John and Amy Lee have become very generous supporters of Colorado golf in the years since their son, Michael Lee, the 2011 CGA Match Play champion, passed awayin December 2020 after battling Covid-19.
They were instrumental—along with the city of Greeley—in gaining funding to build a short SNAG (acronym for Starting New At Golf) course at Boomerang Golf Links. The nine-hole layout, which opened in August 2025, was named the Mike Lee 9, in honor of their late son, who graduated and played golf at Greeley Central High School. A 24-by-18-inch cast aluminum plaque noting Michael Lee’s many personal attributes and the support the city of Greeley and others provided in making Mike Lee 9 a reality sits on a pedestal near the first tee.
“We want young kids to love the game,” said John Lee, Michael’s dad. “And it’s so gratifying to know that Michael’s name will live on forever through this course. That really what warms our hearts. … It’s been a community effort for sure.”
“The Mike Lee 9 represents more than a recreational opportunity,” Greeley mayor John Gates said at the 2025 dedication. “It’s a gathering place where families will create memories (and) young people will learn the game.”
The Lees established the Michael Ray Lee Foundation in 2021 and since then it has raised and distributed a significant amount of money to numerous golf-related causes in Colorado. That includes college scholarships for select high school senior athletes in the Greeley/Weld County area; financial support for the Colorado Junior America’s Cup team, for Team Colorado (part of the USGA national development program), for the Colorado School of Mines golf team and for Greeley-area high school and junior high golf teams; and purchasing SNAG kits for use in P.E. classes by Greeley-area schools, to promote junior golf development.
As CGA CEO and Executive Director Ed Mate once noted, it all adds up to a “testament of goodness.”
And it’s all been done in tribute to Michael Lee, a well-liked, respected, upbeat young man who excelled at golf. At the Colorado School of Mines, he twice was named the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Player of the Year and earned NCAA Division II honorable-mention All-American status in 2013. In 2022, the Mines’ athletics Oredigger Hall of Fame posthumously inducted Michael Lee, and that same year, the school dedicated its indoor golf center to his memory and renamed it in his honor.
