Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
FORT SUMNER — Carl Vick muscles his tee into the hardened ground, addresses the ball, and smacks a shot toward a red flag off in the distance.
Next to the flag, a tall Cottonwood stands guard over the table-top sized greens, swatting away down with its limbs any shot that is a little long or a little right. Nearby, cattle graze on grass sweetened by a recent rain and wild turkeys peck out an existence among the woody underbrush.
Vick and the handful of grizzled golf veterans known around town as the “Alligators” readily admit the Fort Sumner Golf Course will never be confused with those at Augusta National or Pebble Beach.
But for more than three decades, they’ve waged war on the scruffy fairways and oil-and-sand greens on the 9-hole course less than a mile off U.S. Highway 60/84. They play for pride as much than the handful of quarters they can win on a good day.
“We have a lot of fun out there,” Lund said. “Rufus (Johnson) said playing out here is like a combination of water polo, cricket and croquet.”
A retired banker, Lund said he and rancher Billy Wilton play five to six times a week — “much to the disgust of our wives.”
“It’s just a good bunch of fellows,” said Lund, a New Hampshire native who met his wife while he was stationed at the air field in Fort Sumner during World War II. “We get mad at each other sometimes because we’ve played so much together but when it’s all said and done it’s a lot of fun.”
Inspired by a few rounds of golf with his brother-in-law at then Colonial Park Country Club, Vick carved the 9-hole course from a 22-acre plot of tree-snarled river-bed bottom. “He just hacked it out of the wilderness,” Lund remembers.
Before it opened in 1971, Vick said he pulled out dozens of trees and planted acres of Bermuda grass. But without an irrigation, any sign of the Bermuda grass is long gone, turning any shot into an adventure.
The layout includes six par 3s and three par 4s, with holes ranging from 88 to 279 yards. Par is 30.
James Walling, a retired accountant, jokingly refers to what has since been dubbed Salt Cedar Country Club as the “best course in the county.”
“It’s all we got,” said Walling, who remembered money being scarce when he opened for business in 1952. “We have a lot of fun out there and it’s something to do.”
Johnson was a one-time golf instructor in Burbank, Calif., and has a smooth swing to show for it. He said he hits a lot of “hit-and-hope shots” nowadays because the ball can end up two feet from the pin or 20 feet away depending on the luck of a bounce.
Raised in Fort Sumner, Johnson moved back to his hometown from California two years ago after his wife died.
“I figured it was a great place to live as a kid so why not now,” Johnson said.
With only a handful of regulars left — and the majority of them in their 70s and 80s, Vick isn’t sure how much longer the course will remain open.
“The only reason I do it any more is for Ralph and Billy,” said Vick, a retired National Guardsman who is known as the “General.” “What in the world would they do if they didn’t have a golf course.”
Lund and Wilton, who use orange golf balls in the winter when it snows, don’t want to know.
