Bumming around town with Bill Bumerton
Bumerton is a retired Navy fighter pilot who had been missing in action for several years while he traversed the globe looking for greener grass. He discovered the grass is only greener here (it’s blue in Kentucky), so he returned to again take charge of his 1954 green Hudson Hornet that has been in storage, refilled his pipe, and is ready to continue his smokin’ ways. Here is what he recently told us at the Sports Paper.
Man, did you see what Jordan Spieth did Sunday, Big Dawg? The guy – and he’s only 19 – won the John Deere Classic on Sunday in a five-hole playoff. That’s the same Jordan Spieth who two years ago at Gold Mountain Golf Complex won the U.S. Junior National Amateur. The sub-note to this is that when Spieth played the national amateur at Gold Mountain, he played with a caddy arranged by Gold Mountain’s then executive director, Scott Alexander. The caddy was a Tacoma teacher that Alexander knew. The teacher and Spieth hit it off so well that Spieth hired the teacher to his caddy when he landed on the PGA Tour. The teacher took a year’s sabbatical from teaching and you don’t need to look now but that teacher just won about two year’s worth of teaching salary with the 10-percent he gets from Spieth’s $828,000 victory. Spieth is the youngest golfer to win a PGA event in 82 years. He already has earned $2 million since leaving the University of Texas in December to join the tour. He’s made six top-10 finishes and made the cut in 12 of the 16 events he’s entered. So there, Big Dawg, go break out your clubs, you still have a chance at riches. Well, on second though, no you don’t. You were the world’s worse golfer when you played, and now I suspect you probably are the worse in the Universe. … Speaking of golf, I’m pleased that Mark Knowles, the head golf pro at Gold Mountain, has enticed his good friend, Randy Fossum, to come out and work a few hours a week at the course. Fossum has been in a wheelchair for 10 years after suffering a couple seizures and enduring some horrible moments. But he’s more than willing to get back on the green, so to speak. “We’ll see how it works,” says Knowles, who was five years behind Fossum at North Mason High School back in the 1980s. “As a young person, he was always nice to me. I always considered myself as being his younger brother.” When Knowles got the job at head pro and became charged with doing all the hiring, his first thought was to Fossum. “I wanted to find some way he could be involved,” says Knowles. “He’s really excited about it. Knowles, by the way, is doing quite well on the links. He won the last two Northwest Pro-Ams. He won his first in the middle of June at Alderbrook and the next one held at LakeLand Village, which was his home course growing up. Knowles, by the way, is 45. Fossum is 50.
