Bob Labbance, USGA Museum Committee Member, Dies
Sep 02, 2008
I was fortunate to have known Bob Labbance for 25 years. Our first meeting had nothing to do with golf. Having moved to South Royalton, Vermont in late August of 1983 to attend Vermont Law School, I was hungry and 108 Chelsea Station was pretty much the only sit-down restaurant in town. Bob was the owner, head chef and one of the waiters. At that time, I hadn’t played golf in several years but, as anyone who met Bob in any context will attest, his love of the game soon became apparent and it wasn’t long before I dusted off my clubs. The restaurant was only open for breakfast and lunch and most afternoons he would drive out of town after the lunch rush in his old Volvo hatchback. His clubs were always in the car and headed in any compass direction. South to the Woodstock Country Club, east to the Hanover Country Club, north to the CC of Barre or west to the Rutland Country Club.
It is often said that the true measure of a man is what others thought of him. It can be found in the company he keeps. Bob lived in several worlds during his life and many people from one may have had no connection with folks in another. There was the golf world, the food service world and, most importantly, the friends and family world. I spent considerable time with Bob in all those worlds and the common theme was that he was extraordinary in each. His wife, Kathie, somehow managed to keep herself largely out of the golf world. As I write from Bob’s home office overlooking Camel’s Hump, she is out tending the garden on this beautiful late summer’s day. His daughter, Simone, at 15 is an accomplished sitar player. His son, Griffin, played all four years on the U32 High School golf team. For 15 years, beginning when Griffin was three, Griffin and Bob played his age in holes on his birthday and the photos of those days lined the walls of Bob’s office.
Most within the golf community knew Bob as a writer. He wrote seventeen books on golf, served as the golf editor for “The Valley News,” was a managing editor at “Turf Magazine,” edited six northeastern state golf magazines for many years, wrote a series of greenkeeping histories for “Superintendent Magazine,” and played a crucial role in researching and editing The Architects of Golf. Geoffrey Cornish’s inscription on Bob’s copy reads:
“I trust you realize I am not unmindful of the contributions you made to bringing this volume to a successful conclusion.”
Bob never sought recognition for his work; he simply wanted the recognition for his subjects, such as Walter Travis, Wayne Stiles and the courses whose histories he researched and wrote. However, an important piece of Bob’s golf writing has been unknown until now. In the spring of 2003, Bob joined the great tradition begun many years ago by Joe Murdoch. He wrote under a pen name for the British Golf Collectors Society’s magazine, “Through The Green,” known only to him and their editor. Bob was “Bunkie Foozle” and he took great delight when many of their readers wrote to complain about Bunkie because he had criticized the “esteemed” Bob Labbance in a recent piece having to do with Balkan politics.
Bob grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut. His first golf experience came during the third grade at a friend’s backyard apple orchard around 1960. By the time he was 11 in 1963, he had started caddieing at the Country Club of Fairfield, where he looped for three seasons. He played on Mondays when the course was closed and he must have been a highly desired caddie, as he was on the bag for Julius Boros during that first season. It was his personal highlight at a time when the name Seth Raynor, the club’s famous architect, meant nothing to him.
In 1970, he started college at Bates in Lewiston, Maine, and other interests, such as radio and photography, soon took precedence over golf. He took photography classes for several years under John McKee, including an assignment to carry a camera with him 24 hours a day for a week. One photo from that week is an amazing image of snow falling from the roof of Pettigrew Hall. He took his passion for photography onto the golf course, and the results have appeared in publications too numerous to mention. There is, however, one image he was particularly fond of: the shot of the Redan at Yale that graces the cover of Eighteen Stakes on a Sunday Afternoon, for which he took no fewer than four trips from Vermont to New Haven to get just the right shot. It may simply have been an excuse to keep playing the course, but who would blame him?
He didn’t pick up his clubs from 1971 until the early in 1980 when he and David Cornwell, whom he had met while a late night D-J for Bates’s college radio station, WRJR, began playing together in the Upper Valley area around White River Junction and Lebanon, N.H. They had neither a good guide for golf courses in the area nor the funds to play as much as they wanted to. So they came up with a simple but hardly revolutionary idea: write a golf guide to Vermont. Little did Bob think at the time that he would parlay this concept into an actual career.
Bob and David traveled throughout Vermont visiting golf courses from 1980-1986. They logged over 7,500 miles “looking for golf, and in gathering information a casual pastime turned into an obsession.” Even that early in Bob’s golf writing career, he was focused on the “ambience, challenge and outstanding design features” of the courses they visited. Bob was always interested in who designed the course and what original features still existed. In many cases, the key people at the course didn’t know. Throughout Bob’s career, he set out to change that. He wanted to see courses restored and their original architects recognized, well before today’s welcome restoration movement began.
By the late 1980s Bob was covering golf tournaments, initially as a member of the print media, and then as a photographer. Some of his early press credentials include photo badge #00038 from the 1988 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., a credential from the 1989 U.S. Open at Oak Hill CC in Rochester, N.Y., and a press badge for the 1990 Masters, a tournament he covered several times. It was at The Country Club in 1988 when he first met Herbert Warren Wind, who had a significant impact on Bob, as he did with so many of us. Bob covered the Masters for many years and won the lottery for press to play the course on the Monday after the tournament one year. He was quite proud of that and emphasized that his “selection” had everything to do with the assortment of Vermont maple products he’d sent to the key decision makers a few times over the years. He made an eagle on the 10th hole.
After I moved back to Boston in 1987, Bob and I kept in touch through our common and mutually growing interest in golf. He would call and ask if I could join him on one of his research trips and off I’d go, invariably meeting Bob in the parking lot or at the pro shop minutes (or even seconds) before our tee time. He would come up with ideas such as walking four of Vermont’s “ski area” courses from the tips over two days, or a piece on halfway houses, tee area benches or the ubiquitous bells we’ve all rung. He was still working full time in the food service business, having given up 108 Chelsea to manage the South Royalton House, owned and operated by the Vermont Law School. Bob bought a pasta machine and operated Peavine Pasta out of his house, making fresh pasta which fueled many of our golf excursions.
It was on one of these excursions in 2000 that I asked Bob if I could write an article for him. He said “you work for the National Park Service; they must have courses in some of the parks. Write about one of them.” I wisely kept my day job, but my first golf article appeared in the 2001 issue of “Commonwealth Golf.” It was about Highland Links, located within the Truro Highlands Historic District inside the boundaries of the Cape Cod National Seashore. Bob was a great editor to work with; he was always included stories on golf history and architecture, not just the latest resort course or the newest high end course, despite the fact that they were the ones who bought the ads. As my immersion into golf writing and golf history deepened, I found that whoever I spoke to in the golf world, be it a superintendent or a writer, invariably knew Bob, had read his writings and had tremendous respect for him. Just as Bob’s long time association with Geoff Cornish opened so many doors for Bob, my association with Bob has meant the same to me.
Through Bob, not only was I able to develop relationships with myriad superintendents, golf writers and others in the community, but I learned invaluable research skills that are simply not taught in a traditional academic setting. We also got to play a few great golf courses. The scope of Bob’s research skills becomes clear when perusing his files. They contain detailed records of who he spoke to and that person’s contact information, references to source materials, and later their Web sites. He spent decades traveling around New England and rarely passed up the opportunity to inspect an old bookstore, long before the days of eBay made that wonderful pastime obsolete.
Some people who live with collectors like us may not view collecting as a talent, but consummate he was, amassing a huge collection of early references to the game, a library of more than 4,000 volumes. In addition to traditional ephemera ranging from medals to scorecards and postcards, he had Pink Panther and Fred Flintstone golf puzzles, the only known record albums with the Rolling Stones and Beatles holding golf clubs on their respective covers, and even such modern oddities as Tiger Woods bobble-head dolls. He continued to collect right up through this past spring, and was anxious to hear about the prices from at August’s PBA golf book auction, the catalogue for which he had read to him.
Not only could he answer questions about so many of the great, yet still relatively unknown golf architects, in most cases he knew about their courses, and further still about the current and previous superintendents. To Bob, the “supers” were the most important person at any golf course, and he had tremendous respect for them. They taught him all he knew about agronomy, and his knowledge of that field was encyclopedic. And of course, the golf architects themselves, from the “Golden Age” designers we never met to all of today’s household names, were held in great esteem by Bob. In going through his inscribed volumes, their words say the world about Bob.
On the 2002 Bethpage Black Course Field Notes: “For Bob Labbance – A true golf course architecture aficionado who is a credit to the golf industry – all the best – Rees Jones.”
On the 1988 edition of The Game of Golf and The Printed Word 1566-1985: “To Bob Labbance, Who loves the printed word…. And plays a hell of a game. With the best wishes, Dick Donovan.”
Unlike me, Bob actually was quite a proficient golfer, playing to a 7 handicap. He had two holes in one, both at the Woodstock Country Club on different holes, and I can still remember when he holed out for eagle from 160 yards one of Yale’s great par fours. For more than 20 years, he hosted what is likely the longest continually operating Cayman Ball tournament, known as the Stockbridge Cayman Invitational, which in later years, was played out on the exclusive Hump View Links, a classic country course mowed out of the fields on his and his neighbors’ property. We played over tractors and into tires. Limited to three clubs, it brought in such luminaries as local golf professionals and superintendents, along with a smattering of less reputable characters. I had no prouder golfing moment than when I defeated Bill Van Liew in a rain soaked playoff in the summer of 2005. Bill went on to win this year’s Vermont Mid-Am, small consolation.
I always had a sense of the respect Bob garnered from whomever he encountered, but that became tragically apparent on August 31, 2004, when he suffered a serious spinal injury while we were researching yet another Wayne Stiles course. Having fallen off a bridge head first (wearing his golf bag) into a stream, he was almost totally paralyzed, underwent spinal surgery a few days later and spent months in a rehab facility. Through it all, so many friends, family and colleagues from all his various endeavors, visited and regaled us with stories of his past. Through it all, he kept his grace and his humor, and of course, his love for the game of golf. I remember commandeering the rehab van to a nearby indoor putt and pizza place, so Bob could get a few strokes in. He naturally had an ace. I didn’t. Over the next three years, he continued to write and recover, working his way back onto the golf course, although he was no longer able to walk more than a few holes. He was a proud USGA Walking Member, and joined the USGA Museum Committee in 2006.
Then his legs started failing him unexpectedly in early 2007. Finally, in the fall of last year, we got the diagnosis of ALS. His reaction was not unexpected: “Kevin, we’ve got to finish the Stiles book.” He worked us hard for the next several months, all the while, continuing to edit the Golf Collectors Society Bulletin, write greenkeeping histories and research the several golf club histories he worked on with long time friend and collaborator Patrick White.
The outpouring of support from all facets of his life, past and present, continued to move all who knew him. Friends from his high school years would show up, people who worked with him at various restaurants, along with superintendents and other golf dignitaries. People from the community banded together and went way beyond simply installing an elevator onto his house; they installed and painted a new roof, built a handicapped bathroom, re-graded the driveway, built a shed for Kathie, and tended to their gardens. Bob continued to watch golf and other sports, and had us read accounts of sporting events to him. His dignity and courage were unfailing. In our last conversation, he said that of all we did during our research and writing for "The Life and Work of Wayne Stiles," he was most proud that we were able to reunite Taconic with their original blueprints, so they could undertake a complete restoration effort which began in late August.
Bob was fully forgiven by my wife and me for having missed our wedding in November of 1993. He had been invited to play golf with the King of Morocco in the Federation Royale Morocaine de Golf and took home the Hassan II Golf Trophy.
I will miss his words, his guidance, the wonderful arc of his four wood off the tee, and of course those wonderful peach waffles from 108 Chelsea that fueled my law school years.
My thanks to the USGA for asking me to write about my friend, Bob Labbance. My apologies for having gone way beyond my allotted word count; I usually did it to Bob.
Kevin Mendik contributed this appreciation of Bob Labbance on behalf of the USGA Museum. For questions or comments, please email David Normoyle, Assistant Director of the USGA Museum at dnormoyle@usga.org.
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Bob Labbance (in wheelchair) with, from left to right, Kevin Mendik, Geoffrey Cornish and Phil Wogan at the Mass. Golf Museum on May 1, 2008. Courtesty Kevin Mendik
Bob Labbance doing research at Yale University's golf course, circa 2004. Courtesy Kevin Mendik
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