WOODBERRY FOREST, VIRGINIA | Memory is a curious thing. We’ve all played rounds of golf in recent months, the details of which our minds have already purged. And we all have rounds or places or experiences in the game that we can recall every minor detail even decades later.
A week ago, I took a walk down memory lane with a high school teammate and it was as if the 43 years in between never elapsed. Everything was exactly as it was in my mind’s eye in the 1982 Prep League championship, when I broke 80 for the first time in my life in the most meaningful round in 50 years of playing this game.
The Woodberry Forest School in the rolling hills of central Virginia boasts something very few (if any) high schools in the world can claim – its very own Donald Ross course right in the middle of its bucolic campus. It’s a nine-hole course with small, crowned greens. It weaves down and back up the hill three times, around athletic fields, past cattle pastures and in the shadows of the gymnasium and chapel and infirmary that each can come into play with a wayward approach shot.
That counting score helped us finish an unexpected second in the championship and secure the Prep League’s all-sports Directors Cup for St. Chris in the final championship of the school year. It was the highlight of my sports career.
And it hasn’t changed a bit in the 43 years since I first played it and etched every inch of it in my memory banks. Before Michael Rigsby and I returned on a bright and breezy November afternoon, I could have drawn a scaled diagram of every hole on the course complete with each hedge, fence, dogleg and building that have sat there relatively untouched since Ross designed the par-35 layout in 1926.
And I’d only played the course three times as a 17-year-old in the spring of 1982.
I was the No. 6 player on our St. Christopher’s team, and Rigsby was No. 5. Our scores didn’t count often on a team that included Country Club of Virginia kids Armistead Mauck, Turner Bredrup, Bill Morrisett and Gib Davenport.
I was a senior when I qualified to compete in my only Prep League golf championship – 36 holes on the nine-hole Woodberry course. All the fifth and sixth boys started on the seventh hole – the first of consecutive par-5s before the long par-3 ninth. Nervous doesn’t begin to describe my condition.
Through those three long holes, I had nine putts and three triples, the last thanks to slicing my persimmon 5-wood out of bounds onto the columned stoop of the Memorial Infirmary. It was a long trudge across the campus and around the gym to the first tee, where our coach, Jack Bolling, was standing and asked how it was going.
“Not good, coach,” I said, informing him of my disastrous start. “Well, just have fun,” he said.
Three holes later when I passed him again en route to the fourth tee, I hadn’t added any more official putts and had picked up a stroke to par. “Keep it going,” Mr. Bolling said, not really expecting that I could.
By the time I reached my 18th hole on the uphill, dogleg-right sixth, I was still 9-over and needed one more par to break 80 for the first time. The approach uphill had to carry a gravel road and split hedges that flanked the gap to the chapel-adjacent green. I pushed it right and figured all hope was lost when it flew into the thick privet. But the ball somehow slipped through the bushes with just enough room to take a stance and bump a shot toward the green. The ball rolled up to 4 feet and the nervy putt (only my 27th of the day) fell in for 79 – the first and last score of my life that ever truly mattered.
I’ve never forgotten that round, and returning to Woodberry Forest thanks to the courtesy of athletics director Matt Blundin (the former two-sport star in football and basketball at Virginia) only brought it all flooding back and reinforced every picture that was seared in my hippocampus. With consistent 15-20 mph wind and frequent gusts in the 30s, a repeat result was not to be last week. But I nearly hit it on the same infirmary stoop and tripled that damned ninth and made a more conventional par on the sixth without encountering the hedge.
The unrelenting winds chased us off after nine this time, and I was still 9-over. Yet it was one of the most enjoyable experiences to relive a 43-year-old memory.
I’d like another crack at it, preferably on a nice spring day like 1982 when all the cards fell into place.
Scott Michaux
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