AUSTIN, Texas — At their East Austin shop, Zach Henke and Justus Cogdell are used to working with steel. Big steel. Their day-to-day work includes everything from structural I-beams and cranes to custom staircases, railings and decorative vent hoods. But recently, an unexpected email brought a project unlike anything they had done before: building the trophy for the Austin Championship presented by Compliance Solutions
.And the pair had to do it quickly.
Tournament organizers needed a late replacement after plans for another trophy fell through, so they reached out to Henke and his team to see what they could come up with on a tight deadline.
"You just don't get opportunities every day to build something like this," Henke said.
Fortunately, Henke
had the right guy in the shop.
Cogdell, Henke's shop manager, is also a trained blacksmith. While plenty of people spend their free time playing golf, Cogdell spends his at the forge. He got into blacksmithing at Austin Community College, where he completed a two-year specialization in sculptural blacksmithing. Since then, the craft has been his job, his hobby and, at times, a side hustle.
Now he was being asked to make his first championship trophy. Organizers didn't give them many restrictions. They provided the tournament logo and asked that a bat somehow be incorporated into the trophy. Beyond that, Henke and Cogdell had room to get creative.
For Cogdell, who grew up in Austin, that meant making sure there was no mistaking where the trophy came from. He sketched out a design incorporating the city's historic Moonlight Towers, then turned the requested bat into a Mexican free-tailed bat, the species famous for the massive colony that lives beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge.
The result is a trophy loaded with Austin touches. Getting it finished, however, has turned into a race against the clock.
"It's extremely fun. I love creative projects and sculpture," Cogdell said. "It was a little stressful because the timeline's really tight, but being able to go through the creative process and think about what we want to incorporate and how to make it unique to Austin, which I grew up in, was really, really fun."
Cogdell has made plenty of sculptural pieces over the years, but never anything quite like this. With the Austin Championship underway, he and Henke are relishing the attention that came from a trophy that started with little more than an email, a tournament logo and a request for a bat.
Soon enough, somebody at Omni Barton Creek Resort will hoist it.
Tim Schmitt is the managing editor of Golfweek and the golf coordinator of the USA Today Network.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: How Austin Championship trophy was forged with bats, Moonlight Towers and Texas steel
