Wes Brown
Chattanoogan Wes Brown has seen the world of golf from about every angle – from standout junior golfer to successful senior player, and from caddy to club supervisor.
He has also been involved both with private and public golf courses. About the only perspective of golf he has not experienced personally is that of a professional golfer. But he has played with a number of well-known golfers who became pros, including Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer.
“It has been a lot of fun,” said Mr. Brown, who is now in his 70s and is mostly retired.
Most Chattanoogans of today know Mr. Brown as the former supervisory official at Moccasin Bend Golf Course, where he was a member of a partnership that ran the public club for four decades. Even though he was very visible there, that job was actually secondary to his longtime position as an agent with the family’s insurance business.
As Mr. Brown recently looked back from his Heritage Landing residence on his lengthy involvement with golf, he said his earliest memories are of playing at the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club in the summers before World War II.
“We lived on Dallas Road and my father dropped my brothers and me off at the gate of the club,” he said. “We would have a sandwich and a nickel for a Double Cola. We would buy a drink from the caddy master, who was under the pro shop. We would play golf, swim and play some more golf.”
The brothers also began caddying at the club in the pre-golf cart days. Generally the club preferred older caddies, but World War II opened up some opportunities for teen-agers under the draft age. “We would play in the morning and caddy in the afternoon,” he said. “That is where we learned the game, by watching other people.”
Mr. Brown, who made 85 cents for 18 holes in his first caddy job, remembers that a golfer would write a ticket for a caddy after a round. The caddy would then take it to the caddy master to be paid. If a caddy had charged food or drinks earlier, that would be subtracted from the pay. After a golfer would shower, he would then pay the locker room attendant. The locker room attendant and the caddy master would later get together to make sure the day’s caddy incomes and tickets matched.
According to Mr. Brown, Frank Weaver was the longtime caddy master at the club. His predecessor was Pete Gunn, who, Mr. Brown remembered, could drive No. 1 green in one shot, which was no easy task.
Among the Country Club members he vividly remembers are Boots Seaton, “Mr. Bill” Oehmig (the father of Lew Oehmig), and Ewing “Pappy” Watkins, the latter of whom was tall and slender and had an easy swing.
He also recalls some of the pros at the club: Aaron Jackson, Wilbur Oakes, Bud Carroll, Red Gann, Charlie Thompson, and – more recently - Billy Buchanan and current pro Bruce Etter.
By caddying and playing at the club, Mr. Brown went on to develop his skills to such a level that he won the Tennessee State Junior three times and the Tennessee State Amateur in 1948. He also won the Sandy Summers on Signal Mountain, as did his son, Jeff, a generation later.
He also remembers playing in a national tournament in Peoria, Ill. “I caught the train there and stayed in the dorm at Bradley University. I was the medalist (in the stroke play part) but lost in the matches,” he remembered.
Although Mr. Brown enjoyed some success in golf at that age, he admitted that the junior golfers of his era did not compare to those of today. “Golfers were nothing like they are now,” he said. “It’s all we could do to shoot par.”
Among the other local junior golfers at that time were Bill Ragland, Lew Boyd, Scottie Probasco, Tom Braly, Tom Lebby, Carroll Armstrong and Ed Brantly, among others.
Mr. Brantly, who went on to have one of the best amateur careers of any Chattanoogan, was a few years younger then Mr. Brown and was just getting started in the game when Mr. Brown was winning a lot. “I always needled Brantly that I beat him by 20 shots one time,” Mr. Brown remembered with a laugh.
Mr. Brown graduated from McCallie School and went on to play as the No. 1 golfer at Washington and Lee. At that time, they were in the old Southern Conference with Wake Forest, whose top golfer happened to be a gentleman named Arnold Palmer. Mr. Brown once played against him.
“He was excellent around the greens and my brother, Lew (who played for North Carolina and was caddying for him that day), was fussing at me for not getting up and down around the greens like Palmer,” he recalled. Of course, they later realized that Mr. Palmer was a golfer with rare talent.
During that time, Mr. Brown also played with such future pros as Harvey Ward and Art Wall. And during each spring break while he was in college, the W&L team would spend five days at the famed Greenbrier resort in the mountains of West Virginia. His team would play matches against Ohio University, and their captain was Dow Finsterwald, another player who enjoyed success on the pro tour.
“I won some and he won some,” Mr. Brown recalled.
As to what makes a good golfer, Mr. Brown believes one has to have good instruction and dedication to the sport. It also helps to have a little natural talent, he added.
After college, Mr. Brown gave some thought to becoming a pro, but he soon had other responsibilities and declined. “I got married and had a little girl and went into the Army,” he said. “But it is best I didn’t turn pro because there were too many good players around.”
He had entered the Army in 1952, when the Korean War was going strong. He ended up in Oklahoma, where he played in an all-Army golf tournament with Billy Maxwell.
He already had an insurance license, but went into business with his father and brother, Ed, after serving in the military.
He also began raising a family. He had three children, Honey Doramus, a former Girls Preparatory School May Queen, who now lives in the Nashville area; Wes Jr., who also lives in the Nashville area; and Jeff, who lives in Charlotte. Both Wes Jr. and Jeff were standout athletes at McCallie.
Mr. Brown himself had also played other sports at McCallie in the 1940s. He was halfback on a football team that lost four games in three years, and was also captain of the basketball team that won the Mid-South Tournament against Baylor and other military prep schools. He went on to play in a Tennessee-Kentucky all-star high school basketball tournament against some future University of Kentucky stars.
In the mid-1960s, businessman Jimmy Wann had an idea to try to lease some city- and county-owned land on Moccasin Bend and build a golf course. He approached Mr. Brown’s brother, Ed, about the idea and Wes soon became involved as well. A total of six stockholders ended up forming a partnership.
Although the stockholders basically came up with their own layout and built the course by themselves, they did consult a Mid-Western architect named Press Maxwell. “I knew him out in Oklahoma,” Mr. Brown said. “He was getting ready to do a course in Memphis. He talked us into putting in bent grass greens. We were the first public course in the region to have bent greens.”
The partners’ lease on Moccasin Bend was renewed several times. However, in the fall of 2005, officials decided to open it up for bids, and a Woodstock, Ga., company was granted the operating lease.
Mr. Brown said he enjoyed his time with Moccasin Bend. “It was very enjoyable,” he said. “I enjoyed the turf aspect” (of taking care of the grass on the course). I enjoyed providing fun for a lot of golfers.”
The club averaged a financially healthy 40,000-50,000 rounds a year, he said. In recent years, some area clubs such as Moccasin Bend have not averaged as many golfers because the number of courses has grown relatively more than the number of golfers, he added.
Although Mr. Brown did not continue to play competitive golf quite as much after reaching adulthood as the late Lew Oehmig did, he did occasionally enjoy flashes of success. He won three city tournaments and finished second in the state open to pro Mason Rudolph.
He also played in four U.S. Amateurs. During one at The Country Club, the famous course in Brookline, Mass., he was leading by six holes in match play on the back nine. One golfer he knew, who assumed that Mr. Brown would win, innocently asked him whom he would play in the next round. That broke Mr. Brown’s concentration and he ended up losing the match.
In 1990, after Mr. Brown had passed the age of 60, he won the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club’s club tournament – more than 50 years after first playing the course.
And in 1991, he had an opportunity to play with the great Tiger Woods. Tiger, who was then only 15 but was already a well-known and accomplished amateur, had come to Chattanooga to play in the U.S. Amateur at the Honors Golf Course and Cleveland Country Club. He arrived just as the tournament started, and he did not reach match play.
However, he and his father, Earl, and half brother, Kevin, had area hotel rooms booked for the whole week, so they played some of the area courses, including The Farm in Dalton and – yes – Moccasin Bend. And who joined their foursome at the latter? That’s right, Mr. Brown.
“He had a nifty 68 and birdied the last three holes,” Mr. Brown remembered, adding that he shot a 73. “His father was a fine individual and so was his half brother.”