Be Like Bob Memorial golf tourney a hole-in-one

By Chuck Woodling     Jul 15, 2003

Organizers of the Be Like Bob (Billings) Memorial golf tournament whiffed no drives, shanked no irons and lipped no putts.

“We had two of the best days of weather you can have and we had a full field,” Monte Johnson said. “Our overall goal was accomplished.”

Johnson, a former Kansas University athletic director, was one of the driving forces behind the two-day golf tourney at Alvamar that will help fund an endowed KU basketball scholarship in the name of Wilt Chamberlain.

Billings, who died last February at the age of 65, and Johnson were teammates of the legendary Chamberlain.

Johnson estimates it will take $350,000 to endow the grant for an out-of-state KU men’s basketball player. Some of that money already had been raised by Billings before he died. The remainder will be funded by the annual golf tournament.

Organizers set a goal of raising at least $40,000 during the inaugural tournament.

“From all indications, we’ll do that,” Johnson said. “That’s without the final accounting. It’ll be a couple of weeks before all the expenses are taken care of.”

A total of 286 golfers competed in two-man teams, playing 18 holes Saturday and another 18 Sunday on Alvamar’s public and private layouts.

Next year’s Be Like Bob Memorial will be about a month earlier. The dates are June 19-20.

“We wanted to have it earlier this year,” Johnson said, “but by the time we starting working on it the Alvamar calendar was pretty full.”

According to Johnson, it won’t take many more tournaments to fund the Chamberlain scholarship.

“It might be two,” he said. “It might be two or three depending on how the pieces of the puzzle fall together.”

Once the tourney’s initial goal is met, the Big Like Bob Memorial will not be dropped, Johnson said, because Billings had another pet project involving KU — the proposed Athletic Hall of Fame.

The K-Club, composed of former KU lettermen like Billings, is hoping to raise enough money to erect an 8,000-square-foot building to house a hall of fame adjacent to Allen Fieldhouse. The structure would be located on the east lawn near the Phog Allen statue.

Billings, Johnson said, had obtained items — including a letter jacket — from Chamberlain prior to the Big Dipper’s death in 1999 to be placed in the Hall of Fame.

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