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.
“Dynamite’s forte is a robust golf game, a thick-molasses drawl and clothes so loud he has to get behind a tree when his opponent putts.”
WILL GRIMSLEY, AP DISPATCH FROM 1949 U.S. AMATEUR
“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.”
Born in Ocilla on Nov. 10, 1919, the burly Goodloe quickly became a sports legend in the sport-obsessed nearby city of Valdosta. He played football and golf for Valdosta High in 1934-37 and then went on to play both sports – as well as be a member of the diving team – at Georgia Tech.
He got the nickname Dynamite because he was shaped like those round cartoon bombs with the sparkling wick coming out of one end. He surely could land a mean cannonball off the diving board.
“He played a bit of guard for Georgia Tech,” wrote Grimsley again. “He had one distinction. The enemy had a tougher time going over his side of the line when he was on his back than when he remained vertical.”
But it’s golf where Dynamite’s skill and character exploded the most. Tommy Aaron came on the Georgia golf scene a few years after Goodloe’s prominence and lived in opposite corners of the state, but like everyone else he heard many of the not-so-tall tales as an avid newspaper reader.
“He was about 5-feet tall and about 5-feet wide, thus the name Dynamite,” recalled Aaron, the 1973 Masters champion. “I heard he was quite an athlete; he could do all these flips and dives off the diving board and that sort of thing. Yeah, he was quite a character.”
Goodloe’s amateur career was filled with plenty of golf highlights. He won back-to-back Georgia Amateurs in 1954 and 1955. He was an alternate for the 1951 Walker Cup team that featured luminaries Bill Campbell, Frank Stranahan, Charlie Coe and Dick Chapman. He competed twice in the British Amateur, in 1950 (St. Andrews) and 1956 (Royal Troon), advancing to the quarterfinals at the Old Course. He competed in four U.S. Amateurs, entering as the low regional qualifier in 1949.
Dynamite also played three times in the Masters, his best finish a T28 in 1955 when he won some crystal for an eagle on No. 15 in the final round. He was the low amateur sitting at 1-over through three rounds as a Masters rookie in 1951 before he blew up with an 88 in the final round.
Among his reported accomplishments were 18 holes-in-one, winning the Jack Oliver Invitational at his home Valdosta Country Club nine times and setting the course record with a 62 in 1959. He played golf with every notable amateur as well as exhibition charity events with pros including Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Louise Suggs, Kathy Whitworth, Julius Boros and Al Geiberger.
He was an uncle to another Georgia Tech golfing (and placekicking) great, Bunky Henry, who was the 1967 NCAA runner-up, won once on the PGA Tour and finished ninth and 11th in the 1969 U.S. Open and PGA Championship, respectively. Goodloe reportedly taught Henry how to play golf.
Golf, however, was not the only sport in which Goodloe’s personality made an impact. After college, Goodloe went home to Valdosta, helped run his uncle’s laundry business and worked for a local insurance agency with clients in the agricultural industry. He never stopped playing golf for pleasure and competition.
Georgia Tech’s legendary football coach Bobby Dodd, who liked to fish almost as much as coach, made frequent recruiting trips in the 1950s to Valdosta – fertile recruiting territory then as it is now. Goodloe, who founded the Valdosta Touchdown Club, was well-known to south Georgia’s football coaches and got to know Dodd, taking the College Football Hall of Fame coach out to the best fishing holes on some of the lakes in Quitman, Georgia.
Like so many others, Dodd was attracted to Dynamite’s charisma and believed it would translate into a good recruiter. So he hired Goodloe in 1959 as the program’s chief recruiter and freshman coach, a position he held from 1959 to ’68, spanning Dodd’s last seven seasons at Georgia Tech as well as another year under successor Bud Carson.
With his many talents, Goodloe earned induction into the Valdosta-Lowndes County Sports Hall of Fame in 1978, the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame in 1984 and the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame in 2009.
His prowess on the golf course never diminished until the very end, as Dynamite shot a 71 on April 2, 1982 – the day he died in Valdosta at age 62.
“He’ll never be forgotten by anyone who has even caught a glimpse of him waddling down the fairway, grinning after a good shot, talking to himself and spectators after a poor one and biting down all the harder on his short cigar stub when competition is toughest,” Bradberry wrote in 1948. “Coupling this natural color with a real ability to play the game and a great personality and you have Dynamite and a thorough understanding of why fans always adopt him as their boy.”
E-MAIL SCOTT
Top: Bill "Dynamite" Goodloe endeared himself to fans in St. Andrews at the 1950 British Amateur.
Courtesy of the University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums