Cuscowilla's Golf Classic Grew a Second Night, and the New One Has Nothing to Do With Golf

"This event is about much more than great music and great golf," Dr. David Bradley said in July, when tickets and sponsorships for the newly named Songs & Drives for Lives went on sale. He could have been describing any of the charity tournaments that fill a Lake Oconee calendar between April and October. Golf classics for good causes are common enough here that most residents could name three without much thought. What makes this one worth a second look is what happened to it this year. The tournament that has quietly run at Cuscowilla for several years just grew a second night, and the new night has no golf in it at all.

On September 13, the event opens with a Singer-Songwriter Night inside the Cuscowilla clubhouse, featuring Corey Crowder, a Lake Oconee resident and an award-winning songwriter and producer, alongside fellow songwriters Ray Fulcher and Ben Williams. September 14 returns to the format longtime members already recognize: the golf tournament that has run under The Oconee Cellar's name at 126 Cuscowilla Drive for the past several years. Together the two days now carry a new name, Songs & Drives for Lives, and a beneficiary that has been part of this community's story since 2022, the Spencer Bradley Foundation for Mental Health.

The Golf Classic That Outgrew Its Own Name

Before it needed a second night, this was simply the Oconee Cellar Charity Golf Classic, a tournament built by a local liquor store owner who wanted to thank his customers and support his friends. In its first year it raised just over $38,000. In the year that followed, it topped $70,000, nearly doubling, without a marketing budget or a rebrand. It grew on word of mouth among people who already knew each other from the same clubhouse, the same cart paths, the same Sunday afternoons at the lake.

That kind of growth is unusual for a single-format fundraiser. Golf classics tend to plateau once the regulars have played the course a few times. This one didn't, and the reason shows up in who has been running it. The event was never handed to an outside events company or a professional fundraising shop. It has stayed in the hands of neighbors, which is also why, once appetite for it outgrew a single afternoon, the fix wasn't simply a bigger tournament. It was an entirely separate night, built around music instead of golf.

Who's Actually Running This

Matt and Daniela Garofalo own The Oconee Cellar and built the original tournament from scratch. "We have been friends with David and Patti for over 25 years," Matt Garofalo has said of the Bradleys, and that friendship is the reason this event exists in its current form at all. Daniela Garofalo has put it more simply: "Spencer grew up with our boys here at the lake."

This year's expanded event added Luxury Lake Oconee Real Estate Group as headlining sponsor, alongside the Bradleys' own Lake Oconee Dentistry practice. The sponsor list reads like a directory of businesses that have operated within a few miles of Cuscowilla for a decade or more, which is part of what separates this fundraiser from a generic gala with a rotating cast of out-of-town vendors. Nobody flew in to run this. Everyone involved already had a reason to be here before the first ticket went on sale, a detail worth sitting with if you've ever wondered what actually holds a golf-club community together between tee times.

The Twenty-Five Years Behind the Check

The foundation exists because of Spencer Bradley, David and Patti's son, who died in June 2022 after his own struggle with mental health, one that friends and family later said they hadn't recognized in time. Spencer had attended Kennesaw State University, joined Theta Chi Fraternity, and was working toward a degree in the Coles College of Business. People who knew him described a young man who spent late nights helping friends through their own hard moments, which is part of what makes the foundation's specific focus, teaching people to recognize and respond to a crisis before it becomes irreversible, feel less like a slogan and more like a direct answer to what his family wishes someone had known how to do in time.

Money raised at Cuscowilla has already funded that kind of training for teachers and students at Lake Oconee Academy, Greene County Schools, Gatewood School, Kennesaw State University, the University of Georgia, and schools in Buford County. The foundation has set a goal of training 100,000 people over five years. It has also established a scholarship at Kennesaw State for students pursuing mental health related degrees, with the first recipient, a psychology student named Anna Shoup, receiving it in 2024.

Even the small details at last year's tournament carried the theme through. Winners were given pieces of pottery made using kintsugi, the Japanese technique of repairing broken ceramics with gold rather than disguising the crack, crafted by an artisan whose work has been presented to Japan's Prime Minister. That isn't the kind of detail a rented events company thinks to add. It's the kind of detail people add when the cause is personal, and when the people planning it have spent 25 years at the same lake.

What's Actually Happening on September 13 and 14

For anyone in Cuscowilla weighing whether to carve out time, here is what's confirmed:

• September 13: Singer-Songwriter Night at the Cuscowilla clubhouse, featuring Corey Crowder, Ray Fulcher, and Ben Williams
• September 14: the golf tournament, continuing the format run under The Oconee Cellar's name in past years
• Location for both days: Cuscowilla on Lake Oconee, 126 Cuscowilla Drive, Eatonton
• Tickets, sponsorships, and golf team registrations are on sale now through the foundation and reported in the Eatonton Messenger's coverage

None of that requires club membership beyond whatever a guest pass or ticket already provides. The foundation frames the event as open to ticket holders and sponsors rather than members only, which is worth knowing if you have friends visiting Cuscowilla this week who assumed a private club meant a private guest list too.

What this really tells you, if you already live inside these gates, is something about how Cuscowilla's calendar gets built. It isn't assembled by a social committee working off a template. It grows the way this tournament grew, one relationship at a time, until the format itself has to change to hold everything the community wants to put into it. A golf tournament became a two-day event because the people running it have known each other for a quarter century and weren't going to let a single afternoon carry the whole thing anymore.

If you're weighing what it actually means to live inside a community where a liquor store owner and a family of dentists can build a $70,000 fundraiser on friendship alone, that's a conversation Leslie Clark has often, usually over a much smaller question: what a specific street, dock, or fairway lot at Cuscowilla is really like to own once you're the one hosting Sunday afternoons there. Schedule your free consultation to talk through it.