With no more competitive mountains to climb in amateur golf, Pat Tallent decided last year to scale a peak of a different sort. That was taking over the operation of a municipal golf course routed on top of an old strip mine in eastern Kentucky not far from where he grew up. The goal was simple: help the facility not only stay in business but also prosper as he upgraded aspects of it on his own dime.
Called StoneCrest Golf Course and owned by the city of Prestonsburg (pop. 3,791), the layout is located on some 200 acres in the Appalachians Mountains and close to the border with Virginia and West Virginia. The area is best known for the coal that miners have extracted from the ground there since the mid-1700s. But over the past several decades, it also has become a mecca for music lovers. Butcher Holler, where Loretta Lynn and her younger sister Crystal Gayle were raised, is a short drive away. And U.S. 23, aka the Country Music Highway and so named because other notables from that realm such as Ricky Skaggs, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless and Billy Ray Cyrus grew up along that road, runs right past Prestonsburg. The town also happens to be the site of the Mountain Arts Center, which hosts concerts and is home to the Kentucky Opry.
Hiking, mountain biking and kayaking are big in this region as well. And Tallent believes that StoneCrest makes golf another viable and attractive recreational option.
“It’s good for me to come back to Floyd County and give something back to the community,” said the 70-year-old Tallent, who recently bought a home with his wife, Cindy, on the golf course and now spends a few months of the year there. “This area did well with coal for many decades, but not anymore. And though the recreational opportunities are awesome, that industry has yet to really develop.”
The hope is that StoneCrest will help in that regard.
Tallent grew up in Maytown, which lies about 15 miles west of Prestonsburg and these days has a population of 227.
His grandmother was a May, and she owned the local general store. “The post office was there as well, and it was the center of all activity in Maytown,” he said with a slight drawl.
As for his mother, she worked as a schoolteacher, while his father was a supervisor at a local hydrocarbon plant.
One of four brothers, Tallent played golf as a kid, on a nine-hole course with sand greens that were doused with motor oil. But his real passion was basketball, and as a 6-foot-3-inch shooting guard for since-shuttered Maytown High School, he averaged nearly 40 points a game as a senior. From there, he went to star at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., playing for his older brother Bob. Tallent was an Academic All-American in 1975 and 1976 and team captain during his last two years. In fact, he was so good that the Washington Bullets (now Wizards) selected him in the sixth round of the 1976 NBA Draft.
“I was the last guy cut in training camp,” he said. “I thought about going to Europe to play professionally but ultimately decided to take advantage of the degree in accounting I had earned and go to work at Price Waterhouse.”
During his time at George Washington, Tallent started to play competitive golf by walking onto the golf team. Eventually, he became its No. 1 player.
Tallent concentrated on his career after graduating from George Washington, teeing it up only on occasion. But by the mid-1980s, he started to take the game more seriously. Tallent also started to have some real successes in golf. In 1987, he qualified for his first U.S. Amateur, at the ripe old age of 34. He also won the 2000 Maryland Amateur and the 2007 Virginia Amateur.
From there, he went on to enjoy a storied golf career, taking most notably the 2002 Travis Invitational at Garden City Golf Club, the 2009 Crump Cup Senior title at Pine Valley and the 2010 Coleman Senior at Seminole. Tallent also earned the low-amateur honor at the 2004 U.S. Senior Open.
Then came his biggest triumphs, the 2014 U.S. Senior Amateur (his only USGA title) and the 2015 British Senior Amateur.
Not surprisingly, Tallent took his rightful place in the National Senior Amateur Golf Hall of Fame in 2021.
Tallent was 67 years old when he received that recognition and more or less done with tournament golf because of knee and back injuries. But he was quite content to kick back with Cindy, with whom he had raised three daughters, at homes they kept in Florida and Virginia.
Then, Johnny Ray Turner came calling.
“They had never been able to make money with it. And they kept cutting costs in an effort to keep it afloat. The conditioning suffered as a result, and it was not clear how long the city could sustain it.” – Pat Tallent
A fellow native of Floyd County who had grown up in the hamlet of Drift just 16 miles south of Tallent’s childhood home in Maytown, Turner represented Kentucky’s 29th District in the state Senate for some two decades. He suggested that Tallent get involved with StoneCrest.
“I am something of a known entity around there,” said Tallent, who has been inducted into the Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame as well as the Mountain Sports Hall of Fame. “Mostly for my basketball but also for my golf.”
The idea intrigued Tallent, especially given how the city was struggling to keep the course going.
“They had never been able to make money with it,” Tallent said. “And they kept cutting costs in an effort to keep it afloat. The conditioning suffered as a result, and it was not clear how long the city could sustain it.”
So, Tallent made a proposition: If they continued to spend the $400,000 they had been allocating for the golf course on an annual basis, he would cover whatever else was needed to bring the property back to what it could and should be.
“Basically, I was capping their losses,” Tallent said. “And if we made money when all was said and done, we would share in the profits, 50-50.
“I’ve been very fortunate in my life,” he said. “Cindy, too. I did well at Price Waterhouse and then served as CFO of a hazardous-waste recycling company, retiring when I was 50. I had met Cindy at Price Waterhouse, where she had been very successful. And she did even better when she moved into telecommunications for a company that was bought not too long ago by Microsoft for $7.5 billion.”
In other words, they had the financial ability to do this.
Tallent also had the inclination, in part because the project allowed him to get involved in golf in a very different way.
“Through all my years playing competitively and on some very special courses, I had developed a real interest in architecture,” he said.
With StoneCrest, he had a layout that needed a bit of tweaking from a design standpoint as well as upgrades to its maintenance and the overall amenities the facility offered golfers.
Tallent started to put his plan in place in April 2023.
“One of our first moves was initiating a tree-cutting program,” he said. “That gave us back the views, and the views throughout the golf course are as good as any I have ever seen.”
At the same time, Tallent started to look at the overall design of the layout.
“It wasn’t bad,” he said. “But the city did not have enough money to hire an architect when it built StoneCrest, so they used a residential engineering firm instead,” he said. “And having been designed in 2000, before the golf ball started flying so far, a lot of the bunkers were not coming into play off the tee.
“The course had maybe 80 bunkers when it opened, and today there are only 25 or so. We got rid of many of the ones that were no longer in play while making the ones we kept more visually appealing.” – Pat Tallent
“The course had maybe 80 bunkers when it opened, and today there are only 25 or so,” Tallent said. “We got rid of many of the ones that were no longer in play while making the ones we kept more visually appealing.”
In addition, Tallent altered the style of the bunkers. “They had flash faces, and we turned them into something Seth Raynor might have designed, geometric and lying flat on the ground with grass faces.”
Tallent also stretched the par-72 course by roughly 300 yards, so it can play some 7,200 yards from the tips. “But we have five sets of tees on all but two holes,” Tallent said. “That way we can accommodate players of a wide range of abilities. And we can have fun with the set-up, like they do at the Los Angeles Country Club, where George Thomas designed holes that could be played one day as a par-4 and the next as a par-3.”
At the same time, he installed a Toptracer system on the driving range, which he lets young golfers use for free on Monday nights.
“We also don’t charge greens fees for high school and college kids,” he added.
Tallent points out that the influx of cash he has been able to provide as well as the ways that superintendent Brad Reynolds has used those funds have improved conditioning significantly, largely through more regular mowing and proper aeration. “The fairways at StoneCrest are playing like those at Congressional and Caves Valley,” said Tallent, mentioning two Maryland clubs of which he is a member. “Overall, the golf course is in fantastic shape.”
So, it appears, are course finances. “We increased revenue by more than 55 percent in 2023,” said Tallent, who to date has put some $2 million into the golf course and its operation. “And we are up an additional 59 percent over 2023 this year.”
Rounds have also been rising and are expected to top 27,000 in 2024, an increase from 18,000 two years ago.
But those numbers tell only part of the story, and Tallent also gets a sense that his efforts are paying off by the things he takes in from his golf course home.
“I can’t believe how many young girls I see out there now,” he said. “And how many groups of young guys in their 30s and 40s are teeing off most days.”
Chalk it all up as another win for Pat Tallent.