An Architect, a Missionary and an Airplane Mechanic

I’m not sure who got the bigger surprise the first time I played a rec golf league match in college. Representing my fraternity in a Ryder Cup–style format, I sliced a drive into the woods on the second hole, something I had done hundreds of times before. So I pulled another Sports Authority special out of my pocket, teed it up and launched it off my Golden Bear 10-degree into the fairway.

“What the hell was that?” said the rival frat boy we were up against. 

“Breakfast ball. That first drive sucked,” I said matter-of-factly, dumbfounded by his consternation. 

“But the woods are inbounds, and I can see your ball up against a tree.”

“Yeah, but my second drive was what I meant to do. Player B is always better.”

My playing partner, who came of age on the well-groomed fairways of a North Florida country club, looked at the ground and shook his head. I had told him that I could play golf—and I could. But I didn’t understand these rules that he and the rest of the group followed. In my mind, those were the same that the pros played by. And we were not pros. 

It was downhill for the rest of the match and has been pretty much ever since. Those rules still don’t come easy to me, two decades and hundreds of rounds later. I was brought into the game following a much different set, one that I still find more important and eminently enjoyable. It’s a welcome departure from the Roman civil law advocated by the USGA. It’s more of a common-law form of golf, skillfully honed over the years by an architect, a missionary and an airplane mechanic in North Carolina.

If you grow up in the suburbs of a major city, there are two main ways to learn golf. The first is at the local country club with a PGA professional, mastering the proper etiquette through organized lessons, camps and tournaments. The second is on the public course with a father, mother or some other sort of golfing parental figure, following whichever path seems best. The former group gets the coveted spots on high school teams that don’t have room for hackers or goof-offs. The latter, which included me, keep playing on the public tracks, learning less about competitive golf and more about life. 

My formative lessons came at something resembling weekly golf rounds at Monroe Country Club, 30 minutes southeast of Charlotte, helmed by our trio of leaders. The rounds were always open to whoever was interested, be they near/distant/removed family relations or folks from church or work. My father, the architect, and his friends, the missionary and the airplane mechanic, brought their sons when we came of age, so we joined their universe for those late-afternoon hours. It was equal parts comedy routine, philosophy class, lessons in marriage don’ts (they had identified many more of those than do’s), spiritual revival, ill-conceived financial schemes and, occasionally, golf. 

The only thing country club about Monroe is its name. Owned by the city, it’s the type of pretension-free place where more shirts say Dale Earnhardt than Peter Millar. When I was a kid, it wasn’t uncommon for groups of four to appear from the woods, play a few holes, then disappear before getting too close to the clubhouse. But, like many munis, good bones and a committed staff make it one of the best in the area and a destination for those seeking diamonds in the rough. 

The front nine opened in 1936 and sports Donald Ross’ signature. The wandering Scotsman is credited with building more than 400 courses, and even he admitted that he spent more time on some than others, perhaps not even visiting a few of them at all. Given that Monroe is little more than an hour away from where Ross eventually settled in Pinehurst, it’s fun to think that the brain behind No. 2, Seminole and Oak Hill scouted these holes as well. But, if we are being honest, chances are he didn’t. And that’s fine—for our group, honesty was more of a fluid concept anyway.

There are a few Ross hallmarks, including turtleback and elevated-plateau greens and blind approaches, and they led to the formation of several common-law rules. My father—who gave me his name, bloodline and propensity to play approach shots from forests on the right side of the hole—recorded one of the most remarkable birdies in the history of the game on No. 8, a par 4 that turns you back toward the clubhouse, ascending with a blind approach to a narrow horizontal green at the apex of a hill. About 40 yards off the tee, his low stringer exploded an unfortunate feathered resident as it flew over the fairway. The missionary and the airplane mechanic determined that the drive was so pure, he obviously would have birdied the hole, and since a bird was the only thing that prevented it, Dad was awarded a 3. 

A new rule was born, and I learned to take a stroke off the score anytime wildlife impedes my game. 

None of us could ever figure out No. 3. The hilltop-to-hilltop par 4 measured only 335 yards from the tips, but any drive that couldn’t get all the way to the green—and none of ours ever could—fed back down into the valley for another blind approach, this one to a pinched, front-to-back-sloping vertical green hemmed in by two sand traps. Only 10 yards beyond the green was the course’s driveway and parking lot. In all my rounds there, I cannot remember anyone finding the green in regulation. But we landed in that parking lot often. 

The missionary, Dr. Tim, who served as the official philosopher and theologian of the group, dubbed No. 3 a “Debacle Hole.” In scoring terms, this meant that if you played the hole badly enough, you simply picked up and took a “D,” which acted as a wildcard for whatever score you needed at the end of the round. The missionary also had a doctorate in psychology, so no one questioned his proclamation. 

It should be obvious by now that these were not competitive rounds, at least in the traditional sense, and “real” golfers who occasionally joined us could be driven to madness. Dr. Tim brought other eccentricities with him that he’d acquired from a lifetime of travel. Perhaps his habit of playing barefoot, before eventually migrating to golf sandals, was the result of serving the needy in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, but it took me years to realize that this wasn’t a widely accepted thing to do in golf. 

As for the quotes from the movie Joe Dirt that he sprinkled in throughout a round—“Life’s a garden, dig it?” (when in a sand trap), “You done with that apple core?” (when someone broke wind) and “You gotta keep on keepin’ on” (for most any other situation)—those were picked up teaching high school students and took on a spiritual bent of their own. 

Another tradition he started was referring to a local veterinarian as “my personal physician” and consulting him on any injury or ailment any of the three of them suffered. They also wrote his name in for virtually all political offices, from county sheriff to president of the United States. Years later, after reading an article by former Esquire editor Terry McDonell about his adventures playing golf with Hunter S. Thompson, I realized that Dr. Tim brought the same level of unpredictability and intrigue, and he didn’t even need the Chivas Regal or LSD. 

The back nine at Monroe, across Pageland Highway and through a forest of Carolina pines, was designed by Tom Jackson in the early 1980s and features wider fairways, flatter greens and more water. 

No. 11 is a par 3 that requires a carry over a pond to an elevated green, with a long bunker separating the two. In my earliest outings, we would sometimes play with a guy named Joe, from church, who would find that bunker from every angle of the hole, including over the back of the green. When he tragically died of a heart attack, my dad and his friend thought it would be fitting to rake his ashes into the bunker and were stopped only by Joe’s grieving family. Henceforth, hitting into that bunker would evoke the reprimand “Hey, you are hitting into Joe!” from Dad or Rick, the airplane mechanic, and the player got to shave a stroke off their score in memoriam. 

Rick honed his craft in the Air Force during the Vietnam era. He didn’t talk much about his service, not because of what he had seen, but because, he assured us, whatever he did would have landed him in trouble with his wife and potentially the U.S. government. He could repair anything mechanical, and often did for us, but couldn’t fix his long iron and driver swings. So he simply didn’t carry them in his bag. And he didn’t need to, because if he caught the sweet spot on his garage-built clubs, he could hit his 5-iron just as far as anyone could drive it. 

Unlike my father, who speaks mostly under his breath on the course, and Dr. Tim, who never took a breath between platitudes, Rick repeated the same quotes round after round, year after year. This would usually start the first time he rolled a putt past a hole, when he’d look toward the pro shop and mutter, “Someone must have ironed this green out.” And, of course, if he deemed the green had been ironed out, you could count on a two-putt maximum.

In addition to “hitting into Joe,” he would let you know that you “sure got ahold of that one,” whether you actually did or not, and announce, “Let’s go to the clubhouse!” at the end of a round, referring not to the actual clubhouse but to the Jack in the Box down the street, where they would eat post-round tacos.

Eventually, college and a job pulled me out of town, but we picked up just like old times whenever I returned. The last round I played with them together was in December 2021. For the first time in my life, I did not shake Rick’s hand on the tee when he gave me his standard greeting of “Oh, Mr. Moore!”—feigning surprise even though he knew I was visiting. He was recovering from cancer, and we were concerned about him getting COVID. Two months later, he did, and none of us ever played with him again. 

Dr. Tim gave a memorable eulogy at church on a chilly March day. Toward the end, he broke down about wanting just one more round of golf with his friend—to shoot the breeze over the fairways, battle with the ironed-out greens and share tacos at their clubhouse. 

No. 18 is my favorite hole at Monroe, a par 5 that starts on the highest point of the property at a clearing and plays gradually downhill and to the right, back into the woods and Richardson Creek. The hole narrows as it moves to a gentle green blocked by a line of trees on the right, but with deep slopes off the left and back sides that make a precise wedge or well-balanced bump-and-run the only plays. Standing on the tee box, usually as the sun is moving toward the horizon, the boundary between the fairway and the woods becomes less defined as the shades of green blend in the softer light. A breeze is always present, as if the course itself is exhaling with you to finish off the day. 

Among our many conversations on that course, we pondered various takes on the nature of heaven. Now that I have kids of my own, I find myself on the difficult end of the questions I used to ask, trying, as C.S. Lewis did, to describe things for which words do not exist. As I fumble for answers, my imagination wanders to places earthly and not, but inevitably I see the long silhouettes of an architect, a missionary and an airplane mechanic standing on that 18th tee, exhaling with the wind, loading up golf balls fished out of water hazards and keeping scores more important than anything on a card.

“You gotta keep on keepin’ on.” —Dr. Tim, the missionary, and also Joe Dirt