Inez Nunley, who is 90, likes to line dance. She favors the Electric Slide, but added with giggle and a whisper: “I also like to Wobble.
“And I’ve got a ’75 Corvette with a T-top. It’s orange and white.”
But most of all, she loves to play golf.
First introduced to the sport in the early 1950s when she took a golf class at Southern University in her native Louisiana, her passion for the game blossomed at Madden Golf Course, where she was a regular with the Madden Women’s League … until this year.
Earlier this month, the City of Dayton announced it was closing two of its three golf facilities – Madden and Kittyhawk – while keeping Community Golf Course open.
The courses had been losing money in recent years and had been subsidized by the city’s general fund. A National Golf Foundation study last year recommended the city make at least $7.9 million in renovations of its three facilities.
And with the financial fallout from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the city foresees at least an 18 percent shortfall in general fund.
But the sudden closures took local golfers by surprise and was especially crushing to those who called Madden home.
While the Nicholas Road facility attracted golfers of all races and ethnicities from across the region, it was especially a home to African Americans. It’s where many learned to play and where they came to socialize.
“It was a part of the community,” said Bill McDaniel, who worked 34 years at the Logistics Management Systems Center at Wright Patterson AFB. “Did you ever watch the TV show Cheers? Madden was a Cheers golf course, a Cheers community.”
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That’s why Nunley spoke for many when she said, “closing Madden just devastates me.”
JJ Mark – who once played football at Kentucky State and Morehead and later worked at Delco Moraine – agreed:
“It feels like when a house burns down and you see the people standing on the street, looking back at the ruins and saying, ‘Damn, what am I gonna do now?’
“Now I ride down the street and look over at Madden and think, ‘My golf home is gone.’ It was home to me for 44 years.”
Clay Dixon, the former mayor of Dayton and an integral part of the Madden community for decades, explained:
“It was more than just a golf course. It’s a venue with a lot of history to African Americans. We had to fight to be able to play there. It became part of the fabric of our community. You can’t judge that just in terms of dollars and cents.
“And now it means even more in our world with how the coronavirus is killing a disproportionate number of African Americans and with everything else that’s happening.”
This weekend, as protests rage across America over the killing of another unarmed black man by a police officer – this time by a Minneapolis cop who knelt for eight minutes on the neck of the handcuffed George Floyd – African Americans need all the places of community joy and embrace they can find and Madden was just that.
“That’s why people are so saddened,” said current pro Larry Price. “To them it feels like the end of an era and they don’t see a replacement. It had been a big part of people’s lives for so long.”
Mark remembers often slipping over to Madden during his 45-minute lunch break on second shift at Delco.
“It was right down the street and I’d come over and putt and chip for a few minutes,” he said, then laughed. “I improved my skills while I was at work.”
Todd Duncan – who graduated from Ohio University, got his MBA at Howard University and worked for NCR – said he “grew up” at Madden.
When he lived in West Dayton near Hoover and Cedarhurst, he’d ride the RTA to Madden every day. “You can imagine a brother on the bus every day with his golf clubs,” he chuckled.
Now 55, he said while he still played regularly at Madden, there were times he just drove over and socialized: “We’d have a putting contest. I’d go in the pro shop and see the old guys playing cards. I’d eat in the restaurant or maybe someone would say, ‘Hey Todd, show this young man how to hit this club’ and we’d go to the driving range.”
Some of his fondest memories come from when he and his girlfriend, Janet Bailey – she’s now his wife – were kids beginning to date:
“It would get near dusk and we’d ride our bicycles through Dayton, over to Madden. Pete Brown was the pro then and he’d say, ‘Todd, why don’t you take her for a ride on the cart paths. That would be nice exercise for you.’”
Duncan grew silent a moment and then said: “In every stage of my life, Madden has had an impact.”
‘Long struggle’ to play
Opened in 1929, the course was designed by Alex “Nipper” Campbell, the Scottish pro and golf course architect, who also did the layout for Moraine Country Club and few other area courses.
In the 1940s, Tom Blackburn was the pro at Madden and to help support his income, University of Dayton friends helped him get the less-than-heralded basketball coaching job at UD, a position he used to turn the Flyers into a national power in the 1950s.
But in the early days of Madden, African Americans were not allowed to play there or at most other courses in the Dayton area.
“We had to play at Miami View, it was just nine holes near West Carrollton,” Dixon said of the course that would be destroyed in 1961 when Interstate 75 was run right through it.
In 1937, black golfers organized the Fairway Golf Club to build the game in the African American community.
Seven years later the Fairway Golf Tournament was launched and it attracted golfers from across the Midwest, as well as celebrities, including heavyweight champ Joe Louis, singer Billy Eckstine, R & B saxophonist Red Prysock and some top black pros.
“As a youngster I caddied out at Miami View,” Dixon said. “That’s where I first saw Joe Louis.”
He said African Americans had a “long struggle” to start playing at Madden. But soon they brought a vibrancy — and some celebrity status — to the course.
“Pros like Lee Elder and Charlie Sifford would come through and Jim Dent came all the time because he was a good friend of Pete Brown,” said Pete Peterson, who learned to play at Madden after moving here from Alabama and became one of the better amateurs in town while working as a machinist.
Madden always had programs for young people. In the early years Myron Coleman was the Pied Piper of instruction.
Benny Jones, who became the first African American basketball letterman at UD, ran a program that took young people to tournaments across the region and Bob and Mary Jo Wiley were especially dedicated to the youth. In more recent years, the First Tee of Greater Miami Valley program carried on the tradition.
Although there have been several prominent pros, none was better known than the late Pete Brown, who – after winning four U.S. Negro Opens on the Chitlin’ Circuit – became the first African American to win a sanctioned event on the PGA Tour.
Against staggering odds, he triumphed in the Waco Turner Open in Oklahoma in 1964. Six years later he won the Andy Williams-San Diego Open.
He competed on the PGA Tour from 1963-77, often in front of all-white galleries who openly cheered against him in towns where most restaurants and hotels were off limits to blacks.
He and his wife Margaret came to Madden from Los Angeles in 1981. He ran the pro shop and she ran the restaurant for 26 years. They later moved to Georgia and when Pete – who’ll be inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame this summer – died in 2015, she returned to Dayton.
Price, who became the Madden pro 12 years ago, has a colorful story, too.
A VCU grad, he worked for many years as a computer technician before switching to a golf career. He eventually ended up as the head pro at Doral’s Silver Course in Miami.
He admitted he knew little about Dayton when he was offered the golf job here: “But when I saw Madden it warmed my heart. I wanted to work where Pete Brown had worked and carry on the tradition and even try to raise it a little bit.”
He flip-flopped the nines to make for a better finishing hole at the clubhouse and continued to encourage league play, not only by the Fairway and Madden Women leagues, but with groups like the Doc Wright Golf League, which caters to judges, lawyers, court personnel and elected officials.
This coming Saturday golfers are gathering at Madden for what they’re calling The Last Hurrah said Beverly Smith, a Sinclair Community College tutor who’s been active in the leadership of various Madden groups.
Along with a special sale of merchandise and a social-distancing tailgate — beginning at 3 p.m. — there may be a chance for people to walk the course one last time.
‘There’s a real hole in our hearts’
Smith grew up south of Pittsburgh, went to Central State and then stayed in the Dayton area:
“When I was in my 30s, I happened to date a guy who was a golfer and I thought maybe I should learn to play the game.”
She began playing with the Madden Women’s League and quickly fell in love with the game, although the other romance soon ended up in the rough.
Nunley said she took that first golf class at Southern to get the last credits she needed to graduate: “My father was going to kill me if I didn’t get out of there on time.”
Back then she said LSU “didn’t want” African Americans in grad school, so she enrolled at the University of Cincinnati and went on to Kent State and Wright State. She became the school librarian at Roosevelt High and then Colonel White, where she joined other women golfers at Madden.
“The more I got involved, the more it was like family,” she said. “If one of us was in trouble, we all were.”
Todd Duncan was mentored at Madden by Coleman, who first taught kids the fundamentals and golf etiquette before allowing them on the course.
He said he soon fell in love with “the chess aspect of the game:
“You can play 17 holes horribly, but then on the 18th you figure something out and you get so excited about it. Then the next day you realize what you thought you learned, you really didn’t. But then you figure something else out and so the rest of your life you’re chasing that perfect shot. There’s always something that brings you back.”
Yet now folks can’t go back to Madden.
“There’s a real hole in our hearts,” said Smith. “What are we going to do?”
Friday afternoon, Inez Nunley briefly figured it out.
Although her daughter, Shadyne, specifically instructed her nonagenarian mother to stay indoors in these COVID-19 times, I caught her bending that rule when I stopped by to pick up a golf photo.
She had been in the backyard with her hybrid club hitting golf balls over the creek behind her house.
Her beloved course might be gone, but the wild side is not.
Credit: DaytonDailyNews
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