Excerpt from "Golf in the Carolinas"

 Passion For Golf - A Carolinas Love Affair With The Grand Old Game

The precise moment that golf snares our flesh, our hearts and our souls differs from one person to the next, but the essence of the moment is much like the ones experienced by J.M. Whitsitt of Charleston in 1912 and Dan Hill III of Durham in 1953.

            “The first time I had my hands on a golf club was on St. Patrick’s Day, when some of my friends urged me to take up what I thought then was a mollycoddle game,” Whitsitt recalled in a 1936 letter to Pinehurst’s Richard Tufts. “I walked around with them on the old Belvedere course and hit a few drives which were exceptionally good, according to their statements. In any case, the bug bit me, and I immediately went up the next day and bought a set of clubs.”

            Hill’s family moved to the Hope Valley neighborhood about two miles southwest of downtown Durham and settled into a home alongside the twelfth fairway of Hope Valley Country Club. Hill, nine years old at the time, knew nothing about golf and knew no other boys on his street. One June morning, he attended a junior golf clinic conducted by head pro Marshall Crichton and Duke University golf coach Ellis “Dumpy” Hagler.

            “I remember not being able to figure it out,” says Hill, the Carolinas Golf Association president in 1984-85. “Then I hit one shot and it got up in the air with a little draw and it went right at the 125-yard marker. I remember it like it was yesterday. ‘Oh my God, that was something!’ That was the light bulb for me.”

            The bug bites. The bulb pops on. From there it’s a life of sunrises and sunsets with good friends and automatic two-down presses; of infomercials at 2 a.m. hawking titanium drivers and the latest gadget for the one-plane swing; it’s the Scottish sky, sunny at one end and rainy at the other, as you make the turn at Royal Dornoch; it’s super-balls and four-balls and high-balls at the nineteenth hole; it’s the internal challenge of rallying from a bad start to post a respectable number, of not posting that career best mentally when you’re only on the fourteenth fairway; it’s posture and grip pressure and takeaway and finish; it’s settling into a beefy leather chair with a volume of prose from Herbert Warren Wind or James Finnegan; it’s qualifying for match play in the Carolinas Amateur or winning the first flight in a One-Day Tournament.

            “Our golfers just love the game,” says Jack Nance, executive director of the CGA. “Every championship is like the Ryder Cup for them. They really enjoy playing and competing. They love the competition. They love hanging out afterward around the scoreboard, sitting at the bar. They love to tell stories. The camaraderie is a common thread. It’s really fun to see.”

            The triggers and hooks are different from one golfer to the next. But each falls under the spell of the game, generally for life, and sets off on an insatiable quest to master his mind, his body, his equipment, the wind and the rain, the tucks and rolls and hills of the terrain. The passion flows in the old-money private clubs and throughout the daily-fee enclaves of the Carolinas as well. Two of the most ardent golfers at Asheville Municipal Golf Course are Billy Gardenheight and the course’s long-time starter, Cortez Baxter. 

 “Golf is like drugs, it’s addictive,” says Gardenheight. “You can play from cradle to graveyard. Most sports you have to give up. This one you play as long as you want to. I’m seventy-two and I’ve been playing since 1945.”

            “It’s like sex—you  don’t have to be good at it to enjoy it,” Baxter adds. “Once you pick up the clubs, that’s it. You’re done for.”

            Marty McKenzie of Pinehurst provided two pieces of counsel in the fall of 2007 to a youngster who was just beginning the game. One, he gave the boy a club with a pre-formed grip so that he would begin his golf life with his hands properly positioned on the club. Two, he warned him to “never expect perfection.”

            “You won’t get there,” McKenzie said. “In golf, the journey is more important than the destination. Look at Vijay Singh. The man hits eight million golf balls a day, and every time they interview him, he’s working on something.”

            For Heyward Sullivan of Greenville, S.C., the latch was a series of twenty-five golf lessons given by his father as a Christmas present when the boy was twelve. Sullivan remembers the pro at Greenville Country Club very well—“A Scotsman named David Ferguson who rolled his Rs through a thick burr,” he says.

            Ever since, “Golf has been a wonderful part of my life,” says Sullivan, the CGA president in 1998-99. 

            James Tufts, the founder of Pinehurst, built nine holes as a lark in 1898 but wasn’t smitten with the game’s prospects. He inquired of Allen Treadway, the manager of the Holly Inn in Pinehurst, if Treadway thought nine more holes would be a good idea.

            “Save your money,” Treadway answered. “Golf is a fad and will never last.”

            Tufts’ instincts and better advice from others in his circle convinced him otherwise, and soon Tufts embarked on the expansion of the fledgling Sandhills resort that would lead to Pinehurst becoming an early beacon to the growth of golf in America, to amateur scion William C. Campbell comparing Pinehurst with the home of golf itself, Scotland’s own St. Andrews, and to Pinehurst as recently as 2007 being named the No. 1 golf resort in America by Travel & Leisure Golf magazine.

“Everybody can play golf,” Tufts said in those early days around the turn of the last century. “Some excellently, others indifferently, still others very badly, but all enjoyably. It keeps the player out in the open air; it keeps him moving over wide spaces; it exercises all his muscles and all his wits. It is an ideal sport for the maintenance of bodily and mental health.”

            Louis Grimball won one of the early CGA Amateurs, brandishing Col. O.J. Bond 8-and-7 in 1915 at the Country Club of Charleston. Columnist W.F. Morgan surveyed the proceedings and had this to say in the News & Courier the following morning:

             “Well, it’s over. Nice outing in old Charleston, was it not, and one renewed old friendships and made new ones. Ah! Golf is a great sport, played by men of ‘birth and education.’ It makes one forget his cares, it clears the cobwebs from one’s brain and has a place all its own in the line of sports. Who wins? Ah! What does it matter? After all, it’s playing the game that counts.”

Greensboro businessman A.W. McAlister was one of the early adherents to the game. He was a founder of Greensboro Country Club and in 1911 penned a book entitled, The Eternal Verities of Golf.

McAlister dedicated his book to the “comeliest thing in the world, a brand new golf ball,” noting it was “clean as the ivory of a little child’s tooth; fair as the dimpled hand of a maiden; elusive as the liquid note of the wood robin.” He remarked over the “similitude between right living and right playing of the ancient game” and believed that golf, correctly played, is a complete philosophy of life.

“Fortunate is the man who can live as he plays golf if he plays it right,” McAlister wrote, drawing these comparisons to good golf and good living:

* You cannot worry about the future, fret over the past, be overwrought emotionally or tell lies.

* If the mind begins to borrow trouble by dreading overmuch that bunker in front, there is nothing else so sure to carry the ball into it.

* Put behind him the memory of the bad stroke or the lost hole and play the next as if he had just won a victory.

* The man who swears at golf ought to have his clubs taken away temporarily and be sentenced to stand in the corner of the clubhouse for a season.

* A man cannot be a dishonest golfer and persist in the game, for it will lose its charm if not played on the square.

“Golf is a health-giving diversion in God’s out of doors which refreshes and rejuvenates and during the hours of play excludes all things else, politics, business, love, and for that reason it is the game of games for busy men of strenuous life,” McAlister wrote. “It is full of discipline and philosophy and wisdom.”

In a letter to the head professional at Greensboro Country Club concerning an upcoming junior competition, McAlister noted the importance of helping the children remain relaxed and loose despite playing “for keeps” in front of their parents and friends.

“A good golfer forgets the gallery, never gets excited, and pays no attention to anything but the ball,” he said. “The player that is least concerned and least self-conscious is the one who will win the tournament.”

The beauty of the setting and the companionship among golfers are certainly among the draws to the game. Wynn Solle, his father, Al, and Jay Harris are members at Pinehurst Country Club and cherish their late-afternoon rounds in the summertime.

            “Plenty of nights the three of us will be out walking and we’ve got the place to ourselves,” Wynn says. “The shadows are perfect. We’ll look at each other and think, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’”

“We just love the game,” Al says. “There’s no other game in the world. And where better to enjoy it than Pinehurst? I can wrap it up in one word: Tranquil. You get to be my age, you really appreciate that. When you’re young, you don’t think about those things.”

            Bill Campbell, the West Virginia insurance man who has a warehouse full of competitive and administrative laurels in golf, puts it nicely: “In golf there are no strangers, only friends we have not yet met.”

            The game’s beauty comes from its distractions from the minutia of life. George Williams is a retired Clinton attorney, now ninety years old, who has won the club championship at Coharie County Club some twenty times.

            “You have a certain amount of stress build up at work, and when you’re out on the golf course, you can forget about everything else,” Williams says. “It’s a way to relax. It’s good fellowship, and you learn a lot about people on the golf course. It’s something you can do into your later years. It keeps you active. I enjoy playing with young people. It helps you keep a young attitude.”

            For the price of a green fee and a set of a clubs, golfers get recreation as well as tuition into the University of Life. Joe Inman played college golf at Wake Forest University and professionally on the PGA and Champions Tours. He learned every value imaginable on the golf course.

            “You grew up learning how to act around adults,” Inman says. “You learned to control your emotions. You learned how to present yourself. You learned integrity, discipline and sportsmanship—without knowing you were learning anything. My dad always told me, ‘Joe, the most important things you don’t learn in the classroom.’ He was right. You were learning them on the golf course.”

            In the Carolinas you’ll find the beginnings of the game in America—there’s good reason to believe golf clubs were shipped to Charleston as early as 1759 and that a golf society was formed in the city in 1786.           

            In the Carolinas you’ll find the umbilical cord to the home of golf in St. Andrews, Scotland. The parallels between the Village of Pinehurst and the Auld Grey Toon are legion—sand, obsession and Donald Ross. “The United States may not have a St. Andrews,” says USGA executive director David Fay, “but Pinehurst is the closest thing to St. Andrews we have in terms of that feel for the history of the game, the passion of the game. The whole place exudes golf.”

            You’ll find personality—from the twinkles in the eyes of Harvie Ward and Billy Joe Patton during their amateur zeniths in the 1940s through the ’60s to the gangsomes that line up Saturday mornings at municipal courses from Asheville to Charleston.

            You’ll find terrain unequalled for its variety and beauty—riveting mountain vistas to thick hardwood forests to idyllic oceanside landscapes.

            And you’ll find passion. Michael Jordan had won the 1988 NBA Most Valuable Player award and was to be presented the award in Chicago, where Commissioner David Stern, Chicago Bulls officials and the news media were present for the ceremony. But Jordan was a no-show. He was going thirty-six that day in Pinehurst.

            Arnold Haultain in his classic 1908 work, The Mystery of Golf, writes of his recent conversion to golf and his total consummation with the game. “The duffer is puzzled at the extraordinary fascination which his new-found past-time exercises over him,” he observes. “He came to scoff, he remains to play; and he inwardly wonders how it was that he was so long a heretic.”

             Throughout the Carolinas, for more than a hundred years, they remain to play.