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Mort's golf tournament helps Kidney Foundation Tim Mort went for the "Wow!" factor when he took over as organizer of Cadillac Invitational golf tournament. "When people walked away," he says, "I wanted them to go, `Wow, that's the most incredible thing I've ever done for that amount of money.'" Last year's tournament, which benefits the National Kidney Foundation, at Rogue Valley Country Club showed a net profit of $65,000. Wow! It ranked ninth out of 125 such tournaments nationwide, outdoing those in Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago and New York City. Wow! A player once walked away from the line for tee prizes - gifts for the golfers that often are of minimal value - and announced excitedly, "This is just like Christmas." And the prizes this year are better than ever, including four golf trips and a snappy jacket in each packet. Wow! The sheer enormity of the charitable event will be celebrated, and rightly so, at a Sunday dinner and on Monday, when the fifth annual tournament unleashes 50 teams vying for a berth in the national tourney at Pebble Beach, Calif. Now seems a good time to reflect. Call it the 'Whoa!' factor. What has become a corporate-driven machine - the $300 individual entry fee necessitates it - began five years as a mom-and-pop operation, a project Grants Pass couple Paul and Stacy Prozy undertook because the cause spoke directly to their being. That is not an overstatement. The NKF's objective is to rid the planet of kidney and urinary tract disease. It's because of that disease that Paul and Stacy came together. It's because of that disease that Paul died two years ago, at age 42, on a golf course. The two met in Northridge, Calif., in February 1985. She worked at a dialysis facility, and he was a patient in his third year of treatment. They married 21/2 years later, then moved to the Rogue Valley in March 1990. "Golf was his life," Stacy says of Paul, who several times was the club champion at Illinois Valley Golf Club and who belonged to Grants Pass Golf Club, on which their home sits. When a second kidney transplant failed, she recalls, and doctors said it would be a while before he could golf again, Paul was teeing it up four weeks later. Even in his death was the sport etched. He was coaching the Hidden Valley High School golf team when a heart attack, a result of renal failure, struck as he prepared for his second shot from a fairway at Applegate Golf Course. His affection for golf and a desire to help others with kidney disease are the foundation of the Cadillac Invitational. Paul and Stacy, who works at Redwood Dialysis Services in Grants Pass, used to stage small golf tournaments for the dialysis unit. Someone in the Portland NKF office learned of their efforts through a social worker and enlisted them to coordinate one for the organization. "It was a lot of knocking on doors at the start," says Stacy, "trying to get people to commit to something they weren't sure of. We both put a lot of work into it, but Paul definitely did." It was about then that Paul visited Mort, who was national sales manager for KOBI-TV. "I thought, 'Oh great, another one of these non-profit golf tournaments," says Mort. "When he came into my office, he had 20 players signed up. He was just a true golf lover, but he didn't have any corporate contacts." Mort decided to help, and by tournament time, the field swelled to 94 players. The profit was negligible, but the seed was planted. The following year, the event raised $19,500. Then $50,500. Then last year. Mort, himself an avid golfer, has been enveloped by the cause to the extent that he will be installed next week as president of the board of directors for the NKF of Oregon and Washington. Until Paul Prozy walked into his office, Mort had no connection to the disease or the move to eradicate it. "No one in my family had any kidney disease or related problems," he says. That changed in January, when his father died of kidney failure. "It's ironic how these things happen, how they come full circle," he says. Mort flew his mother in from Pennsylvania this week to be a part of the tournament she'd heretofore only heard about. She'll hear her son deliver his annual speech, one that will mean a little more this year. Stacy Prozy will hear it, too. She goes to the dinner each year and sees the trophy on which the winning team members will have their names inscribed. It's a big, beautiful, bronze number. She thinks it's a wonderful way to remember her husband. "He passed away doing something he really enjoyed," she says, her voice cracking and words momentarily stumbling over the fissures. "I can appreciate that. Still, it's hard." Which is why this tournament is so necessary. Have a local golf story idea? Reach sports editor Tim Trower at 776-4479, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.