Golf Stories: Dogwood Tournament

Tom: I was fifty years old, so that qualified me for the seniors, but I was still playing in the regular Dogwood. So I led the whole thing. First day I had the lead over the entire thing. And second day, I still had a lead, but in the senior group I was about fifteen strokes ahead of the nearest man to me. I’ve got a picture at my house, “Forkner still leads” or something like that, and I had three fingers down so I must have been three under par.

And [chuckles] I was walking along with one fellow, a young fellow, and we were walking along side by side, and he said “you know, if somebody’d told me a damn gray-headed fellow was going to be three strokes ahead of me I’d have told him he was a damn liar.” [laughter]

But Sunday, the last day, it was just a misty rain, not hard enough where it stopped the playing, but hard enough that the greens had water kind of on them, slow your putt down. And somebody could handle it better than I could, but I lost my lead and lost the tournament on that last day. But that’s the nearest I ever came to winning the Dogwood — but I led it for two days. And the next year they came out, in the senior year you had to be 55, that let me not be in the senior group anymore. But I still got that big trophy.