Golf Lessons with a Legend
By: Jennifer Herseim | Categories: Alumni Interest
This June, Gordon Coleman, IE 46, looked out over the lush green grass at East Lake Golf Club that the legendary Bobby Jones once called his home course. The memories from Tech came rushing back. There was the time that Coleman, an enrollee of the V-12 Navy College Training Program, fished out golf balls in “every shade of disrepair” from the bottom of a lake under the supervision of Coach Fred Lanoue.
“[Coach Lanoue] would bring us out here to dive into the lake for golf balls. We’d go to the pro shop, and he’d take out the balls that he could use for the range and give us back the rest,” Coleman remembers. The student-divers would take turns hitting the rejected golf balls back into the lake where they had just fished them out.
This year’s inaugural Georgia Tech Alumni Association Golf Tournament was held at East Lake—a course with likely more memories and connections to Georgia Tech than sunken golf balls at the bottom of the club’s lake.
Even before East Lake was founded, John Heisman helped form the Atlanta Athletic Club in its location and served as the athletic director of swimming, basketball, and track programs. Heisman would go on to become Tech’s football coach and the namesake for the Heisman Trophy.
But East Lake’s most prominent Tech connection is, of course, Bobby Jones. If the rolling green hills could talk, they would regale you with the stories of one of golf’s greatest.
Inside East Lake’s Tudor-style clubhouse, the walls are much more forthcoming. Framed newspaper clippings in the “Bobby Jones Room” document Jones’ impressive career, including when he solidified his name in the sport by achieving a “Grand Slam,” winning golf ’s U.S. and British Open as well as the U.S. and British Amateur all in the same year (1930).
Jones was in Tech’s class of 1922 with legendary George Griffin as well as with Coleman’s father, Claude S. “Joe” Coleman, ME 1922.
“My father was pretty athletic. He played basketball and football under Coach Alexander,” Coleman says. But—as his father told him years later— he wanted to learn a sport that he could play his whole life. And who better to teach him how to play golf than his classmate, Bobby Jones?
The story goes that Coleman’s father went to Jones and said, “Hey, Bobby, take me out and show me how to play golf.”
The two went to East Lake, and Coleman’s father started hitting balls at the range as far as he could. They were going far… The problem was they were also going far to the left.
“Bobby said to him, ‘Joe, your problem is your right hand is doing all the work. You’re hitting it like a tennis ball. Golf is a two-handed game,’ ” Coleman recalls.
But Jones had a solution. The two marched to the pro shop, where Coleman’s father got a left-handed club. It worked. Coleman’s father became a southpaw golfer from then on out.
“I first heard this story when I was growing up and thought I’d learn how to play golf,” Coleman says. “I took out my father’s golf clubs and said, ‘Dad, there’s something wrong with your clubs. They’re crooked.’”
Following his father, Coleman enrolled at Tech in 1943. After receiving his bachelor’s in 1946, he was commissioned as a naval officer, traveling around the world to New Zealand and Antarctica. Following active duty, he returned to Tech to receive his degree in industrial engineering.
He was hired by Procter & Gamble during a recruiting event on campus and left soon after for Cincinnati, Ohio. There he met his future wife on a blind date for a co-ed softball game. They’ve been married for 72 years.
At this year’s Alumni Association golf tournament, held June 21, Coleman watched as two of his daughters and their spouses played a round of golf on the same green hills where he, his father, Bobby Jones, and many other Tech alumni have set foot. If only these hills could talk, they might say—Go Jackets!
