By Dave Kindred
Photos By Peter Gregoire
December 2007
All summer, 87-year-old Jacob Wilson Logan drove around Baltimore in his '91 Chevy van with signs on the sides saying he'd play anybody, anywhere, anytime. He'd pay green fees and buy lunch. Listen to him long enough, you'd hear him promise $1,500 to anybody 82 or older who beat him. "Cash," he says, "or a $3,000 savings bond."
I love old people. My ambition is to be one and do it about the way Jacob Wilson Logan does it. The little man tees it up every morning, plays 27 holes most days. Along the way, he talks because he is one talking man. He'll tell you about life and love, about gambling, race relations, avoiding young women, and why it's good to carry a shotgun on your bread truck.
He told me, on the first tee, that 14 clubs are too many.
"Six'll do," he says.
Three woods, 6-iron, sand wedge, putter.
"Them extras," he says, "cause confusion."
He calls himself Daddy in homage to the charismatic preacher Charles M. Grace, known through the mid-20th century as Sweet Daddy Grace. Logan's preacher-man voice begins at a high pitch and screeches higher when he's worked up. At such times, he often announces, "The truth is the light of the world! Am I telling the truth? You know it!"
On the morning of his wife's funeral, Daddy Logan drove to a golf course. But no playing partners arrived for an 8:30 tee time. "So I left," he says, "and buried her."
Her name was Estelle Stephens. He first saw her in a restaurant by a Baltimore shipyard during World War II and told her right then, "I'm going to marry you, girl." Six months later, he did. They had three children, 11 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. They lived happily ever after, 63 years. It was not an act of indifference, then, to be sitting in a muny golf shop the morning of his sweetheart's funeral. The new widower showed up because he'd made a promise.
A sign on his van had invited three golfers to Baltimore's Forest Park Golf Course. He arrived after dawn to wait for strangers who might or might not come. He definitely would not play, but, as promised, he'd pay. He waited until 8:45 a.m. before leaving for Estelle.
The van is a rolling bill-board. Printing high on a side window tells how Tiger and Oprah got him started in golf. At the back, on the spare-tire cover, a message reveals a divine interest in Daddy Logan's golf: "Has been chosen by God to be the oldest golf player in the world." At our fifth hole, I asked how he knew God's plan.
"A feeling," he said. "I feel it within myself. You got to have the feeling. Like, I don't play with a glove. Gotta have feeling. The feeling, I got."
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