Jim Dent was known for his big drives. But his heart was even bigger

The last time I spoke with Jim Dent, the local son of Augusta, Ga., It was a month before this year’s masters, AKA The Rory Mcilroy Dance Dance. Jimmy, in his wooden driver running the prime minister, brought the ball as well as as well as Rory Mcilroy. He died on May 2, at the age of 85.

Jim was a great man with a gentle soul and a generous heart, and he was a legend in Augusta, in certain parts of it, anyway. You may ask him more about Golf in Augusta, and on this early March day I had a specific question for him some others might have answered and maybe no one.

I wanted to learn something about Charlie Choice, an eternal Jim friend who later became John Gotti’s driver. The Limo driver, though the choice had golf tips for players in the Teflon Don district. He too cooked for Gotti. When they were young, Charlie Choice was a stick like Jim Dent was a stick.

Dent did not have the gift to throw, chop and place it John gave It was in the 1990s, or that Charlie Choice had in the 1960s. But Dent had a long and fluent rhythm that brought to mind Julius Boros (who came before him) and Eduardo Romero (a offspring as a swinger of natural origin). There was no hit in the oscillation of the dent. In the 70s and ’80s, Jim could run a golf ball with a pant -driver As long as Jack Nicklaus or someone else, one fades after another, found. He was included in the famous black golfers room more than 30 years ago, and not just for his withdrawal to the high tour. (He had 12 wins in that county, no one in the regular tournament.) The induction was for his life in Golf, and for his life, the period.

When the black golf Pioneer Pete Brown, the winner of San Diego Tour Stop in 1970, was old and weak, Jim invited Pete and his wife to live in a house he owned in the outskirts of Augusta, where tents owned property for generations. (The family owned the company of the dent company, and they had high status in black Augusta. At least part of the champions withdraw, where the first two rounds of Augusta’s national amateur It was played, it was built on land that the dent family once owned.)

Jimmy was like a place like Sam snead It was the place. He could kill, cook and eat more. He was strong in the country and played quickly. Describing Dent’s career in PGA Tour, Pete Brown, Old, Old and Ill and Sandid at the time, he told me that Dent was an impatient, humorous golf player who wanted to hit the driver hit in the course and verse, did not practice his short game and had faults in concentration. He made friends wherever he went. “Everyone loves Dent,” Pete told me. Pete was Jim’s mentor.

Jim Caddied in masters as young – he had Bob Rosburg in ’56. He never played on tour and never played the course. He learned about the Golf of the Private Club holding doubles throughout the 1950s in Augusta National and Augusta Country Club. He once told me how he would stroll from his home, through the country’s club course, over a fence, over Creek’s Rae and in Augusta National Caddy Shack.

In the tournament, Jim’s nickname was a “big boy”, though there were many people who didn’t use it. As a child, Mr. Dent was boyin a racist and opposing way. It was common then. Fasten that divot, boy. like boy Was your name. I became in groups with him in the mid -1980s and it was an honor to know him as a reporter. Jim Dent won what he knew, through the experience of life. He told me about duplicating his caddy money, or trying, in white -owned pool halls in Augusta and competing at home with money in his front pocket.

Term shack shotgunDent told me, came from small tight houses, like the one in which he grew up in Augusta’s Sand Hills Sand HillsWith a front door and, 30 meters on the other side of the house, a back. If the Pope were to return home and the wrong man was falling off his back, it was a straight and easy shot. Not that such a thing has ever happened in the house dent on the Porter-Talks Street were people fearful of God! Jim’s shrimp visits and Jim’s pools were angry. A portrait of Jim Dent, father and son, both pro golf, is a study in pride.

Jim played some Caddie-Day Golf on Country Club and in the Fort Gordon course in Augusta. In the early 1960s, when Jim was in the early 20s, blacks were finally allowed to play the city -owned course in Augusta, the one named Patch. It did well there. The entrance road to the course was later named for him, and for several years his son named was in favor. (Jim Jr. has a older sister, Victoria.) For years, Senior Dent has been a regular rule in the cards room in the patch, playing a Rummy card game called Barracuda, a cousin of Tonk. I liked to talk to Jim, personally and on the phone, because I could always learn lost things in the world from him. Sand Hills, in his time, produced golf figures with secret legends like San Pedro de Macorís in the Dominican Republic, has produced short steps. Some, from both places, made it on the show. Jim Dent did it on the show.

Charlie Choice no. He went from Augusta to Atlantic City (Dent did the same) where he met Gotti and became his chef and driver. I am stealing this by myself, from a book that comes out next month:

Charlie Caddied as a child and he could make his golf ball sing. Whenever he entered the Pro Store in Patch People said, “Here comes Mr. Golf.” He had the short game everyone loved. Like Jim, Charlie was from a highly valued family, Kin for the Hornsby family, owners of a prominent black business in Augusta, Pilgrim Insurance. Charlie was baptized at Cumming Grove, the historic black church near the country club Augusta. Unlike Dent, Charlie was more interested in cash golf than the tournament golf. He spent his days in golf courses and at night he worked as a chef and driver. He had him safe something John Gotti, the head of the Gambino crime family, was looking for.