He was a bright cadad with a bright future. Then came that terrible Tuesday

In the best, the safest clubs, the line between members and employees is not thick and rich, like the one you would draw with a whole new sharp. It is porous, more like a line that would draw with a sharpie on the last legs.

And so it is in National golf tiesOutside the beaten path to Southampton Township, in the southern fork of the eastern edge of Long Island. There are caddies employees, Clubhouse and Pro Shop there that the club members know almost as if they were family members. And there are members of the club, some of them the captains of the industry (use a strange and faded phrase), who find new promising employees in the club’s employment rolls. Nelson Doubleday, formerly a prominent book publisher and owner of New York Mets, knew the territory. Jimmy Dunne He has worked this fertile land for years. Mike Bloomberg, in his own way, has also. A company is as good as its employees. All the best business schools teach it.

And a golf club and course is a good environment for the bosses to see themselves if a person has the gift of faith, the willingness to go up and beyond. Who would not want to hire a person with those qualities? The people who took the refrain (“do it!”) From a 1975 dance disco-man’s hit (“The Hustle”) and turned it into a motto of life.

Enter Kevin Williams, Aka Big Kev, a great, athletic and loving child in the hustle, in the style of NGL. Throughout the 1990s as a student at the Shoreham-Wading River High School at the Suffolk County, then during his four years at Boston College-he worked as a caddy in National. Sometimes he would travel to work with his father, Mike Williams, a high school teacher of mathematics with a summer work working on NGL Pro Shop. Big Kev had the math gene, always useful for a caddy. He had the uninhabited attitude, as the best umbrellas (and athletes) do. At high school, he was the captain of his Golf team, his basketball team and his baseball team. Good grades, too. Excellent grades. He played Golf in BC, Jesuit School in the Boston’s Chestnut Hill section.

This kind has been going on for a long time. In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was a Kiddy Caddy in Brae Burn Country Club on the outskirts of Boston by the name of Peter Lynch. Young Peter Cadded for Fidelity Investments President D. George Sullivan paid his education at Boston College with the money he made cadding, later went to work for loyalty and became one of Wall Street’s biggest investors. Lynch once told Sullivan, “Prominent person, Big Tipper, bad golf player.” Lynch had the hustle gene – and the math gene. This kind of thing continues today. We only hear about this later, when someone pulls an ace from the river.

Big Kev had a regular loop in National, Barry Van Gerbig, First Semina President. As a rich social with wealthy children, Van Gerbig took Ben Hogan in a house he rented in Palm Beach, Fla., And brought him to the seminol to practice. One day Hogan said to him, “Things you have, this life you have, you haven’t earned it. It is time for you to become your man.” These sentences informed the rest of Van Gerbig’s life. Van Gerbig liked Big Kev. Kevin during one of his summer in BC, had an internship lined up in Solomon Brother, Wall Street firm.

The practice fell when the firm’s ownership changed his hands in the late 1990s. Van Gerbig called his successor as president of Seminole, Jimmy Dunne, to see if he had a summer position for him at Dunne’s firm, Sandler O’Neill. Dunne did. One day that summer, on a strong walk in Deepdale Golf Club In Long Island, Big Kev shot 73. There was a joke on Sandler O’Neill in those days that the application form listed a blank for your golf handicap. In any case, golf is good for sales and has always been. Dunne told Kid, “When you finish BC studies, if you want a job here, you have one.”

You can call this Old Boys network at work. Is. Also the world’s way. All this goes beyond golf and Wall Street. When Charles Bler MacDonald was trying to get national golf links, he called on some of his rich friends in Agoikago and asked them to write a check and join his club. Seed money. One of the first in Robert Todd Lincoln, president with good heels of Pullman Palace, manufacturer and operator of railway cars and son of President Lincoln.

Kevin Williams graduated from Boston College, Magna Cum Laude, in 1999. That summer, he began full -time at Sandler O’Neill, selling bonds. Next year, immediately before Christmas, he proposed to his high school girlfriend Jillian Volk, after the two sat in Santa’s lap in Macy’s. They set a marriage date for December.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a perfect Tuesday back at school, Jimmy Dunne was playing in a The US mid-amateur Qualifying at Bedford Golf & Tenis Club. Mike Williams, a veteran teacher of mathematics, was in his classroom. Kevin Williams was in the office of Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor of the South Tower at the World Trade Center. Kevin called Jillian with the destructive news that the North Tower was hit by a plane. But he was fine. His building was being evacuated. A few minutes later, the south tower was hit. The rest of the day was chaotic. The rest of the week, the rest of the year. The consequences are still felt to this day.

At one point, on the terrible Tuesday, Mike Williams called Jimmy Dunne and said, “They found Kevin!” Later he called Dunne again. “They found a Kevin Williams. Just not Kevin Williams.”

Mike Williams made 30 or 40 trips to the ruins of the twin towers in the coming months, looking for any remnants of his son he could find. He and Dunne talked daily.

The Williams family had two funerals for their eldest son, the second more than a year after the 9/11 attacks, after a partial recovery of the once large and extremely vibrant body. “The second was more difficult than the first,” said Mr. Williams Wednesday afternoon. And the first one was impossible.

Mike and his wife, Pat, were at the Golf National Golf Links on Wednesday afternoon. When it reaches September 10, they are often. They play five random holes, from 14 tee at home. For years, they would then travel to New York City and participate in the remembrance services of September 11. But for recent years, they have changed their model. They found the day, after unfolding in the lower Manhattan, to be just too much. A lot of holiday for this, that and something else. And not to focus enough on lost life and evil after those deaths. They spend September 11 every year in Montauk, in the eastern part of the southern fork of Long Island. Likes like the bottom of the earth there, broken and beautiful, not for the pallor of the heart.

The 9/11 attacks took the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people, 66 of them Sandler O’Neill employees. Two of them 66 came out of the national ties of Caddy Yard, Kevin Williams and John F. McDowell, who went with the ax, from the dorsum of his nose, so thin that you can cut the paper on it. In Taj Mahal Caddy Shack of the club, there is an abundance of tribute to both men. “But as the years go by, fewer and fewer people knew boys or even less know their story,” said club caddiemaster Billy Muller, another day. He was drowning, remembering Big Kev and Ax and the day they took their lives.

The uphill walking from the sunny green of the 16th to the national to the 17th raised is as beautiful as every walk in the golf. Green at 16, a Par-4, is a gift, in the form of a punch bowl. When the pin is in the middle green, even a second mediocre shot can end its way near the hole and leave you with a semi -wonderful blow to birds. The 17th is another gift, a top raised with a spectacular view of the breast in a short par-4, where a poor pop-up stroke can still go well over 200 yards and leave you with a pitch shot in green. You can play those two holes in eight shots. You really can.

Whenever Dunne walks from 16 green to 17 tee, a driver in hand, he touches a small rooted round stone with the driver’s head, Titan in poured cement. If the club becomes a little scratched, he doesn’t care. If a small spark comes out of the club’s only, this is only appropriate. There is a cross on the top of the stone, drawn in such a way that it looks like the Middle Ages. Three Roman letters: Kev. They look Roman, the way they are drawn. Great Kev. Pat and Mike Williams stopped in stone on Wednesday afternoon, made a photo, made some gardeners.

The baseball field at the Shoreman-Wading River High School was renamed Kevin Williams Memorial Field more than 20 years ago. It receives awards to be the best baseball field maintained in the Suffolk District. The Williams family does a lot of work on its own. The Kevin Williams Foundation has sent thousands of children deprived to summer sports camps. Jimmy Dunne has been a great supporter among other national members.

Mike made the Kev tribute stone. He took a container of Wonton soup, placed some 9/11 powder at its end, poured cement into it, drew the cross and three letters while the cement was hardening, removed the plastic shell, and buried the cylindrical monument, planting it in a sea of ​​title professionals.

For Jimmy Dunne, every day is a reminder day of September 11th. The day simply gets more attention when the current day, September 11, rotates every year. Wednesday evening, at a small dinner at Midtown Manhattan, Dunne, in response to a question, found himself talking about Kevin Williams. He gets similar questions from time to time. When Dunne gave the starting address at the University of Notre Dame in 2021, its first minutes – emotional and embedded – were related to Kev Big.

Mike and Pat Williams have two adult children, a daughter, Kelly and a son, Jamie, now in their 40s. Kevin would be 47 years old today. Mike did not make the stone tribute alone. Jamie was close to his father all the time, including her planting. Jamie was also a caddy at the Golf National Links. He has worked at the old Dunne firm, now called Piper Sandler, for years. Mike, in his retirement from teaching, still works at the Golf National Links, entering tours and exits. He and Jimmy Dunne speak all the time. A tall employee and a long member. They talk about yankees. They talk about golf. They talk about field maintenance and course maintenance. What they are talking about, indeed, all the time, is Big Kev.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments in Michael.bamberger@golf.com.