UNION POINT, GEORGIA | Despite seven years – and all the mud, overgrown thatch and weeds that accompany that time unkempt – Doc knew exactly where to look. The Sunday pin was always in the same spot at the back of the last green. It was there in January 2015 when he and all the regulars at “The Rock” putted out there for the final time.
It’s still there, January 2022, buried like a time capsule at the place formerly known as Greene County Country Club.
“The cup’s still here,” said David “Doc” Thornton as he dug it out with his hands.
In fact, the bones are everywhere, sitting fallow and overgrown across 154 acres of rolling and pond-pocked Georgia countryside. The yardage markers still stand at the tee boxes and range. The club’s sign and “Clean Spikes Before Entering” still bolted to the modest brick clubhouse. The bench dedicated to H.K. Edwards still sits outside. The keystone shaped pool surrounded by the only palm trees in Union Point – “a pool has to have palm trees,” said former owner Ed “Bo” Pounds – sits filled with muck. The bridge across the pond slowly decays.
But The Rock is no longer. The gate out front has been padlocked since the club owner died and the property sold at auction in 2015. The GCCC signs flanking the entrance have been replaced by Celebration Baptist East Annex – which has a seven-year lease – on one side, and a verse, Deuteronomy 11:24, on the other. Three wooden crosses stand where members used to watch the Sunday dogfight roll into the last green.
Doc Thornton and Darren “Crack” Davenport grew up at The Rock, which officially opened in 1967 as a nine-hole course that put the “country” in country club. It eventually expanded to 18 holes in 2008. They learned the game from older golfers there. They played on the Greene County high school team there. They won nine combined club championships there. They dominated as partners in the annual St. Patrick’s Day tournament, so much so that the rest of the field put a $100 bounty up for anybody to beat them (they couldn’t).
On a clear, cool January afternoon, they returned to the place where so much of the happiest times in their lives were spent. Dennis Mitchell, a pastor for Celebration and a former GCCC member, showed up in his Bug House Pest Control truck to unlock the gate.
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