Zach Johnson looks back on his and the PGA Tour's flood-relief effort

The PGA Tour held a press conference Tuesday to state its renewed commitment to charitable efforts.

The Tour had players David Toms, Stewart Cink and Zach Johnson speak about their pet charities.

Johnson spoke at length about his own efforts, and that of the Tour's, in raising money for the floods in Iowa and the Midwest. His words, from a transcript posted Tuesday night at pgatour.com:

We were out there in San Diego, and I played Thursday's round and started -- water started to rise, started to rise, started to rise. We're seeing it on CNN, we're seeing it on the internet, videos and that sort of thing. Get out there Friday, play my round, and I think I played late that day if I'm not mistaken. And I got done with my round, and I didn't play very well. I don't know what I shot, but quite a bit over. One of our media relations guys pulled me aside and said, there's quite a few people that want to hear from you. I'm like, did I do something wrong, rules infraction? What happened? Then I pulled up there and I saw all their faces, and I thought, oh, I know exactly what this is about. Basically Friday my hometown alone, the river crested about 22 feet above flood level in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which you can't prepare yourself for emotionally. It was just an instant shock to the system. So at that point for me golf, work, everything just kind of seemed peripheral. My focus and my prayers and my heart was certainly back home.

More on the jump:

I remember we flew from San Diego, I think us three here if I'm not mistaken, to Hartford, to a board meeting there, and I remember after the board meeting pulling Tim aside, and he was well aware of the situation and so was everybody else on the staff of the TOUR. He said, anything we can do. In a matter of five minutes the TOUR already put together an initiative just for about a two or three-month period, especially when the TOUR was kind of coming back to that area, to the Midwest, where players and whoever, if they cared to donate a part of their check, a percentage, a flat donation during the week of a tournament, these tournaments, this program was already put together. I mean, it was on pgatour.com in a matter of days. ...

The beauty of that awareness was I remember getting the phone call -- actually, I was sitting at home watching a basketball game -- excuse me, a football game, and someone from PGA TOUR Productions contacted my agent and said, we'd like to do a piece on this flood benefit thing you're doing. I'm like, okay. You guys would like to show up for the event (the golf exhibition Johnson held with Tour pros Chris DiMarco and Todd Hamilton in Iowa City), that would be great. They're like, we want to do more than that. In a matter of three hours they put together I'd say probably about a 10 to 12-minute documentary on Cedar Rapids alone and the floods, kind of had me back there. It was the first time I had been back, so emotions were certainly like a roller coaster. And this DVD that Tour Productions put together, strictly their expense, they came up and did the whole thing, two or three hours of my time, we have this now certainly on DVD and we're able to use it for the future. We're able to use it for maintaining awareness, use it for companies or even individuals that really want to be a part of helping families out and kids out.

The video, with sights all too familiar to Cedar Rapidians like myself, is here:

This isn't written to get Johnson on the Vatican's short list for future sainthood. And the PGA Tour isn't purely a humanitarian organization, though it can match its results in charitable efforts favorably with any pro sports organization.

But good is good, and using the advantages you have in life for good is good. I have no idea where the dollars went that Johnson and the PGA Tour raised for flood victims, but I'm sure they did some serious good to some people who really needed it.

I enjoy covering pro golf in no small part because very few of the players seemed to act like they deserve every good thing that comes their ways. Maybe they're great actors, but prima donnas seem to be few and far between.

Perhaps that's because golf is such a humbling game.

Whatever the case, I don't mind the PGA Tour bragging about what it did to respond to last spring's flooding around here. Maybe it will remind people that what happened here was horrible, and things are still quite a ways from being fixed.

Incidentally, Johnson's playing partners Thursday and Friday at The Players Championship are Sergio Garcia and K.J. Choi. Garcia won the event last year. He's playing poorly on the PGA Tour this season.

Johnson is seventh on the 2009 PGA Tour money list with earnings of $1,979,151.