Chase walked down the long slope from the porch of the clubhouse, across the clipped grass, to the little bronze plaque set into a boulder beside the first tee. The wind moved through the pines overhead. He had passed that boulder every morning for three seasons without reading it. He bent, shielded the sun from the metal with his hand, and spoke the words as if each one were heavier than the last. “The first ball struck on this course was hit by William Thurman, caddie, age sixteen, April nineteen sixty one.” I am Willie Thurman, seventy nine years old, and I stood on the porch in my pressed khakis and my old cap with the little green member pin on the brim.
In 1961, I was a sixteen year old caddie who carried two bags for a dollar and a quarter. The founder of the club, Mr. Harlan Beauchamp, asked me to hit the opening drive of the new course because I was the only caddie who had spent his lunch hours on the range. I hit it two hundred and forty yards. In 1988, after twenty seven years as head caddie and teaching pro, the members voted me an honorary lifetime member, the first Black member in the history of the club. The little green pin was pinned to my cap by Mr. Beauchamp himself.
An old member in a blue blazer, ninety years old and seated at the porch rail with a mint julep in his hand, set the glass down so carefully it did not clink. “Willie,” he said, “Willie, I held your bag in sixty three. Did you know that? You told me to take the five iron, and I took the four.” A group of young golfers by the pro shop had stopped with their clubs on their shoulders. The beverage cart girl stood with a tray of lemonade. A greenskeeper on a mower cut the engine and took off his hat.
A tiny green pin on a worn cap gave one retired head caddie an afternoon on the porch to bring a young pro back to the first tee in Augusta.
I gave my terms while Chase walked back up the slope with his shoulders hunched. “Son, I am not going to tell the board. You are twenty six, you want to be a head professional some day, and you thought you were doing your job. But I would ask you for one afternoon. Walk the course with me, all eighteen holes. I will tell you who built every bunker and who carried every bag. And on the first tee, I would like you to let one of the young caddies hit the opening drive of the day.”
Chase took off his visor and held it in both hands. “Mr. Thurman, I read about you at the Golf Hall of Fame when I was in college,” he said, in a voice that kept breaking. “I wanted to work at a course where a man like you had made a name.” He looked at the grass. “And on my first season I told you that members only could sit on the porch. I told you the pin was a souvenir. I said it in front of the whole terrace.” His face crumpled. “My own father caddied in Savannah. I know better.”
But embarrassment, as I have learned over the years, makes people grab at the nearest thing. Chase reached out, plucked the green pin off the brim of my cap, and strode toward the pro shop, saying he would check it against the membership book in the office. He got ten yards. The old member in the blue blazer rose from his chair at the rail. The beverage cart girl wheeled her cart directly across the path, and the greenskeeper brought the mower around, and the young golfers closed up behind him in a line, their clubs resting on their shoulders.
Chase stopped on the clipped grass, with the pin held out in his fist and a half circle of people before him, and nobody said a word. Then the old man in the blazer spoke, slow and clear, in the voice of a man who has been giving orders for seventy years. “Son,” he said, “that man taught me how to read a green. You will give him back his pin.” Chase swallowed, came forward, and with great care replaced the pin on my cap. He stood back and took off his visor again.
The consequences were kind. That afternoon Chase and I walked the course, all eighteen holes, in a cart, and I told him the story of every bunker and every old tree. At the first tee the next morning, a young caddie named Marcus hit the opening drive of the day, and the whole membership applauded. The board voted to move the plaque to a stone podium with a small bench, and to hang a framed photograph of the first ball in the clubhouse. Chase asked me to give a lesson. I gave him three.
In the name of my wife Ruth, who passed in 2018, I started the Ruth Thurman Fund. It pays for golf lessons, clubs and college scholarships for caddies and the children of caddies, in Richmond, Columbia and Aiken counties. In the first year we gave scholarships to sixteen caddies and bought clubs for ninety two children. One was a fifteen year old boy from Hephzibah who had hit balls with a broom handle, and who broke ninety on his first full round, crying all the way up the eighteenth fairway.
On the first Saturday of April, the sun rose over the pines and the morning mist lifted from the first fairway. I stood on the tee in my old cap and green pin with a driver in my hands, beside Chase and thirty caddies in white coveralls. He handed me a ball. “Mr. Thurman,” he said, “would you hit the opening drive?” I teed it up. I took a breath, and I swung, and the ball rose bright against the pines and landed two hundred yards out, a little short of where it had landed sixty years before, but just as straight.