History

Chick won all four major championships of his day - the Western Open in 1910, the U.S. Open in 1916, the U.S. Amateur in 1916 and and again in 1920, and the Western Amateur eight times between 1909 and 1923. His two-under-par 286 score winning the 1916 U.S. Open at Minikahda Club in Minneapolis marked the first time ever that par was broken for 72 holes in the event, and the record stood for the next 20 years. And all this time, Chick used only seven hickory-shafted clubs! When he also won the U.S. Amateur later in 1916, he became the first ever to hold those two USGA titles in the same year, a feat since matched only by Bobby Jones. Until Scott Verplank's victory in 1985, Chick was the only amateur to win the Western Open.

Chick took special personal pride in his durability as a contestant. He was winning senior tournaments in the late '60s, some sixty years after his initial titles. He competed in a record 50 successive U.S. Amateur championships. He won four Chicago City Amateurs - his first in 1907 and his fourth in 1944, thirty-seven years later. For many years, Chick reigned at the Western Open, his annual get-together Chick Evans with Chicagoland golf fans. His final appearance as a player was in 1967, but in the following years, he toured the fairway ropes in a cart, stopping repeatedly to shake hands and chat with his many admirers. In his last appearance at a Western Open in 1978, Chick and champion Andy Bean had a private conversation about what type clubs Chick (then 88) should be swinging.

Overshadowing both his greatness and durability as a player was Chick's unique contribution to golf: creation of the caddie-scholarship concept. Chick was firm about never turning professional. There were many offers, especially when he held both the 1916 U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur crown for three years due to the postponement of those tournaments during World War I. "Within minutes after I won the National Open, I had several very lucrative offers," he recalled. "My mother and I talked it over, and we decided that I would remain an amateur - forever."

There was, however, a trickle of income from golf which he could not accept and still remain an amateur. As the 1916 U.S. Open champion, Chick made a series of phonograph records on golf instruction for the Brunswick Record Company in an effort to get the masses interested in the game. Chick was owed some $5,000 in royalties for those recordings, but wanting to retain his amateur status, he refused to accept the money for himself. He directed that the income go into an escrow account. Other endorsement income soon boosted the fund.

The idea for what to do with the money came from his mother. Although college had beckoned Chick, he dropped out of Northwestern University after a year. The Evans family did not have the financial resources for college, and athletic scholarships had not yet been introduced. Chick's mother suggested he use the money to help those who could not afford college to get there: "My mother wouldn't think of accepting any money unless we could arrange it to be trusted to furnish educations for deserving qualified caddies," Chick related. "She pointed out that the money came from golf and thus should go back into golf....It was all her dream, her idea." That idea became his own dream. However, not until ten years later did it begin to materialize. It was 1929 when Chick convinced the Western Golf Association to take over the fund and use it for college scholarships for deserving and needy caddies - in other words, for young men and women like himself 20 years earlier.

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Evans Scholars
Indiana University
1075 North Jordan Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47406