Robert Busby
Obituary Story
HIGH SCHOOL GOLF COACH SUFFERS HEART ATTACK AFTER FIRST CAREER HOLE-IN-ONE, MAY HAVE POST-HUMOUSLY JEOPARDIZED CAREER OF MAJOR STU DUFF
LEE, Miss. – Bodock County High School golf coach, Darby Gillespie, 46, was found dead early Sunday morning at the first tee of the back nine at Twin Meadows golf course. According to sources, it was a habit of Gillespie’s to play a round of “Sabbath golf” before the course became, as he described it, “polluted with church-goers.” By his signature Titleist No. 7 ball found in the cup of the same hole, it was determined that Gillespie died immediately after sinking a hole-in-one. It was the first of his career.
Gillespie, who stood at six-foot-three and weighed just south of three hundred pounds, will be remembered by his players as a bear of a presence on the golf course, always with a jaw full of Red Man and a blue solo cup in tow, half full of Gatorade from the five-gallon spigot cooler in the bed of his truck and topped-off with some other substance that “wasn’t Evan Williams,” according to Gillespie. He considered the likeness to his hero, John Daly, to be “hard-earned,” but it was the “Holy Word” of Arnold Palmer’s backswing and short game that Gillespie preached to his ten teams, eight of which he had coached to the playoffs.
But while his players will remember Gillespie as a devoutly religious follower of the game—once, when someone asked him what he thought of Mark Twain’s assertion that golf was a “good walk spoiled,” Gillespie replied, “Who’s Mark Twain, and when the [expletive] has walking ever been enjoyable to that punk or anyone else?”—his friends recall a slightly different, albeit somewhat similar Gillespie.
Mac McCoy, branch president of the Peoples Bank located on the Highway 6 bypass, remembers Gillespie as a “good-hearted, hell-raising but God-fearing good friend” who was “about as privy to unabashedly speaking the truth as Carol Morton [Claygardner resident] is to doing un-Baptist things.”
As evidence of his statement, McCoy offers the anecdote of a night he and Gillespie and a mutual friend of theirs were arrested in Starkville, Mississippi. The three were drinking beer on the back porch of their friend’s house when, “out of god[expletive] nowhere,” their friend launched a beer bottle through the upstairs window of the house next door, the construction of which had just been finished the week before and which the three of them had thought was empty until a light came on in the room seconds later.
According to McCoy, Starkville’s finest showed up a half hour afterwards and proceeded to bang on the door for ten minutes before their friend “finally got the balls to answer.” As the authorities were leading all three of them to the patrol car, Gillespie allegedly asked the officers if they minded him calling them “a drove of fascist pigs” because they seemed to him to be moving only when enforcing fascism.
The cop escorting Gillespie across the yard spun Gillespie around and said, “There’s three white guys in this house and one black girl [in that bedroom]. What does that look like to you?”
Gillespie replied, “The Sixties?”
But McCoy is quick to point out Gillespie was anything but racist. “Darby was just able to look outside himself at the bigger picture,” Hill says. “He was aware how what happened that night might look to someone not there, and that’s how he answered that cop.”
But if one man’s word isn’t enough to defend Gillespie, look at the man’s track—er, course—record: since quitting his position as head groundskeeper at the Bodock Country Club to assume the reigns of the high school golf team in 2000, he not only instigated the integration of the golf squad, but the country club as well.
When Gillespie became coach, golf was the only sport at BCHS that wasn’t offered to black students, not because of any backwards regulations on the school’s part but because, ever since the team was created in 1948, it had played at the segregated Bodock Country Club. In his second year, Gillespie moved the team’s official course to Twin Meadows, whose fairways had been accessible to blacks ever since the late Beauregard Eutuban, who owned Eutuban Lumber and Quarry—and who was black—donated the land for the development of an equal-rights golf course back in 1983.
A year later, the Bodock Country Club attempted to reach a compromise by offering to open up the driving range and course to blacks but not other facilities, such as the Pro Shop, showers, the pool, club membership, etc. Gillespie declined the offer. The club became fully integrated the following year, but Gillespie kept the team at Twin Meadows, which has been the official home of the Warrior golf team ever since.
In the decade the squad was under his tutelage, Gillespie took the Warriors to the playoffs eight of those years. Six times they made it to Regionals, three times to North Half, and twice they made the trip down to Jackson for the State Championships, which they won in 2007.
But not everyone is convinced these social and athletic accomplishments are what’s worth remembering about Gillespie.
According to Mayor Stu Duff, the only thing that had changed about Gillespie from when they were younger to the time of his death was that, instead of a cooler of Gatorade in the backend of his truck, it was an empty one, which he had a habit of informing cops “may have at one time been full of beer.”
The incident the mayor’s referring to, of course, is the night back in college that he and Gillespie spent in the Itawamba County Jail, an event Duff had kept a tight lid on for many years and which almost cost him his re-election bid two years ago when the story surfaced via his rival, Colonel Harks, of the Claygardner community.
According to Duff, Gillespie thought it would be a good idea if they polished off their last two beers in the cab of his truck in the parking lot of the Itawamba Junior College dorms before heading up to their rooms so they could “listen to some ‘Jim Dandy’ on eight-track without Mrs. McWhirter [the dorm mom] citing us for noise disturbance.” But halfway through their beers and Black Oak Arkansas’ High on the Hog, a campus police officer spotted them. When questioned whether there were any beers in the cooler in the bed of Gillespie’s truck, Gillespie replied, “No, sir.”
“You sure about that, son?” the officer asked him.
“Yes, sir,” Gillespie said. “We drank them all.”
Mayor Duff adds, “Yeah, he was quite the witty son-of-a-[expletive] when he got to drinking, sure. Problem was the jackass’ bull[expletive] meter kicked in high gear whenever cops was in the vicinity.”
“That’s what Duff said, huh?” McCoy says in response to the mayor’s comments. “Hell, Stu should just be happy Gillespie took the secret to his grave that it was our good mayor [who] hurled that beer bottle through that poor black girl’s bedroom window.”
McCoy adds, “Let’s see him spin that one come election time next year.”
Darby Gillespie was the son of the late David Gillespie of the Claygardner community. He is survived by his mother, Susan Gillespie; his sister, Kendall Russell, pharmacist at Montgomery Drugs; brother-in-law, Jeff Russell, and their three children. Services will begin at 11 a.m. Wednesday, September 9, 2009, at the Browning Funeral Home in Lee.