He was a fierce Caddie with a shiny future. Then came that terrible Tuesday

At the best clubs, the most confident, the line between members and employees is not fat and rich, such as one that you would draw with a brand new Sharpie. It is porous, more like a line that you would draw with a sharp legs on his last legs.

And so it is on the National Golf on the left, outside the beaten track in Southampton Township, on the Zuidvork of the Eastern end of Long Island. There are caddies, clubhouse and pro shop employees there who know the club members, almost as if they were family members. And there are club members, some of them captains of the industry (to use a picturesque and fading sense), who find promising young employees on the club’s employment roles. Nelson Doubleday, once a prominent book publisher and owner of the New York Mets, knew this territory. Jimmy Dunne has been working on this fertile soil for years. Mike Bloomberg also has that in his own way. A company is only as good as its employees. The better business schools learn that.

And a golf club and job is a good setting for bosses to see for themselves if a person has the gift of trust, the willingness to go beyond and outside. Who doesn’t want to hire a person with those qualities? People who took the chorus (“Do it!”) Of a dance-craze disco hit from 1975 (“The Hustle”) and turned it into a motto.

Entered Kevin Williams, aka Big KEV, a huge, athletic and beloved child who does the crowds, NGL style. The whole nineties-first as a student at the Shoreham-Wading River High School in Suffolk County, then during his four years at the Boston College worked as Caddy at National. Sometimes he would ride to work with his father, Mike Williams, a high school mathematics teacher with a summer job in the NGL Pro store. Big Kev had mathematics, always helpful for a Caddy. He had the never-saying attitude, such as the best Caddies (and athletes). In high school he was the leader of his golf team, his basketball team and his baseball team. Good grades too. Excellent figures. He played Golf at BC, the Jesuit school in the Chestnut Hill part of Boston.

Things like this have been going on for a long time. In the 1950s and early sixties there was a Kid Caddy near Brae Burntry Club in the suburbs of Boston named Peter Lynch. Young Peter Cadddied for the president of Fidelity Investments, D. George Sullivan, paid his tuition fees for Boston College with the money he earned, later worked for Fidelity and became one of the largest investors in Wall Street. Lynch once said about Sullivan: “Excellent person, big tipper, bad golfer.” Lynch was busy – and the maths. This kind of thing is still going on today. We will only hear about it later, when someone gets a bait from the river.

Big Kev had a regular loop at National, Barry van Gerbig, the former Seminole President. Like a Rijk-Kid Socialiteite, Gerbig Ben Hogan picked up in a house that he Beach, Fla., And brought him to Seminole to practice. One day Hogan said to him: “The things you have, this life you have, you didn’t deserve it. It’s time for you to become your own husband.” Those sentences informed the rest of the life of Van Gerbig. Van Gerbig loved Big Kev. Kevin was prepared at Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street company, during one of his BC Summer.

The internship then dropped the ownership of the company in the late nineties changed ownership. Van Gerbig mentioned his successor as Seminole President, Jimmy Dunne, to see if he had a summer position for him in the company of Dunne, Sandler O’Neill. Thin did it. On a day that summer, on a solid outing in Deepdale Golf Club on Long Island, Big KEV 73 shot. There was a joke at Sandler O’Neill in those days that the application form mentioned a blank for your golf handicap. In any case, Golf is good for sale and it has always been. Dunne said to the boy: “If you graduate from BC, if you want a job here, you have one.”

You can call this the Old Boys network at work. It is. It is also the way of the world. This all goes beyond Golf and Wall Street. When Charles Blair MacDonald tried to get national golf shops off the ground, he called some of his rich friends in Chicago and asked them to write a check and become a member of his club. Seed money. One of the first was Robert Todd Lincoln, well -to -do president of Pullman Palace, manufacturers and operator of railway cars and son of President Lincoln.

Kevin Williams graduated from Boston College in 1999, Magna Cum Laude. That summer he started full -time at Sandler O’Neill, who sold bonds. The following year, just before Christmas, he introduced his girlfriend in high school, Jillian Volk, while they were both on Santa’s lap with Macy’s. They have established a wedding date for the following December.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a perfect back-to-school on Tuesday in the northeast, Jimmy Dunne played in a US mid-amateur qualification match at Bedford Golf & Tennis Club. Mike Williams, veteran math teacher, was in his classroom. Kevin Williams was in the office of Sandler O’Neill on the 104th floor of the South Tower in the World Trade Center. Kevin called Jillian with the devastating news that the North Tower was struck by an airplane. But he was fine. His building was evacuated. A few minutes later the southern tower was beaten. The rest of the day was chaotic. The rest of the week, the rest of the year. The aftershocks are felt to this day.

At one point, on that terrible Tuesday, Mike Williams Jimmy Dunne called Dunne and said, “They found Kevin!” He later called thinly back. “They have found a Kevin Williams. Just not our Kevin Williams.”

In the coming months, Mike Williams made 30 or 40 trips to the site of the debris of the Twin Towers, looking for a remnant of his son he could find. He and thin spoke daily.

The Williams family had two funerals for their eldest son, the second more than a year after the attacks of 11 September, after a partial recovery from Kevin’s once large and very lively body. “The second was more difficult than the first,” said Mr. Williams on Wednesday afternoon. And the first was impossible.

Mike and his wife, Pat, were on Wednesday afternoon at National Golf on the left. When September 10 arrives, they are often. They play a casual five holes, from 14 T -shirt to house. For years they would then drive to New York City and participate in the memorial services of 9/11. But in recent years they have changed their pattern. They found the day, while it unfolded in Lower Manhattan, just to be too much. Too much celebration of this, that and another thing. And not enough focus on the lost lives and evil behind those dead. They spend every year on September 11 in Montauk, on the easternmost part of the Zuidvork of Long Island. It is just like the end of the earth, rough and beautiful, not for the heart of the heart.

The attacks of 11 September claimed the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people, 66 of them Sandler O’Neill employees. Two of those 66 came from the National Golf on the left Caddy Yard, Kevin Williams and John F. McDowell, who went by ax, from the dorsum of his nose, so thin that you could cut paper on it. In Taj Mahal Caddy Shack of the club there is a tribute to both men. “But as the years pass, fewer and fewer people knew the boys or even less their story,” said the club’s caddiemaster, Billy Muller, the other day. He stitched in, remembered Big Kev and Ax and the day that their lives claimed.

The small uphill walk of the sunken 16th Green on National to the Elevated 17th Tee is just as beautiful as every walk in Golf. The green at 16, a par-4, is a gift in the form of a punch bowl. When the pin is in the middle of the green, a mediocre second shot can make its way to the hole and leave a semi-makable putt for birdie. The 17th Tee is another gift, an elevated tee with a spectacular bay view on a short par-4 where a weak pop-up Tee shot can still go more than 200 meters and you can leave a pitch shot in the green. You can play those two holes in eight shots. You can really.

Every time thin runs from 16 green to 17 Tee, driver in his hand, he taps a small round sunken stone with the head of the driver, titanium cast cement. If the club gets a bit scratched, he doesn’t care. If a small spark comes from the only club, that is only appropriate. There is a cross on top of the stone, so drawn in a way that looks of medieval. Three Roman letter: Kev. They look Roman, the way they are drawn. Big Kev. Pat and Mike Williams stopped at De Steen on Wednesday afternoon, took a photo, did some gardening.

The baseball court on Shoreman-Wading River High School was renamed Kevin Williams Memorial Field more than 20 years ago. It gets prizes because it is best maintained baseball field in Suffolk County. The Williams family does a lot of work themselves. The Kevin Williams Foundation has sent thousands of disadvantaged children to summer sports camps. Jimmy Dunne has been a strong proponent of it, including national members.

Mike made the KEV Tribute -stone. He took a wonton soup container, put about 9/11 dust in the soil, poured in cement, pulled the cross and the three letters while the cement paved, removed the plastic scale and buried the cylindrical monument, plants on a sea of ​​titleist professionals.

For Jimmy Dunne, a memorial day of 9/11 is every day. The day just gets more attention when the actual day, September 11, rolls around every year. Wednesday evening, during a small dinner in Midtown Manhattan, Dunne noticed, in response to a question, 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, the first few minutes of it – emotionally and spontaneously – were about Big Kev.

Mike and Pat Williams have two adult children, a daughter, Kelly, and a son, Jamie, now in the forty. Kevin would be 47 today. Mike did not make the stone tribute alone. Jamie was next to his father all the time, including planting it. Jamie was also a Caddy at National Golf on the left. He has worked at the old company of Dunne, now called Piper Sandler, for years. In his retirement of teaching, Mike still works at National Golf on the left, which comes in for tournaments and trips. He and Jimmy Dunne always talk. An old employee and a long member. They talk about the Yankees. They talk about golf. They talk about field maintenance and course maintenance. What they are talking about all this time is Big Kev.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments on michael.bamberger@golf.com.