As ‘best friend to St. Jude kids,’ FedEx founder Fred Smith forged enduring partnership through FedEx St. Jude Championship

For the audience of fundraisers for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith had a photo he wanted to share. It captured a moment from the mid-1980s, with Smith alongside St. Jude founder Danny Thomas, at the annual PGA TOUR event held in Memphis. 

Appearing literally larger than life on video screens flanking the stage, there they were — the visionary who built the overnight delivery company that transformed the way the world does business visiting with the visionary who built a children’s research hospital that transformed the way the world treats children with cancer. 

Smith, who had been introduced as “a best friend to St. Jude kids,” said this of Danny Thomas’ humanitarian legacy: “What’s been done at St. Jude is one of the greatest gifts to humankind I’ve seen over my lifetime.”

This was in July of 2023, two years before Smith’s death at age 80 on June 21, 2025. ALSAC, the fundraising and awareness organization for St. Jude, surprised Smith that afternoon with a lifetime achievement award. Recognizing his many contributions, including as a former board member for ALSAC and St. Jude, the Executive Board Room was named in his honor.

The plaque outside it reads: “May all who enter be inspired by his model of leadership.”

Smith’s leadership, around the time of that photo with Danny Thomas, would officially launch a partnership pivotal to the future of both FedEx and St. Jude. 

It was 1986, and the Memphis PGA TOUR event benefiting St. Jude, long known as the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, needed a boost. It was the beginning of an era that would see many sports teams and leagues embrace naming rights deals.

As Smith recounted, he quickly committed his 15-year-old company, then still known as Federal Express, to step in as title sponsor. And he emphasized this — he wanted St. Jude included in title and branding.

Thus was born the Federal Express St. Jude Classic, known today as the FedEx St. Jude Championship, which for the fourth straight year will kick off the PGA TOUR’s postseason series, the FedExCup Playoffs.

“If you ask me what my fundamental principle is when I negotiate, it would simply be to say what you mean and mean what you say,” Smith told that audience of fundraisers in 2023. “With Danny Thomas, I think, it took five minutes. It was just, ‘OK, you want us to be the sponsor, we'll be the sponsor.’ ”

Sealed, Smith recalled, with a handshake.

“There was no discussion of money and all that sort of stuff, just ‘Okay, we'll do it,’” Smith said. “And everything that Mr. Thomas told me, he'd do, he did — and then some. Hopefully we did the same ourselves.”

As recounted in a documentary produced decades later, “Linked By Inspiration,” the former tournament chairman R. Grattan Brown called the partnership “a major turning point.”

“It enabled us to do a lot more than we'd been able to do previously and increase contributions to St. Jude,” Brown said.

Heading into the 2025 event, the overall tournament support for St. Jude since 1970 is valued at $80 million, the majority generated in the nearly 40 years since Smith and Thomas agreed to join FedEx and St. Jude as title sponsors.

Beyond the fundraising and awareness, the partnership has led to the integration of tournament elements authentic to the culture and mission of FedEx and St. Jude. None more cherished and anticipated than the Purple Eagle program, in which a FedEx plane is dedicated in the name of a St. Jude patient who is a child or a grandchild of a FedEx team member.

In late 2024, Smith came to St. Jude to serve as featured speaker for the St. Jude Executive Roundtable. Before he spoke, a video played sharing the story of Purple Eagle honoree Micah – a St. Jude survivor and grandson of a FedEx team member.

It prompted Smith to share the story of a FedEx executive who had lost a young daughter to leukemia in the early 1980s, when survival rates in the U.S. were much lower. 

“That brought it home to me,” Smith said. “St. Jude is a great gift of humanity because now those (survival rates) are completely reversed, and I believe she would still be with us if she had come along in this day and age because of what the great scientists and doctors have done.”