HISTORY

Each year, the Borck Memorial Tournament is held in memory of Jay Borck, a young golfer who died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1968 at the age of sixteen. He passed away one week after winning the Brooklawn Junior Championship.

Jay was a promising and talented golfer who often had to travel outside of Connecticut to compete with golfers of equal ability. Soon after Jay’s death, his brother, Jim, and father, Chester, along with family friends Samuel and Giles Payne and Paul Hiller thought the best way to memorialize Jay would be with a world-class junior golf tournament.

The tournament’s founders could never have anticipated that the tournament would become as popular or long-lasting as it has. The popular dinner was added in 1972 and girls were invited to join the boys as participants in 1976. In 1980, the Borck Family Foundation established the Borck Memorial scholarship, which is awarded to deserving students who have shown good citizenship and an affiliation with the game of golf.

In 1988, the tournament also became a memorial to Jim, who succumbed to cancer that year. A tree was planted for Jim on Brooklawn’s sixteenth fairway—right next to the tree that had been planted for Jay twenty years earlier. Jim believed strongly that blessings grow from sorrows, and he considered this tournament to be one of those blessings.

The summer of 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the Borck Memorial Tournament. It also will be the first tournament to be held after the passing of Chester Borck, who died in October of 2008—twenty years after his son James and forty years after Jay. Scholarship was as important to Chester as sportsmanship, and the Borck Memorial Scholarship, which he initiated, remains an enduring testament to his generosity and his enthusiastic support for people who pursue their dreams.

Jim and Chester’s work, along with the work of the tournament founders Giles Payne, Samuel Payne and Paul Hiller, has ensured that the Borck Memorial is more than a memorial to Jay. It has become a way to share Jay’s love of the game of golf with a new generation every summer.