PALM DESERT – Two groups that have always been criticized as lacking compassion for conservation and the environment have been golfers and hunters.
Meet Dave Stockton, golfer, hunter and executive vice president of the Bighorn Institute in Palm Desert.
"Hunters make some of the best conservationists there are," said Stockton, best known for a golf career that included two PGA Championship wins and who is now a renowned short-game instructor. "I have enjoyed it. It has been a great thrill."
Stockton brings together his passions for golf, hunting and the Bighorn Institute this month when he hosts a fundraising tournament for the institute Nov. 25 at Stone Eagle Golf Club, just a few miles from the Bighorn Institute in the hills of south Palm Desert.
Stockton, 72, is no longer an active tournament player, devoting his golf efforts to teaching with his sons Dave Jr. and Ron.
A Southern Californian who was born in San Bernardino, Stockton played his high school golf at Pacific High School, college golf at USC and has always spent time in the desert golfing or hunting. Stockton sees no conflict between his love of hunting birds or elk or bear and his work to preserve the bighorn sheep.
"My dad owned a sporting goods store. I've hunted and fished all my life," said Stockton, an inductee into the Southern California Golf Association Hall of Fame. "I'd fish during the golf season and hunt during the offseason. The reason I do the hunting is when you just play golf, you gain weight."
But Stockton also flips though photos on his phone to show off some of his recent hunting exploits, as well as a beautiful pink and orange sunrise near the Salton Sea.
"That's why I do it," he said, looking at the pictures. "I get a kick out of it. Anything I do I am passionate about. When it came to the bighorn and seeing what Jim DeForge and his wife Amy have created, they have put an awful lot of sheep back into the wild."
Stockton's support for the institute was ramped up at the suggestion of an old golfing friend.
"President Ford got me on the board," Stockton said. "It's all conservation people except for a couple of us, Bob Howard and myself who are hunters. Everyone else is a conservationist. So we come from a different view point."
Stockton is more than just a high-profile figure on the board. He easily talks of lambing seasons, of the institute's lambing pins and of how he is concerned about three new home sites at the south end of Bighorn Country Club that come uncomfortably close, he says, to the institute's property.
"It's really too bad that (the new lots) are going in, because unfortunately lambs always are born on the north side of a mountain," Stockton said. "Well, that's the closest it is to Bighorn here. And I think 400 yards was the original buffer and all of a sudden these three lots pop up in there. That's where I'm at now, there is land (homeowners) could build on. I was shocked when that went through."
Without question one of Stockton's biggest contributions to the work of the institute is the golf tournament that instantly became one of the institute's biggest fundraisers each year.
"They had this gala, and the gala was a big production and all this stuff, and made $10,000 or $20,000 at the end," Stockton said. "I said I can put this golf tournament together and we'll make $100,000 and make a hell of a lot more and not work nearly as hard. Because golfers generally are really the ones that support causes like that."
"It's fun to be a part of it," Stockton added. "You get done at the end of the day and you say, gee, I wish there was something else they could do. But I don't know what else the institute could do that can make the kind of money we are going to bring end."
In the end, Stockton believes there can be a blending of all of his passions.
"I want to be playing golf whether I am playing at Indian Wells or PGA West or Bighorn or Stone Eagle, I want to play and I want to see a bighorn," he said. "Well, they are there. The last couple of years when they have played the Bob Hope (the Humana Challenge) they have shown the bighorn coming down."
Bohannan writes for the Desert Sun.
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