By Dave Kindred
Photos By Chris Stanford
January 2009
Eleven years ago, when I met Bill Meadows at the golf course of his unusual dreams, I called him Bill.
He said, "Farmer."
"Sorry?"
"It's Farmer."
"Not Bill? You're Farmer?"
"Mother and Dad named me William. But I'm Farmer."
The conversion happened in the early 1960s when he wore a straw hat and bib overalls to sell tomatoes along a country road. He was a college graduate, a high school teacher, a football coach. But city slickers out for a ride saw the get-up and said, "Oh, you're the farmer?"
They bought his tomatoes by the baskets, perhaps unaware that before dawn he had driven to a real farmers market where he bought the tomatoes they bought from him. He says that in the summer he made five times his annual teaching money.
"Ever since," he says, "I've been proud to be Farmer."
On his Rolls-Royce convertible, spotted one night at the local 7-Eleven, the license plate reads: FARMER 1.
He's 73, robust and voluble with a snowy tangle of curly hair so eye-catching it suggests a man who wants you to remember his sales pitch. To celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary, the man who claims a net worth of $129 million invited 200 friends to The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia at a cost of $350,000, not to mention the $378,000 Betty spent on the Rolls delivered by a Marilyn Monroe look-alike.
Who knew tomatoes could do all that? Meadows, in fact, describes a life's arc from a West Virginia coal-camp shack with no plumbing to a seven-bathroom mansion bought from Joe Gibbs, the Hall of Fame football coach. After tomatoes came nurseries, landscaping and cattle. The man could sell stoves at a shipwreck. In 1993, on his farmland near Civil War battlefields in central Virginia, he built Meadows Farms Golf Course, a place as distinctive and eccentric as its creator.
He'd played golf as a young man and then put away the devil's sticks for almost 30 years. Once he fell into the habit again, Meadows decided golf was too expensive for the common man and too boring for the uncommon man. By building his own place, he reckoned to change that. "I'm a wealthy man," he says, "and I can get things done the way I want them done."
He wanted unique. He got it. In times of $150 public-course tickets, his green fees range from $37 to $49 with 20 percent off for members. (Membership: $10.)
Meadows believes golf architects work until they come up with a hole they really like and then repeat it 18 times. So he gave a contrarian's directions to his designer, Bill Ward, of Beckley, W.Va.
"I wanted the course to be so unusual that every hole would be like starting on a new course. We had to get away from 'traditional.' "
To that end, he put a tee in the shadow of the Widow Willis' 150-year-old clapboard house that served as a Civil War hospital. Push your drive, you get a free lift from a 22-tombstone graveyard, the earliest burial 1831.
All chances of being ordinary disappeared when Ward suggested a par 6, and Meadows improved on the idea. "Bill, that's good!" he said. "Let's make it the longest hole in the United States!"
Damned if they didn't.
It's 841 yards from the back, and it's not an airport-runway freak. It's hilltops, hillsides, valleys, ponds and a three-leaf-clover bunker. It calls for real thinking and real shots: a drive short of a pond, a second kept left on a fairway falling right, a third short of a second pond and an approach over the pond and that bunker to an elevated green sloping sharply back to front.
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