Golftow n J ou r n al
A Giant in Amateur Golf Good-bye to Bill Campbell. (We'll not see your likes again)
By Lee Pace
Phootograph Courtesey of The Tufts Archives
The Goliaths of the golden age of amateur
golf keep slowly and sadly meeting their makers. Those who colored and enriched Pinehurst’s halcyon days in the mid-20th century before the launch of ads on sleeves, titanium shafts and triple-row irrigation systems are one by one succumbing to the inevitable pull of old age. Harvie Ward passed in 2004 and Billy Joe Patton followed in 2011, joining caddies like Fletcher Gaines and Hardrock Robinson, and scribes like Charles Price and Dick Taylor in adjourning to that Pine Crest Inn bar-in-the-sky.
The somber news came in late August that Pinehurst had lost another of its champions — in literal and figurative terms — with the death of William C. Campbell, a four-time North and South Amateur champion, and a decorated golfer and amateur statesman from one end of the globe to the other. My mind immediately floated back to a winter morning in 1991, when I flew a puddle jumper into the small airport outside Huntington, West Virginia, took a cab into town, mounted one flight of stairs and found the door for Campbell Insurance. Beyond the reception area was a hodge-podge of wooden furniture, filing cabinets, tables with stacks of paper, correspondence and folders, also a tall, refined looking gentleman in a gray suit. “My grandfather had this space when he opened the business more than fifty years ago,” Campbell said with a smile and warm handshake. “As you can see, we don’t waste much money on overhead.”
My eyes took in all the photographs on the walls, a veritable mini-museum of Campbell’s life in golf and his positions as former U.S. Amateur champion (1964 at Canterbury); USGA president (1982-83) and Royal & Ancient captain (1987). There’s Campbell playing in the Walker Cup in Scotland. There he is, watching in the background as Curtis Strange hits his memorable bunker shot on the 72nd hole of the 1988 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. There’s his old friend, fellow mountaineer Sam Snead. Campbell was almost apologetic for all the fuss the game makes on his walls. “Excuse all the pictures,” he said. “I have no other place to put them, really, other than a closet, and that would be a shame. We don’t get much traffic in and out of the office, so it’s not like you’re trying to impress people. I enjoy them.” Campbell pointed to four photographs taken at Pinehurst — in 1950, ’53, ’57 and ’67 after his victories over Wynsol Spencer, Mal Galletta, Hillman Robbins and Bill Hyndman, respectively, in the North and South Amateur. What followed was three hours of fascinating storytelling and a bird’s-eye view into the wheelhouse days of amateur golf. “We hadn’t reached the point yet where the better amateurs would routinely turn pro,” Campbell said. “We weren’t into the college golf syndrome, where it was a scholarship leading to the tour. It was just the beginning of that. We had quite a number of people like myself who were fair players, who wanted to play competitive golf but had no intention of being professional golfers. The amateur game was pretty lively without being dominated by college golf. It was a fun thing. You’d run into the same people year after year. You grew older as they did. Over that period of the late ’40s to the late ’60s, I had the pleasure of being part of that. “By the time I got married, in 1954, Pinehurst was a habit,” he continued. “Joan, my wife, took to it very kindly. It was the only place I traveled for golf that she joined me. It was such a salutary experience for her as well as for me.”
PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . October 2013
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