The Sanderson Farms Championship doesn’t have Brooks Koepka or Dustin Johnson or Justin Rose or another other top 10 players in its field.
But they do have something that the WGC event going on in Shanghai doesn’t have — Reveille The Roster.
What’s that you ask?
It’s the championship trophy for this week’s event in Mississippi at the Country Club of Jackson — in one of the PGA Tour’s smallest markets. And this trophy is oh so totally cool.
First a little note about Sanderson Farms. It’s the third largest poultry producer in the nation, coming up with more than nine million chickens a week. Yes, you read that right — nine million. That’s a lot of Chick Fil-A drive-thru.
The good people at Sanderson Farms wanted a really, really cool trophy for their champion so they called on California artist/sculptor Malcolm DeMille.
A lot of work went into producing “Reveille” which is a great name for a rooster.
The process of creating the first Reveille took three to four months, DeMille estimates. The model is actually made up of six pieces: six different molds that are cast into bronze, polished, ground, and then welded together. Chemicals are applied to create the colors, which he said is a permanent change that takes just seconds to discolor bronze that has been heated by a torch.
When he got to the finished Reveille product, DeMille said he was most proud of the “attitude” it displayed. “Obviously a rooster is kind of cocky, so I had a little fun with that,” the veteran sculptor said, smiling. “It’s got a bit of a cocky attitude. It’s kind of looking you in your face with a ‘Yeah!? What do you want?’ kinda attitude. I like that.”
There’s what DeMille calls a perpetual trophy, the original creation that stays with the championship, and then the slightly smaller individual champions trophies that go home with the winner each year. DeMille would not say exactly how much his creations cost, but that the perpetual trophies run from “$7,000 to $8,000 on the very low side, and they can go up to $25,000 to $30,000.” The annual champions trophies that are made “might run $5,000 to $10,000 each.”
So that’s no run-of-the-mill rooster, folks.
If you’re wondering what kind of rooster it is, this guy is modeled after Chauntecleer from The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Sanderson wanted a chanticleer rooster, which is a very colorful, large breed of rooster.
The total purse this week in Jackson is $4.3 million. For comparison, the purse over in Shanghai at the WGC event is more than double that, it’s $5.45 million higher, nearly $10 million.
But the entire community has taken to this event in Mississippi. They signed a 10-year deal with the PGA Tour in 2015 to assure their little event will be around for a while.
No, they don’t have the big names or the big bucks but they do have the coolest trophy.
