Colorado Springs – He found the head of a golf club, a 5-iron, lying in the wet morning grass of the Trinidad Country Club near his home. He bent down and picked it up, the shiny steel reflecting the light of the dawn. And his heart jumped.
Quickly he snapped a thin branch from a tree, whittled down the end so it was just the right size, jammed it into the club head and hoped it would stay because, well, this was long before the miracle of duct tape.
It was also six years before the discovery of penicillin and 13 years before the invention of canned beer.
Joe Dolce took a few tentative swings with his makeshift club.
“It was kind of whippy,” he said last week with a smile on his face. “But it worked.”
Dolce was 7 years old. He didn’t know it on that early summer morning in 1922, but with the exception of World War II, his next 4,000 Saturday mornings – some 82 years’ worth – had just been booked.
Millions of Americans play golf. The vast majority plays badly. According to a 2002 Golf magazine survey of people who play at least once a week, the average score is 92 – roughly 20 strokes above par. They have lousy grips and short backswings and lunge awkwardly at the ball, sending it veering wildly left or right. They compensate for all of that by not being able to putt. A whopping 43 percent said they have angrily thrown a club.
Dolce, however, never knew that part of the game.
At the age of 11, he was a scratch golfer. He has won some 200 golf events, from the state high school title to club championships and city championships and state and regional titles. His score hovered around even par for seven decades or so, though in his 30s and 40s, he routinely shot in the 60s, with at least two documented rounds of 64.
Then, two years ago, he got cancer. Doctors removed a big chunk of his stomach. Dolce became weak, and his golf game, as you might imagine, took a terrible nose dive.
Last summer, at age 89, he shot a 77 at the city-owned Patty Jewett Golf Course in Colorado Springs. The next day, he shot a 78. Both scores are what typical amateur golfers – men and women in their 20s and 30s and 40s – shoot when they are dreaming.
Oh, and he walked all 18 holes on each of those two days.
“Scoring that high was quite a new experience for me,” Dolce said.
He hasn’t played a round of golf since. He lives in a senior housing complex. He doesn’t drive anymore. Getting to the course would require asking for a ride. And most of his friends are, well, not around anymore.
In September, Dolce will turn 90. Golf, it would seem, is just a memory. But several days a week, he goes to the closet near his front door, reaches in and grabs a club. And then, in a slow gait, he moves out onto the balcony of his apartment. And he swings the club.
“My son is coming to visit me in a few weeks,” he said. “He loves golf. I’m feeling pretty good these days. Maybe …”
He smiles then. And his eyes sparkle.
Low scores started early
Dolce grew up three blocks from the course in Trinidad in southern Colorado. Starting in 1922, he hit golf balls with his tree-branch 5-iron and occasionally sneaked onto the course. Then he became a caddy.
Each Wednesday he caddied for a doctor. One Wednesday, a member of the doctor’s foursome didn’t show up. He asked Dolce to caddy for him, as usual. And also to play. The caddy shot a 36 on the front nine. Even par. He was 11 years old.
“The doctor and his friends took me into the locker room and gave me a set of old clubs and a lot of golf clothes,” Dolce said.
The men started taking Dolce to local tournaments. He played golf. They made bets.
“One summer a member took me to a tournament in Raton, N.M. It was a big tournament, with good amateur golfers, adults, you know, from Texas and California and places like that. I was 13. He told me to shoot a 76 on the first day, and if I shot better than that he’d make me walk home. It was 20 miles, so I hit a few balls out of bounds on purpose, missed a few putts, and I shot a 76. He bought my betting ticket for the next day, and I won my match, and he won $200. He gave me $20 of it.”
Dolce kept winning just about everything he entered.
His string of Saturday golf matches was interrupted just once. Nothing will keep a guy off a golf course quite like being the lead bombardier on a B-24 and dropping explosives onto German supply lines in Romania for three years.
“For the whole war, I missed golf,” he said. “It seemed like golf was my whole life.”
In 1945 he returned, moved to Denver and resumed his Saturday morning routine at the Cherry Hills Country Club. In 1958 he took a job at the Simmons mattress factory in Indiana. There, he and his wife, Mary, lived for 25 years and raised their only child, Ron.
“Back then there were 265 golf courses listed around the Chicago area,” Dolce said. “I think I played every one of them.”
Teed up every Saturday
Mary died in 1985. Dolce moved back to Colorado, settling in Colorado Springs because he’d played the Patty Jewett Golf Course as a young man and he liked it. He bought a house a block from the first hole. For several years he was the starter at the course, taking reservations and sending golfers out to play and throw their clubs around.
And he teed it up every Saturday. And mostly shot even par.
But then the cancer came. In addition to part of his stomach, doctors took his prostate and his gall bladder. But they left the man. Tall and wiry and feeling stronger every day, Dolce swings a driver on his balcony now and talks about turning the hips and about the importance of finishing the backswing.
And about more important things.
“I had good jobs and a good family, and I got to play golf every Saturday,” he said. “What better life can there be?”
It’s been a year since he last sent a golf ball soaring down the middle of a fairway.
“Maybe my son will take me,” he says, his hands wrapped gent ly around the soft rubber grip of his driver. “I’d like to play again.
“To be honest, I think about it all the time.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
