When you’re selling almost $30 million worth of real estate each year, it isn’t easy to take a week to work in The Players Championship.
That’s OK with Clare Berry. She’s glad to help.
“It’s a good break and it’s fun,” says the owner of Berry & Co., a 10-agent real estate office on A1A. “We won’t miss any sales.”
Her career as a tournament volunteer started like so many others - a friend asked her to help.
“They needed someone to write press releases and knew I had been a newspaper reporter,” she said. Indeed she had: she had been a reporter for the Ponte Vedra Recorder and was part of the group that started the now-defunct Sun Times at the Beaches.
“I said, ‘When?’ And they said, ‘Can you come over at 5 this afternoon?’”
That was 1983 and she became a one-person committee, making her a true pioneer - the tournament’s first woman committee chairman. Since the start of the old Greater Jacksonville Open in 1965, which morphed into the Players in 1977, only men had been committee chairs. The best a lady could do was “co-chairman.”
“The next year they figured out what they had done,” said Berry. “They made a man the chairman and I was the ‘co-chairman.’”
She toiled in PR for five years, writing the volunteer newsletter and doing press releases.
“It was great fun but it was year-round,” she said. “I had a real job. I told them that I’d like to work in the tournament, but only during tournament week.”
She was moved to the Admissions Committee - as a co-chairman, of course - for a year and that was a disaster. The rains came hard on Friday, postponing the second round, and the 36-hole cut, until Saturday morning. Part of her job included producing pairing sheets and the third round wasn’t finished until mid-morning.
“I can still hear the copy machine going,” she said. “I stood in the PGA Tour headquarters while that thing went thunk-thunk-thunk. I’d grab a stack and hand them to my committee members, who ran out to the course and put them where the spectators could get them.
“It wasn’t a lot of fun.”
She asked to be put in a “fun” position and, since 1990, that’s where she has been: she’s the chairman - chairman, not co-chairman - of the Player Services Committee, which exists to help the Tour players.
“We try and anticipate any need,” she said. “For instance, we go to our favorite restaurants and ask them to hold a few tables each night for players. We release them about 3 if we don’t get enough players, so the restaurant doesn’t lose business.
“We’ve compiled a book of menus. They come by the desk in the clubhouse and make their choice.”
She and her 10-person committee staff the desk from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. - later on Friday as players await the cut - and handle any problem.
“The players get a booklet with all sorts of information and it includes our phone numbers including our desk, my home phone and my cell.”
According to local real estate statistics, only three other local agents sold more dollars worth of real estate last year and her average sale was among the highest.