BY SCOTT MICHAUX
We’ve lost another giant from the golden age of sports journalism. When we remember venerated Charlotte, North Carolina, newspaperman Ron Green Sr., 95, who died peacefully Wednesday night in his home, one specific word comes to mind.
Thankful.
Thankful for that “F” in chemistry at Charlotte’s Central High School that prompted him to seek academic refuge in Miss Jessie Henderson’s journalism class.
Thankful for his stringer job as a prep junior at The Charlotte News, that ultimately led to his taking a job straight out of high school in 1948 and nearly seven decades of bylined stories in the News and the Observer.
Thankful for all the Masters – 60 of them – and U.S. Opens, PGAs, Ryder Cups, ACC basketball tournaments, Final Fours, Super Bowls, Olympics, NASCAR races, World Series games, NBA playoffs, heavyweight title fights and everything else from which he provided perspective.
Thankful for the beautiful family that he and his beloved Beth – three kids and five grandkids – gave the world, including our own Ron Green Jr., who remains a comforting echo of his father’s modest, lyrical, Southern grace in sports journalism.
And thankful for Senior’s gracious friendship, sharing breakfast over the morning paper, press rooms and evenings with a bottle of wine to appreciate the beauty every day that the Masters provided.
Not a Thanksgiving Day went by for “40 or 50 years – I forget which,” as he once wrote, that the citizens of Charlotte, North Carolina, didn’t wake up to Senior’s heartwarming list of things to be thankful for – Arnold Palmer, Dean Smith, that Tiger Woods may thrill us again, warm shelter on a rainy winter night, Christmas songs (but not 12 Days or the drummer boy), libraries, family, The Head Shop, a newspaper in the driveway every morning “may it ever be,” and of course Beth, his wife of 68 years with whom he had “been involved in a romantic affair for quite some time now” until her passing last October – that elicited nods and “Amens” with every genuine and deftly crafted sentence.
Senior’s Thanksgiving columns were as much of a tradition in the Queen City as turkey and all the fixin’s (never Brussels sprouts, please). I’m thankful that the internet allowed those of us outside the circulation area of the Observer to be uplifted from afar.
The only thing Green wrote more often were dispatches from Augusta, Georgia, every April for 60 years, from 1955 to 2014, after which he passed up his premium parking space to watch from home with Beth and read what his oldest son had to write about the events of the day. He caught a ride to the golf course once with Byron Nelson and got to sit and have breakfast at the Partridge Inn with Arnie on the Sunday morning before Palmer went out and won the first of his four green jackets, in 1958.
“Obviously, the right send-off,” Palmer wrote in 1990 for the foreword of a collection of Green’s columns.
Of all the things he witnessed in his career, the Masters and the people who populated it ranked at the top. He never grew tired of it, as you could glean from the titles of three of his four books: “From Tobacco Road to Amen Corner: On Sports and Life” (1990); “Shouting at Amen Corner” (1999); and “Slow Dancing with Bobby Jones” (2004).
“I liked going out in the morning on tournament days,” Green told Scott Fowler, his successor at The Charlotte Observer, a few Aprils ago. “Just the way it felt. And looking at all the beauty and letting it all sort of wash over me, kind of gathering you up and sending you out to work. I was in love with it. I look back now, and I was silly in love with it. Like a guy in love with a girl. But I’m glad I was. I think it showed through in what I wrote.”
It surely showed. From one 1994 dispatch: “The back nine at Augusta National is Eden with flagsticks, all pine and azaleas and dogwoods and rambling creeks and little ponds and memories and promises. This is where you go to feel the embrace of the Masters before the battle starts, to see the beauty, to know the peril, to look for ghosts, to listen for echoes.”
Anyone who met him felt Green’s generosity of spirit. Having moved from North Carolina to Georgia in 2001 to become the sports columnist at The Augusta Chronicle, I lived more than an hour from Augusta and was a homeless local during Masters week. The Greens welcomed me into their rented house full of N.C. writers for the week every year.
Senior lamented not playing golf anymore when he reached age 92, “but it’s no great loss to the game,” he told his old paper.
Covering the Masters for the Augusta paper was a daunting task, especially that first year when Tiger Woods was chasing his “Tiger Slam.” But every morning I’d wake up to Senior reading my stories and kindly telling me everything he liked about them. His gracious endorsement did more for an insecure columnist’s confidence and furthered my career as much as anything else.
So many who knew him could say the same. “He was my friend, mentor and a great example of how one ought to conduct themselves,” said journalist Mike Purkey, a former GGP editor.
When Senior officially “retired” after the USGA finally staged a U.S. Open at his beloved Pinehurst in 1999, the party at the Pinecrest Inn (where everybody knows his name) was the biggest celebration of the week until Payne Stewart holed those final three decisive putts.
Senior lamented not playing golf anymore when he reached age 92, “but it’s no great loss to the game,” he told his old paper. Of course, he was a fair player in his day, with some Cedarwood Country Club trophies and a Golf Writers Association of America championship to his credit. Cedarwood even named its grill room after him.
But it was newspapers and writing for them that were his biggest joys outside of his family.
“I loved being a newspaperman,” he told Fowler. “I loved the rush, and the crush, of a deadline. And I just never got over feeling good when I saw my byline in the paper.”
Ron Green Sr. was presented the PGA of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism in 2006, joining a list of peers he fit comfortably beside such as Herbert Warren Wind, Jim Murray, Furman Bisher and Dan Jenkins. His son, Ron Jr., joined his father on that register in 2023.
These were the writers who made the Masters what it is and whom you could not imagine an April in Augusta without them under the big tree that, as Senior wrote, “has been standing there in Southern soil for a hundred years or more, silently telling stories of bygone days.”
He has been inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, the Carolinas Golf Hall of Fame, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame and won numerous national and regional awards, including selection as North Carolina Sports Writer of the Year on five occasions.
Upon his induction into the N.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2006, Green said: “I’ve always been lucky. I lucked into high school journalism. I almost didn’t apply for the job with the News. I wound up on a staff at the News that included some of the best newspapermen I’ve ever known, and they taught me a lot. I was in the right place at the right time all the way to the finish line.”
Count everyone who knew him or read his work among the lucky ones. As Grantland Rice, the only sports writer who ever got to be a member at Augusta National, once wrote: “For when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks – not that you won or lost – but how you played the game.”
Ron Sr. played it about as perfectly as anyone could.
“I wouldn’t change much of anything,” Green told his old paper. “If somebody said, ‘I’ll give you your life all over again,’ I’d say, ‘Oh, I’ll take it.’ It’s been about as good as it can get, if you ask me.”
It was, and thanks for letting us share the ride.
E-MAIL scott