Myrtle Beach Patriots Continue Quest Toward $1 Million Goal

Jimmy Biggs:
So what we started with The Myrtle Beach Patriots, we call ourselves, is actually… We were given that name by the founder of the Folds of Honor Foundation, Major Dan Rooney, who is a fellow PGA member an F-16 pilot with the U.S. military. I don’t know if there’s a cooler being in the world than a golf pro, and a fighter pilot. That’s like superhero status right there. But what we started is basically a group effort. We started off with golf marathons five years ago and that kind of morphed into a tournament and then now it’s a whole weekend. We take… We kind of ride the coattails of the national campaign, which is Patriot Golf Day that benefits Fold of Honor Foundation.Jimmy Biggs:
So we call it our Patriot Golf Weekend here in Myrtle Beach. It starts off with a dinner Friday evening, auction. We have a guest speaker come in. Saturday we have our Battle for Glory Golf Tournament, which is like our Ryder Cup event. It’s a three on three scramble match-play event, it’s a lot of fun. You get three of your buddies out there. You take your three buddies and beat up on each other all for a great cause. And then Sunday, myself and the other Myrtle Beach Patriots play a hundred hole marathon. A hundred holes in one day. We tee off at 6:30 in the morning and keep going until we hit the 100th hole.

Jimmy Biggs:
I’ve always had a deep appreciation for the military. My grandfather was in the military. He passed at a very young age, for me, but I’ve always just had this drive to want to do something for the military. I never knew what it was, what can I do as a golf pro and Major Dan’s mission with the Folds of Honor just really resonated with me. It’s something I can do as a golf professional that we can… We run tons of events throughout the year. We help fundraise throughout the year. So to be able to do something for the military using those tools that I’ve been given, there’s no greater cause for me. I mean, I love golf and I have the ability to have that freedom to play golf because of what our heroes do for us. And to be able to honor what they do for us by educating their legacy, there’s no greater mission for me. And just having that in my life has been very fulfilling.

Jimmy Biggs:
Well, we started off with 10 guys back in 2014. We just wanted to raise a little money for Folds. We thought it’d be a neat idea, “Hey, let’s go play a hundred holes of golf, see what happens.” We raised 16 grand that first year. The following year we tried to do the same thing, but we wanted to double our take. So we ended up playing 200 holes in two days. That was a physical undertaking that none of us wanted to ever do again, but we did hit our goal. We hit 32 grand. Let’s see, in 2016 was our first year of the Battle for Glory, creating that tournament to kind of thank our donors and sponsors for supporting us in all these marathons. So we did the tournament that first year. We did the marathon following that. We actually did that tournament the day after a tropical storm blew through. I can’t remember the name of it right now, but we played at The Pearl that year. We had four inches of rain and we actually did play through it. The course was fine. It actually worked out pretty well.

Jimmy Biggs:
Right on through the year before that, we did 84 grand. Then this past year, awesome. We did $105,000.00 in total funds raised from The Myrtle Beach Patriots. So that was… If you said we were going to go from 16 grand to 105 grand in five years, I would have said you’re nuts, but now I don’t think it’s that ludicrous to think we can go crack a million in another five years. Now the way I think that happens is that Myrtle Beach, as a whole, embraces the Folds of Honor and the mission that the Myrtle Beach Patriots have started.

Jimmy Biggs:
So again, this started with 10 guys. Last year there was 21 people who played a hundred holes. Imagine if a hundred people played or 200 people played. We can find a lot of people to go play golf all day on a golf course, but what if all of them raised a certain amount of money. A Folds of Honor scholarship is $5,000.00 to a family. If every golf pro in Myrtle Beach raised $5,000.00, all right? So you’ve got 80 something golf courses in Myrtle Beach, times that by $5,000.00. We’re already halfway to a million there. And then if you do some extra stuff, maybe an event. We do a big event here in Myrtle Beach, The World Amateur. If it was even a fraction of that size, why couldn’t we raise a million dollars in a year?

Jimmy Biggs:
So that’s kind of where I’d like to see Myrtle Beach going, but I think we can do it because there’s… Myrtle Beach is the best. We’ve got the best. We’ve got some of the best golf courses in the world. We’ve got some of the best golf professionals in the world and people who really love the military. And I think all that mixed together would be one hell of a show and really put Myrtle Beach on the market, on the map. Everyone can be a Myrtle Beach Patriot. It’s not something that was… It is something that you have to earn, but I can’t think of a better way to do it than to raise a little money for some of our heroes and play some golf at the same time.

Jimmy Biggs:
Maybe you can’t go up, pick up a gun, put on body armor, but you can certainly tee it up for a weekend, play some golf with your family and still accomplish what needs to be accomplished, which is to support these families, get their children the education they deserve so they can move through life and be productive and honor their fallen parents or wounded parents.