Mason Rudolph Golf Course is in the death throes, thanks to city fathers, clueless newcomers who have no idea how important, historically, he was ... and really "modern" media coverage

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.  

(Both photos are from the internet)

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 20^th 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.