Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston area late last summer and for Houston resident and PGA Tour pro Chris Stroud, it meant a call to action.
Stroud organized a golf fundraiser for Harvey relief, along with fellow Houston-area professional Bobby Gates, and held a golf outing and auction with a very special auction prize.
The fundraiser was held at Bluejack National outside of Houston, the first Tiger Woods-designed course in the United States, and one of the top-secret auction items was a private lesson with Woods.
“It was sort of a secret,” Stroud said Tuesday at the Houston Open, per the Golf Channel. “The secret was, ‘Hey, Tiger’s going to do something.’ We don’t know if he’s going to fly in and play, if he’s going to come, just come say hi.”
Woods had just begun playing again off injury and while he wasn’t one of the pros who participated in the pro-am, did donate a two-person private lesson for auction. That immediately became the hot item at the auction.
The lesson reached $200,000 – off $10,000 bids – when Stroud tried to get Woods on the phone. The goal was to get Woods to commit to a second lesson, but Stroud couldn’t connect. Regardless, the Woods private lesson went for $210,000, nearly 20 percent of the total raised that day. Stroud was grateful for the assist. When he saw him at the Genesis Open in Los Angeles in January, he went up to Woods on a putting green.
“Shook his hand, gave him a little man-hug and said, ‘You have no idea what you’ve done for my area,’” Stroud said. “He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘Seriously, anything I can do, I’ll help.’ So it meant a lot for a guy like Tiger, to see what he’s doing now and be able to donate some time away from his kids and family and golf and life, was pretty special for us.”
The total haul for the fundraiser came to nearly $1.1 million, with the proceeds going to 40 Houston-area families.
The PGA Tour is in town for the Houston Open, which begins on Thursday at the Golf Club of Houston.
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