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Golf on Cape Cod - Personal ProfilesFOR THE GOOD OF THE GAMEBy RON DRISCOLL
I In his late 20s, the younger Dowling took up the sport in earnest and, as the USGA likes to say, once he picked up the game, it never let go. GOCC: You two have known each other for a long time, right? JT: Since about 1961. Sandy was a good friend of [Jay’s wife] Connie and Stanley Moore, and they were involved in sailing. They were like brothers and sisters growing up, really. SD: We did a lot of competitive sailboat racing together at the Hyannis Yacht Club. Our families were very close. JT: Sandy used to be on the water a lot when he was younger. He’s pretty much given that up now… GOCC: But you are still involved in sailing… JT: I am, and my family is. We’ve enjoyed it a lot. The kids just got through with another Scudder Cup series a couple of days ago. It’s been a big thing on the Cape since 1913, when the Wianno Senior was invented, and the Moore family has always been involved in that. It’s a great class of boat. GOCC: How long have you been playing golf? SD: Basically, when I gave up sailing, I started to play. I played on and off when I was in school. I liked baseball, and I played that in school and in college, and so I really didn’t start to play golf until my late 20s, but then I went at it with a vengeance. JT: He had a great teacher. His dad was a 1-handicapper on Cape Cod for many, many years. He was one of the best amateurs in the area, so Sandy had a good lineage. GOCC: So who beats whom right now? SD: On any given day? It’s 50-50, about. JT: Sandy’s a better golfer than I am. But we have pretty good matches. SD: My father was born and brought up in Dedham, but his folks had a summer house in South Yarmouth, so he used to go over there as a kid and practice at Bass River, which was a public course. GOCC: But there weren’t many public courses or municipal courses around in those days, were there? SD: To tell you the truth, this place (Hyannisport) was as close to a public course as you could get. Until about 15 years ago, after Labor Day, this pretty much opened up to the public. You had to call the pro shop, but it was understood that the public could come in…. SD: Golf wasn’t as popular among young people when we were growing up. I mean, if I came to high school with a golf bag over my shoulder, guys would beat me up. It was football, baseball, and that was it… Golf wasn’t for us. GOCC: So your father was a good player, but you really resisted playing until you were in your late 20s… SD: Actually, my father played semi-pro baseball and semi-pro hockey. And I got into the baseball thing with him. I caddied for him a lot…. I didn’t get paid (laughing), but I caddied for him a lot. It was baseball as far as he and I were concerned. And after that, he would go off and play golf and I would go sailing. JT: Don’t let Sandy kid you though, he had a heck of a golf swing and he could hit the ball. When I got out of college – I went to Colgate – I had about a three-week hiatus before I went to work... So every morning for three weeks, Sandy and Connie and I would come up here and play golf. Connie would usually get upset and walk in after about 12 holes. But Sandy had a pretty good swing even back then… SD (laughing): It was a baseball swing, just lowered…. Actually, I’ve never had a golf lesson. JT: He didn’t go to the practice range too often, either. SD: Nah, that stuff is overrated. It’s like cramming for an exam… If you don’t know it by now, it’s too late. GOCC: So how did you get involved on the state level? SD: It probably had something to do with a guy named Don McMillan, who started the Par Club, which is now the Francis Ouimet Society. It’s an independent organization, but its sole purpose is to raise money for the Ouimet Caddie Scholarship Fund. I knew him from Oyster Harbors, and I also knew a fellow by the name of Joe Paterno, who was a prominent golfer around here, and he was on the executive committee of the Massachusetts Golf Association. I got to know them both, and they knew my father… and I got a call one day from somebody on the nominating committee, asking me if I wanted to be on the executive committee, back in … I’m gonna guess, the early 80s. I said sure…. My father had been on it – as a matter of fact, he had been on it twice! GOCC: Really! SD: So I said “sure”, and I went to a bunch of meetings, and three or four years go by, and I get a call from somebody and they say, “We want you to be second vice president.” So I said, “Whoa! Does that mean that eventually I’d become president?” And they said, “Yeah.” So I asked, “Do you know where I live?” And they said, “Yeah.” And I said, “Do you know where the headquarters of the MGA is [in Weston at that time]?” And they said, “Yeah… but you never have to go there.” So I said, “You realize I haven’t been chairman of the championship committee…” because usually there was a progression – you weren’t going to become an officer unless you had been chairman of the championship committee. And I said, well, I’ll do it, provided you make me chairman of the championship committee for a couple of years. So they did, and I went through the chairs and became president…. went up there once or twice a week over the two years I was president. GOCC: Were you involved with the MGA at the same time, Jay? JT: I had known that Sandy’s dad had been on the executive committee, and we’d always had this love of golf. So in 1989, Sandy had been so involved and was about to become president of the MGA. So I said to Sandy, right here in the hall one day, “If you ever need anybody to help, let me know…” SD (laughing): Wouldn’t you think a guy that age, at that point in time, would know better? JT: At about that time, Sandy had come up with this idea of the blue coat committee, the idea of which was to help out at tournaments… You might work your way into being more involved. So I did that for maybe a couple of years. And then I got asked to be on the executive committee. Funny thing about the time element – Sandy talked to me about getting involved, and he said, “You know, just a day or two, here and there. No big thing…” GOCC: Did you say it with a straight face? JT: And so a few years later, maybe 1994, Biff Kelley, a former president of the MGA, asked me to be the head of the championship committee. So I was chairman for a couple of years, and then moved on… the progression to president is about an eight-year tenure. GOCC: Like being in purgatory? JT: To tell you the truth, I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. People ask me, “Why do you get involved in the MGA?” And I say, it’s because of the guys, both in terms of the people who are involved on the committees and the executive group, and also because of the players. You get to know all of the good players around the state, and you meet people like Walter Lankau [of Stow Acres], who not only has been president of the Golf Course Owners’ Association, he has also been the head of the Ouimet Society. He’s really quite a guy, and he’s just one example of the kind of people you meet, from all walks of life. … JT: I just went to a long-range planning committee meeting the other day up at Essex (County Club), and the guy who is chairing the long-range planning committee is Bill Van Fassen, who is in his early 50s and just retired as the head of Blue Cross in Massachusetts. You get some fantastic guys involved. GOCC: Long-range planning involves what, then? JT: That’s a good question. The MGA has fairly much been run the same over the years… we run championships. But now the junior program has gotten very big, we have our own course [MGA Links at Mamantapett]… the thing has expanded tremendously. We’ve built Golf House at the TPC [the new MGA headquarters in Norton]. It’s a much different organization in a lot of ways, but the basic premise has always been the same. Now we’re looking at what we should be doing going forward.
GOCC: And Jay, were you in charge when the junior program expanded? JT: We were fund-raising for Golf House. We needed about $6.5 million, and that was a big job that got everybody involved. At the same time, there was a little par 3 course (Wading River) available less than five miles away. So we figured we’d better take advantage of the opportunity to get that. Sandy’s group had thought about building a course out in … where was that, Sandy? SD: Sturbridge Village. We leased about 200 acres of land from Old Sturbridge Village for $1, and we hired Rees Jones to build a golf course. And then (counting up in his head) nine route plans later, we decided we couldn’t do it. There were too many wetlands, and we couldn’t get a decent golf course out of it. It was going to be a daily-fee golf course owned by the Mass. Golf Association, and we’d use it maybe twice, three times a year for selected tournaments. We would have still played tournaments all around. The reason for it was that we were concerned about our income base, which is primarily from the handicap system. We were concerned that the source of income was too restricted. We wanted to increase the base, and this was a way of trying to do that – the magazine was another way we were going to try to do it. SD: We talk about the MGA, and actually the majority of the so-called members (63 percent) of the MGA are public golfers. Everybody thinks of them as private club golfers, but they’re not. I think most people think of the MGA as running a half-dozen or 10 tournaments a year, thank you very much, and that’s that. They probably think of the USGA in the same way. Well, let me see, they run the Open … and they’ve got an Amateur, and some kids’ tournaments and a women’s tournament or two. I think that’s what a lot of people think of, but both organizations are much, much more than that. They rate the courses, the MGA assists the USGA in producing the handicaps. They’re big-time into kids’ golf with all the Fore Kids programs. GOCC: What’s the relationship between the New England Golf Association and the Massachusetts Golf Association? SD: The New England Golf Association runs the USGA qualifiers in New England, and they get paid for doing it. And the New England Golf Association in turn pays the MGA a fee for doing all the administrative work for the New England Golf Association. Basically the New England Golf Association has no employees – there’s one guy who’s the executive secretary (Harry McCracken) and he runs it, and then there are a bunch of us who are either friends of Harry’s or USGA committee people in each state who help. It’s really not a formal relationship, but it’s a very close relationship. JT: It’s almost a rite of passage in a way. A lot of the past presidents of the Mass. Golf Association move on and help the New England group. Sandy is very involved with Harry – he’s Harry’s right-hand man. I guess what you all realize is that all the state golf associations are arms of the USGA. It’s all through the USGA. GOCC: What about your relationship with the WGAM? SD: They’re a sister organization, if you will. They’re housed in the MGA headquarters, and the MGA does the handicapping for them, but they’re separate and distinct. JT: They’re at one end of the hall, and we’re at the other end. It’s not a close relationship – they run their own programs and we run ours. In a lot of states, that’s changing; it’s really important to note that. There are only a few states that have totally integrated women’s and men’s golf, but there are many, many states where one organization is running most of the events now. It’s not as close a relationship here as perhaps it could be, and going forward perhaps it will be, because that seems to be something that’s going on around the country. SD: I don’t know whether they still do it, but several times I refereed the finals of the women’s amateur championship for the WGAM. And I don’t know whether they still ask the MGA people to do that, but I used to do some of that. GOCC: We’re interested in junior golf and the growth of that. Also, there’s a lot of talk about being overbuilt, about 3 million players coming in and 3 million leaving. Are you getting growth in the youth program, and are you getting girls involved? JT: Our junior golf program is very active. We have a couple of people who coordinate the thing from Mass. Golf. We’re in Springfield, we’re in the city, we’re gonna be on Cape Cod next year, hopefully at Hyannis Golf Club. They’ve actually had to cut them off because they’ve gotten so big. There are six or seven places around the state where they’re set up, and they run even in the wintertime. It’s been big, especially in the last 10 years or so. But we’re starting to get fragmented to some degree in my opinion, because you’ve also got the AJGA, then you’ve got the Titleist Tour, the PGA Junior Tour, you’ve got all these groups just in Massachusetts, not to mention some of these kids like Peter Uihlein [of North Dartmouth, the 2005 AJGA Player of the Year] who play in events around the country. What’s happening, from my point of view, it’s a little worrisome that the thing might get fragmented. JT: As far as golf in general goes, the economy has a lot to do with it. There is an overbuild situation right now, there’s no question about that. We’ve got Turner Hill up for sale on the North Shore, we’ve got a course out around Worcester that’s being converted into house lots, there’s a course here on the Cape that there’s been similar talk about. So there are courses that are really struggling right now, and many courses, courses that you would never think of, are looking for members right now. So golf is a little bit static right now; I think it’s down about 10 percent nationally. SD: There’s another issue that we haven’t talked about, and I can see it’s going to become a real problem. I don’t know about here, I am a little closer to the situation at Oyster Harbors. The junior golf program over there has 75 kids in it, and some of the adults, the working men, come down and they say, “I can never get on the darned golf course.” They do the best they can to keep the kids out of the prime tee times, but it’s awfully hard to juggle, and ultimately the kids are going to be the ones to suffer. Because I can tell you who’s going to win that fight, it’s going to be the paying members. I worry more almost about some of the kids at a club like that than I do the public course kids, because they have all those clinics. GOCC: Before you guys got involved in the MGA, growing up in golf, who were the Cape Cod golf icons? Who did you look up to? JT: The Cape Cod Pro-Am League started back in the early 50s, 1952, I think it was. And you had guys like George Morrison and my father-in-law Win Moore and Bob Dowling and Dutch Wessner, Doc Griffin, all those guys… My father-in-law was one of the founders, and I think probably Bob was, too. SD: Yeah, my father played every Wednesday in that league. JT: My father-in-law, C. Winthrop Moore, was involved in starting the Cape Cod Pro-Am League and also the Indian Summer. Norman Cook was one of those founders, too. Win was the chairman of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce golf committee. And I had just married Connie, and Win said, “Come on, we’re gonna go over to New Seabury.” I was maybe 22, and they put the shovel in the ground for New Seabury in 1962. GOCC: What about Guy Tedesco [former director of golf at New Seabury]? JT: Guy didn’t come until a couple of years later, but he was just an icon there for many years. He was a presence, he had the little cigar, he was a big man, kinda raw-boned. But the thing about Guy was that he was soft-spoken. And he was the type of person that when he said something, everybody listened. SD: He was on the Mass. Golf Association executive committee for a short period of time. Right after he got sick, when he was in remission, we played one time together up at Nashawtuc at an MGA outing. And they had all these flowers all over the place, and someone commented about how pretty they were. And Guy looked at them and said [disdainfully], “They don’t belong on a golf course. Do you know how many man-hours it takes to take care of those things?” SD: People like Guy and George Morrison and Dutch Wessner and Allan Stewart, they were just well known local guys. If you read the Cape Cod Standard Times back in those days, you’d see two or three of those names on any given Saturday or Sunday for doing something in golf. Ollie Hallet is another one. I remember playing against him once, and I had this new driver, a Toney Penna driver, and I was really proud of this club. Ollie takes a look at it, and he says, “I’ve never known anyone who could hit a Toney Penna driver.” SD: Then there was Bill Bearse, who was a professional amateur, or an amateur professional, I’m not sure which. JT: Oh yeah, he was definitely one of those guys. He was the Cape Cod Amateur champ a couple of times, and he played out of here, and one day right around the time Tom Niblet was going to leave here as pro, well, Bill was very friendly with some of the members, and he was like a 1-handicap, and by gosh, he ends up being the pro. He was the pro here for a long time. He was a great guy. He had a funny swing. SD: I remember one time I beat him in the Cape Cod Amateur, when I was just a kid. He redesigned the first green here at Hyannisport. It used to be a two-tier green, and he made it like this (a steep pitch from back to front). So we start out, I was the 8th seed, the highest seed, and he had been the medalist. We start out and he three-putts No. 1, and I’m thinking, “Thank you very much.” He ended up drilling the ball into the bushes on the corner at No. 16, and he walked over and shook my hand. I won. GOCC: Over the years is there one particular match, or a player you played against, who stands out? SD: I remember playing several times against Dick Stimets in the club championship at Oyster Harbors, and those were great matches…. Of course, I never beat him – he won ’em all. He won what, 22 club championships there. He won all over the place, in Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, Florida, Bermuda. I never beat him when it meant anything… You know, for a dollar Nassau I could beat him any time. SD: It was kind of a gutsy move, because I’m the one who got the invitation! GOCC: How long have you both been members here? JT: Since 1968. SD: In the 1950s sometime – whenever my family membership ran out – I joined. And I’ve been at Oyster Harbors since 1970 or ‘71. My folks were members at both clubs for quite a number of years. JT: Tell them about your father and Oyster Harbors. SD: My father was a member at both clubs, and for whatever reason, he quit Oyster Harbors one year, and he stayed here at Hyannisport. Shortly before that, some friends of mine over at Oyster Harbors had suggested we join over there, and so we did. Very soon after that I became chairman of the membership committee. So I got a call that winter from my father in Florida, and he says, “I’m mad at Hyannisport. I’m gonna rejoin Oyster Harbors.” So I said to him, “Do you know anybody?” And he says, “Listen, you!” So he quit here and joined over there. JT: I thought Sandy was going to tell the story about how right after he joined there, he was in the grillroom and he looked at the board on the wall and he saw his father’s name up there several times for winning the club championship… and Sandy didn’t even know it! SD: We’ve got a new clubhouse over at Oyster Harbors, and they’ve started to put up plaques with all the club champions and all the tournament winners. And my name is on the club championship plaque twice – it’s on one line and then on another line right across from it…. 20 years apart! That’s kind of neat, isn’t it? GOCC: Speaking of courses, which is your favorite on Cape Cod? SD: I like the golf course here better than Oyster Harbors. You can’t hate the view either. Without question, this is my favorite course on the Cape… not even close. JT: You just never get tired of playing this place. SD: Give me Kittansett, Sankaty Head and this course, and I wouldn’t need another one. And with that, they were off for another tour of the ‘Port…
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When Jay H. Tracy talks about golf, he emphasizes the camaraderie of the sport, the friendships and associations he has formed, the people he would have never met without the golfing bond.
SD: Every year they have a dinner at The Country Club for the executive committee and all the past presidents. I can remember talking with three past presidents, and they said, “The organization that you’re running is so much different from the one that we ran just 10 years ago.” I can remember setting up three different corporations when I was president. I added the magazine, Mass. Golfer, as a separate corporation, and we set up a corporation to lease two golf courses and run them [Mount Hood and Leo J. Martin].