Possible Misquotation

This of course was one of my few claims to fame during my 2002 Presidency. I had a quote in Golf World.

"That fund is supposed to be for a rainy day. It's raining right now." -- Randy Harris, president of the Greensboro (N.C.) Jaycees, which administers the PGA Tour's Greater Greensboro Chrysler Classic, on the decision to dip into a reserve fund to make a $125,000 payment to enable renovation to begin of tournament site Forest Oaks CC. The tournament's charitable contributions have dropped 97 percent in five years."

The only problem is, I'm pretty sure I never said this. During the 2002 year we had a lot of big decisions to make regarding the future of our event. One of the biggest centered around finding a new home for our tournament or finding a way to improve the current FOCC course.

We were now living in a post 9/11 world right in the middle of what had been labeled by many as a "B" market. The choice between building a new course and redesigning an old course was placed in front of us.

This was a complex process and it required many stages of development, all of which were being closely monitored by the local media. I realized that we as an organization owed our local media outlets an opportunity to ask questions.

Again, this was a complex issue, and although I was well versed, I had many advisors. I invited a local reporter to the Greensboro Jaycee office in August of 2002. At that time I also invited my 2002 president-elect James Latts, 2002 Greensboro Jaycee treasurer Michael Fogarty and as I remember a newly appointed 2004 General Chairman Mike Davis.

Please understand that I was not trying to intimidate this reporter. I just wanted to make sure I had the right people in the room to answer as many questions as possible.

There was a question about the reserve fund being used to enable the renovation. As I remember it Michael took point on this question and referred to the reserve fund as a "rainy day fund" and if I remember correctly, James Latta said "It's raining."

I may have repeated this phase in front of this reporter, but I don't think I said it first.

If you would like to read the entire article go to:

http://www.golfdigest.com/newsandtour/index.ssf?/newsandtour/gw20020830bunker.html