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Golf on Cape Cod - Personal Profiles
Fordie Pitts: An amateur for the ages Fordie Pitts Jr. has competed in three U.S. Senior Opens, finishing as the low amateur in 1984 at fabled Oak Hill. His name is all over New England, state, and local record books: dozens of club championships, three wins in the Tournament of Club Champions, two State Senior titles, and possibly more Massachusetts best-ball victories than anyone in history, including 10 with his children (four Father-Son titles with Fordie III and six Father-Daughter crowns combined with Mary Lou and Karen). In 1996, at age 66, he shot 64 at Cohasset CC to qualify for the U.S. Senior Amateur. But Fordie’s golf background goes much deeper and touches many of the great players of the past 60 years, both locally and nationally. Like the day he hitched a ride to the course with Robert Tyre Jones Jr., better known as Bobby, and the time he partnered with Arnold Palmer in a little game at Bay Hill, the King’s home course in Orlando.
GOCC: I think everyone who’s grown up following golf in New England knows your name…. FP: Well, it’s an unusual name. GOCC: I think repetition has a lot to do with it, too. We have found your name in US Amateurs and state events dating to the 1950s. How did you get started in golf? FP: I caddied at Wollaston starting in 1940, when I was 10 years old. GOCC: That’s a great entrée to the game. A lot of people of a certain age cut their teeth as caddies. FP: In those days almost every kid who caddied ended up playing, maybe not right away, but when they grew up and got married and had a few bucks, they would play. That’s a big void today: You have parents who try to get their kids to play, but a lot of them don’t take to it. ... Another aspect of it is that the people you would meet caddying were people you would never have a chance to meet otherwise. Can you imagine being a kid today and caddying for Paul Fireman, getting the chance to talk to a guy who is that successful? In my day, if you were a good caddie, players would ask you to caddie for them on a regular basis and you would build a relationship. When I caddied, a lot of people ended up getting jobs from the people they caddied for: executives, doctors, lawyers … It was an education, one that kids don’t get today. GOCC: So you live in Scituate. How long have you been there? FP: Since Mary Lou and I got married–in 1957. We’ll be married 50 years in October. I was the golf pro at Scituate Country Club after high school, and I was teaching a woman named Louise Fletcher from White Plains, N.Y., and told me she had a daughter she was hoping to get to play golf and would I be willing to give her lessons? I was anxious to make money and I said, “Sure, bring her over.” So a week or two later she brought her daughter over, and…. I never made any money! (laughs) And that’s how my wife learned to play golf, and she still plays at Scituate, and all five of our kids are members there, too. FP: I was 19 and she was 16. I was the golf pro for just one year and then I went in the service. She went on to college, and I didn’t see her the first few years after I came out of the service, and then somewhere along the way, we made contact. And now we have five children and 10 grandchildren… GOCC: And you have three children directly involved in the golf industry? FP: Three were. Karen recently left Etonic, where she was a vice president. She went to a division of Stride Rite, still in the shoe business, just not golf shoes. Fordie III works for Titleist, where he’s in charge of the club fitting for the three tours. He also goes to colleges and does fitting for them, too. And they have a range in New Bedford where they also do fittings. He used to be on the road a lot more, but now he visits each tour roughly every two months. And Mary Lou is director of advertising for Titleist. GOCC: We’ve always thought that must be one of the easiest jobs on the planet, selling golf balls for Titleist. FP: It probably is…. but they work awfully hard. Mary Lou has two children, and she loves to play golf, but I think she works about 80 hours a week. She plays relatively little… and yet she was club champion at Woodland six years in a row. GOCC: How did your children get so deeply involved in the game? It isn’t necessarily always a natural progression. FP: They all play. Mary Lou recently said to me, “Dad, why didn’t you make us play more?” I used to take these kids one at a time, kicking and screaming, to Scituate Country Club to try to teach them to play golf. And now Karen and Mary Lou would kill to get out and play in a tournament… they just love to play. GOCC: So in other words, they feel that if you had pushed them along a little bit they think they would be better players now? FP: Oh, yes. Mary Lou is either a 6 or 7 handicap and Karen is 6 or 7 or 8; both about the same – and I guess they think that they could be a 2 or a 3 if they had played more. GOCC: So it always comes back to being Dad’s fault…. They wouldn’t have gotten over there at all if it hadn’t been for you, and yet, why didn’t you push them more? FP: At the time, of course, my wife would say, “Why don’t you leave them alone? They’ll go when they want to go.”
FP: In the caddie yard at Wollaston, we had two or three holes dug into the ground and one club, and we would play while we were waiting to get a loop. In those days it wasn’t automatic–there were roughly 100 caddies and you weren’t carrying doubles–you were carrying singles. But as the war went on … the caddie ranks got kind of thin. We went to carrying doubles and finally there was a shortage of caddies. It was about that time that I joined Furnace Brook Golf Club. Kenny Campbell and I would caddie in the morning and play golf in the afternoon. Kenny and I played against the No. 1 team in the Norfolk County League, which had teams from Thorny Lea, Brockton, Walpole… at 14 years old! GOCC: So you guys were hotshots… FP (laughing): We thought we were. They didn’t have junior leagues in those days. Most of my friends weren’t members of clubs. Back then Furnace Brook was 18 holes, and it cost us $25. What a deal that was, although $25 at that time was a lot of money. That was 25 rounds of caddying, because we made less than a buck, unless you had doubles. GOCC: Did they have junior golf tournaments at that time? FP: They had just started them. The first State Junior Championship was held in 1941. They had the State Caddie Tournament at Woodland, and if you were a junior member at a club you could play in the state juniors, and if you were a caddie you could not. The state caddie tournament run by the MGA was the stronger tournament. I ended up tying with Eddie Arrobino. We had a playoff, and I won the playoff. That was my first win. GOCC: That’s great stuff. You played in high school, I take it. FP: I was captain of the high school team at North Quincy, and we won the state championship in 1948. Kenny Campbell was on the team, and the guy who won the state juniors in 1950, Bill McCarthy, was on our team. GOCC: And then you went on to play collegiately? FP: I couldn’t afford to go to college. When I was in high school, I took the college courses, but my parents didn’t have any money. They couldn’t send me to college… I thought I was going to be a golf pro. And then Uncle Sam, well… what happened was this supposed friend of mine was a recruiter for the Air Force Reserves (laughs). It was around the time they were starting to draft people for the Korean War, so he said to me, “Why don’t you join the Reserves? I can get you in…” Well, he got me in all right – this was like August, and by September or October I got word I had been activated and was being sent to Chanute Field in Illinois. I was in special services; as a matter of fact my duty was to run their golf driving range. And we started plans for a golf course, which didn’t get done while I was there…. But it did get done later on. GOCC: Did you play with anyone notable while you were in the service? FP: Yes. We actually had a golf team there, and the Air Force had a national tournament… I recall playing in San Antonio with Don Hoenig (who won every state open in New England before he was 20 years old) and with Morris Williams, who was the best player in Texas in those days. He was a pilot, and he was killed in a crash. To this day they play a college tournament in his memory. GOCC: So how long was your tour of duty? FP: I was in the service for almost two years, and when I came out, Harry Ernst at Hatherly used to run a weekly tournament, and I played a few times. Harry asked me why didn’t I go to school? Well, I didn’t think I could get into school. He suggested I call BC, and I didn’t do it. He got after me again when school started, so I called up and got an appointment. They told me I had to take an exam, and I said, “Oh, oh… an exam.” But I took it, and they called me the next day and said, “ You’re in.” I went there under the GI bill, and I was captain of the golf team. When I got out of the service I got reinstated as an amateur–my time in the service counted toward that–and in the summer I played in all kinds of tournaments. I probably played in more tournaments than any other amateur in New England. That’s a guess, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. GOCC: And you ended up playing in national amateur events? FP: I qualified for the first US Junior in 1948. It was in Ann Arbor, Mich. In those days they used to check your irons, and I was in line behind Ken Venturi. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but he had a brand-new set of irons, and they found out that his grooves were too deep, so he had to get them filed down. (Venturi, a future US Open champ, lost in the match-play final.) GOCC: You also played in several US Amateurs? FP: Yes, I qualified, I think, five times. The farthest I went was the fourth round at The Country Club in 1957, when I lost in the fourth round to Deane Beman. He didn’t win it that year, but he did go on to win it later. Mary Lou and I were supposed to get married, the date was set, and I kept winning matches. They were telling me that I’d better lose pretty soon, or there wasn’t going to be a wedding! GOCC: So you were running up against a deadline. When did you first play in the Amateur? FP: My first one was in 1955, at James River in Virginia. I stayed at the hotel that was the USGA headquarters, and I didn’t know where the course was or how to get there. I stepped out of the hotel and a man asked me if I would like a ride to the course. He said, “We’ll be going in a few minutes–we have to wait for Mr. Jones.” And a few minutes later, Bobby Jones came out. He was walking with two canes in those days, and the man suggested to me, “Why don’t you sit in back with Mr. Jones?” It took about 25 minutes to get to the course, and I got to talk with him for the whole ride. He had been at Harvard, of course, and he used to play at Wollaston. Lindy Fowler was a writer at one of the Boston newspapers and was one of his acquaintances. He also asked me about a few other people from Wollaston, some of whom I knew. He had the Southern accent, and he was a really nice man. I met him on two other occasions, when I worked for A.G. Spalding and Mr. Jones would come to our sales meetings. And after the meeting I would go up and say hello. GOCC: How did you come to work for Spalding? FP: I got an interview through a friend, and I was in equipment sales for Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and part of Massachusetts. In the wintertime they sent me down to Miami. They only opened the branch there in the winter at the time. My wife and I had just gotten married, and business got so good they wanted me to stay in Miami year-round, but we didn’t want to do that, so they got someone else. I worked for them about another year, and then I quit, thinking that we had a deal to buy Scituate Country Club… and then the deal fell through. We were married with a child, and that wasn’t a good period. I got into sales after that, for a company called Electronic Fasteners in Waltham. I was with them for 30 years. While I worked there, we started an investment club, and we decided we ought to buy a little business. Before you knew it, we owned George Smith & Co., a drafting and arts supply company in Boston. So I ended up buying this company and continuing to sell fasteners for the Waltham company. All our kids worked there for us in the summer. GOCC: Talk about a man of many hats… Were you able to continue to play every weekend? FP: I could play weekends, and I used my vacation time to play in tournaments. There weren’t nearly as many tournaments in those days as there are now. GOCC: Speaking of tournaments, you never won the Mass. Amateur, but you must have had a lot of close calls. FP: I was a five-time semifinalist, never got to the final. My closest call was when I lost on the 19th hole to Smiley Cornell at Myopia Hunt. I had won my first-round match there, and my second-round opponent was Bobby Knowles. He had won the French Amateur, the New England Amateur, and was the club champ at Myopia. Some guys at the bar were members and friends of his, and they were saying that he was gonna crush that kid from BC. A friend of mine heard this remark, put a few thousand dollars on the bar and told them they could have any part of it they wanted. They put up $400, and I beat Knowles the next day, 4 and 3. FP: Being low amateur in the US Senior Open at Oak Hill in 1984. GOCC: Would you say you played better as a senior than before that? FP: I probably had a much better record. Of course, this is me saying it, (pausing) but I think I was probably the best senior around for about 10 years. GOCC: Why do you think that was? FP: I didn’t have the responsibilities that I had before. When we had the company, I was selling fasteners, and we were raising five kids. That’s a lot going on. GOCC: As your game evolved over the years, what do you think improved? FP: I think I had basically the same game, but life was a little more stable. I always felt I was a good iron player. People say I was a good putter, but I never thought I was. I qualified three times for the Senior Open. I think I was second- or third-low amateur in the Senior Open in 1987 (at Brooklawn in Connecticut). And if I had just finished with three triple bogeys at Oakland Hills (in 1981), I would have made the cut in all three of my Senior Opens. But I ended up making a 13 on the 16th hole. I kept hitting it on the green, and it kept backing up into the water… GOCC: What about your involvement here at Hyannis Golf Club? FP: I had been coming down here for years in the pro-am leagues. Dick Marchetti from Miller Golf had four partners to buy the course here, but the bank wouldn’t give them the money because they didn’t feel there was anyone knowledgeable enough about the golf business. So they asked if I wanted to get in the group. We bought it on a shoestring. The day we bought it, some of them wanted to turn around and sell it…. About five years later Joe Keller got involved with me, and that’s when we started to make some improvements. GOCC: How did the Cape Cod Open get in here? FP: Jim and Lois Gaquin, who had been involved for years with the Cape Cod Pro-Am League, loved golf and wanted to be around golf, and I thought Cape Cod could use an Open. GOCC: What do you think about how equipment has evolved? Guys like Nick Price say they think it’s taken a lot of the finesse out of the game. FP: It takes a lot of the skill out of the game. It is much harder to cut the ball and hook the ball at will. The game used to be played by maneuvering the ball. The ball just goes farther and straighter without having a better swing. Golf courses weren’t built to be able to carry the ball 300 yards–the big hitters in those days hit it 270, and most of them were kind of wild. Now the short hitters are hitting it longer than the long hitters could then. When I played, most of the big, strong guys would be playing football and basketball; they didn’t play golf. Now you have kids like (Titleist chairman and CEO) Wally Uihlein’s son, Peter. All he’s ever done is play golf, take lessons, work out and follow a regimented diet… It’s almost like they’re robots. GOCC: You had a problem here at Hyannis, a run-in with the USGA, several years ago.... FP: What happened was we used to have a special tournament at the end of the year. It started with about four or five groups, and they would bring their friends, and it just got bigger and bigger until it used to sell out. We’ve done things exactly the same since the day it started. They called it the Fordie Shootout. The fee was $125, $100 of which goes into the prizes—amateur prizes and the players’ pool. One year, somebody got a call that the Mass. Golf Association was upset about the way the tournament was run. I went in the next day to see Tom Landry, who had just taken over as director. We went through the whole thing … I thought he was in sync with us, but the next thing I knew the USGA was involved. They told us we broke all kinds of rules, and we asked, “What rule?” We said that we were playing for our own money, and that’s perfectly within the rules. They said, “That’s not the way you did it.” We were an invitational, and they said we weren’t an invitational. I asked, “Tell me why you can do this to us and you can’t do it to other people…” They said, “You didn’t run it right” and would never give me a straight answer. FP: I started the thing and it was named after me. We had a choice of returning the money and retaining our amateur status…but I didn’t feel that I could return the money. I had been involved in the thing more than anybody else, so I stayed with it. Joe (Keller) signed the letter and sent the money back, and I fought them. I went down to Far Hills on the day of the USGA’s annual meeting. They gave me a half hour to talk, and I said I wasn’t going to go in unless my wife could go in, and finally they agreed to let her go in with me. There must have been 100 people in this huge room. I spoke for 30 minutes and said, “If there are any questions, I would be happy to answer them.” Not a word, not a question, not a smile…They wouldn’t budge on it, but they never gave me a legitimate reason. GOCC: Did you speak to somebody down in Orlando, at the golf show? FP: Yes, that was later on. The following year I called Tony Zirpoli (the USGA’s director of amateur status) who asked, “You’re not gonna run that again, are you?” I told him “Yes,” and asked him, “What do we have to do to keep you guys happy?” When he told me, I said, “Tony, that’s exactly what we did last year.” He said, “No, you didn’t!” Well, that’s what we did, and that’s what they were telling us we could do… GOCC: And that’s how you explained the way you ran it to them…. FP: One thing he did say is, “You can’t play for too much money.” I asked him, “How much is too much?” “We can’t tell you that!” he said. (Shaking his head) ... It’s a joke. FP: For almost two years… two seasons. That hearing was my chance to fight back, but it was a waste of time. A couple of the USGA guys came to me afterward and told me I did very well and they hoped I would prevail. We have run it exactly the same way every year since, and they’ve never bothered us. ... I had been involved with the USGA for about four years, on the committee for the Mid-Amateur when it started. It’s a strange group, I’ll tell you that. GOCC: We always like to ask people what their favorite courses are. What are your top three? FP: Down here I like Hyannisport, Oyster Harbors and Eastward Ho! I like Cape courses more so than places like Salem or Winchester… those courses are too soft. I like a course where the ball rolls—firm courses, firm greens. I like Woods Hole, Plymouth… I won the Hornblower there one year. Nationally, I like Winged Foot, Seminole, Oakland Hills, Oak Hill. Of course, the US Open courses and the US Amateur courses are all good courses. GOCC: We heard you got into a game with Palmer at his home course. FP: I played with Palmer at Bay Hill one day. When he’s there, he plays in the shootout. It was about eight years ago. He shot 72 that day with a ball out of bounds. GOCC: How did that come about? FP: When I played in the Senior Open at Oak Hill, a friend of mine named Bob Hoff had Palmer as his houseguest. Bob was also a member at Bay Hill, and I ran into him at the range at Bay Hill, and he told me I ought to play in the shootout. So I’ve played in it for probably 20 years, once or twice a year. One day our team won, and Bob asked if I wanted to play again tomorrow. I said “Sure,” and he added, “I’m trying to get you with Palmer.” And I said, “Yeah, sure…” I didn’t think there was much chance of that. The next day I was out on the range, and a cart pulled up beside me. The driver asked someone, “Who are you playing with today?” and the fellow answered, “I’m playing with Palmer and Bob Hoff and some guy from Massachusetts named Pitts.” I had been hitting it pretty good, but all of a sudden… (laughing) GOCC: You started to get a little out of sync, huh? FP: There are probably six to eight teams in this thing. When I was introduced to Palmer, he asked me, “Would you like to play with me in a few matches?” I said, “Sure.” My friend said, “Watch out–those are $500 bets.” I said, “It’s worth it to play with Arnold.” “Only if you win!” said Arnie. I found out later that they were $50 matches. We didn’t win, but we would have won the side bets if we hadn’t both missed putts on the last hole, so no money changed hands. After the match Arnie came in and sat with us for about an hour… had a couple of beers, then left to go to a radio interview. We had a good time. GOCC: What pro did you look up to growing up? FP: Hogan, obviously … like a lot of people. I read his book. ... It’s funny–I’ve talked a lot of golf with a lot of pros, guys like Phil Friel… but I’ve never had a lesson. GOCC: That’s a pretty good recommendation for Hogan’s book.
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Pitts was honored last fall for his role in creating the Cape Cod Senior Open, and the trophy for the event’s low amateur was named for him. It’s a fitting tribute: At 76, Pitts can boast of a nearly 50-year marriage that began on a practice tee, a business ledger that includes part-ownership of Hyannis Golf Club and a record that led another local luminary, Charlie Volpone, to call him “the ultimate amateur golfer in Massachusetts.” Indeed, it has been an awfully successful ride.
GOCC: What was your progression from caddying to becoming such a strong player?