"Tom,
Dynamite Goodlow? My dad used to talk about playing with him before WWII in Atlanta. I don't anything about him. Any stories you can tell?"
Bill McB:
Whoo! Now you're asking me to go way back and really stretch my memory. I don't believe I ever met Dynamite Goodlow or at least I don't remember him.
Just to preface a bit though, I should remind you that my father was a firm believer in never speaking to someone about golf he figured was not interested in golf and that applied to me when I was young because I didn't like golf or at least he thought I didn't. So what I heard from him about his experiences all came later when I started to play a lot which was around 35, so that was thirty years ago or around 1980.
But to Dyanamite Goodlow and why my father mentioned him to me after around 1980. I think it was because Dad loved to tell me, when he thought I was finally interested, about the important and interesting and often funny things that happened to him in his career in golf and often about things that happened long before I liked golf.
As best as I can remember Dad knew Dynamite Goodlow pretty well and would run into him at various tournaments----whatever they were I can't say other than one which was the only story I remember about Dynamite Goodlow.
It was when he first played against Dynamite Goodlow (I may remember the story just because I always thought his name was so funny and interesting). I distinctly remember it was a big tournament in Ormond Beach Florida. In those days (when we lived in Daytona Beach so it was probably in the 1950s) Ormond still had that incredibly immense old hotel right there and John D. Rockerfeller lived right down the street. He may've even owned the hotel. I think it may've been the biggest wooden hotel in the world at one point.
I actually remember the old Ormond Beach golf course that was part of it and believe me it wasn't much. But Dad drew Dynamite who I recall was the line coach of something like the Georgia Tech football team and he was big and really strong and a full-blooded good ole Southern boy. Dad not only beat the shit outta Dynamite he also set the course record shooting something like a 63 or 64.
But here's the best part. When he beat Dynamite, and Dynamite shook his hand he said: "Jimmy that was one great round of golf and I'm telling you right now that is the last time I'm gonna let some DAMN YANKEE beat me like that."
As far as I recall from my father's maybe one time story about Goodlow the next time Dad ran into Dynamite in a tournament he got the shit beat outta him by that big ole colorful Georgia Tech line coach who Dad said could really play.
That was the way they talked back then. When they said a guy could "really play" they weren't using that term lightly, that's for sure.
But the ones I mentioned above were just some of the amateurs I think. Then there were the pros. My Dad loved the pros and he knew a good many of them certainly including all the good LPGA pros because Dad used to deal with all the ones who worked for Spalding. Dad wanted to be a golf pro, a touring pro. Unfortunately when he told his mother that's what he wanted to do her response was this: "No son of mine is going to be a golf pro, touring or otherwise. You do that and I will disinherit you immediately."
That's what he told me when I got interested in golf. It's pretty sad, don't you think? But that's the world he came from---that's what it was like and that's the way it was back then for him I guess. I know he ran away from a lot of the world he came from and even though he never did consider turning pro again the way I figure it golf and the people in it back then, particularly the ones he knew down in Florida, saved him from himself and what he may've become. God did they all ever love it so but my recollection is they were so easy going and relaxed about it back then at least around me, compared to the way it seems to have gotten.
It seems like it was all so simple then, but haven't we all heard that one before?
