Friday, March 28, 2008

Elkhorn's Shirey to tee it up on Champions Tour in Caribbean

One of 78 players in next week's $2 million tourney


By JEFF CORDES
Express Staff Writer

Native Alabaman Don Shirey Jr. has become well known in Idaho over the last five years as one of the Gem State?s best basketball referees, but the Elkhorn Golf Course general manager is returning to another passion, competitive golf, next week at the PGA Champions Tour event at Cap Cana, Dominican Republic. Photo by David N. Seelig

The fact that Don Shirey Jr. comes from Alabama and has lived in the mountains of Idaho for the past five years is unusual in itself.

Now throw this other item into the mix—Shirey's passions in life are golf and officiating high school basketball.

And that's unusual, certainly not a typical combination of summer and winter pursuits. But the blend of individual and team sports makes perfect sense to Shirey, an outstanding high school basketball player who developed into a fine college golfer at Auburn University in Alabama.

Shirey, Troon Golf's general manager at Elkhorn Golf Club the past five years, enjoys wearing different hats and associating with a wide range of people. He made a living at playing golf for 20 years and supported a family of three daughters.

Now 51, he operates an upscale golf club in Sun Valley and struggles like everybody to stay straight off the tee.

But he's able to shift gears during frosty Gem State winter evenings and embrace all the different challenges of high school gyms where he tries to keep everything and everybody straight on the court.

He has done it so well and effectively that Fourth District coaches from the Magic Valley and Sun Valley region have voted Shirey to officiate state tournament games four times in his five winters of officiating Idaho prep basketball games.

Shirey said, "I'm a golf general manger by day and a basketball official by night—and now I'm also a Champions Tour senior golfer."

Not bragging but displaying a sense of pride, Shirey is returning to high-level competitive golf next week for the first time since ending his six-year stint on the PGA Tour in 1992. Operating golf courses the last 12 years, he just hasn't played much competitively. That's about to change next week.

Shirey, eligible to play in his first-ever 50-and-over Seniors Tour tournament, will compete in the 2008 Champions Tour event April 4-6 on the two-year-old Jack Nicklaus Punta Espada Golf Club course at Cap Cana, Dominican Republic.

The 54-hole, stroke play tournament with ocean views of the Caribbean Sea will feature a 78-player field and official prize money of $2 million, with the winner collecting $300,000. Golf Channel will broadcast all three rounds in the United States and coverage will also be distributed internationally.

Well-known pro golfers like Nick Price, Tom Watson, Tom Kite and Craig Stadler are due to compete in the ninth event on the 2008 Champions Tour. Shirey was invited to play with the big boys on an unrestricted sponsor exemption granted to Troon Golf, which operates Punta Espada Golf Club.

"It's a big thing for me," said Shirey, who played in and won his first professional tournament, the 1978 Alabama Open, at age 21. "I've always wanted to play in one more tournament. And this will mean it's the fourth decade that I've participated on the PGA Tour."

Shirey said, "My big goal is to go down there and not embarrass myself. I haven't done much competitive golf for 11 years. Being a general manager I've taken myself out of the PGA side of things. I'm on the management side. But I've also never done anything in my life to finish second. I want to play my best golf against the world's best players."

He has been tuning up his game over the last six weeks.

In February Shirey spent five days in Rome, Ga., playing golf and working on his game with a friend and mentor, Bert Seagraves, who has watched the development of his career. Rome is where Shirey raised his daughters, Carmen, 25, Allison, 22, and Lindsey, 17, a high school senior. He has been divorced for six years.

Rome is where Shirey was the general manager and owner at Horseleg Plantation Country Club for six years, from 1996-2002. He took the property from bankruptcy to a $3.5 million operation. In 2003, he joined Troon Golf, the world's largest golf management company, and came to Elkhorn to oversee a major restoration of its golf facilities and Elkhorn Golf Club's change to a private upscale golf course.

Shirey made one more training stop before traveling to the Dominican Republic. On March 22 he went to Scottsdale, Ariz., for five days to work on his short game at Talking Stick Golf Club with Troon Golf Director of Education Tim Mahoney.

Cap Cana Champions Tour practice rounds on the par-72 Punta Espada Golf Club course will be played Monday and Tuesday, March 31 and April 1, followed by the Pro-Am April 2-3 and competition rounds Friday through Sunday, April 4-6.

Shirey will have some butterflies on the first tee Friday but he's been there before and knows many of the tour players. "I've had some affiliation with a lot of these guys," said Shirey, who earned $233,127 playing pro golf from 1978-92.

One thing is certain. Officiating high school basketball has kept the 6-1, 175-pound Shirey in such good physical condition that he's close to the playing weight he carried onto the court as a shooting guard for Alabama's Fort Payne High School in the early 1970s. Shirey said, "I'm as fit as I've ever been in my life."

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Giving his best effort

Shirey's father was a coach and basketball referee. His brother Mike played football at Auburn and is now an electrical engineer for the Tennessee Valley Authority, but he's also a line judge on the SEC's top college football officiating crew. Mike Shirey has officiated in a Fiesta Bowl game.

Sports were a big thing in the Shirey family. Don said, "My dad introduced me to golf at age nine and I grew up with one objective—to be a professional golfer." Nonetheless his basketball shooting ability was Shirey's main claim to fame in his high school years.

"I got tons of basketball scholarship offers," he said. "I remember our second-to-last regular season game for Fort Payne High where I was a #2 shooting guard. I scored 39 points and we got beat by 25 points. I decided that when I gave my best effort, I wanted to get some credit for it."

So, instead of taking the basketball scholarship route, Shirey elected to beat the balls day after day and put his passion into the individual sport of golf. He walked on the golf team at Auburn and became a part of Auburn's first-ever SEC championship golf team in 1976. By his senior year, Shirey had become Auburn's #1 player.

After capturing the Alabama Open at the tender age of 21 in 1978, Shirey went on to win 50 professional events on golf's "mini tour" minor league from 1979-87. That in itself got Fort Payne product Shirey named to the DeKalb (Ala.) County Sports Hall of Fame in 2004.

He played in his first of two U.S. Open Golf Championships in 1985 at Oakland Hills Country Club in Birmingham, Mich., and was the very early nine-hole leader. His first of six years on the PGA Tour was 1987. In 1990 Shirey played in the U.S. Open won by Hale Irwin at Medinah Country Club in Medinah, Ill.

Driving accuracy was never Shirey's strong suit. Iron play was. The technology that brought in metal woods starting in 1987 coincided with Shirey's debut on the official PGA Tour. That put Shirey, a player who could only hit a wooden club drive 250 yards on a good day, behind the eight ball right off.

Still, he enjoyed his best professional season in 1989. Shirey ranked sixth of all 350 pros in "greens in regulation," a statistic showing the strength of his irons. He finished in the top 125, a full exemption. Shirey's best PGA finish came that season, a third place at the Provident Classic in Chattanooga, Tenn.

"I played with John Daly and Stan Utley in the final group," said Shirey. "I birdied four of the last six holes to take my biggest paycheck, $29,100, but Utley birdied his last two holes to beat me by two strokes.

"Three weeks later I was seventh at the Hartford Open and won $29,000. That doesn't seem like a lot of money today, but I'm proud to say I made a living and supported a family for nearly 20 years by doing nothing but playing golf."

Shirey was operating the Rome golf course after his playing career had ended, and he attended one of his daughter Allison's middle school girls' basketball games. His mind wandered a little, as you might expect at a middle school girls' basketball game.

He started concentrating on what the officials were doing.

"That's when I started becoming completely obsessed with officiating basketball. I wanted to do it, and do it the best that I could. Becoming the best official in the state of Georgia became my #1 goal," said Shirey, who spent nearly 10 years as a basketball referee in the Rome area.

After moving to Sun Valley in 2003, he registered with the Fourth District Activities Association and became one of 100 basketball referees in the area. Only eight of those officials are considered the cream of the crop and are voted by coaches each year for the state girls' and boys' basketball tourneys.

Shirey, whose knowledge of the rules, decisive manner and smooth-talking southern manner have made an impression with Gem State hoop fanatics, has been chosen for state four times in his five years.

He officiated the 2005 state boys' tournament. He refereed the 2006 State 4A girls' championship game won by Centennial 58-45 over Coeur d'Alene at The Idaho Center in Nampa.

This year, he had four games at the 2008 state boys' tournament including the 5A third-place game won by Highland of Pocatello 67-45 over Eagle on the Nampa floor.

Certainly the most memorable game Shirey did was the 1A boys' semi-final between White Pine Conference (northern Idaho) rivals Troy and 2006 state champion Lapwai on Leap Year Day at Vallivue High School in Caldwell. It went down to the wire, the Troy Trojans winning 56-54 en route to their second state championship in four years.

"It was an incredible game," said Shirey, who did it with Gary Carlson and had to put up with boisterous fans from both teams, all game and afterwards.

Troy had placed third in the White Pine behind defending state champion Genesee and Lapwai, but the Trojans shrugged off highly regarded Carey in their first game and rallied into a 54-54 tie with favored Lapwai in the semi-final.

The Trojans designed a play for senior star Jason Smith, and Smith made a driving floater with 6.8 seconds left. Shirey said there was a lot of contact and no fouled called.

With one second left, Lapwai had the inbounds pass in its offensive zone and got the ball in the deep corner to senior Justin Hernandez, who already had 14 points. Shirey was stationed right there, in the corner. He saw the whole play.

And at the buzzer, Troy's Riley Nelson partially blocked a 3-point attempt by Hernandez that would have won the game if successful, or would have sent Hernandez to the free throw line for three shots if ruled a foul. It was the biggest call of the whole 1A tourney.

"The Troy defender elevated and blocked the ball. There's wasn't any contact, there was a huge amount of separation, although their fingers touched after the ball was blocked. Lapwai's kid did sort of an Academy Award flop after."

So Shirey made the call that ended the game. More accurately, he didn't make it.

He waved it off. No foul. Game over. Shirey said, "Sometimes the right call is no call."

Lapwai didn't like it. After the tournament was over and the dust had settled on Troy's championship, Shirey was gratified to receive a message from a Lapwai supporter who had seen a photo of the final play. The Lapwai fan wanted to tell Shirey that he had made the right decision in not whistling a foul on Hernandez's potential game winner.

Are Idaho basketball fans different from fans anywhere else, we asked Shirey?

He laughed, spreading the sweet southern smile that has disarmed so many irate Idaho coaches over the years. "No they're not—all of them are uneducated (about the rules)," he said with a smile.

Shirey added, "No, really, the first game I officiated was a nightmare and it has gotten better from there. What I like is being part of the game and giving something to the kids who deserve my best effort. Giving back to any athletic endeavor has meant tons to me in my life.

"The relationships I've developed are immeasurable. It's not six degrees of separation, it's one person, and it's all coming through sports."




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