Which custom car is the Charles Schwab Challenge giving to its winner this year?
The PGA Tour is making its yearly stop in Fort Worth for the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club, and one of the tournament’s unique prizes — a custom restored car — is once again up for grabs.
This year’s pick is a 1982 Jeep Scrambler.
Mason Reed, the managing director at Charles Schwab in retail acquisition and corporate marketing, has been a part of this tradition since it started. The Scrambler will be the seventh car given away to a Colonial winner.
“It’s given us a storyline for the tournament by design,” he said. “PGA Tour events follow a very structured model. The way the tournament is formatted, the way you determine a winner, the days, I mean, everything has to be repeatable by design, so that doesn’t leave a ton of room for creativity around it.
“And if you add to that the fact that golf is steeped in tradition, trying to find new traditions presents a great opportunity for us, which was the genesis of starting to have a car trophy, if you will. And we jumped through a lot of hoops and had a lot of debate about this at the beginning when we wanted to do it for the very first time, and immediately it became embraced by everybody. ... So it’s really taken on a life of its own.”
1982 was chosen as the year for this tournament’s vehicle because of its special significance for the company, which offers banking, investing and other related services, Reed said.
“As investors became more interested in their investments and had more tools at their disposal, leaning into information and trading increased through the decades, and we’ve been there for them for that entire ride. This information became available 24/7 back in 1982,” Reed said.
After deciding on the year, the company chose the vehicle, which led them to work with a company based out of Johnson City named Vigilante 4x4 run by husband and wife Daniel and Rachel van Doveren.
“It’s been a really, really nice collaboration,” Daniel van Doveren said. “We get requests for work pretty frequently, and [we’re] selective in the people that we do partner with, because once you do, you have to get it right. ... Schwab really gave us that liberty, and the mechanical liberty to do what we felt was right.”
Vigilante 4x4 specializes in Jeeps, including Wagoneers, Cherokee and J-Trucks, and had only recently added the Scrambler, making the partnership with the tournament serendipitous.
“The fact that the Schwab called in that moment, and that they had that particular model in mind, that really gave us the opportunity,” Daniel van Doveren said. “We wouldn’t have been able to do it if we hadn’t had that process started already from the beginning, because you know, sometimes these restorations can take two, three years, depending on the complexity of the, of the build, and so the timing was perfect.”
