Wake Forest's 1976 ACC championship team pictured here featured six players who made it to the PGA Tour: Curtis Strange, Jay Haas, Scott Hoch, Bob Byman, David Thore and Tim Saylor. Front row from left are Mark Tinder, Haas. Back row from left are Saylor, Byman, Wayne DeFrancesco, coach Jesse Haddock, Hoch, Strange, Thore and Chapman.

Champions All

North Carolina has produced several notable pros,
many great amateurs and a few unparalleled rascals

By Ron Green Sr.

Here's an interesting fact: In 1964, Davis Love Jr., then the pro at Charlotte Country Club, played in the Augusta Masters, a rare thing for a club pro, even one of Love's exceptional skills. He had earned his place in his second Masters with a high finish in the U.S. Open. On Sunday night, after the final round of the Masters, he drove home and on Monday, another generation of exceptional skill was born. Davis Love III has had a few good Masters himself.

Here's a good story: After he was badly burned in an airplane crash, Skip Alexander, a PGA Tour pro from Lexington, had minimal use of his left hand. He asked doctors to shape the hand into a permanent grip that would hold a golf club. They did and he returned to the tour and won the Ben Hogan Award for exceptional achievement after overcoming a physical problem.

Here's a cute story: Charles Price, who would become one of our greatest golf writers (and settle in Pinehurst), tried to play the tour back in the late 1940s but had little success. He asked Clayton Heafner, a topnotch tour player out of Charlotte, “Why can't I play golf?”

Heafner eyed Price's 5-foot-9, 135-pound frame and said, “Have you ever noticed that most of the young guys who come out here are pretty big? Most of them are built like a truck driver. And did you notice they can all putt? Most of them have a touch like a hairdresser. Well, the trouble with you is, you're built like a hairdresser and putt like a truck driver.”

I never believed that story but I like it.

One more: Bill Harvey of Greensboro, who was once one of the top amateurs in the country (and reputedly the best gin player), has won tournaments in five decades, starting in the 1950s, and may not be done yet. Once, when asked why he never turned pro, Harvey, who never turned down a game if the price was right, said, “I couldn't afford to. There wasn't enough money out there to make me give up what I was doing.”

Someone asked me about golf in North Carolina and those kinds of things started popping into my mind, little things about some of the biggest people in our realm. Golf has a rich and colorful history in North Carolina, much of it glorious. This is a state that has been the fairway to stardom for a long list of champions, several of them national champions. It has been a campus for a dazzling lineup of college stars. It has been home to some towering figures in the development of the game. It has sent forth some record breakers. And it has turned out one of the best golf gamblers of our time.

On Sept. 4, 1942, Raymond Floyd was born at Fort Bragg. The cute little fellow would grow up to be big, strong and the best golfer ever from North Carolina, an intense competitor noted for the stare that he wore when he was in the heat of battle. He is a Hall of Famer who won two PGA Championships, a U.S. Open and a Masters championship, along with 18 other PGA Tour victories and thus far more than a dozen Senior PGA Tour titles. He was a member of eight Ryder Cup teams.

And then there is Leon Crump. He grew up caddying and scuffling at what was once Eastwood Golf Course in Charlotte, a public course whose eighth and 10th greens backed up to a service station; whose women's lockerroom once contained a Harley-Davidson that someone was probably hiding from the repo man; whose fairways were frequented by a professional wrestler who wore his mask when he played golf; whose games included hitting from the roof of the clubhouse or throwing the ball around the course with a jai alai cesta or hitting while standing in a golf cart, things like that.

Crump ruled Eastwood and had a pretty good command of most other courses he played around the country. Amarillo Slim, the great poker champion who also enjoyed a game of golf, once told Sports Illustrated that Leon Crump was the best in the country at playing golf for money. Crump traveled some with the legendary Titanic Thompson and he locked horns with an occasional tour player. He eventually wrote a book about his exploits.

On the legitimate side of amateur golf, Harvie Ward, a handsome son of a Tarboro pharmacist, was, with due respect to Billy Joe Patton (with whom we will deal shortly) the best ever from North Carolina. Ward, playing for the University of North Carolina, won the NCAA championship in 1949, won back-to-back U.S. Amateurs in 1955-56 and won the British Amateur in 1952.

One of Ward's most memorable triumphs came in the North & South Amateur in 1948. He had beaten a fellow named Arnold Palmer in the semifinals and faced Frank Stranahan, heir to the Champion spark plug fortune, in the final. More than 1,000 Carolina students came to cheer for Ward and the match turned into a pep rally of sorts, since many of the students knew little or nothing about golf. They knew Ward, a popular figure on campus, a happy-go-lucky type who would walk down a fairway with his arm around a girl.

“He had a certain rhythm and motion and romance about his game,” a teammate recalled a few years ago.

Stranahan was every bit as handsome as Ward and had a body built through a weight program. He often played in pro tournaments. His game, though, and his demeanor were all business. Which didn't serve him well since the students cheered every mistake he made and went nuts every time Ward got the ball airborne. Ward one-putted 18 of the 36 holes and won 1 up. The next year, Stranahan drubbed the Palmer fellow 12 and 11 in the semis and beat Ward 2 and 1 in the final.

The best woman golfer ever from North Carolina? Estelle Lawson Page of Chapel Hill. She won the 1937 U.S. Women's Amateur. In the title match, she knocked off the great Patty Berg, 7 and 6. She also won seven North & South Amateurs against the likes of Dorothy Kirby and Louise Suggs, won three state championships and won seven Carolinas championships.

The most colorful player, and one of the best players, period, was Billy Joe Patton of Morganton. He talked his way around a course, playing to the galleries. His backswing was a blur, the result of which was often trouble, but he was such an imaginative and daring escape artist, some people said he was better off in the trees than in the fairway. At the end of an escape, though, there's always a putt to be made and Patton made them. He will tell you today, “You never saw me miss a 3-footer, did you?”

Patton almost won the 1954 Augusta Masters, finishing one stroke behind Ben Hogan and Sam Snead after hitting two balls into the water on the back nine of the final round. He set a 36-hole scoring record in the U.S. Open and came close to winning that championship on two occasions. He won the North & South Amateur three times and the Southern Amateur and reached the semifinals of the U.S. Amateur. He played on five Walker Cup teams and four World Cup teams.

Here's how he played: In the U.S. Amateur semifinal at Pinehurst, he was two down to eventual champion Labron Harris going to the 13th hole. He hit his second shot to the 13th about 10 feet from the cup and could win the hole if he made it. He got ready to putt, then backed away, went to his golf bag and pulled out a floppy old hat and put it on. He got ready again, then went back to the bag and put on a pair of glasses he had sat on the night before, with obvious results. They were crooked and looked like they might fall apart. He settled back over the ball and this time he hit it and it went in.

He halved the 14th, then hit a horrible tee shot on the par-3 15th, bogeyed and went two down. Then he made a miracle pitch on the par-5 16th for a birdie but lost the match on the 17th. Never a dull moment.

The man who traveled the rockiest road to success was Charlie Sifford of Charlotte. He was a black man playing tournament golf at a time when he was not welcome at many tournaments because of the color of his skin. He won two tournaments on the PGA Tour — the 1967 Greater Hartford Open and the 1969 Los Angeles Open — and two more on the Senior PGA Tour. His biggest victories, though, were won off the course. He pioneered the way for black players and for that, he was honored as one of the top 100 people in the first century of golf.

If you start talking about giants of the game whose roots were in North Carolina, you mention Richard Tufts, whose family owned Pinehurst until 1970. He served on every sort of committee the United States Golf Association had and was its president for awhile. He helped write and rewrite some of the rules of golf. He captained a Walker Cup team. He helped found the Carolinas Golf Association. He was as great a champion as amateur golf ever had, not on the course but off. The halls of fame into which he has been inducted, while great in their honor, seem somehow inadequate in paying tribute to a man who cherished golf that was played and respected the way it was meant to be.

There is a handsome statue of Tufts just outside the Pinehurst clubhouse. Standing beside his is a statue of the greatest architect ever to call North Carolina home, Donald Ross. Just off the great No. 2 course he built is the home in which Ross spent the last decades of his life. His trademark greens with their elevations and their devilish dips and twists lie across America and if he designed a course, rest assured the members will point that out to you.

Collegians not otherwise prominently mentioned here who achieved stardom on the campus or later in tournament golf include Arnold Palmer, Art Wall, Mike Souchak, Jack Lewis, Lanny Wadkins, Jay Sigel, Curtis Strange, Jay Haas, Gary Hallberg, Joe Inman, Leonard Thompson, Jim Simons, Eddie Pearce, Scott Hoch, Jerry Haas, Chris Kite, Len Mattiace, John Inman, Billy Andrade, Donna Andrews, Nina Foust, Jean Bartholomew, Cathy Johnston-Forbes, Patty Jordan, Carol Mann, Karen Noble, Katie Peterson, Laura Philo, Kathy Postlewait, Stephanie Neill and Angie Ridgeway, to name a few.

Curiously, given how much golf we play and how strongly we embrace it, there have not been a lot of national champions from our state. Floyd won the Open, Page the Women's Amateur, Ward two Men's Amateurs and the British Amateur. Larry Beck of Kinston won a USGA Junior championship. Cliff Cunningham of Monroe was a national senior champion. David Eger, who grew up in Charlotte, won the U.S. Mid-Amateur (and a couple of North & Souths).

Clayton Heafner twice finished second in the U.S. Open. In the 1951 Open at Oakland Hills, Heafner went into the final round tied with Ben Hogan for fifth place, two shots out of the lead. Hogan played two groups in front of Heafner. Now, this is how hard Hogan concentrated on his game — he shot a closing 67 to win. Heafner shot 69 and finished second. In the locker room, Heafner congratulated Hogan on his victory and Hogan said, “Thanks, how'd you do?” Heafner used to get red around the neck telling that one, and he'd call Hogan a name or two.

Heafner could play. He won six PGA Tour events and made three Ryder Cup teams, never losing a match in that international competition. His scoring average of 70.43 in 1948 was second only to Hogan's. In that other Open Heafner almost won — he missed a six-footer on the final green that would have tied him for the championship with Cary Middlecoff.

Badin's Johnny Palmer won nine times on the PGA Tour, including the 1949 World Championship tournament in Chicago. He was runnerup to Sam Snead in the 1949 PGA Championship and was a Ryder Cupper. He was among the best of his time around and on the greens.

Other notable pros from North Carolina include Alexander, Chip Beck of Fayetteville, Clarence Rose of Goldsboro, Jim Thorpe of Roxboro, Larry Hinson of Gastonia, Sam Adams of Boone, Jim Ferree of Winston-Salem, Leonard Thompson of Laurinburg and Johnny Bulla of Durham.

Notable women include Marge Burns of Greensboro, 10 times state champion, six times Carolinas champion, five times winner of the Teague Award as the outstanding female athlete in the Carolinas, LPGA Teacher of the Year in 1976. Pursuing some of Burns' records is Page Marsh Lea of Raleigh, who won the North & South Amateur, six N.C. Women's Golf Association titles and three Carolinas junior crowns and was a two-time All-American at the University of North Carolina.

Giants of the game include Peggy Kirk Bell of Pine Needles Resort, who was a Curtis Cup team member, won the Titleholders and the North & South Amateur and who has for years been regarded as one of the top teachers in the country. In 1990, she received the Bobby Jones Award for her contributions to the game. It is one of the most prestigious of all golf awards.

Another giant is Pat Corso, president of Pinehurst, who brought the U.S. Open, the U.S. Senior Open and the Tour Championship to Pinehurst. So successful was the U.S. Open, it is returning in 2005. Corso has led the restoration of the resort to its old elegance and stature and at the same time moved it forward in keeping with the times.

Other amateur men of note include Dale Morey of High Point, who has won 270 tournaments in his long career, two of them USGA Seniors titles; Charlie Smith of Gastonia, winner of the North & South and a Walker Cupper; his brother Dave, known as “Big 'Un”; David Strawn, runnerup in the U.S. Amateur, and the aforementioned gamesman Bill Harvey, who won more than 200 tournaments, including a N.C. Amateur, three Carolinas Amateurs, the Porter Cup, Eastern and Dixie Amateurs and the Tournament of Champions Amateur and was twice runnerup in the North & South.

Architects of note are Tom Fazio, who has lived in North Carolina for several years now and who has been rightly acclaimed the best by his peers, and the Maples family, most notably Dan and Ellis, who have done masterly work.

No doubt I have overlooked some who deserve mention here and for that I apologize. I can remember having seen a sand green, which means I'm now old enough to be forgetful.

About the author: Ron Green Sr. retired in 1999 after 50 years as a writer for the Charlotte Observer and the Charlotte News. He has written two golf books, "From Tobacco Road to Amen Corner" and "Shouting at Amen Corner."

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