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Simpson’s involvement for the love of the game
   2010 KGA President Jack Simpson

   As the Kansas Golf Association heads into the second decade of the “new millennium” it turns to a man with a long background of helping those involved in Sunflower State amateur golf to lead as 2010 president. In a time when the game of golf faces many challenges and in a year when the Association celebrates its 100^th Kansas Amateur Championship, Wichita’s Jack Simpson brings his passion for all things golf to the KGA’s top board position.
   “I just think we have a great organization,” says the 71-year-old Simpson. “I feel very blessed to have this opportunity. It’s going to be a very special year for everyone involved with the Kansas Golf Association, from our competitors to all our great golf clubs and volunteers that make our championships so special.”

‘Herding cats’
   Simpson said he was looking for a way to give something back to the game when he first got involved in the KGA.
   “Golf has been so good to me and I love working with the kids,” Simpson says. “I don’t really remember who put me onto it – it may have been Gary Conover. I volunteered to help with the Jack Simpson

Kansas Amateur Public Links…in Wichita. Then I started working with Scott and Vicki Brooks in junior golf, as a starter and ‘herding cats out on the golf course’ as I like to call it.”
   Simpson says as he got more and more involved he realized he didn’t know enough about the rules of golf – “and (I) still don’t.” He’s now attended three USGA rules seminars.
   “I think on a scale of one to 10 I’m a seven and a half or an eight – not any more than that, because I make mistakes,” he says. “But I really enjoy (rules interpretation) and I really enjoy working with the kids. I think I’ve had the South Central Region junior golf program for three or four years and I’m going to do it again this year.”
   Simpson says his involvement has also allowed him to rekindle relationships with people he used to play a lot of golf with but hasn’t as much the last few years due to back trouble.
   “(Tournament administration and rules officiating) gets me back out there with a lot of guys I used to know,” he says.
   And Simpson takes pride in those events. The new president says he thinks the KGA’s championships are run as well or better than any in the country.
   “I think the KGA is one of the best-managed and best-administered golf associations in the United States,” he boasts. “I talk to people who have played in our events, and have for one reason or another, competed in championships in other states, I’m thinking of two states in particular – Texas and Arizona --and they say, ‘There is nowhere else that we’ve ever been that holds a candle to the way you manage your events. They’re very professionally done.’”
   One thing Simpson says he would like to do as KGA president is get more familiar with the work of the Kansas Golf Foundation.
   “I haven’t been very involved in The Foundation or up to date on what The Foundation does,” he admits. “I know what they do is good and (KGF Executive Director) Phil Miller does an incredible job with it and he has a core group of people with it that are really dedicated to what they are trying to do.”

36 holes a day
   Simpson grew up in Sioux City, Iowa. He says he played a lot of “sandlot” sports with the other kids. Before his brother and sister arrived, he was an only child for about 10 years. That allowed him to play golf with his parents, Don and Jerry, who were “avid golfers.”
   “They would take me to the course with them…I got to drag my mom’s pull cart around,” he recalled of early trips to the Sioux City Boat Club. “Like a lot of kids, when mom and dad weren’t looking I would pull a club out of her bag and start swinging a little bit. The next thing you know I’d scrounged up a golf ball somewhere and I’d bang it around a little bit.”
   Simpson says he isn’t quite sure when he played his first round of golf but estimates it was at about age 9. By the time he was 11, he says he was playing about every day. The family moved to another golf course, closer to his house and he started playing with a group of friends there. He even began caddying.
   “It was not unusual to play at least 36 holes a day,” he says.
   Simpson says he played a year of baseball in high school.
   “I quit doing that about when I was a sophomore…I wasn’t very good,” he recalls.
   Simpson played on his high school golf team his sophomore year, but the family relocated to Wichita before his junior season. Simpson’s father had purchased a heating/air conditioning and refrigeration wholesale distributing business that had a branch operation in Wichita.
   “I sort of played on the Wichita East golf team but I never made the traveling squad,” he says. “We had a lot of really good players.”
   Simpson graduated Wichita East and attended what was then the University of Wichita. A year later he transferred to the University of Kansas.
   “I didn’t do very well, which was my own fault,” he admits.
   Simpson says he dropped out of college for about a year and a half. He worked for a lawn service “digging up a mulberry hedge” and quickly came to the conclusion “I needed to be back in school.”
   He returned to the University of Wichita and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration with a major in accounting in 1962.
   “I took a little extra time getting out of school,” he confesses.

Superior businessman
   Simpson says a summer internship with a national CPA firm in Kansas City convinced him he didn’t want to become an “auditor-type” accountant. He developed a “real interest” in taxation and that led him to law school at Washburn in Topeka. He finished his law degree in 1965.
   “I had worked with a CPA there in Topeka while I was in law school,” he says. “And I worked for them for a little over a year, and of course I was pretty impatient, and it didn’t look like I was going to have a long-term opportunity with that firm.”
   So he took advantage of an opportunity to return to Wichita and serve as general council for Fort Zackary & Associates, a large insurance agency.
   “They did a lot of estate planning work and that sort of thing,” he says.
   In the fall of 1968, Simpson says his father talked him into getting involved in the family business and the younger Simpson would be involved in Superior Supply Company, Inc. for the Jack Simpson

next 30 years. He was elected president of the company in 1979 and purchased a majority interest in the business from his father in 1991. From 1991 to 1998, the business saw sales grow from $10 million to $25 million annually.
   “I started on the bottom, working on the inside sales desk,” Simpson says. “My forte was always the financial side of the business and the logistics and operation side -- the purchasing, the inventory control, the warehouse management. My dad, his interest was mostly in sales, so he managed the sales organization and that all worked out pretty good. We kind of stayed out of each other’s way.”
   Simpson says when his family arrived back in Wichita he started playing golf at MacDonald Park and on some regional golf trips. The Simpsons’ first home was actually on the course and he could sneak through the fence in the evenings and play a couple holes.
   “Everybody over at MacDonald knew I was doing it and I had a season ticket,” he says.
   Simpson qualified for match play in the 1966 Kansas Amateur Championship, but withdrew the following day after the Topeka tornado struck.
   “Our apartment was hit and I withdrew,” he recalls.
   One of the benefits of working with his company, Simpson, through trade association events and business contacts, had the opportunity to play at some of the finest facilities in the country over the years, including The Broadmoor in Colorado, Pine Valley, Merion East and Cypress Point. He also made a golf trip to Scotland back in the mid-1980s.
   Simpson says he met wife, Wally Sue, on a blind date his first year of law school. They’ve now been married 45 years. The couple has a set of twins, now 42. Son James lives with his wife and two children outside of Boston and works for Phillips Electronics. Daughter Mary-Margaret, who lives in Lawrence, had been a school teacher for several years and is now about to graduate from Washburn with a degree in nursing.
   Though much of his interest lies in golf these days, Simpson says he likes to read “non-fiction, history and investment stuff” and enjoys spectator sports. Wally Sue’s main interest is in her two grandchildren, he adds.
   “My wife’s not too much of a sports fan, but I love Wichita State baseball and basketball…,” Simpson says. “…and of course, like everybody else, I like to watch a lot of TV sports.”