| Florida Times-Union
There was a winner of the 2020 Players Championship.
It wasn’t a professional golfer making a putt at the 18th hole of the TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course.
And it wasn’t just one person. The cancellation of The Players because of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a chain of events that started with the simple act of feeding some hungry people with food that wasn’t going to be consumed by golf fans.
It created what PGA Tour player Billy Horschel called a “ripple effect,” that eventually resulted in a 129% increase in people receiving meals from Feeding Northeast Florida and an 82% increase in the amount of food distributed — more than 2.8 million people served and 30.8 million pounds of food distributed.
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In addition, the initial donation of food from The Players led to the creation of Project S.H.A.R.E., in which 78 furloughed or laid-off restaurant workers were employed to prepare meals at the kitchens of nine restaurants and Florida Blue, with more than 600,000 meals prepared through Feb. 12.
“This one little ripple had this continuous affect that led to unbelievable progress in feeding people,” said Horschel, who has been a supporter of Feeding Northeast Florida for most of his PGA Tour career. “It’s pretty cool what The Players did and what it all led to. I still get choked up and get goosebumps thinking about it.”
Hungry people were fed and restaurant workers, many with families to feed, might have otherwise been unemployed.
“This gift saved lives”
If there was ever a silver lining to the signature athletic event on the First Coast getting canceled for the first time, this was it.
Susan King, the CEO of Feeding Northeast Florida, minced no words over the impact of The Players donating the food that would have gone to feed golf fans for the final three days of the tournament.
“This gift saved lives,” she said. “The impact of what they did is so profound … they not only helped us feed people but helped keep restaurant workers employed, who in turn helped us feed even more people.”
When Horschel and the other PGA Tour players in the field received a text the night of March 12 from commissioner Jay Monahan, informing them that The Players was going to be canceled, he came to the TPC Sawgrass the following day to clean out his locker.
He also had a question.
What was being done with all the food, the club sandwiches and wraps, the fruit and vegetables, the hamburgers and hot dogs, the crab legs and scallops that were in refrigerated areas at the clubhouse and hospitality venues, ordered and prepared in anticipation of three more rounds of golf?
Turns out like minds were on the same wavelength. Players officials had already contacted King about the idea of accepting the food donation if the tournament indeed would go on without fans or be canceled.
“I found our players relation staff and [Players executive director] Jared Rice and asked them what we were going to do with all that food,” Horschel said. “I didn’t want it to go to waste and I was hoping it would go to Feeding Northeast Florida since The Players has supported them in the past. Jared told me to come to [commissioner Jay Monahan’s] press conference and we’d talk about it.”
After explaining the decision to cancel the tournament, Monahan dropped a surprise.
“Billy Horschel, I was told is here,” Monahan said during the news conference. “He’s in the back. Hello, Billy.”
Awkwardly, Horschel raised his hand. Monahan then explained why he was singling him out.
“Billy is an ambassador for Feeding Northeast Florida, and obviously we’ve prepared to have over 200,000 people here on the property and won’t,” Monaghan said. “So one of the things that we’re quickly going to get to work on is how do you take all the food supplies that we have here and put them to good use for our community, and that’s something that we’re going to do immediately.”
Horschel said he was shocked.
“Not that other people had thought about it,” he said. “But shocked that the plans were already in place.”
The Players donated more than 17,000 meals
Within two hours, the Tour had arranged for 18-wheel trucks to transport the food to a warehouse on Industrial Boulevard that had been donated to Feeding Northeast Florida. King said without that facility, which had cold-storage, the organization would not have been able to accept the gift.
Eventually, three and one-half loads of food were delivered. Members of the TPC Sawgrass and PGA Tour staff — including chefs and workers in the clubhouse, plus Horschel, his wife Brittany and their children, helped load the trucks.
King said the final tally was 20,881 pounds of food donated by The Players, which equated to more than 17,000 meals.
The next issue was distribution.
King said much of the food donated by The Players was different from what they had received in the past. There were flats of strawberries, boxes of lettuce, huge pans of salmon and scallops and containers of pulled pork — plus sandwiches that had already been made and had, at most another two days of shelf life.
“We had to seal and freeze what we would but there was a lot of food we had to distribute very soon,” she said.
The sandwiches were the first order of business. The next day, March 14, the Sulzbacher Center and the Trinity Rescue Mission received boxes of the chicken and vegetable wraps. Monahan himself led a crew of PGA Tour and Players officials who came to the Sulzbacher Center to serve the food and another portion went to mobile pantries and agencies that conducted drive-through feeding programs.
What to do with unprepared food?
King said there was one issue for which she wasn’t prepared: the amount of food they received that had to be prepared. They simply couldn’t drop a pan of salmon in the laps of senior citizens living in poverty.
And, because of the pandemic, volunteers and people who needed to be fed couldn’t come to dining facilities Feeding Northeast Florida served.
“The food wasn’t packaged for a normal distribution,” King said. “And we didn’t have the facility for repackaging.
There’s where Project S.H.A.R.E. came in. Blacksheep Restaurant Group owner John Insetta had the answer to King’s problem. He had restaurant employees at risk of being laid off. He also had the kitchens at his three restaurants.
Insetta’s chefs and other employees then began cooking the food and packaging it in meal-size containers for distribution in the area. Within two weeks nine more restaurants, plus Florida Blue became involved. More food came in from Disney, Congaree and Penn and Cisco.
Soon, more than 3,000 meals per day at one point were being prepared and distributed to low-income seniors, and more than 600,000 before the program ended last month. The meals were distributed to 50 sites across an eight-county area serviced by Feeding Northeast Florida.
“The Players was the beginning of a snowball effect,” King said. “Disney closed and we started receiving food from them. A few weeks later, Cisco started clearing their coolers. Florida Blue stepped up … the increase in the number of people we were able to help was extraordinary. I won’t say for a moment that we have met the need but we’ve chipped away at the need.”
One thing the best golfers in the world learn is that making the best of a tough situation is just as important as making birdies. He said the lesson of the 2020 Players Championship was how the community lost its biggest single athletic event but fed thousands of hungry people.
“It was pretty cool that on the same day we had to cancel The Players, the PGA Tour went straight into, ‘how can we help support the community, with the people who were going to be hurting with this pandemic coming,” he said. “They turned a negative into a positive that helped thousands of people.”