The boy who would be King Charles III was a wee lad and not yet invested as the Prince of Wales when he stumbled upon meeting a short and ample gentleman with a Southern drawl as sweet and thick as sorghum molasses in the 1950s at a golf course in Scotland. The low-slung man greeted the young royal using a name he likely never heard again in the 73 years it took him to ascend to the throne of the United Kingdom.
“Mr. Prince” is how the man called “Dynamite” addressed young Charles Philip Arthur George, a greeting that only made him more irresistibly charming to legions of golf fans on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s surely only a coincidence that “Mr. Prince” would name his first-born son and heir to the throne William, though it’s not unlikely the young Charles was just as thoroughly smitten by this unforgettable character from the small south Georgia town of Ocilla: William Goodloe Jr.
Bill “Dynamite” Goodloe had that kind of effect on people.
“Everybody is just wild about ‘Diney,’ the roly-poly blond blaster from Valdosta, Ga.,” wrote Will Grimsley in an Associated Press dispatch that appeared in the Atlanta Journal on the occasion of the 1949 U.S. Amateur at Oak Hill in Rochester, New York. “Dynamite, who in parlor circles answers to the name of William L. Goodloe, Jr., is five feet five, weighs 220 pounds and sights his putts by the lighted end of a black, foul-smelling cigar.”
Oh, yes, the press loved Goodloe as much as the galleries who hung around his matches in his day as they would later hang around the similarly charismatic John Daly. “Diney” was so colorful that Grimsley wrote he wore “clothes so loud he has to get behind a tree when his opponent putts.” This was before another south Georgia golfer named Doug Sanders peacocked on the stage.
Dynamite’s endearingly outsized personality had already garnered a reputation when he played golf for Georgia Tech in the early 1940s. At the 1941 Southern Intercollegiate Championship at Athens Country Club, the golf writer for one of Atlanta’s newspapers, Al Sharp, offered this of Goodloe: “You can’t beat these collegiate golfers for statements … Dynamite Goodloe, of Tech, was at breakfast on qualifying day at 7:30 o’clock … Quoth Dynamite: ‘I got up two hours ago and I’ve played that course three times already while pacing my hotel room. Now all I got to do is play it two more times for keeps.’”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution archives include this from John Bradberry from the 1948 U.S. Amateur: “Reports from the National Amateur Golf Tournament in Memphis indicate that Mr. Bill (Dynamite) Goodloe, Jr., of Valdosta, Ga., was the most popular and colorful figure in the meet. They further suggest that the small crowds for the final two rounds might well be attributed to the fact that Mr. Goodloe was eliminated earlier, much to the disappointment of the fans who adopted the rotund Georgian as their favorite.”
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