A two-day gala and golf tournament to support the families of America’s fallen heroes brings country music legends Larry, Rudy and Steve Gatlin to Colorado as the headline act.
Five years ago, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Steve Ritchie asked Colorado Country Music Hall of Famer and philanthropist Bo Cottrell if he and his wife, Lynne, would help organize a golf tournament to benefit an organization called T.A.P.S.
Cottrell said no.
“Taps? I thought it was a charity for retired dancers,” he jokes.
But Ritchie, who had worked with the Cottrells when they ran the Make-A-Wish charity tournaments at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Eisenhower Golf Course in Colorado Springs, explained that T.A.P.S. stood for Tragedy Assistance for Survivors—an outreach program to comfort and support the family members of fallen soldiers such as those from Fort Carson.
“I still said no—respectfully, of course,” remembers Cottrell. “This was in 2006, and we’d been putting on tournaments pretty much every year—for Easter Seals and Make-A-Wish—since 1984.”
Then, “not a week later,” Cotrell says, came The Call.
“A friend in California, a guy tough as nails. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. His son had died in Iraq. He was crying his eyes out,” Cottrell says, misting at the memory. “He said he couldn’t have gotten through the experience without T.A.P.S. The next call I made was to tell Steve I would do the tournament.”
The Cottrells mobilized quicker than a platoon on high alert. They whipped up an event at Heather Ridge Golf Club in Aurora. They enlisted country music legend Gary Morris as the celebrity host, and brought in a wide range of entertainers, sponsors, military representatives and, naturally, a number of survivors—mostly women and children—whom T.A.P.S. had helped.
The response was overwhelming. With each annual iteration, the event grew, turning into a three-day extravaganza that consisted of Morris and some of Nashville’s foremost songwriters and comedians performing at the Songwriter’s Show and Dinner at the Red Lion Inn on Friday, a Saturday night concert and barbecue dinner for 480 served up by the Amarillo-based Coors Cowboy Club at Steve Grove’s Ranch at Cherry Creek, and rounds at Arrowhead Golf Club (Saturday) and Eisenhower (Sunday).
“The more people learned about what T.A.P.S. does, the more people wanted to be part of it,” says Lynne Cottrell. “But last year we condensed it into two days—Friday and Saturday. There were just so many moving parts.”
For this year’s event, which takes place June 18 and 19, the Cottrells decided to move another part. They got Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers to serve as celebrity hosts. “Gary Morris’s passionate support and commitment helped us raise $300,000 last year,” says Bo Cottrell, “He was with us from the beginning and we know he’ll continue to participate.”
Larry Gatlin certainly hopes he does. “Gary’s a nice guy and maybe the best singer I’ve ever heard,” says the Academy of Country Music’s one-time Male Vocalist of the Year. “I’d cut my own throat if I could get a voice like his…
Really? “Oh, that’s just my West Texas B.S.,” he says with a laugh. “Given the nature of the tournament, I guess I shouldn’t say things like that.”
And given Gatlin’s patriotic nature, it comes as no surprise that he and his brothers jumped at the chance to participate in the T.A.P.S. event. Their father “is an 82-year-old Marine just currently not on active duty,” according to Steve Gatlin, and the Gatlins have performed at countless USO shows—during the Balkan War, Larry recalls singing “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve to a lone soldier on the Serbian-Macedonian border—and at army bases and at hospitals like Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
“I know my New York friends think I’m a cretin for saying this, but I’d rather fight the SOBs in Baghdad than in Boston,” he says. “War never solved anything—except tyranny. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an African-American who thought the Civil War shouldn’t have taken place.”
So last summer, family friend Tommy Vickers (who would pass away this March) invited Larry Gatlin to play Castle Pines Golf Club—“oh please, Br’er Fox, don't fling me in that briar patch!” Larry quips—and introduced him to the Cottrells, who would show him videos of the kids at the T.A.P.S. grief camps. “As soon as I got the tears out of my eyes, I screamed, ‘I’m in!’” Gatlin recalls. “I don’t want to sound like Billy Graham, but the Lord says, ‘If you do not take care of the widows and orphans, I will not know you.’ I’m not the spokesman for my brothers on all things, but to raise money and awareness for this wouldn’t be a hard sell.”
It wasn’t. “For every soldier who made the ultimate sacrifice, there are people who are left behind,” Rudy Gatlin explains from his home in Dallas. “They need our love and support, and, by golly, we’re going to do our part to ease their pain a little bit, to love them and support them. We’ve been charged with that by the Almighty.”
Brother Steve echoes the sentiment: “There are thousands of charities you can be involved with, but I have great respect for our military, and to give back to these kids and to whose who have lost a spouse or a relative is a privilege and something very near and dear to our hearts.”
It will also be a privilege for the boys to perform at the T.A.P.S event at Steve Grove’s Ranch Saturday night. Fired up about the success of Pilgrimage, their first album in more than 17 years, Larry, Rudy and Steve will mix in new material like “Johnny Cash Is Dead and His House Burned Down” with “Broken Lady,” “All the Gold in California” and their many other hits.
The night before, with the songwriters at the Red Lion, won’t be too shabby, either. The boys have invited Nashville luminaries Leslie Satcher and John Randall Stewart, as well as gospel great Bill Gaither and a number of other A-listers to participate. “And there’s me, your humble servant, with 28 BMI Awards and nine Grammys,” Larry Gatlin adds.
Speaking of distinctions, Rudy Gatlin’s plus-1.3 index put him atop Golf Digest’s most recent biannual list of musician golfers. Steve and Larry respectively clocked in at 3.4 and 3.5, although Steve’s handicap has climbed north of 6, while Larry’s has dropped to 2.1. That’s strong play from three hardscrabble West Texans raised on football, football, football. “We all considered golf a weenie sport for rich kids,” Larry says.
That changed when each went to college—Larry to the University of Houston; Rudy and Steve at Texas Tech. “We all fell in love with it, and over the years we’ve even become close friends with many of the players on the PGA Tour—Ben Crenshaw, Tom Kite, Fuzzy Zoeller, Hale Irwin,” says Larry. “I’ve gotten to play with Mr. Palmer, Mr. Nicklaus and Sam Snead.”
The brothers are only slightly less competitive on the golf course than they were on gridiron. “There’s nothing friendly about the way we play,” laughs Larry. Rudy concurs: “Deep down inside we like to beat one another’s brains out.”
On tour, Rudy explains, “We pack guitars and our golf clubs. The clubs go in last, because they’re the first thing we use when we arrive.” Although it’s often for fun, the Gatlins have used their sticks and played some licks on some of the world’s greatest courses in support of the world’s foremost causes. (On the day we spoke, they’d just returned from playing and performing at the 22nd Frank Sinatra Starkey Hearing Foundation Celebrity Invitational in Indian Wells.) But June’s Colorado event will be different. “We all have great respect for our military,” says Steve Gatlin, “People all over the country are affected by this. We’re happy to step in there and pick up the reins.”
The Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers T.A.P.S. Celebrity Classic
Title Sponsors: AIMCO, Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, LLC
Locations: Friday: Red Lion Inn (3200 S Parker Rd, Aurora); Arrowhead Golf Club (Littleton); Steve Grove’s Ranch at Cherry Creek (6225 S. Fraser St., Centennial)
Contact: Bo and Lynne Cottrell 303-696-0450; lcottrell@aol.com
Cost: A foursome at Arrowhead ($5,000/$1,250 per person) also buys tickets to Friday’s Singer/Songwriter dinner and Saturday night’s barbecue and concert. Separate tickets to the evening events are also available ($100 for Friday; $150 for Saturday). Saturday’s golf event will feature a separate competition between teams from each of the four military branches. Each team costs $5,000 to sponsor. “I’m going to sponsor one,” says Pete Coors, a longtime supporter of the event, “but I’m agnostic as to which. I like them all and appreciate their contributions.”
The Organization: Founded in 1994 by Bonnie Carroll following the death of her husband, Brigadier General Tom Carroll, in an Army C-12 plane crash, T.A.P.S. provides ongoing emotional help, hope, and healing to all who are grieving the death of a loved one in military service to America, regardless of relationship to the deceased, geography, or circumstance of the death. “It’s about honoring the service and sacrifice of so many by caring for the loved ones they have left behind,” Carroll said at last year’s event, which gifted more than $300,000 for the organization’s Good Grief Camps and Adult Survival Seminars. To date, T.A.P.S. has helped more than 25,000 survivors—many of them children and young widows—through peer-based support, crisis care, casualty casework assistance, and grief and trauma resource. For more information, visit taps.org.