Randy Oakes

We Should Have Kept the Dog Randy Oakes

In the backwater flatlands of a small southern Indiana town on a storied, old nine-hole golf course hard on the banks of the Ohio River a 15-year-old boy enjoys the summer of 1961 playing golf and learning about life. For this young man, the summer starts in June as a contestant in an adult 36-hole tournament in southern Illinois, a tournament that he leads after the first hole. The summer ends in August in Louisville, Kentucky, on the 18th hole of his first match in his first men's match play tournament. It tells of the events that made up his summer and the last summer of the grand old golf course and its culture.