They are going to kill Mason Rudolph Golf Course, a slap in
the face of a great man and a city’s history.
Oh, I know the plan is on hold after the public learned
about the maneuver by government to quietly erase a precious bit of
Clarksville, Tennessee’s history. The
public protest came after the deed basically was done. It is one more example
of how the lack of effective local newspapers is allowing government to be
basically unchecked.
That hurts me, because I spent my life as a newspaper reporter and editor, and I took our public watchdog duty seriously. Besides that, I loved Mason Rudolph, a man who, apparently, the big guys in charge of Clarksville have tried to forget.
Early on in my life as a colorful young journalist in
Clarksville – 1974-1988 – I was told by my boss, Gene Washer—to telephone the
legendary golfer, Mason Rudolph, and gather some details and quotes about some
PGA Tour event in which he was playing.
As the junior sportswriter on the staff of The
Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle such tasks were just a part of the job. I once
did a two-hour recorded interview with Pat Head (pre-Summitt), the great
basketball star from nearby Henrietta, while she was in Montreal as co-captain
of the 1976 women’s basketball team that took Olympic silver. I turned the tape
over to Washer, and he wrote the story. It was a decent story, but the quotes were
exceptional.
Anyway, Mason was a different story. He was a PGA legend, the most important
athlete – except for Wilma Rudolph, the wonderful woman who ran from a youth
marred by polio to buckets full of Olympic medals – in Clarksville’s history.
That may be slightly hyperbolic, as Head became Summitt and
revolutionized the women’s basketball game, but at the time all of that was in
the future. If not for her, there likely would not be a Caitlin Clark on the
news every time she takes a shot or uses the bathroom. Oh, I truly admire both
of them, by the way, as they were/are in their ways, rebels with a cause.
Mason-- as kind a man as a 24-year-old sports reporter could be
assigned to call on Fridays for first-round details, Saturdays for details to
put in Sunday’s paper and on Mondays if he had made the cut and completed the
tournament – was a pleasure and didn’t take any offense that the only golf I’d
played at that point was for a college Phys. Ed requirement and a few times
with my Dad. I was limited because I
always had trouble with my drives, although I could play the short game
OK. And, I always have enjoyed using my
putter, but that’s another story, indeed.
Anyway, Mason and I would talk briefly about the highs and
lows of the tourney. I’d write a short story that we could put into the
Associated Press write-thru or we could use it as a brief across from the agate
page. Nobody knows what an agate page is/was in this clicks-journalism era, but
it may have been the most-important page in the sports section for gamblers and
other sports fans.
Mason was the real deal on the tour, and Clarksville’s
greatest ambassador to what then was still a growing sport.
Now, unless good sense and history win, it looks like they
are going to take his golf course, a short (good for my “so-called game”)
nine-hole course, a green jewel in the heart of his hometown, away.
In a week or so, Mason Rudolph Golf Course, which should be
protected as a historic landmark, was going to be closed to make way for walking
trails and all the other claptrap that they put in city parks these days. Plans
are to call it Mason Rudolph Legacy Park. That, in itself, is silly. Mason
Rudolph’s LEGACY is golf. I believe this likely will happen, as the big guys
who run the city wait for the delayed (because of ineffective media) reaction
and angst to go away.
I’m no longer a Clarksvillian, but I think that is a load of
crap. Mason Rudolph should always be
honored by having this 48 acres in the heart of the old city used as a golf
course.
Nowadays, as the “Queen City of the Cumberland” booms in
population with new industry, Nashville property tax refugees and military
retirees, most people likely don’t know that nickname for the city. Let alone
the golfer Mason Rudolph.
Clarksville native Mason, at 16, was the youngest-ever (at
the time) player to qualify for the U.S. Open, when he did that in 1950. He
went on to win the USGA National Junior Amateur Championship that same year,
the first 16-year-old to do so.
He continued to play for his beloved hometown school,
Clarksville High, and he won TSSAA titles in 1951 and 1952. He went on to play
at the University of Tennessee and Memphis State.
He was on the winning side as a member of the U.S. Walker
Cup team in 1957. Golf World Magazine,
in 1999, named Mason as one of the Top 10 Junior players of the 20th
Century.
Mason six times won the Tennessee State Open.
He went on the PGA Tour in 1959, and did it in style: He was
named Rookie of the Year.
He won five tour events during his 21-year career that
included competing in 15 Masters and 16 U.S. Open Championships.
He was an equal to his teammates on the 1971 Ryder Cup team.
Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, J.C. Snead and Mason won the cup for
America.
There are many other highlights in a fine career that
included a stint as Vandy golf coach.
Mason was in the charter class of inductees into the
Tennessee Golf Hall of Fame in 1990 and in 1995 went into the Tennessee Sports
Hall of Fame.
Like I said, I left Clarksville in 1988, so I don’t have a
vote nor do I have any sway over history-blind city administrators and blowhard
politicos. And as far as I can tell, the local newspaper, now overseen by the
much-ballyhooed Giant Corporate Cannibalize Local American Newspapers Project, has not done
its job in letting people know what is happening over on Golf Club Lane.
But I have memories that tie me to that course and to the
city. I not only was a regular caller to Mason when he was out on tour, I also
spoke frequently with his wife, Carol. If Mason wasn’t available, she had all
of his stats and details.
And on more than a single occasion, I was a coffee-drinking
guest in the Rudolph home, overlooking the fairways of Clarksville Country
Club, a beautiful course for the city’s white, rich men. My “friend” O.J. Simpson, a recently deceased
double-murderer, movie star and great halfback, broke the color barrier by
playing tennis in an Acme Boot Company international outing at the club.
My only other tie to that country club course was my pal, Mason-disciple
Larry Schmidt, because we’d get loosened up and go sledding out on the course
when snow covered the Queen City.
I really loved Mason and Carol, and even after I moved to
Nashville, I called them, just to say “Hi.” They always were glad to hear from
me and vice versa.
When I became Leaf-Chronicle sports editor in the
late-1970s, one of my duties was to cover the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, at
the old Colonial Country Club in Germantown, east of Memphis. Regardless of
standing on the tour, Mason always played in what essentially was his home
tourney.
I stayed at the Holiday Inn out by Interstate 40 and a
Shoney’s (an expense-account-friendly fine dining establishment). Each day, when I went out to the course early
and came back late, I kept “bumping” into young Spaniard Severiano Ballesteros,
who stayed in the next room. He was then a “tour rabbit,” fellows who lived in
their cars and quadrupled up in hotel rooms as they tried to make their marks.
Seve, who was a kind and gentle fellow, did more than make his mark.
It was out at the Colonial that I met tour sponsor, the
“actor” Danny Thomas. I introduced myself to him, and he literally turned away
from my handshake. Well, really, he was
so drunk, he may not even have seen my extended hand or me. He did much for
children, of course, but I always will think of him as an asshole too important
to bother with a sub-30-year-old journalist. Howard Cosell gave me the same
treatment a year or so later at the Ali-Spinks title fight, but it didn’t
bother me because Ali embraced me and Leon was not a bad guy, either. Hit in
the head too much, probably.
I spent my Colonial days walking the course with Mason, who
looked to be in contention in the first round. In reality, age got him and he
finished down the list. But it was the last time he made the PGA cut, and I was
glad to be out there with him.
And, through him, I met some of his friends. Lee Trevino was
such a joyful soul. I even got to walk a fairway with Gary Player, and we both
grabbed beers from a stand on the course. Great people don’t look down on young
guys, and Gary was a great man.
I’ve admitted to
being no golfer. In addition to Larry
Schmidt, I had a fanatic golfer friend, Freddy Wyatt, who took me out to Swan
Lake (an 18-hole course on a lake and near Dunbar Cave), and tried to teach me
to drive. I just could never get the grasp, so I mostly drove the cart and
oversaw the beer distribution in many days I spent with him and his friends.
Austin Peay Head Basketball Coach Ronnie Bargatze – now better
known as comedian Nate Bargatze’s favorite uncle – also was a golf fanatic, so
he and Larry played for dimes many afternoons.
And there have been other courses developed around
Clarksville since I’ve been gone.
But Mason Rudolph, which reportedly only had 2,790 players
last year, was the workingman’s par-three course. It was forgiving and fun to play. A stupid statistic from the city, it is
pointed out that that number of golf players is less than the number of
households in a one-mile radius of the course.
Does that matter? Why?
My non-golf-playing friends and I even staged our own
version of the Masters there one week back around 1980. A red-checked sportscoat I bought for a
couple of bucks at the Mustard Seed, went to the winner.
The participants were all ranks of newsroom glory, from the
editor to the clerk to the cops reporter, the copy desk chief, a particularly
rotund government reporter who couldn’t write but was nice as could be and the
sports guys.
A future Army colonel, who was a summer intern at the
newspaper to learn the ropes of local media for his future public affairs officer
duties in war, peace and I’m sure time spent in Washington’s Concrete Foxhole,
drove the cart we rented. His main role was to make sure my friends and I had
at least one pint per stroke as the afternoon went on. We did let the
more-serious play through.
We ended the night at the Pizza Hut, where the jacket went
to Sandy Smith. I don’t think she actually won the competition, but the coat
looked good on her, and she was the most-sober among us at the awards ceremony.
I played a few more times at Mason Rudolph Golf Course, the
last time being when I took on Billy Fields, formerly the rotund reporter who
had sold his body and soul to public relations, and Tony Durr, former editor
who left Clarksville in the dead of night for a variety of reasons. But I was
his best friend in town, and he came back to visit me occasionally.
We played 18 holes – twice around the course – and the stakes
were simple. Durr purchased a used set of Goodwill clubs that morning and the
winner of the day would get them. I gave
most of them back to Goodwill years ago, but I continue to hold onto my putter.
Other memories of Mason Rudolph Golf Course are pretty simple.
Many days, I drove by the course on my way to work at 200 Commerce Street. It was out
of my way, but it was a peaceful route and helped me mentally prepare for the
day’s murders, prostitution busts (the town madam was a distinguished history
scholar and a close – not professional – friend), mayoral drunken antics, fatal
GI car wrecks and helicopter crashes and the occasional bit of good news or
visit with The Lone Ranger.
There were times I’d drive my favorite rodeo cowboy and
reporter and his customary 12-pack past the course to get to the nearby rooming
house where he lived.
Sometimes, as I did “man-on-the-street” columns for the
newspaper, I’d stop at the course and walk the course, looking for human
interest and for my own clarity of mind. Sometimes I found neither.
Fifty years ago, I moved to Clarksville. Fourteen years
later, I left, a bit melancholy because no one in town – other than the
newsroom and the Chief Sheriff’s Deputy and vodka-chugging mayor – even called to
tell me I should stay. There were no farewell celebrations, no invitations for
dinner or drinks in the city where I’d worked seven days a week, as much as 12
hours a day, to help make sure the newspaper did its duty. Truth is, that always has bothered me, but I
was not a born-and-bred Clarksvillian, so I shrugged it off.
So, I suppose it’s really none of my business what
Clarksville does with Mason Rudolph Golf Course. Most people up there probably don’t even know
who he was.
But I’ll tell you, he was a damn nice guy, a fellow who put
Clarksville on the map as a golf and athletic hot spot.
And he was my friend, as well. To turn a golf course named
for him into a millennial-favored set of walking trails and politically correct
monkey bars is simply the wrong thing to do.
Next thing you know is they’ll turn Wilma Rudolph Boulevard
into an overpass.
