A Place to Play

Editor’s Note: Shortly after the publishing of this feature, Asheville Municipal Golf Course was devastated by Hurricane Helene and the front nine was destroyed entirely. For more information including how to help, visit Friends of Asheville Muni. 

In the summer of 1973, a young high school basketball coach showed up for the usual Saturday morning gangsome at Asheville Municipal Golf Course in North Carolina, a 1927 Donald Ross design with a $2 greens fee, a barrel full of odd golf clubs for sale in the pro shop and a cast of characters named Black Jack, Jitterbug and Smiley. He parred the first hole, eagled the second, birdied the third and eagled the fourth. 

Four holes, 5-under par. 

Walking to the fifth tee, one of the young man’s playing partners said, “Roy, you might go on to be a great coach. You might win a state championship, even a national championship. But you’ll never do anything in my mind to beat what I just witnessed.” 

Thirty-two years later, Lefty Patterson phoned the basketball office at the University of North Carolina and got head coach Roy Williams on the line. They exchanged pleasantries and reminisced about Williams’ firecracker start all those years ago (and he did bring it home, thank you very much, firing a 69). 

“Roy, you just won a national title,” Patterson said, referencing the Tar Heels’ 2005 NCAA basketball championship. “Still, that round at the Muni beats everything.” 

Williams—who grew up just south of Asheville and spent four formative years coaching at Charles D. Owen High School in nearby Swannanoa Valley before winning three national championships and making nine Final Four appearances while becoming one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time—still loves golf. He says it offered escape and passion beyond the court and has taken him to the finest courses and clubs in the world. As his high school basketball career wound down, Williams figured golf could be his lifelong competitive outlet. 

“That’s where my love of golf started,” says Williams, now 74 years old and three years retired after his Hall-of-Fame career. “I have so many memories at Asheville Municipal and met so many great people, just some crazy and fun characters. 

“I played golf with doctors and politicians and people who didn’t have two quarters to rub together, guys who were trying to win some money to eat that night. It was a great, great place. It was a melting pot and a place where you learned about people and human nature.” 

It’s 10 a.m. on a steamy Tuesday in July, and Matthew Bacoate, the 94-year-old director of the Skyview Golf Tournament, steps away from his paperwork and a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup “energy boost,” as he calls it. He’s in the Asheville Muni golf shop to demonstrate his recent discovery about the proper position of the right elbow in the golf swing. Bacoate has been around the game since 1943, when as a 13-year-old he began caddying at Biltmore Forest Country Club, the elite enclave 5 miles south of Asheville that was spawned in the early 1920s from the Vanderbilt family’s Biltmore Estate.  

“I always enjoyed stdying the golf swing, figuring out how to get more-accurate shots,” says Bacoate (pronounced ba-COAT). “I’ve been observing all the pros. Every one of them is able to get that right elbow tucked into their rib cage on the downswing. It happens so fast, it’s hard to see. But you do that and swing through the ball.”

Bacoate addresses an imaginary ball with an imaginary club, his loose-fitting shirt hanging over a frame that remains spindly despite a regular nocturnal intake of lemon pound cake, strawberry ice cream and a banana. 

“You’re never too old to try something new,” he says, snuggling that elbow into his side as he comes through simulated impact. “I’ve been doing pretty good the old way. But I wish I’d known this 30 years ago!”

Bacoate is enjoying a few quiet moments now that 124 players are out on the golf course in the amateur division of the 64th rendition of the Skyview Open. (Fifty-five professionals and a special invitation to four golfers from historically Black colleges and universities will follow in the afternoon.) He was here for the first Skyview, back in 1960, when the event was organized by a group of seven golfers active at the only facility in Asheville open to Black players.

“My job was to make signs and post them in the Negro neighborhoods,” says Bacoate. “I went to a grocery store, got some cardboard boxes and used crayons to make the signs. We had about 50 golfers and about 200 spectators show up. Most of the people knew nothing about golf, but this gave them an opportunity to go somewhere they had never been before. It was just amazing, the number of people that came out for the first tournament and covered the patio around the clubhouse.”

Bacoate pauses and smiles at the memory.

“We had to do a lot of monitoring of the gallery,” he says. “They didn’t know you were supposed to be quiet. They were just there to have fun.”

Ralph Alexander of Charlotte won the first Skyview, posting a three-day total of 225 to beat Lawrence Wilson of Asheville by eight shots. Two white golfers, Dr. Robert McGuffie and Walt Gossett, participated the following year, and the Skyview has since been open to all people, eventually settling into its recurring date of the week after the Fourth of July. A young Lee Elder won four straight Skyviews from 1962 to 1965 before earning his PGA Tour card in 1968. Chuck Thorpe won five, and his brother Jim played in the Skyview as well. In 2015, Harold Varner III of Gastonia played in the Skyview. Tournament organizers count 29 Black golfers who competed in the event and later played on the PGA Tour. Legendary boxer (and golf fanatic) Joe Louis was nearby one year and teed it up. 

Bacoate remembers the Skyview as being part of the fabled “Chitlin Circuit” of tournaments in the 1960s and early ’70s. Before universal access to hotels and restaurants, Black golfers would stay with friends or sleep in their cars. Some carried frying pans and utensils to warm up hot dogs and baked beans as they traveled. 

“The Skyview is about the history and resilience of a group of men who were denied opportunities to participate in regulated golf,” Bacoate says. “The group had to forge their way through lawsuits in order to bring about a new day.”

Bacoate never played on Tour, but the game became a bedrock in a life that included raising a family and running one of the most successful Black manufacturing facilities in Asheville through the mid- to late 1900s. 

“Golf is my elixir,” he says, then launches into a story about running a plant that produced medical garments, among other items, beginning in the 1970s. Around suppertime, he would take a break and head to a driving range just west of downtown to hit a large bucket of balls. 

“I would take my time and work on those golf balls. I would take about an hour and a half,” he says in a precise, clear voice. “Then I would go back to the plant. My brain was so relaxed when I returned to work. I would sit at my desk, wander through the plant, and I was more efficient. I had more clarity. I was refreshed. That’s why I call golf my elixir. It’s been that for me my whole life.”

He plays just an occasional nine holes these days, usually with potential sponsors for the Skyview, but he always keeps a driver and 7-iron in the trunk of his car. There’s no formal practice facility at Asheville, but there’s a patch of grass near the par-3 eighth hole golfers use to work on their short game. 

“I pull my car off to the side of the road and hit balls,” he says. “I love that feeling of mental clarity I get from hitting golf balls.” 

Bacoate’s pants pockets jingle as he chats, filled as they are with Kennedy half-dollars. If he sees someone spreading good cheer, a gentleman opening a door for a lady, a random Joe on the street passing, smiling and making eye contact with a total stranger, Bacoate will approach the individual, extend his hand and place a half-dollar in their palm. Invariably, the recipient will ask, “What’s this for?”

“So many people don’t speak anymore. People walk around looking like they’re mad at the world,” says Bacoate, who orders $500 worth of coins three or four times a year from his bank. “Courtesies that once were common you don’t see anymore. I’m trying to germinate that.”  

Before the 2023 Skyview commenced, Bacoate approached Mike Batten, a pro from St. Augustine, Florida, and put a coin in his hand. Batten used the half-dollar as his ball marker and won the tournament. Bacoate delighted at the post-round photos taken with Batten holding the coin next to his smiling face. 

“I try to lead people to where I am,” says Bacoate, who would hand out more than 200 half-dollars during the three days of the 2024 Skyview. “I want to see people meet each other, smile and have a conversation. Those coins get a person’s attention. Where better than a golf course to be a gentleman? Don’t get angry. You can’t hit the ball angry. Stay calm, concentrate—but not so much you get aggravated. You have to be calm and take your time.”

Asheville Municipal Golf Course sits 3 miles southeast of downtown Asheville on land that in the early 1900s was called Happy Valley Farms. The land was bought by a developer who envisioned a residential neighborhood and golf course that would be open to Jewish citizens, but the project never got out of the gate, and the city of Asheville bought some of the land for a public course.  

The front nine sits on a plain bordering the Swannanoa River, and the back nine, just to the north, winds through stark elevation changes in the Beverly Hills neighborhood. It is one of four venues designed and built in Asheville in the 1920s by Donald Ross.

There was no heavy earth-moving machinery for Asheville Muni, so Ross made do with what he had, placing bunkers and angling greens on the front side to challenge the golfer’s course-management skills. On the back nine he ran holes up hills and down valleys, ensuring balls would bounce right to left on one canted fairway, then left to right on another. He massaged the flatter areas with one green built on a ledge and bunkers in the corners of doglegs on others to vex the aggressive player. 

It was one of two major municipal projects that Ross took on in North Carolina’s mountains-to-the-coast cities of Asheville and Wilmington. The Wilmington course opened a year earlier, and both were hailed by Ross as templates for the coming wave of public courses. 

“The development of municipal golf courses is the outstanding feature of the game in America today,” Ross said in 1926. “It is the greatest step ever taken to make it the game of the people, as it should be. The municipal courses are all moneymakers, and big moneymakers. I am naturally conservative, yet I am certain that in a few years we will see golf played much more generally than is even played now.”

Asheville Muni has been in business ever since, offering affordable golf to those who didn’t grow up among the mansions and leafy neighborhoods of Biltmore Forest or Asheville Country Club. Williams was one, acknowledging that he grew up in Arden “on the opposite side of the highway” from the rich folks. 

“My high school basketball coach, Buddy Baldwin, loved to play golf, and my senior year he asked me to caddie for him,” Williams says. “I think he just wanted a way to put a few dollars in my pocket. The Muni was the first course I ever played. I just loved it. Everyone called it a dog track, but I didn’t because I didn’t know any better.” 

Williams remembers working for Piedmont Airlines one summer during a break from his university studies in Chapel Hill, hauling baggage on and off planes. He worked six days a week but only six hours a day, giving him time for golf before or after his shift. 

“A summer pass was $75,” he says. “I played 26 straight days in the month of June. By July, I had got my money back. My first-ever handicap, I got at the Muni. It cost something like $3. For me, that was a big moment. Going on 50 years now, I have recorded every single round of golf I have ever played—no matter where. It all started at the Muni.” 

The Muni was also where the Black golfers could play, most of them, like Matthew Bacoate, learning the game as a caddie. Billy Gardenhight, a fixture at the Muni in those days, was called “Black Jack” (as in “the Black Jack Nicklaus”). He started as a caddie at Biltmore Forest in 1945. “I made $3 and thought I was rich,” Gardenhight says. 

Harry Jeter caddied at Biltmore Forest and Asheville Country Club. “In time, I figured out I could do better than these guys,” says Jeter, who has the Muni course record of 62 (which he’s shot nine times).  

John Brooks Dendy followed that same path and melded his passion for a game considered the domain of the privileged with a creative process Black elders have termed “Ethiopian ingenuity,” which speaks to the art of making something out of nothing or making the best use of what you have. Dendy began by collecting stray metal club heads and discarded broom handles. He took a knife and whittled the broom handles down to a more flexible thickness, fit one end into the club head and shaved the other in the manner of a grip.  

Charlie Owen Jr. started playing golf when he was 7 or 8 years old. His family lived in Biltmore Forest, south of town, but ran Owen Mills in Swannanoa to the east, so his father passed the Muni every morning on his way to work. Caddies from area clubs were allowed to play the Muni on Mondays, so Owen Sr. would drop his son off at the course every Monday morning during the summer and pay Dendy a fee to teach Charlie how to play.  

“Brooks could have been a PGA Tour star,” Charlie says. “He was the best putter I have ever seen. There is no one out there today who can touch him. When I first started with him, all we did was the short game. He always said if you can hit a wedge and hit it properly, you can score. He said tee shots are for people to awe over, but wedges are for people to win with. I’ll never forget that comment. It’s just as true today as it was then.” 

Bobby Steiner moved to Asheville in 1990, when he was 20 years old, and had never touched a golf club. He was waiting tables at night and found golf at the Muni as “something to do.” He fell under the game’s spell, learning to play from the regulars at the course. Cortez Baxter, the longtime starter at the Muni, taught Steiner to chip by instructing him to lift his right leg off the ground and hit chip shots for two weeks—essentially ingraining for life the ability to remain stable on his left side on shots around the green. Steiner’s love affair with golf prompted him to turn pro and become a golf instructor, which he’s done now for a quarter of a century in California and Texas (including being on the Golf Digest instructional staff).

“To this day, I’ve never found the joy in golf that I had walking at Muni because now basically any round I play is going to mean that I’m going to ride in the golf cart, and it’s just not the same thing,” says Steiner. “Nothing has ever taken the place of what I experienced walking those fairways with that cast of characters. You had no idea who you were going to find on that first tee, but four hours later you were going to know them pretty well. The only thing we had in common was golf, and that was enough. It was the absolute love of the game. It was glorious.”

Pete McDaniel shagged balls and caddied at Biltmore Forest in the 1960s, and after one round he was given four wood-shafted clubs by a kindly old gentleman who said, “See what you can do with these.” Within days, McDaniel had cobbled out a rudimentary five-hole course on the grounds of a school near his home. 

“That money in my pocket was a huge motivating factor,” McDaniel says. “I wanted to keep caddying, and, once I got those clubs, I wanted to play.”  

McDaniel went on to a career as a journalist, working at the Asheville Citizen, the Times-News in Hendersonville and, later, Golf Digest. In 2000, he authored a book titled Uneven Lies: The Untold Story of African-Americans in Golf. McDaniel was 1 when the 1954 landmark ruling of Brown v. Board of Education effectively ended the Jim Crow era of “separate but equal” public facilities and play at the Muni began to be fully integrated. In McDaniel’s mind, golf was the perfect metaphor. 

“In golf, it’s just you, the golf ball, the golf course,” he says. “No one can influence that. No one—you’re totally in control. And for a group of people who have never had any control over anything, I think that was the real appeal of the game.

“This was freedom. This gave us a place to play.”

The Muni clicked along over the years until it ran into some trouble in the early 2000s. There was talk of a Walmart Supercenter to be built less than a mile away, and neighborhood residents and concerned golfers worried that the front nine could be chopped up if the two-lane Swannanoa River Road was widened to accommodate traffic. They pooled their resources to document the history of the course and area and applied for the Muni to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The application was approved in April 2005; the road remains intact at two lanes.

More recently, the course, which hadn’t fallen into disrepair but clearly had deteriorated, got another boost: a $3.5 million renovation and restoration from the fall of 2022 through July 2024 via city funds, user fees and grants. A big chunk of the project concerned stormwater, irrigation management and repairing infrastructure that had worn out over a century, but tees, greens and bunkers were polished and the pro shop was renovated. Architect Kris Spence, who’s developed a niche over 25 years of restoring Ross courses, was hired via funds from the Donald Ross Society to provide a master plan (though he was not hands-on in supervising and managing the work). 

“It’s been glorious to watch,” says Phil Blake, who grew up in a house on the 10th fairway and has played the course for more than 50 years. “I never in my lifetime have seen this much money thrown at this golf course. There were periods of time when the superintendent might rebuild something, but to have new sod? That’s country-club-type stuff.”

The complex on the first green signals how things are different now. Flanking the putting surface are grass hollows, bumps and long, wispy grass, sort of a Pinehurst effect as indicated on Ross’ original blueprint. The bent/poa greens are in good shape and getting more fine-tuned maintenance attention with new equipment and manpower. On the par-4 16th, trees have been pruned to open sunlight, parts of the fairway resodded, the green completely resodded and new bunkers built around the green. Approximately 100 trees were culled to improve sunlight and airflow. 

Standing on the terrace overlooking the front nine, head pro and general manager Pat Warren looks at the third green and sees a maintenance worker walk-mowing its perimeter. 

“The other day, I saw three workers on one green,” he says. “I stopped and thought, ‘I’ve never seen three guys in one place before.’ It’s nice to have the staff to get things done, not to mention some new equipment. We’ve never walk-mowed a green before.” 

The evening before the Skyview, course superintendent Matt Dierdorff organized a group of some two dozen members of the Friends of Asheville Muni coalition to disperse around the course, some taking divot tools to repair ball marks and others taking pails of sand to fill divots. Paul Bonesteel conceived the idea for Friends of Asheville Muni while working on a documentary about the course and its history in 2019. 

“The love of golf transcends any other issues people might have in the world,” he says. “There is a sense of community here that is very special—a community formed around common ground. Since the very beginning of the game, I think it has had that effect. Sure, you can play alone. But it’s a lot more fun to play with other people.”

They have come from near and far to play in the 2024 Skyview. 

Noah Ratner grew up nearby in the Haw Creek community, learned to play golf at the Muni and has played in the Skyview since he was 14 years old, winning three times. He remembers hanging out with the gangsome golfers as a boy. They talked of gambling, of women, of the Vietnam War. Mostly, they just loved to play golf, talk trash and exchange a few bucks along the way. 

“I never knew race at the Muni—white, Black, anything,” says Ratner, today an assistant pro at Biltmore Forest. “Everyone is there for one reason: They love golf. It’s pretty incredible.”

Reggie Simmons came from Columbia, Missouri, after seeing Bonesteel’s documentary on Golf Channel. He brought his 15-year-old daughter, Allyah, a 12-handicapper. 

“This is an historic place,” Simmons says. “Where I grew up, I didn’t have the chance to play golf. Now my daughter can play anywhere she wants. I thought it was important to come learn more about how golf evolved for Black people.” 

Beth Thompson drove a half hour from the west in Waynesville. A lifelong golfer and single-digit handicapper, she plays often at the Muni. 

“I enjoy a match over here with the men, playing for some money,” she says. “I have played in the Skyview for years. I am amazed with what they have done with the golf course. It was in such terrible shape. They had a horrible drainage problem. I couldn’t have imagined how they could make it much better. But, Lord have mercy, what they have done is incredible. I am thrilled for them.” 

Jesse Williams is one of four HBCU golfers participating, their expenses picked up by The First Tee. The 21-year-old from Winter Haven, Florida, plays at Miles College in Fairfield, Alabama. He played basketball and soccer as a kid but found himself pulled to golf after hearing stories handed down through the family about his great-grandfather, Columbus Mitchell. Mitchell was an excellent player in the mid-1900s in Akron, Ohio, but had limited opportunities to advance in the game.  

“He was not allowed to go pro because of the color of his skin,” Williams says. “When I was younger and first started to play, it made me sad and a little angry. But as I’ve matured, I realized golf is a way for me to connect with him even though I never met him. Playing golf through him and for him puts a chip on my shoulder, motivates me, gives me something to play for rather than be angry about.”

Williams has one of Bacoate’s Kennedy halves in his pocket and the respect of his elder. 

“I love these young guys,” Bacoate says. “Their minds are already made up where they want to go. They look you in the eye, and their pants are above their butts. This day and time, people have no respect for elders and tradition. These guys seem to have that.” 

After three days of competition, Luke Gifford of Boca Raton, Florida, will collect first prize of $6,300 out of a purse of $44,000. Bacoate has set a goal of a $60,000 purse and at least $10,000 to the champion in 2025. He has ideas for expanding the tournament’s social media exposure. And there’s no telling how much better the Asheville Muni will look after another year of letting some 8.5 acres of fresh sod knit it. Sleep? Bacoate needs only about three hours a night with all there is to do. 

“I am overwhelmed with how many golfers came to me, sought me out, to tell me how much they enjoyed coming here, how good the golf course looked and played,” he says. “They said they would come back and tell their friends.”

Seems like Bacoate isn’t the only one who finds his elixir at the Muni.  •