Frank is much more reserved. Although 6-foot-7, he sometimes disappears in a room. But he is no less committed to taking care of his customers. He usually arrives at Cog Hill 30 minutes before dawn on the weekends so he can be prepared to meet the first players off the tee.

The family legacy is important to Frank, and Cog Hill truly is a family business. His wife, Pat, oversaw the remodeling of the clubhouse.

Marla, the eldest of Frank’s three children, helps with the accounting.
Her husband, Kevin Weeks, is one of the best teaching pros in the state. The middle child, Katherine, works closely with Frank in running the business operation and is the heir apparent. The youngest, Joe, just opened his own course design firm and helped in No. 4’s renovation.

“People ask, ‘How do you select a job?’” says Jones. “I say that it’s the people first. The Jemseks are terrific people. It became as much of a friendship as a business relationship. We did devote ourselves to this job, but they were worthy of our devotion.”

Jones’ commitment to the Jemseks extends beyond merely completing the renovation. He has lobbied Mike Davis, the USGA’s senior director of rules and competitions, who had had concerns about
Dubsdread, particularly with drainage issues that would have prevented the course from playing fast and firm enough for the Open.

“I thought the changes came out wonderful, better than I thought they would,” says Davis. “The new greens are wonderful. My concerns about the drainage and agronomics all have been mitigated. The message I have passed along to our staff and committee is that if you want to go to Cog Hill for an Open, it is easily good enough as a test of golf.”

That is an encouraging message for Jemsek, who has been disappointed by the USGA in the past. When Cog Hill hosted the 1997 U.S. Amateur, a trial run for the Open, USGA officials were openly critical of the greens. When it came time to award the Chicago area its next Open, the USGA selected Olympia Fields for the 2003 event.

“If I learned anything from my dad,” says Frank, “it’s that you can succeed if you don’t quit trying. This helped us get better. It was a good thing. It inspired us to make all these corrections.”

There are plenty of hurdles remaining, foremost among them the waiting list. The U.S. Open is booked through 2015, and already there are favorites for 2016 and 2017. At the earliest, Cog Hill wouldn’t get an Open until late in the next decade.

As he waits for the USGA to decide on whether to bring the U.S. Open to the premier public course in the best public-golf city in the country, Jemsek imagines what sort of reaction a thumbs-up would evoke in his father. Would it make him as happy as the time he saw Frank pick up the garbage in the parking lot?

Jemsek smiles at the thought.

“Oh, I think it would,” he says. “It was my dad’s dream to get an Open and he passed it down to us. I’d love to be able to do it for him.”