing with a tournament-worst 73 (+1). That included bogeys on six, eight and sixteen and birdies on nine and thirteen. Not all the scores were in when I left, but 58 was leading (-14).

The volunteers were all very nice and the organizers did a great job with the sold out event. I took a peek at the silent auction table before I left and it appeared Spare Key raised a lot amount of money for the cause.

Special thanks to Jeff Miller and his wife Deb for the invitation.