17 North Beach Street
Nantucket, MA 02554
(508) 228-1515
TOMMY BRESETTE
Helping shape the future of a generation of islanders through the Nantucket Golf Club Foundation.
Nantucket's Person of the Year
Tommy Bresette
There is a select group on Nantucket who are widely known on a first-name basis. Rocky, Packy, Holly, Nat, Wendy—the list goes on—have all become long-running characters of this sitcom we call island life. A shining star on this list has always been Tommy B. A bartender-turned-chief-operating-officer of the Nantucket Golf Club, Tom Bresette bridges the divide between one of the most exclusive clubs on the island and the everyday, hardworking folks that make Nantucket tick. A jolly, Santa Claus kind of guy—minus the beard and the belly—Bresette has helped the Nantucket Golf Club become one of the island’s most powerful fundraising engines over the last 20 years.
“He is Kennedyesque,” said Ed Hajim, the founder of the Nantucket Golf Club who now serves as a director of the foundation. “He remembers names. He remembers backgrounds. He never misses anybody. Deaths, births or marriages, he’s always there. Once we decided to create the foundation, Tommy became the driver.”
With Bresette serving as the Nantucket Golf Club Foundation’s executive director since its inception, the foundation has raised more than $44 million—including a record-setting $4.8 million this past August. To put that in perspective, the Boston Pops on Nantucket Concert raised $2.6 million this year with the contributions of 5,500 attendees. The NGC Foundation nearly doubled that sum with just 250 contributions. “It’s a real testament to the incredible generosity of our members,” Bresette insists.
Since 2006, the NGC Foundation has leveraged its fundraising firepower to provide full college scholarships to Nantucket High School students. Five years ago, it expanded the scholarship program to include students pursuing vocational careers after high school. By 2025, the NGC Foundation will have funded the post-high school educations of 100 local students. Money is also distributed in the spring and fall as grants to dozens of local nonprofits and causes that benefit children on the island.
After the board established the foundation’s Children’s Charity Classic in 2001, Bresette orchestrated and executed every detail, from setting up the two-day golf tournament and organizing the 250-person gala to procuring exclusive auction items and serving as the auctioneer himself. “Tommy turns it on,” said Hajim. With so many different potential causes for the club to direct its fundraising efforts, it was Bresette—then in the process of having children—who pushed for local children to be the beneficiaries.
But Bresette’s work did not stop there. He leads the selection committee through the rigorous process of interviewing high school candidates applying for the scholarships. Recipients are then tracked throughout their four years to ensure they are maintaining their grades, but through this process, they develop a bond with Bresette and his team.
“The fact that Tommy B has helmed this program since the beginning is a testament to how much he cares about this community and its children,” said River Bennett, a Nantucket High School graduate who received the scholarship in 2009. “I value the connection that he and I built from when I was a candidate, and even today—10 years out from my college graduation—I know that his door is open to me and the rest of the scholars. It’s a privilege to have that type of a relationship.”
After receiving his scholarship, Bennett attended the University of Virginia (UVA), where he studied political and social thought, and finished his degree with a thesis on the political rhetoric surrounding energy independence in the United States. From UVA, Bennett received his master’s in nuclear engineering and radiological sciences at the University of Michigan. Today, he’s working as a nuclear engineer at a startup called Radiant that’s developing a micro nuclear reactor on a mission to provide clean energy.
“The Nantucket Golf Club Scholarship has been a truly foundational piece of my trajectory,” Bennett said. “Entering college knowing that I would leave debt-free created space to act on my curiosities, and I credit the Nantucket Scholar program with kick-starting a career that I love and that I never could have imagined as a teenager.”
While Bresette takes fatherly pride in all of his scholars, he also has impressive children of his own. A father of four— each of whom are attending prestigious schools themselves, including his eldest, Luci, who turned down a full scholarship to Harvard to attend Stanford—Bresette credits much of his success and the success of the foundation to his wife of 27 years, Leslie, who ran the foundation with him in the beginning. “None of this would have been possible without her,” he says.
Family has always been at the center of Bresette’s life and the inspiration behind his generous spirit. The sixth child in a tight-knit family of nine, young Tommy was already used to being cramped at his kitchen table in Potomac, 24 miles south of Washington, D.C., when his parents began welcoming strangers to join them for dinner. Migrant workers, the unhoused, anyone in need—all had a place at their table.
One evening, Tommy found himself sitting across from Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers, which the Bresettes came to support. There had been threats on Chavez’s life, so the Bresettes offered him a safe place to stay while he was in D.C. fighting for better treatment of agricultural workers. Chavez became one of many people who lived with the Bresettes for periods of Tommy’s youth.
“Our house was open to everyone,” Bresette reflected. “Anyone in need.” Much of this emphasis on social justice came from Tommy’s father. Dr. John “Jack” Bresette, better known as “Dr. B,” was a beloved surgeon in D.C. On Saturdays, Dr. B would take Tommy and a couple of his siblings to do rounds at the
Columbia Hospital for Women. He also brought them to see patients as a volunteer physician at the Little Sisters of the Poor where he would often have to write death certificates for unhoused patients. In the spring of 1974, Dr. B helped start a free clinic in D.C. called the Zacchaeus Clinic, which subsequently became one of the largest in the city.
Throughout his childhood, Bresette observed his father interacting with patients, nurses, clerks, custodians, the unhoused—all walks of life—with unwavering compassion. He embraced the ideals of his father but pursued his own form of service when he set out on his own. More specifically, Bresette entered the service industry during college. Beginning as a busboy, he worked his way up to bartender and opened up a number of restaurants in D.C., the last of which happened to be called Nantucket Landing.
Bresette eventually discovered the real Nantucket after college friends Tom Scott and Tom First invited him to help them deliver a sailboat from Florida to the island. During the sail, the two Toms pitched Bresette on joining them in starting a juice company. “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” Bresette told them. With that, the soon-to-be-launched Nantucket Nectars only included two Toms—not three.
While Bresette might have missed the boat on Nantucket Nectars, he fell in with the island’s hospitality industry. Seth and Angela Raynor convinced him to move to the island to be the bar manager at the Boarding House. He quickly became a fixture on the island, one of the original “Nantucket star-tenders” who knew everybody’s name and what they drank. In 1996, he met Leslie, and they married later that year. As the young couple began considering starting a family, Bresette felt the itch to get out from behind the bar.
Some twists of fate delivered him to the office of Fred Green, the president of the newly founded Nantucket Golf Club off Milestone Road in 1997. A legend in the golf industry who was responsible for building 11 other courses around the country, Green took a shining to Bresette. “The first time I ever saw Tommy he was tending bar at the Boarding House,” Green recalled fondly. “Here was this guy three-deep at the bar running a sideshow, knowing everybody’s name and what everybody was drinking. And I thought who is this guy?”
When a club employee mentioned that Bresette was interested in a job, Green told him to come for a visit. “I’ve done a lot of interviews in my life, and I could tell from talking to Tom that there was a level here that was more than a bartender,” Green said. After a number of meetings, Green offered Bresette the job as club manager. “It’s been one of the best hires I ever made,” said Green, who remains a mentor to Tom. “Nantucket Golf Club is really, as some people have said, an institution, and it’s played a very, very important role far beyond the concept of just getting a bunch of people together to play golf… and a lot of that comes down to Tom.”
For his dedication to Nantucket’s youth and service to the community,
N Magazine selects Tommy Bresette as Person of the Year.
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