What they said: David Toms

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As part of Tuesday's announcement by PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem concerning the TOUR's renewed commitment to charitable efforts, veteran pro David Toms discussed the involvement from the players' perspective:

David Toms

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First of all, with my foundation, I just felt like I was following the lead of the PGA TOUR. My rookie year was 1992, and for years and years I just played in our tournaments just like one of the regular guys and knew a little bit about what went on with the volunteers and the charity component of each event.

But as I started to serve on the Player Advisory Council and on the board of the PGA TOUR, I got more involved in actually what goes on and how much it means to the communities that we play in and how big of a deal it is for players' involvement on all levels in each individual tournament. And for me it was about six years ago, I guess, that I was in a situation, I made the Ryder Cup team, and I knew I was getting some money for that. I wanted to form a foundation and have a board on that foundation that helped me pick and choose the charities that we would give the monies out to, because number one, I didn't want it always just coming back on me. When you said no to a worthy cause, had some people to back me up. We have a process which we evaluate all the different charities that we're involved in.

It's been very rewarding from a personal standpoint of people we've been able to help, especially with the Katrina effort. It was really amazing. That week I didn't play in the tournament in Boston when it all went down, and they actually had me on television. I was actually out in a dove field shooting doves when they had me on TV for the Deutsche Bank tournament and just kind of made a plea to everyone out there that we needed help, Louisiana needed help, and I told them that 100 percent of the dollars that were raised would go to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Like Tim said, we didn't have much overhead cost or anything like that. We really had a small office and a bank that's basically run by one of my best friends, so I didn't have much rent.

It was an interesting time. I was sitting there on Labor Day in my office taking down credit card numbers on a piece of paper, and after a few hours of doing it I was like, this is not very efficient. So we had to figure out a way to get a company involved that would help us with our computer programs and everything so we could start doing stuff through the computer and taking money that way. We raised a little over $1.5 million. All of it went back to victims.

I think one of the best stories of that week that it was all going on, I went down to LSU Shreveport, which is a branch of the University there in town and walked into the gymnasium, and every inch of the floor was people. You've seen the pictures of people laying out on cots and everything else, and you walk around and start talking to them, and they're like, what do you need, and every single one of them needed something different.

I talked to this gentleman that applied for six different jobs that day, and he goes, I could get one of them but I have no way for them to contact me to let me know. He's like, if I had some kind of a prepaid cell phone.

Then I went down the hall and there was a lady there, her daughter was kind of a weird size, and there were literally clothes piled up in the stairway 12 feet high but there was nothing we could find to fit her. She said if we had a new pair of jeans or something. So we went down to Wal-Mart and I bought $5,000 worth of gift cards and walked in the gym and just started passing them out. It was a huge impact on these people that had nothing except for what was on their back. So that was just one of the little things that we did.

Other things that we do with my foundation, we run a golf tournament in Birmingham, Alabama, of all places, because I'm not a big Alabama fan (laughter), but it was a tournament that I played in for years, and it benefits the Big Oak Ranch. Just a great charity. It's a ranch for abused and battered boys and girls, and they asked me to be involved about four or five years ago. So we've helped them run that tournament, and through the years we've raised about $600,000 or $700,000 for the Big Oak Ranch since we took over that event. In fact, thanks to Zach and Stewart, a couple of the guys that support the event every year, it's quite a big hit, and it's say it's one of the better pro-ams that you would play in all year just because of the quality of the field that we get, the benefactor of the event and the people that turn out. It just works really well.

I'm also involved with -- Hal Sutton has a charity event in Shreveport and he raised money to build a children's hospital, so we're involved in that, as well.

As far as what we do day-to-day, I guess we donated a little over $3 million the last six years with my foundation, and it's all children's-based charities work that we do. I serve on the board of Community Renewal, which I think people will learn more about. The model is that you go in and you try to change neighborhoods, and the way you do that is you build a house, first of all, on an abandoned piece of property. You go into that street, a lot like Habitat For Humanity but it's different because you move in a family that goes into the community there, which is usually a rough, rough part of town, and they go in and they run after-school programs for the kids and try to change these neighborhoods street by street. It really is amazing.

When you start hearing the stories of what they do, these kids literally, a lot of times they'll get off their school bus and they'll walk right through the middle of a drug deal into this safe house. You know, that's the reality of the world out there, obviously not the world that PGA TOUR players live in, but a lot of people do. To me it's something I think is going to spread. I think it's kind of funny that Shreveport, Louisiana, may end up being the model for the nation, but I think you'll hear more about it, and it's a great charity, as well.

Other things we do, we work with Volunteers of America for after-school programs that they run, we've given them between 200,000 and $300,000 over the years. Another charity called the Providence House, which basically takes families off the streets, not just adult individuals, it's all families that would be homeless people, and they bring them in and they provide jobs for the adults and through those jobs they help them save money to get back on their feet once they get out of the program.

The testament to how it works, I would say 80 to 90 percent of the time when the people go through the graduation, they have this big savings account for them. It might only be a few thousand dollars, but to them it's more than they've ever had, and most of the time they donate it back to the program before they go out and get back on the street. So it really says a lot about how it changes their lives.

As far as the players becoming more involved with the charity side of the PGA TOUR, I think it's a great idea. You know, I think that you'll hear more and more stories about what guys are doing on their own. You know, like Tim said, we're on the way to our second billion dollars for the PGA TOUR. But if you combine everything that the players do on their own, there's no telling what that number is. And I think this is just another way to get that message out there.