Bob Labbance, 1952-2008
Reformer.com



Friday, August 29
Robert Edwin Labbance gave me my first golf writing assignment in 1996, and plenty thereafter. So I always gave Bob all the credit, or blame, for my subsequent golf-writing career.
He was my George Bailey -- if it hadn't been for Bob, I probably wouldn't have wound up playing golf in Australia, or Iceland, or Italy, or Ireland, or even as much as I have in New England. He lit the fuse.

Bob was the editor at Vermont Golf magazine at the time I made a remarkable discovery. I had quit playing golf before moving to Vermont in 1991, to the point of selling my clubs at a garage sale. But once here and eventually enticed back out onto a golf course, I found I couldn't get enough of it.

There was only one thing to do with this addiction -- turn it into a vocation. So I sent Bob a query letter out of the blue suggesting that I was about to rededicate my writing life to the subject of golf, and it seemed only logical to begin in my adopted state.

Bob took me up on it, up to a point. The parent company, Divot Publications, was launching a New York golf magazine, and Bob suggested I might have the properly skewed viewpoint to write about a goofy annual tournament in Chesterton, N.Y., called the Dalai Lama Golf Classic.

I did, and the personal history piled up from there. Bob had said, "Maybe we could play in the tournament." We didn't, which seemed like an opportunity lost; behind any golf-writing assignment

there lurks the perpetrator's true wish -- not to lay up riches or even necessarily to produce some great literature, though either or both would be happy byproducts.
The main goal is to enter a new world once again by playing another round, at an unfamiliar course, a sense of discovery quite like the excitement of turning the pages of a new book, a sensation that never grows old.

It was Bob who inspired me to see golf that way, with his love of the history of the game -- the courses, players and the architects in particular, subjects of his many books -- and its literature, to be sure. Whenever I visited Bob's Notown Communications office in Montpelier I was stunned by the extent of his golf library. I could easily have spent days there, and naturally now wish that I had.

Bob succumbed on Sunday morning to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a mere two months after the fund-raising tournament on behalf of his family where I saw him for the last time. I was surprised then that the ALS was progressing as quickly as it was, and shocked to hear of his death.

It pains me that I can't remember the first time we actually met, possibly because we had already developed a lively relationship through editorial correspondence. Bob was the master of the terse email, all in lower case to save time even though he appeared to have more than most; he got by on about four hours of sleep a night, yet always seemed a dynamo of energy.

Whenever we met, it was surely at a golf course, and if there were many rounds together to come, there weren't enough.

A few stand out. Bob and I took a day and a night off from the annual PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando one year to play a round at the King and the Bear course at the World Golf Hall of Fame in St. Augustine, later met up with Bob's old friend, the golf course architect Bill Amick, for a dinner that fascinated me with its rich talk of the game and course design, and then we spent the night at Bob's mother's house. I suppose we traded our respective histories more in that trip than at any other time.

Then there was the not atypical media day debut of the Ragged Mountain Golf Club at the resort in Danbury, N.H. The course had been designed by Bob's friend Jeff Julian, who had two cups of coffee on the PGA Tour in 1996 and 2002 (before he, too, died from ALS, in 2004).

I have a vague recollection we played in a fivesome that day, with some of the usual fellow suspects. The recollection is vague because the usual sense of hilarity set in as early as the second hole. It didn't improve the playability of the course, which was off the charts difficult to begin with, but it did make it fun. (The course is now being redesigned by Brad Booth and Brad Faxon.)

Golf is supposed to be fun, Bob believed. In his annual Stockbridge-Cayman Invitational, which he held for over 20 years, he fashioned a homemade course from adjacent neighbors' fields and sent players out with a limit of three clubs and the Cayman golf ball, made to travel shorter distances than a regular ball.

Aside from the technical rules, Bob's Rule No. 9 summed it all up: "If you are not having fun, you are disqualified."

I played with Bob and his son, Griffin, in last year's last SCI. He was still having fun, though his real playing days were over. Now it's all over. But Bob crammed a lot of life into his 56 years. I'm glad he didn't linger through the mental torments of ALS, but I'll keenly miss his advice, his informed counsel, his encyclopedic knowledge of New England golf, his humor, his friendship.

It would nice to imagine that Bob has entered a new world once again, playing another round at a highly unfamiliar course, and again enjoying that great sense of discovery. But then I imagine his lower case email in response: "blatant sentimentality!"

Scoff away, pal. Then tee it up, and have fun.

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Donations to the Labbance Family Fund can be sent to P.O. Box 53, Bloomfield CT 06002.