Jim Dent

James Lacey Dent (May 9, 1939 – May 2, 2025) was an American professional golfer. Quotes I was big enough to do that, I was still real young when my parents died, but there was my aunt. Her name was Mary Benton, a great lady in my life. Kids think they’re the smartest people in the world, Second thing I learned how to do when I learned how to caddie was shoot dice and play cards. She was dead right. That’s what really got us into golf and got some of us straight too, He saved a few of us. I wanted the best golfers because I’d learn a lot from them, My aim was to watch them play but I didn’t know what a golf swing was all about. That was a lot of caddieing. One day he said to me, ‘You go in.’ I said, ‘OK, I’m going.’ He said, ‘Pick up the bag. That’s what’s wrong with you guys, you’re too temperamental!’ He could change that fast and say things like that. I learned that golf can make you do some crazy things. He told me you can’t win with a ball over No. 7. And he said, ‘Don’t smoke, son, because smoke gets in your eyes and you can’t see. If they tell you, ‘That’s water over there. You can’t go in that water. Gators are in there. Don’t go in there,’ you’d be a fool to go in there, But you don’t let things like that bother you if you want to do something. Schools were segregated and you didn’t let that bother you. You’d go crazy! That’s the reason you see so many young boys today, black and white, they get carried up in stuff they can’t do. You really didn’t think about that, You don’t let nothing keep you back. At Augusta Country Club, if you went out and helped them take crabgrass out of the greens, you could play Friday morning. It wasn’t nothing to go out there and spend an hour or more. All you gotta do is cut the crabgrass up. So we did that. And there was a field down there where we played golf. They’ve made it a range at the Augusta Country Club but that’s where we used to play golf. We had about six holes down there. See, a lot of things happened back in the Jim Crow days but there was some places you could go play. Now, how great a speech is that for a man to tell you and you want to do something that he already did? He was a great guy. He showed me how to chip and how to run the ball up. Johnny was a great ambassador of golf. Made nine straight bogeys, And it was a blessing. It let me know I just wasn’t ready. It was the show! I learned when you get out there with those guys, you got to produce. You just don’t want to be happy out there. I got better each year and the third year I finished in the top 60 and top 60 was the glory days. You were exempt to everything. It was great. You know, I never had any problems because Charlie Sifford, Pete Brown and Lee Elder, those guys just kind of paved the way. What I learned about playing golf has probably kept me all through life, You had to be honest. You had to work at it. You just couldn’t pick it up today and not come back ‘till next week. And if you broke a rule, you had to turn yourself in. Dent Overcame the Odds En Route to Professional Golf, February 26 2019 External links Category:1939 births Category:Golfers Category:Sportspeople from the United States Category:2025 deaths