The Jack & Bill McGovern Memorial Foundation held its second annual fundraising golf outing on Monday. By all measures, It was a smashing success.
EMERSON -- If the measure of a man is in relationships made and lives touched then the math becomes difficult when trying to calculate the impact made by brothers Jack and Bill McGovern…it’s 2x and it is a big number.
On Monday the Jack & Bill McGovern Memorial Foundation held its second annual golf outing that gave new meaning to the term “sold out.” Two hundred and 34 golfers took part at two separate golf courses, White Beeches and Hackensack Golf Club, and 400 people crowded into the HGC Ballroom for the after-golf dinner, awards presentation and silent auction.
It was packed to the rafters with so many people, so many stories celebrating the late brothers and so many good intentions.
“I think about them every day, my brothers, and I swear, if we opened this [event] up to 100 courses I think we would fill 100 courses. It is incredible,” said Jim McGovern, a one-time winner on the PGA Tour (1993 Shell Houston Open) and the head pro at White Beeches. “We have guys coming from all over the country; Northeast, West Coast; they came in from everywhere to be a part of this. It’s overwhelming really, the support and the caring that our family has gotten from so many.”
The McGovern family reaches deep into the North Jersey Sports community and especially in golf and football. Jack was No. 3 in line of nine siblings, Bill was No. 5 and Jim is No. 6 on the list of seven brothers, all of whom went to Bergen Catholic, and two sisters that include MaryBeth, the oldest, and Patty, fourth in line.
So deep into Bergen Catholic history are the McGoverns that their parents, Howard and Terry, are in the BC Athletic Hall of Fame for putting seven sons through the all-boys Oradell parochial school and so are MaryBeth and Patty, the sisters who put up with it all.
Ann, Lauren, Kristy and Colleen (l. to r.) McGovern near the end of Monday's fundraiser.
Jack, a father of four, was the Bergen Catholic Athletic Director when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and succumbed to the disease in 2019 after a year-long fight. He was 61. Athletes who take to the turf at Bergen Catholic now do so on Jack McGovern Field.
“This day means everything to my family just to celebrate my dad and my uncle Billy. So many people that meant so much to them, so much to us over the years are here. There is so much storytelling, some good golf, mostly bad golf and lots of fun,” said Brendan McGovern, one of Jack and Ann McGovern’s four children, and a Bergen Catholic alum (Class of 2010) who has assumed his father’s position as the school’s athletic director. “I feel very blessed to have the opportunity. I feel like Bergen Catholic gave me so much throughout my life, so I am just trying to keep the legacy going of what my Dad started before me; do things the right way and be as competitive as we can.”
Bill followed in Jack’s footsteps as both played football at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA after graduating from BC and then Bill dove headlong into the nomadic world of a high-level coach. He spent 13 years coaching defense at Boston College and his other college stops included Penn, Holy Cross, UMass, Nebraska, UCLA and Pitt, where he met his wife to be, Colleen, at a hotel he was staying at in the late 90s. They married and had three daughters; Amanda, Delainey and Mackenzie.
“I am from Pittsburgh and I met bill when he was coaching at the University of Pittsburgh. He was living in the hotel I was working at. I was in charge of the Pitt staff, which was a whole new staff under Walt Harris. They put them up at our hotel for 90 days, we had a mutual connection through a friend of ours and here we are now 27 years later,” said Colleen, “As special as it is for me to be here, it is even more so for our girls, just to see everybody coming together. Every bit of it is love and support. We have had so much support from this area. We have lived all over the country, but his is kind of home for us because Bill grew up here, it was a place we would always come back to in the summer and we were here 6 years, the longest we were anywhere besides the 13 years at Boston College.”
White Beeches club pro and PGA Tour winner Jim McGovern opening the festivities.
Bill, who was just 60 years old when he passed in 2023, also coached in the NFL with the Eagles, Giants and Chicago Bears. The McGovern brothers’ resumes are well-documented and prudent to this story, but it is their lasting legacies that are the real plotline. Last year, in its first year as a 501(C) (3) charity, the Jack & Bill McGovern Memorial Foundation raised over $150,000 to be dispersed to various charities.
With the turnout on Monday, with the energy and enthusiasm and with the large and tight-knit family at the helm, the Foundation is a force for good with an obvious upward trajectory.
“The amount of people that have shown up in support of both Jack and Bill is just absolutely amazing. We were overwhelmed last year and this year it has even gone up a level. The generosity, the donations…just amazing numbers. Two golf courses, 234 players and about 400 people are here for dinner,” said Ann McGovern, who is channeling her energies into the Foundation to help further the legacy of her late husband and brother-in-law. “We are giving back to cancer charities, pancreatic which was what Jack had and kidney cancer, which took Billy. We also give to Holy Cross and Bergen Catholic athletics, of course. Their whole lives were athletics and it is nice that they both went to the same high school and college, so that made it easier. We are also able to help children stricken by cancer; we are able to send them to summer camp for free. We know what it is like to go through. The physical and emotional toll that cancer takes. It stops your whole life, but it is a financial burden as well and we want to help anyway we can.”
More information on the worthy causes that the Foundation serves can be found on its website. (www.jbmmf.org).
It would have been fun to go around to each of the 234 golfers and all 400 people that gathered in the ballroom at days end and get a story from each about either Jack or Bill. That was logistically impossible, so here are just a couple.
First, Brian Murphy, a local attorney, a former roommate of Jack McGovern’s and one of his closest golf buddies:
“He loved his family first and then Bergen Catholic and Hackensack [Golf Club] after that. He loved to compete, he loved to be with people and he was the guy you went to when you had a problem. He would try to solve it for you,” said Murphy, before getting to the stuff that long-lasting friendships are made of. “Me and Jack would go out, the first two off at 7 o’clock, back tees, everything in the hole…two hours and 15 minutes walking. Not rushing, but we had my son Sean as a caddy and he slowed us down.”
Another local legend was also on hand. Tony Karcich coached four McGovern brothers at Bergen Catholic before moving in to his Hall of Fame career as the head football coach and athletic director at St. Joseph Regional.
“The first thing I saw today was an Ashton cigar. That was Billy’s favorite. He liked a double magnum Ashton and I am a white Montecristo guy. It’s a simple thing, but it brought back so many memories of spending time together,” said Karcich, who will be back on the sidelines this year as a defensive assistant at SJR. “You look around here and you see the impact they had on so many, so many people whose lives they influenced and touched. I am one of them. I was the coach, but I got more out of being around the McGovern family than they got from me. This is just a nice day to think back and reflect on so many positive memories.”
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