An Old Friend: RCC

Ruston Country Club (1926)

In his song “Old Friends”, Ben Rector draws you back to childhood with tender poignancy. He tells how he can still find his way to his friend Wiley’s house on his bike with his eyes closed, inviting us back to a time when we weren’t “afraid of getting older”.

“No one knows you like they know you and no one probably ever will; You can grow up, make new ones, but the truth is there’s nothing like old friends, ‘cause you just can’t make old friends.”

The golf course of my childhood has closed for the last time. It would have turned 100 years old soon. It was your typical 9-hole track with two sets of tees and for most of my life only 1 bunker. I could play it with my eyes closed. Sometimes I still do play it in my imagination, as a 10-year-old hitting driver on the par 3 first hole or a teenager hitting 9 iron. In those days there were still a few places where your mom might drop you off unsupervised and come pick you up “later”, this was one of them. When I started playing there, I had a set of four Little Cougar irons (3,5,7,9) and two woods (1,3) kept in a hand-me-down red plaid bag with creased black leather trim and straps. The bag was always wet from being laid down on dewy grass, and the putter would fall below the lip where I would have to fish it out.

My earliest vague memories of golf were at a much fancier course in a much bigger city, but by age 9, after my parents’ divorce and a couple of moves, this was the place. Ruston Country Club became the friend that taught me the things that we all learn, as we learn to love golf. I can remember seeing all the older men’s golf bags leaned against the wooden rack on the patio. Those belonging to the best players were full of the dulled grey finish of cavity backed Ping Eye 2 irons.  Some of them even had metal drivers. I began to look at my simple and shiny chrome Cougars with a twinge of disdain.

You had to cross the parking lot to get from the 5^th green to the 6^th tee. So, for most of my earliest childhood I played 5 holes at a time. The “back 4” might as well have been in another town. I saw those holes sometimes, if I rode in a cart when my dad visited. But for me and most of my friends 1 through 5 was the perfect loop. Sometimes we would even just play the first and second hole and then slip back through the backdoor of the modest clubhouse where we could eat cheeseburgers and watch TV in a little backroom that had a pac-man and a pinball machine and sometimes a ping-pong table.

I can close my eyes and see down to the driving range where I would hit balls that came with the prepaid range plan that my dad paid for. In the foreground is the willow tree that shielded my vision from seeing a little brick wall during the summer before 6^th grade.  The pro told me I could take a cart, if I would go retrieve the empty baskets from the range. I decided that I would take the shortcut down the two small steps near the old practice green like I had seen the cool college guys do on occasion. At the bottom of the steps under the tree I veered slightly left, slammed into the hidden wall and broke my thumb on the steering wheel. I still have a 2 ½ inch scar down my left thumb where the surgeon opened it to put pins through the bones. The scar now serves as a permanent alignment aid for my left hand as I grip the club. While useful, I do not consider it a fair trade for losing that summer of golf in the era when most of your time was free-time, and you did not even know how to appreciate it. 

Between the willow tree and a utility pole was a small practice green that came and went depending on who was in charge. My mom told me that this is where the swimming pool was when she was a child. Also in that general area of the property, was what looked like a concrete barrel full of gravel with a small water spigot at the top.  You might think it odd for me to remember the utility pole and the water spigot from among all of the features of a golf course. There are reasons.

Once while we were chipping around on that practice green, my brother started tapping his five iron against a metal box on the utility pole, it made a sort of hollow snare drum sound. After a few taps, in search of a different sound, he tapped on the side of the box. BOOM! Black smoke came billowing out of the box as we stood in shocked silence.  His five iron was covered in a black film that we later wiped away to reveal 2 indentions caused by some kind of electrical transmission that was never spoken of to an adult. The water fountain event was not as easy to hide. Same brother. Same area. We turned the faucet on, but nothing came out. My brother who remains to this day a faithful member of the shake-it-if-aint-working school of troubleshooting, pushed back forth on the pipe until we heard a gurgle followed by what could be described as a swell of pressure. We must have looked like wildcatters on an oil rig as a pillar of water reached the sky and blossomed into cascades that showered down upon us.  There was no ignoring this national-parks-grade geyser whose eruption was catalyzed in combination with so much pent up boyhood curiosity and stupidity. The greenskeeper/maintenance director came ambling over. I don’t know if it is true, but I could almost see in his eyes that he was solving the electrical box mystery in his mind, even while he was working to subdue the broken spout. Mr. Charles was the father of 4 boys himself.

My hometown is now served by a much bigger and more beautiful private golf course east of town. People travel from long distances to play there. It has many more bunkers, and you get water in bottles or styrofoam cups near fancy pebbled-ice machines at flower-bedded bathroom stations positioned throughout the course. I love getting to play there with family when I visit home. As for Ruston Country Club, There have been several iterations of the old nine-hole course over the years, different attempts to keep it alive. But the land was finally sold to someone without any intention of preserving it for golf purposes. As my brother phrased it, “It’s barren now.”

I took my kids out on the grounds while it still looked like a golf course. As we walked around, I told them some of these same stories and hit a few shots from “fairways” into green sites.  I briefly entertained fantasies of buying the greens. I would scrape up the Bermuda from as many as I could afford and peddle it to other nostalgians like myself. “We could just keep the grass growing as our lawns,” I thought. I did not buy the greens (I am not sure that is even possible), but I do visit them sometimes in my memories. I am thankful to have had such a simple place to explore and learn the game and so many other things that needed to be explored and learned.

RCC as I might have drawn it at age 11 and Ben Rector pretending to be my old friend