By Lee Pace 

Thumb through the memory banks to the early 1980s in the golf world and I can remember orange and yellow balls, hard-collar Pickering shirts, the advent of the metal wood, the hatching of the Great White Shark and my harrowing switch from a strong to neutral grip. “A grip change like that means you need to hit a thousand balls before you play a round of golf,” said Gerald Johnson, the instructor who used to work at Mike Rubish’s driving range on the outskirts of Durham. I looked back at him a tad glassy eyed, gulped and went back to hitting balls.

            It was a special time also because late June meant another revival of the Herald-Sun Golf Classic.

            I was a neophyte sports writer on the staff of the Durham Morning Herald, before its merger later in the decade with the afternoon Sun. One of my beats was local golf. I had taken up golf only a few years earlier, during my senior year in Chapel Hill, and the more I played the game, the more I wanted to write about it. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to play. The Herald-Sun helped flame both interests.

            The tournament in those days was held at Hillandale Golf Course over the Fourth of July week, when the tobacco companies in Durham shut down for vacation. The field of 224 golfers filled up instantly on the spring morning when the newspaper business office began taking entries for that year’s championship. Tournament administrator Joe Beavers can remember wives waiting outside the office at 7:30 a.m. to deliver their husband’s entry form and fee. “My husband’s out of town today and said he’d divorce me if I didn’t get this entry form here first thing,” one woman told Beavers.

The tournament began the last Sunday of June, and the format for the weeklong event went like this:

• Thirty-six holes of stroke-play qualifying on Sunday and Monday, with 12 flights established (Championship, President’s and First through 10th).

• “Tough Day Tuesday,” when the Championship Flight and President’s Flight began match play, with the tees set on the tips and the pins tucked on the edges of Hillandale’s tiny greens.

• A VIP Scramble Tournament on Wednesday, when the newspaper brass entertained its top customers with golf and a cocktail buffet.

• And then four days of match play Thursday through Sunday, with each flight winnowed from 16 players to one champion.

“People outside of Durham have never heard about it, but in Durham it’s like the U.S. Open,” 1980 champion David Whitfield said at the time.

“The golf calendar in Durham revolves around the Herald-Sun,” added longtime competitor Dink Andrews.

The tournament was inaugurated in 1940 as a promotion for the newspapers and over the years crowned champions the likes of Skip and Chuck Alexander, Mike Souchak and Jim Ferree. It was played two years at Hope Valley Country Club and six at Duke University Golf Club, but for the most part had settled on Hillandale, a daily-fee course that provided the perfect venue. The course has been around in some fashion since 1911, but its current configuration was completed by George Cobb in 1960. It’s short (6,300 yards from the back tees) but demands accuracy on several fronts. The greens are small; a series of roads envelop the course, providing widespread O.B. panic; and an ever-present creek comes into play on nine holes. The quintessential public golf course fit like a glove with a field that included factory workers, plumbers, builders, carpenters and fast-food franchise managers.

Throughout the week, locals would park their cars on Sprunt, Bellevue, Indian Trail and Hillandale roads and find nearby shade and watch the golfers come through. Sunday’s championship matches might draw galleries upwards of a thousand spectators. It was a place to see and be seen. “I’m going to drink me a cold beer and watch the feminine pulchritude,” postal worker Pete Peterson said one year after losing in an early round. Despite a college degree, I didn’t know what “pulchritude” meant. I made sure to look it up back at the office. I agreed it was a fine idea.

The competition was taken seriously by the competitors and the staff of the newspaper as well. I once took umbrage at the editing of my story on a controversial match and faced off with the offending staff mate the next day at the golf course, whereupon he threatened to whip my tail then and there. Thankfully, a competitor in the Championship Flight overheard the exchange and played peacemaker before anyone’s eyes were scratched out.

The financial interests of the newspaper and the Hillandale management parted ways in 1984, and the Herald-Sun set off on a nomadic trek that took it to four area courses over the next 17 years. I left the newspaper that year as well, and though I sometimes thought about entering the Herald-Sun, I believed that since it wasn’t being played at Hillandale, the experience would be lacking. When I heard in March of this year that the tournament would again return to “The Ditch,” as the course is known far and wide for its omnipresent hazard, I was quick to enter.

            I played in two Herald-Suns while covering the tournament in the early 1980s, with one of the experiences still etched in the horror lobe of my brain. When I think of wrecking my Dad’s car at the age of 16, of making a “D” in freshman algebra in high school, I think also of losing a four-up lead at the turn in the 1982 Herald-Sun. That was the year I shanked a pitching wedge across Sprunt Avenue on the 12th hole in the first round. My hands promptly turned to iron and my brains to Jello and I was mercifully closed out on the 17th hole after losing six holes in a row.

            Fortunately, no such Armageddon awaited me this June as I joined 207 other golfers for the 56th Herald-Sun Classic. The format has changed somewhat over the years — qualifying now begins on Monday, there’s no VIP day and the calendar is moved to the middle of June — but otherwise it remains the same well-orchestrated and lively event as before. Hillandale is today what it was in 1982. It’s a no-frills, low-cost daily-fee facility that churns out 50,000 rounds a year and sells every make of golf club, ball and widget known to man in its expansive shop. The course this summer plays inordinately short, given the lack of rain and the cement-hard fairways, but that can work two ways. You hit a lot of wedges into greens, but bad shots that normally would settle within the confines of the golf course now ricochet out-of-bounds in a flash.

            My goal was to shoot 150 for two qualifying rounds and at least make the President’s Flight; further, I wanted to win at least one match. I came up a smidgen short, scoring 79-76—155 in qualifying and landing in the First Flight, but I did win my first Herald-Sun match ever. I posted a 3-and-2 win over Joe Gucker before falling 2-and-1 to Wayne Bridges in round two. It was not a great outing, but it wasn’t a disaster, either. There’s an experience curve to those of us who play a lot of business golf and casual golf when we’ve entered formal competition — it is entirely different when the result of every stroke will be posted on a scoreboard somewhere or, in the case of today’s Herald-Sun Classic, on the pages of cyberspace in a website run by the newspaper staff.

            The Herald-Sun field is always chock full of interesting personalities and stories, and ferreting them out for the newspaper was one of the fun things about covering the event two decades ago. This year the newspaper staff wrote about the Eighth Flight match of Robert Hockman, an 18-year-old who was born with cerebral palsy, is paralyzed on the left side of his body and hits the ball right-handed only. It wrote about a Ninth-Flight match between General King, a 74-year-old who had a heart transplant in 1991, and opponent Jerry Esposito, one of the nurses at Duke University Medical Center who treated King during his convalescence. And it noted the little quirks of various golfers — Third-Flight champion Kevin Lane, for example, likes to play golf in flip-flops.

            It’s nice to see the Herald-Sun Classic still has its personality after so many years. Tournament Chairman John Parham said at the end of the week that the return to Hillandale after 17 years had been a successful one from his viewpoint and that he hoped it would be back to the little course along Interstate 85 in 2003. Hillandale head pro and general manager Zack Veasey, a competitor as a junior and collegian in the Herald-Sun before turning pro 20 years ago, agreed that the return to Hillandale seemed to be an excellent fit.

            “I’ve got so many great memories of this tournament from years ago,” Veasey said. “That absolutely was motivation to get it back to Hillandale.”

            It was a walk down memory lane for me for four days in June, to see the old faces, to see the cars lined up along the third fairway, the locals camped in the lawn chairs in nooks and crannies around the course. “I saw people this week in the same place I saw them 20 years ago,” tournament runner-up Lea Couch said.

            My accomplishments in the business of golf writing since 1987 have been modest, for sure, but they’ve been enough to help keep the creditors at bay and they’ve taken me to the far reaches of the globe. The Herald-Sun Classic of the early 1980s gave me a window into all that’s good in golf, and for that, I am truly grateful.