A golfer in winter
Few in these parts played the game better than
working-man Dick Drummond, now 81
By:MIKE KILGORE
Reprinted from: The Daily Mountain Eagle
Published January 22, 2007 11:57 PM CST
Dick Drummond winds through his yard on a rickety golf cart, glancing left and right like a deacon coming out of a liquor store. He meanders past two more broken-down golf carts, turns left by a stack of old tires and dodges at least a dozen white plastic buckets that must have sprouted like crocuses, filled with everything from nuts and bolts to experienced golf balls and topped-off, long ago, with rainwater. He stops under a big oak to show a visitor a gaggle of muscadine and grape vines rooting in garbage cans, some trellised on rusty pipes.
“This may look like a lot of junk to some people. But it all has a purpose,” Drummond says of the clutter surrounding the weathered house he built on Jasper’s Crescent Circle Road 60 years ago.
In the concrete driveway are two pickup trucks — one battered, one bright white. Parked nearby, glittering like a diamond in a goat’s eye, is Drummond’s burgundy Lincoln Town Car. “WATCH OUT!” and “HANDICAPPED” have been meticulously hand-painted across the back bumper, as if some traffic cop might accept the effort in lieu of a state-issued sticker.
The ancient cart rattles to a front corner of the yard, and here lies the beginnings of Drummond’s latest undertaking: scattered 2x4s, a pile of sand and rolled-out black plastic, materials he plans to fashion into a miniature putt-putt course. It’ll be a test of a golfer’s putting skills, he says. No windmills or clown’s faces here.
“Some fellows might want to come by and play it when I get it built,” he said. “Maybe make a donation.”
Golf. Still a central theme in the life of Winfield “Dick” Drummond, who in March will be 82 years old.
In 1959, Drummond got a rare working-man’s opportunity to play competitive golf at the private Musgrove Country Club, where he would soon stun the membership with his skill on the course, winning the club championship three straight years in the early ‘60s.
Some say nobody at Musgrove, or in Walker County, has ever played the game better.
Woody Brown, a member of the club since 1946, says Drummond is “without question” the best golfer he’s seen there.
Other players have certainly left their mark at the club since Drummond’s heyday: College golfers such as Alec Grant, Tab and Steve Hudson and Alan Pope, and tournament-tested veterans such as Rene’ Williams.
But those who were there believe Drummond stands alone at the top. “Dick would have beat them all,” said Hansel Hudson, who grew up with Drummond around Musgrove and remains a member today. “He definitely could have played on the PGA Tour. He was that good.”
Drummond’s unusual membership arrangement was a trade-out for work he would do on the golf course. The offer came from longtime club manager Aubrey King.
“I had finished up a plumbing job at Aubrey’s house,” Drummond recalled. “He paid me, then handed me a golf bag with a few clubs in it. I said ‘Aubrey, what are these for?’ He said you’re going to play golf. You’re going to be a member at Musgrove.’”
The deal was that in exchange for his membership Drummond would install a sprinkler system on the golf course, which in 1960 was expanding from nine to 18 holes. He also designed and built the second of Musgrove’s signature swinging bridges and rebuilt the original bridge to widen it for golf carts.
Caddy as a kid
Drummond grew up in the shadow of Musgrove in the ’30s. As the Depression began, wealthy Jasper bachelor L.B. Musgrove had leased his rustic retreat, a sturdy log building overlooking Blackwater Creek, to the country club’s founders.
Young Drummond caddied for 60 cents an 18-hole round, minus the cut his older brother, Willard, got as caddymaster. He toted the bags of prominent Jasper citizens such as Dr. L.M. Walker, Dr. Pete Camp, Bob Carr, John Whit Long Sr. and Probate Judge Ed Long.
In those days, enterprising boys who lived nearby shagged balls for 30 cents an hour when they weren’t caddying. Others sold drinks of water to golfers from a spring that runs below what is now No. 6 green.
Everyone walked the course back then. Thirsty players gladly handed the youngsters, stationed at benches under shade trees, a nickel for a turn at a gourd dipper. Ever-inventive, Drummond sometimes one-upped his buddies by bringing a block of ice to the course, sitting it on cedar shavings and chipping it into the waiting dippers.
Caddies were allowed to to play the course on Mondays, and as a golfer Drummond showed promise at an early age. But opportunities to play became less frequent as he grew up. He served in the Army and went to work to support a wife and, eventually, seven children — all under school age at the same time. His six daughters include a set of triplets.
Skilled worker, player
Drummond worked for Alabama Power and later became a plumber-electrician of some renown in the county.
He had learned to read blueprints as a youngster hanging out his father, Winnie, on a Works Progress Administration job building the Bankhead Farmsteads. But Dick Drummond has always been a “my way” man, never one to get hemmed in by blueprints. Far from it.
Hudson, who has known Drummond since both caddied as boys, said that as a plumber “Dick could rough-in an apartment complex in a day, That’s labor, craftmanship, everything, by himself. He could do anything that a man with a Ph.D could do.”
Drummond began to play a little golf after his anomalous club membership kicked in. One day, after a disappointing round, he turned to friend Paul Boteler in the men’s locker room: “You know Paul,” he said, “if I’m going to play this game, I’m going to play it right.”
In the early ‘60s, the 30-something Drummond was lean and leathery, sporting a 5-o’clock shadow at 7 a.m. His sad eyes shone with intelligence and resoluteness. Gunslinger’s eyes. He took on the game of golf with a vengeance.
To the amazement of his playing partners, he might play Musgrove’s front nine right-handed, then turn around, change clubs and play the back side left-handed.
With a golf club in his working man’s hands, he was a virtuoso.
His explanation? “I practiced.”
That he did. He would draw a circle 270 yards out and bang drivers at it, as straight as 6 o’clock. Work took up the daylight hours, so he sneaked onto the course at night to work on his game. Like a magician, Drummond hit practice balls on the course after dark, deciphering where the ball went by the way his unshaven face felt against his shoulder.
“Dick could hit any kind of golf shot,” said Hudson, “and he could do it right-handed or left-handed.”
Bernard ‘believed’
These were golden days at Musgrove. Traditions were being born.
In earlier times, the men at the club would meet for a mackerel breakfast, usually quarterly and on a Sunday morning. The fish, shipped to the club in wooden buckets, were fried early before a day of golfing began.
Wednesday became a big day for golf as downtown Jasper stores and banks closed at noon for a midweek repose. It was a day for high-dollar golf matches.
As the decade of the ‘60s began, a group wrangling over bets on Musgrove’s first tee on a Wednesday afternoon might include Drummond, postal worker Boteler, football coach D. Joe Gambrell, radio executive Bill Edgemon, broadcaster Fred Norris, theater manager Bill Call and clothier extraordinaire Bernard Weinstein.
“The first time Bill Edgemon invited me to play with them I shot 2-under par,” said Drummond. “In the locker room later on, Bernard came over to me and said ‘Dick, I want you to start being my partner. We’ll beat ’em all.’ Bernard believed in me.”
Afterward, it was usually Weinstein and Drummond against Boteler and Gambrell, a gifted player in his own right who had to work golf in around football season.
Drummond would arrive at the club parking lot in his plumbing truck, grab a handful of clubs from among the pipes and fittings in back and strut to the tee wearing his green work clothes with “Dick” printed above the left pocket. On the course he kept getting better, winning tournaments and making a name for himself. And he kept on practicing.
“After a round they’d all go into the locker room and talk about the match,” he said. “I’d go back on the course and play any holes that had given me trouble that day. I mostly practiced my driving and putting (he made his own putters in his sheet metal shop). I mean, if you hit it out there 270 yards like I did, you can just scrape it up on the green.”
Drummond played some memorable matches against Grant, then a Jasper teenager headed to the University of Tennessee on a golf scholarship. Drummond once closed out Grant after just 10 holes in a match-play tournament.
“We had to finish the 18 because of a bet some people had on the match,” Grant remembers. “You can imagine how humiliating that was.”
Superb shotmaker
As a youngster, Tab Hudson, son of the late, revered golf pro Travis Hudson, often played with Drummond.
“Nobody taught me more about golf, besides my father, than Dick Drummond,” said Hudson, a former University of Alabama golf standout who played briefly on the PGA Tour. “He was such a great ball-striker and shotmaker. He’s the best shotmaker I’ve ever played with, and that includes (PGA stars Lee) Trevino and (Jerry) Pate.”
During practice rounds with Hudson, Drummond would sometimes toss both players’ balls into the edge of the woods after their drives had split the fairway.
“Dick would say, ‘hey, Tab, we know we can get it on the green from here. Let’s see if we can get on from over there,” said Hudson.
On and off the course, Drummond could be banty-rooster cocky, a little ornery. That’s putting it mildly. Actually, he might’ve cussed you till the flies wouldn’t light on you, or threatened you with a raised 9-iron — behavior obviously not condoned in the pristine, privileged, sometimes la-di-da world of a private club.
The door that had so unexpectedly opened to him was, just as quickly, closed.
Quiet life
Drummond went on to win a roomfull of golf trophies at public courses such as Lakeside in Parrish, Twin Lakes and Arrowhead in Jasper. He was welcomed back to Musgrove in 1983, this time as a maintenance worker. He stayed 20 years, finally retiring at 78 in 2003, the year his beloved wife, Geneva, died.
Today, he lives alone, quietly, in the house where 40 years ago the hustle and bustle, clamor and clatter of a hard-working couple raising seven kids almost peeled the paint off the walls. He sits in his recliner, smokes nonfiltered Pall Mall’s and watches CNN — what he calls “reruns of the news.” He wishes he heard from his children and grandchildren more often.
Asked about his golfing success at Musgrove and elsewhere, he says only “I don’t know if I was ever the best. I just know I played a lot of it.”
He was playing at Arrowhead on Saturday mornings until the funk of winter set in and he began to feel poorly. “I just don’t have any horsepower right now,” he says.
Work on his front-yard putting course is on hold. He plans to get back to it in the spring, between tending his tomato, grape and muscadine vines.
“I’m 81, and I’m doing all this for 20 years down the road,” he said. “Don’t bet against me.”
Mike Kilgore, recently retired after 28 years at The Birmingham News, works part time for the Daily Mountain Eagle.
