We’ll term it highly unlikely that any of the Tour Championship players this week will encounter the same hazards as a trio of college players did at East Lake 40 or so years ago.
Bill Blalock doesn’t recall the exact date, but other details are clearer. “They were standing on the tee box on what is now No. 12,” said Blalock, an East Lake Golf Club member since 1974, and manager there from 1981-1994. “And there was a guy up in a tree there with a rifle and he said give me all your money. I think they only had a couple bucks between them.”
The kicker to the tale speaks to the unshakeable love of the game and the place that kept Atlanta’s oldest course going through its hardest times.
“As the story goes,” Blalock added, “one of them asked, ‘Can we keep playing?’”
Things changed, of course. Come December, it will be 30 years since Atlanta developer Tom Cousins closed on one particularly important, supersized and distressed property east of town. Who could have known then that the deal would be the necessary first step toward saving a neighborhood, changing lives, rescuing 18 historic holes punched into precious urban green ground, and turning the city into the exclamation point at the close of each golfing season?
Blalock is one of about 40 club members who joined before the resurrection of East Lake still around to give before-and-after witness accounts.
The stories the old guard can tell might shock those younger fans among the happy thousands surveying the immaculate landscape and acres of commercial energy at the Tour Championship this week. Having come of age after the great East Lake rebound, they could not look around and possibly imagine a time when the place wasn’t grand.
Some of the stories surviving the era when East Lake was bordered by one of the city’s most infamous housing projects are macabre. Like the badly burned corpse found on the 18th fairway one morning.
Some testify to other, lesser, dangers. Like dodging bottles flung from the streets beyond. Or the echo of gunfire nearby. Or watching some kid perform mischief, squeezing through a hole in the fence, plucking a ball just hit square down the fairway like a ripe strawberry and making off with it while the player watched downrange. Not sure the Rules of Golf cover that one.
There was the great big-screen television robbery of the mid-1980s, when two fellows boldly drove up in a white van, informed the assistant pro they were there to pick up the set for repairs, loaded it up and drove off to parts unknown.
Others are an almost joyful acceptance of hard times. “We used to have a few leaks in the (clubhouse) roof,” Blalock said. “In the card room if a rain came up when guys were playing cards they’d pull out umbrellas and keep playing.”
When it was too rainy to play outside, they used to play something called “locker room golf,” which involved taking a wedge and batting a ball around a circuit of the clubhouse. Not like they were going to damage anything in an already tattered hall. There was, by the way, a 2-stroke penalty for hitting a locker, a 4-stroke penalty for hitting the locker once belonging to the sainted Bobby Jones. Such sport would be frowned upon now.
Thirty years after Cousins came along and changed everything it is good to recall such tales, serving as they do as a reminder of how far things have come at East Lake.
Credit: Steve Hummer for the AJC
Credit: Steve Hummer for the AJC
“There’s a magic about the property. People don’t necessarily realize it but when they come in there, they feel it,” said Linton Hopkins, an East Lake member since 1989. That magic weaves throughout the history of the place, as well as its current mission.
East Lake was born in 1904, and became famous as the cradle of the 1930 Grand Slam champion and Masters founder Jones as well as three-time U.S. Women’s Am champion Alexa Stirling Fraser. It has earned its own chapter in the Old Testament of golf.
From glory days to decay as the neighborhood around it fell into despair. Back to glory days thanks to Cousins’ determination to reach outward and improve more than a golf course but an entire community.
While the 30 players here for the Tour Championship this week will be dividing up a nearly $58 million pot, this event somehow manages to showcase two natures of wealth, combining the gaudy with the giving. East Lake’s charitable engine for change is primed by the annual Tour Championship. And the Tour Championship’s naked money-grab is softened, humanized by its affiliation with the East Lake story. It has been a thriving partnership for the better part of the 2000s.
That East Lake story, as the old guard will tell you, is one built on the shifting sands of change. Unlike most sheltered, prestigious golf clubs, this one also shares the fate of the neighborhood around it. This place is not separate from the immediate world outside its gates, but rather the two are as connected as the front and back cover of a book.
The worst times for both course and neighborhood date back from the 1970s to Cousins’ purchase in 1993.
Before he joined the club in 1987, Chuck Palmer got a sobering introduction to the area while, as part of his law studies, he went on a weekend police ride-along. The calls to the infamous public housing development next to the course were constant. “We were at East Lake Meadows all night long, both nights. They would only go in with backup. It was the most horrific environment you could possibly imagine. For the kids growing up there, they had so many odds stacked against them,” he said.
Along the way, the flesh began to hang loosely from the strong bones of the course. The bentgrass greens (long since changed to more heat-tolerant Bermuda) surrendered in the summer. A thin glaze of sand and red Georgia clay fought for control of the bunkers. That perfect carpet of green out there now was mottled then.
“You could tell this was a championship golf course, a championship layout,” Palmer said. “They just didn’t have enough money to really maintain it the way it needed to be.”
After the controlling Atlanta Athletic Club moved to the suburbs in the 1960s conditions worsened. As the decades ground on, this proud home to the great Jones, and site of the 1950 U.S. Women’s Amateur and the 1963 Ryder Cup, was becoming a foster child in search of an able parent.
Representing the membership, Palmer approached Cousins with the idea of helping them buy control of the course. No, Cousins answered. But then came the quick counter: He alone would purchase the property while protecting the existing membership. Cousins closed on the deal in late ‘93, and those members who wanted to come along on an uncharted ride could pay a $12,500 joining fee and buckle up. It would be one of the great bargains in golf, as corporate and other top-end initiation fees now reportedly go into six figures.
Suspicions came naturally at first. “No one knew what he was going to do,” Hopkins said. “The rumor was he was just a businessman, he was going to make it all fancy for himself and his friends and we were never going to see it again.
“But a close friend of Tom’s told me he would make East Lake first-class and I relaxed.”
“I’m sure there are people who wondered what it was going to be like. But he saved East Lake. Because there were discussions that suggested the best use of the property would be a cemetery,” Palmer said.
Instead, 30 years later, it is a life-giving place. Between about 100 corporate members, 100 new individual members and 40 of the old guard – according to one member’s estimate – enjoy a premier club. The charitable arm of the place, the East Lake Foundation, has long since replaced the failed housing project with a large and still growing mixed income community. Opened in 2001, the Drew Charter School – which doesn’t play football but does have a state championship in golf – offers the kind of opportunity that only a serious education can provide. A First Tee program out of the nearby Charlie Yates course spreads golf’s more admirable messages to a once excluded community.
Between rebuilding a golf course and remodeling lives outside it, there’s no comparison. Just ask the old guard.
“That’s the miracle of East Lake. It wasn’t just the metamorphosis of the golf club. (Cousins) completely transformed that community,” Hopkins said.
“What has happened there has been extraordinary for golf and for Atlanta,” echoed Palmer.
The next change coming is a major facelift on the old course, to begin about as soon as the last player’s courtesy car leaves the lot Sunday evening.
Hopkins is one of those golf romantics – proof of that can be found in the pages of his book, “East Lake – Where Bobby Learned to Play.”
He’s 83, and the only club he uses anymore is a putter, taking his pleasure in trying to duplicate some of Jones’ more famous putts: “At East Lake you can do his 120-footer from St. Andrews in 1927 (British Open), and his 40-foot uphill at Interlachen in 1930 (U.S. Open) and the 12-foot slider he sank to win the U.S. Open at Winged Foot (1929). Those spots are always there if you can find them.”
Yes, he owns a replica of Jones’ famed short stick, named Calamity Jane.
To such a servant of history, changes to this venerated course could seem threatening, like straightening the lines on a Picasso. But Hopkins says he is thrilled by the prospects. It’s not as if the place hasn’t undergone multiple alterations in the past century and change. While details of the redo are scarce – management is being particularly stingy with the details – they say the changes will bring East Lake more in line with the course Jones knew.
Invoking the name of the designer who remade East Lake in 1913, Blalock said, “To every golf course after a certain number of years you have to do a lot of work. It was time to put a little more of the Donald Ross back into it. I think it’s going to be fantastic.”
“Nobody wants to lose access to one of your favorite places in the world for a year (while work proceeds) but coming out the other end, I think it will be amazing,” Palmer said.
Around East Lake, you can never stop looking to the future, no matter how old you are or how long you’ve belonged.
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