Editor’s note: This story, which originally published on January 29, kicks off our annual Best Of The Year series. Throughout December, we will be bringing you the top GGP+ stories of 2022.
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 The GCCC signs flanking the entrance have been replaced by Celebration Baptist East Annex – which has a seven-year lease – on one side, and a verse, Deuteronomy 11:24, on the other.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).
That same emotion kept coming to Crack’s lips over and over again, even a day after our brief visit to the old haunt: “Sad is the one word that I have been saying since we left there.”
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.
“It was like going back to your high school, years after you graduated,” Doc said. “Great to see it again and a flood of memories come pouring in, but you realize it’s over and there is no going back – which is sad.”
That same emotion kept coming to Crack’s lips over and over again, even a day after our brief visit to the old haunt: “Sad is the one word that I have been saying since we left there.”
•••
The Rock and Reynolds Lake Oconee are in opposite corners of the same Greene County, separated by about 20 miles of rural road yet a million miles apart. All the money filters down to the lake where luxury homes and lush golf courses draw comfortable retirees and weekend retreaters. They’re collectively known as “lake people.”
“Town people” belonged to The Rock.
We moved to Greensboro, Georgia, in 2001, freshly minted townies who everybody already seemed to know as “those newspaper writers” before we even unpacked. Doc’s wife, Terri, sold us our house and it wasn’t long before Doc and Crack introduced me to The Rock – and like everyone else, I fell in love with the place. The origins of its nickname were self-explanatory upon first visit – “pre-irrigation it was a rock in the summer,” they say, though truthfully it wasn’t much different post-irrigation.
Everyone else’s nicknames – and everybody had one – were often less transparent on the surface. Thornton, who sold insurance at the time, was called “Doc” because his dad was an actual doctor. Davenport has been called nothing but “Crack” since Little League when his uniform pants hung down a bit low in the back. “Elmo” made perfect sense for Larry Moore (L-Mo). Jim Hudson’s name evolved from Jimmy to Jimmy Dean to “Dino.” “Flea” suited Franklin Marchman perfectly. Robbie Chapman was “Foots” because of his size 14 shoes. Darrell Cummins was “Gunslinger” because he would try to manipulate the dogfight system. Nile Webb was “Boss Hogg” for trying to twist every bet in his favor. Amory Tarpley, who worked the clubhouse, was called “Scoop” ever since he declined a football scholarship to Auburn to drive a potato chip truck instead.
We joined GCCC in summer of 2001 – monthly dues for the family were $35 – and by the opening Friday of prep football season I had my nickname. I was covering Washington-Wilkes playing its season opener at Greene County High School and the Greensboro radio station liked to interview any visiting media at halftime. The boys at The Rock, who were running the first-down chains for their alma mater, couldn’t wait to hear how Emery “Big E” Brown butchered my last name on the air.
“We’ve got Bobby Boucher here from the Augusta Chronicle …” they uproariously speculated. Big E simply introduced me on the air as only “Scott,” but I was henceforth called nothing but “Bobby Boucher” at The Rock and still to this day in Greene County.
•••
Two things made The Rock such a special place, and neither had to do with its architectural majesty or the conditioning of the course. The biggest was the menagerie of characters out there who made everything so much fun. The second was that many of these “sumbitches” could flat-out play.
The golf course games over the years were legendary from the Tuesday night scrambles to Sunday dogfights. Anytime you thought you might have a chance to win something, one of the usual suspects seemed to hole out a shot from any- and everywhere. They knew every inch and break and quirk of the course.
The course record was 63, shot by Mike Cheplick using a Club Special golf ball. A 63 is also what Merle Tarpley (Scoop’s wife) shot for nine holes in the final club championship there. As the only woman in the field, she was presented all three trophies for Open, Senior and Super Senior champion.
Tim Simpson – a former Georgia golfer who won four times on the PGA Tour from 1985-90 – used to hang out fairly regularly at The Rock. So did Mike Zack, who was the general manager down the lake at Port Armor (now The Landing at Reynolds Lake Oconee) after making three cuts and $1,383 on the PGA Tour in 1979-80. Simpson may have had the better pro career, but folks at The Rock say Zack was the best.
“Zack was the only guy not from The Rock who ever made money there – he was as good as I’ve seen out here,” said Crack, who’s played many rounds with Augusta State golfers including Patrick Reed when he was superintendent of Forest Hills Golf Club in Augusta.
Plenty of outsiders tried to win money at The Rock. Longtime member Ralph “Trey” Rhodes (now a state representative from Union Point) used to regularly bring his college buddies – Georgia football defensive back Kirby Smart, quarterback Mike Bobo and punter Dax Langley – down the road from Athens to play in the Tuesday night scrambles. Smart, now the head coach of the reigning national champion Georgia Bulldogs, was a groomsman in Rhodes’ wedding, and Trey had to take him his wallet that he left that morning at The Rock to the rehearsal dinner.
“You missing something?” Rhodes said as he returned a wallet much lighter than it is these days.
The Greensboro Jaycees hosted a tournament out there and were giving away a car for an ace on No. 7. Chapman aced it the second time around, but the Jaycees said it didn’t count unless it was the first time through. “We took the car,” said Doc.
The Rock was the kind of low-key place where you stirred up all kinds of fun beyond the usual dogfights and scrambles. Whoever stuck around long enough any given day would inevitably get sucked into a Red Nine – playing a match from the most forward tees. There was a Toughman Tournament with the course set up impossibly hard (low score was 98). Cross-Country was played from the first tee to the last hole with the requirement that your ball had to touch every hole in order along the way.
“The record score was like 13 or 14, I think,” said Crack.
There were also some infamous “Caddie Matches” – called such because somebody would caddie for you just to tag along and watch. It cost $20 to buy in and if you lost a hole you were either eliminated or could buy your way back in for $40. The buy-in doubled every time you got ousted, and few could afford to do it often. With Ed “The Captain” Walker holding a cigarette lighter to illuminate the hole, Crack once made a putt in the dark to win $500 in a caddie match.
The Greensboro Jaycees hosted a tournament out there and were giving away a car for an ace on No. 7. Chapman aced it the second time around, but the Jaycees said it didn’t count unless it was the first time through.
“We took the car,” said Doc.
My one and only golf trophy was “won” in the 2001 club championship – second place, second flight. First was already taken, so runner-up came down to a sudden-death playoff against Crack’s brother, Gary, who wanted it so desperately that he fell all to pieces from hitting his tee shot into a pond that rarely came into play. By the time I made a clinching bogey, Gary was still looking for his seventh or eighth shot that was more than likely OB over the green. There was no trophy for third place.
•••
When Greene County Country Club first opened on its initial 75 acres in 1967 (it played about 3,100 yards from the tips with tiny greens averaging 3,000 square feet), it wasn’t much to look at. It wasn’t very green, either. The original superintendent – who made $3,000 a year and got to live in the house adjacent to the first hole – bought a bunch of chicken manure and spread it across the whole hardpan property. By spring it had grass.
In 2008 after they built a second nine across the pond on the adjacent 79 acres, the club’s maintenance budget hadn’t grown much but neighboring Country Club Drive had, and so had the families enjoying the pool. Against advice, Larry Smith thought he’d repeat history and juice the process with another round of cheap fertilizer. The stench didn’t please the neighbors or the women at the pool.
“Where did these flies come from?” they asked.
“There’s 10,000 pounds of chickenshit out there,” was the terse response.
Back in the day, Crack ran the place for nearly two years – superintendent, lifeguard, etc. – before taking an assistant job on one of the lake courses and eventually becoming super at Forest Hills and now Bartram Trail.
The Rock kept plodding along merrily austere until the timing seemed right for new owner Bo Pounds to expand the course to 18 holes. A week after the second nine opened in 2008, the stock market crashed. When Pounds died in 2014, there were still 100 members. But the course’s future was left in limbo and eventually closed and went on the auction block in March 2015.
A Japanese man set the opening bid online at $350,000 and when the time came for the in-person auction he showed up and took all kinds of measurements of the course. He seemed intent on maintaining it as a club.
But when the live auction started an absentee investor immediately upped the bid to $400,000. Everyone looked hopefully toward the Japanese bidder, but he stood silent. The auctioneers kept following him around imploringly – “Going once, going twice … going 413th!” – but the property sold for $400,000 to one of three Iranian brothers who have been hoarding real estate all across Georgia, never doing anything with it.
“That was it,” said Doc, who along with other Rock regulars in attendance were crestfallen at the outcome. “We couldn’t believe it went for that little. I can’t believe we didn’t get a bunch of us together to come up with $400,000 and keep it open.”
They all watched sadly as the equipment and hardware got sold off piece by piece. Somebody got the hot dog steamer, which sat faithfully by the register where Tarpley or Lee Wade would sell those delicious dogs for $1 (I’d usually have at least three or four before the day was over). Doc left with the club championship plaque that has his name on it six times along with Crack (three-time winner, record 14-time runner-up), Foots (seven), Brad Ward (six), Larry Smith (five), original three-peater Charles Piland (1967-69) and Dino (two) among others.
And that was it. An institution that was part of so many people’s lives for almost 50 years is just another piece of rural scenery as you drive by on Hwy. 278. Doc joined Harbor Club down near the lake, a nice but soulless course that anchors the real estate around it. Crack has found a Rock substitute in the vibe down I-20 at nine-hole Thomson Country Club.
The Rock is just a scab that gets picked at every time they drive by it. From the road you can still make out that a golf course used to be there, but it gets harder the deeper you go as nature takes its course.
The par-3 third green, which was just behind Crack’s dad’s old house on Country Club Drive, is already a stand of pine trees 10-20 feet tall. Most of The Rock is turning into a forest, where those pine saplings will soon blur the lines between where mature loblollies and hardwoods framed the wide hole corridors.
And the lock is back on the gate, only opening these days for church revivals and retreats or the occasional trip down memory lane.
“It’s not coming back,” said Doc.
“Sad,” said Crack.