Fall ball with a side of history

A walk on the Black course (no, not Bethpage)

We’ve had a run of warm, dry weather in southwestern Connecticut, daytime highs that will seem like fantasy soon. When November in New England offers such a gift, photos of mid-south golf posted on social media—sun and short sleeves—aren’t stinging as much as they usually do this time of year. For the moment, zip codes don’t mean zilch.

In the early afternoon on one of these winning days I slipped out for nine holes, and my destination, Fairchild Wheeler, ensured it would exercise mind as well as body.

Eighth hole, D. Fairchild Wheeler Black course, on a glorious recent day. (Bill Fields)

I grew up in Southern Pines, N.C., where golf is king in fall and spring and only slightly less royal the other two seasons. (My friend Mike and I have a theory that with a bag on your shoulder and a late-afternoon August sun beating down, the fairway on the par-5 sixth at Mid Pines is the hottest place on the planet, but that is a story for another time.)

As a teenager in the mid-1970s, I had the good fortune to get part-time work at Mid Pines, wrangling the electric carts. The head professional was Jim Boros, whose uncle Julius, a three-time major champion, had represented the club during the 1950s and ’60s. Julius won 18 times on the PGA Tour and in the summer of ’75— when he was 55 years old and I was earnestly trying to figure out how to swing easy, hit hard—nearly got No. 19, losing a playoff to Gene Littler at Westchester. Recently I came upon a list that the great Australian Peter Thomson compiled 30 years ago of the best dozen golfers he’d ever seen. Along with some of the usual suspects, Boros was included, which speaks volumes about how good he was.

The Boros connection at Mid Pines—Julius’ brother, Ernie, was head pro before Jim—meant there also was a link to Connecticut, the family’s home state. When I worked there, two of Jim’s young assistant pros were fellow natives of the Nutmeg State, brothers Barry and Lloyd Matey, who grew up in the Fairfield County town of Monroe, where they were standout multi-sport athletes at Masuk High School in the late 1960s. I got to see a lot of Barry’s buttery action and Lloyd’s more compact, powerful swing during many twilight rounds together after work. From Barry and Lloyd, I heard a lot about the Black course, one of two 18s (the other is the Red) at the D. Fairchild Wheeler public facility, located in Fairfield and owned by the city of Bridgeport.

Barry and his younger sibling talked about the Black as they would a bully shaking you down for lunch money. In their descriptions, it sounded tough and unrelenting, full of hills and exacting par 4s, the kind of place where a golfer couldn’t fake it. Outside of courses I’d seen on television or read about, thanks to the Mateys’ recollections of “the Black at The Wheel” it became a layout more lodged in my golf consciousness than any other, long before I first played it in the late 1980s after moving north.

Ray Matey, their father, sure had the right stuff for the rigors of the Black. He won the D. Fairchild Wheeler Club Championship twice (1943, ’48) and was runner-up three times (1947, ’50, ’52), losing the final to Ernie Boros in ’50. The Wheel was bustling in mid-century, in the years when lots of things were still being manufactured in Bridgeport.

Before Wheeler Park, as it is also known, was built in the early 1930s, the city’s only municipal golf was a nine-hole course at Beardsley Park, a rural oasis planned by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1880s. A golf course opened three decades later, during World War I. Gene Sarazen worked at Beardsley Park as an assistant pro several years before hitting the big time as a 20-year-old with victories in the 1922 U.S. Open and PGA Championship. The Beardsley Park course, where as a teen Sarazen won his first tournament, closed during Wheeler Park’s heyday. The land where P.T. Barnum used to exercise his circus animals in the late 1800s is home to Connecticut’s only zoo. Driving in more than a century later, it’s not very hard to pick out where some of the old holes were situated, the land where Sarazen honed his skills with hickory-shafted clubs.

Sarazen had been a golf star for a decade and the world was reeling from the Great Depression when Bridgeport mayor Edward T. Buckingham envisioned the Wheeler Park golf courses. Hundreds of unemployed men were given work clearing the rocky, 400-acre site in the early 1930s and Wheeler quickly became a well-known in the region’s muny golf circles, with the 1932 New England Publinx being held there. The Black was completed first followed by the Red, each designed by Robert W. White, an influential figure in early American golf.

Robert W. White

White was born in St. Andrews, where his father, also named Robert, was a blacksmith turned cleek maker in the late 19th century. As Pete Georgiady notes in The Compendium of British Club Makers, the elder White produced iron heads for Robert Forgan and Tom Morris and taught the craft to apprentices Robert Condie and Tom Stewart, “the latter becoming the most famous cleek maker in Scotland.” Bobby Jones loved Stewart irons and became a legend using them.

A 19th century club from Robert White of St. Andrews, father of Robert W. White. (Bill Fields)

The younger White emigrated to the United States in 1894. He played in the U.S. Open a handful of times, his best finish 27th out of 35 contestants in 1897 and his best score a first-round 81 in 1906. A professional at clubs in the Northeast (Myopia Hunt, Wykagyl) and Midwest (Cincinnati, Ravisloe) he made his mark outside competition, becoming well versed in agronomy and architecture.

White was a founding member of the PGA of America in 1916 and its first president. When the American Society of Golf Course Architects began three decades later, White was a charter member of that organization too. He laid out about two dozen courses, including Shorehaven (Norwalk, where the amateur legend Jerry Courville Sr. won 26 club championships) and Silver Spring (Ridgefield) in Connecticut in addition to the 36 holes at The Wheel. He also did Longue View in western Pennsylvania and Pine Lakes in Myrtle Beach, where he lived in retirement until his death in 1959 at age 85. After problems with his business in Scotland, White’s father followed him to America, settling in Massachusetts and using his skills working at A.G. Spalding, the dominant American golf manufacturer in the early 20th century.

I went out for my quick nine on the front side of the Black carrying a few irons produced by another giant of 20th century American golf manufacturing, Wilson. I’d just purchased this set, circa 1974 Staff Dynapowers with the adjustable circular weight in the toe, just like the ones I owned more than 40 years ago when I was playing a lot with Barry and Lloyd and first heard about the storied course of their youth. A modern driver and hybrid, along with my Ray Cook M1-N mallet putter from the mid-1970s, filled out the half set in my light carry bag.

The Black has bruised my scorecard plenty over the years; I didn’t have to play it more than once to find out what the Matey brothers had been talking about, even though it’s about 6,5000 from the tips. On this sunny Monday, though, trying to clear my head and loosen my left hip and swinging vintage irons, I wasn’t in the mood for punishment. I moved up to a set of tees the color of the leaves.

It was the first time I’d played the Black at such a yardage, but it won’t be the last. A par, two birdies, nothing worse than bogey. The biggest differences from the blue or white tees came at the eighth and ninth, which were dramatically shorter and par 4s instead par 5s. Driver/8-iron to No. 8 and 2-iron/pitching wedge to No. 9. Cart-boy me would have rolled his eyes, but present-day me walked to the car smiling after a 3-4 finish.

At the steeply downhill seventh hole, which measured 190 yards for me instead of the taxing 225 the Mateys had talked about, I waited five minutes for the threesome ahead, which had been moving briskly, to clear the green. My seat near the tee was a memorial bench, not yet weathered. “In Memory of John Lotty,” an inscription reads. “Make it a legendary day!”

I didn’t know him. After I played, I looked for Lotty’s obituary. He passed away 18 months ago at 74, his age just a little older than Barry and Lloyd are now. Golf had been a passion. The obit also said he was a 1963 graduate of Notre Dame High School. It is located across the street and not far away from the Black course’s seventh hole, beyond the trees that are changing colors.