When Samson Bailey agreed late last year to lease historic nine-hole Middlesboro Country Club for the next quarter century, he never intended to make this tiny town in southeastern Kentucky a golf destination. However, through a much-needed renovation, he does plan to pull the struggling property up by its proverbial bootstraps while also using it to showcase his other Middlesboro-based business - Golf Preservations.
"The golf course is six blocks from my house," said Bailey, an Eastern Kentucky University turf grad who spent years working on golf courses before launching Golf Preservations, which specializes in golf course drainage and construction. "I have all the construction equipment. It's going to be a showcase of what we can do for our clients."
Eventually.
Middlesboro Country Club opened in 1889 and bills itself as the oldest, continuously played course in the country. Recently, however, the course has fallen on hard times. Much of the maintenance in the recent past has been performed by volunteers, and several greens on the property became virtually unplayable until Bailey took over last November with the goal of breathing life into the once-proud layout while also holding it up as a marketing tool for his company.
The marriage of a company that specializes in golf course drainage and construction with a nine-hole property in dire need of some TLC after 127 years of business seemed like a win-win situation. But plans of highlighting the finished product hit a snag when a Feb. 29 fire destroyed Middlesboro's maintenance building and nearly everything inside it. Bailey, who has been restoring the course since taking over the lease in November, had been planning to reopen Middlesboro in May, but his focus now is just getting the place up and running again. And that is going to be a long and difficult process.
"It's almost April and we don't have a sprayer," Bailey said. "A new one is supposed to be here next week. We lost our spreader. Right now, we're using a push spreader I bought at Wal Mart just so we could get some fertilizer on the sod since it's been so warm."
Damage from the fire was estimated at $300,000, which includes $100,000 for the structure and another $200,000 for its contents, including 26 golf carts, a Kubota tractor, nine mowers (a rough unit, four walk mowers, three triplex units and two zero-turn mowers), a Sand Pro, two spray units, a Gator and two other utility vehicles, all of which were in various stages of their respective life cycles. Also lost was much, but not all, of his leftover supply of fertilizer, seed and chemicals.
"We lost a couple thousand (dollars) in seed, fertilizer and leftover chemicals," he said. "Thankfully, my big pre-order hadn't made it in yet."
Because of some of the verbiage in the fine print of his insurance policy, Bailey says any settlement with his carrier likely will fall far short of covering the cost of the damage.
Since taking on the 25-year lease agreement in November, Bailey has spent much of the offseason making improvements to the course, including rebuilding greens on top of his own drainage system. He had sunk an estimated $100,000 of his money into the project when the fire hit. He was planning on installing new irrigation this summer. And while the timetable for reopening the course might not change, some of the other work he had planned, like a new irrigation system, might have to wait a while.
"Some things are just going to have to be put on hold until we can recuperate," he said. "We're going to be using a water truck for a while.
"Our cups were getting powdercoated, so they made it, but we lost three cup cutters and our flags are gone. We can't even cut a cup right now. Thankfully, we don't have to now, but we will soon. Other things, like water hoses and nozzles are gone. It's the little things that you reach for when you need them then realize 'oh (expletive deleted), we don't have that.' "
In what might be the greatest product endorsement of all time, a U.S. General toolbox and its contents emerged from the fire largely unscathed.
Middlesboro is tucked into the southeastern corner of the state near the borders of Tennessee and Virginia, and there aren't a lot of other courses in that neck of the woods to help him out. Ladd's, a Memphis-based supplier of turf equipment for the golf industry, stepped up and, unsolicited, loaned him a Jacobsen triplex greensmower and a Lastec rough-mowing unit as the two entities work out an equipment-lease program. Nearby Wasioto Winds Golf Course at Pine Mountain State Park has volunteered some much-needed extra labor.
He has established a Go Fund Me account to help offset some of the losses and expedite the long comeback process.
Fire officials pinpointed the source of the blaze, which started in the shop at about 12:50 p.m., to a battery charger that was being used to jump start a mower that had been dormant since at least November. No one was in the shop when the fire broke out. Equipment manager John Thompson was out shopping for a transmission for a Gator that was destroyed and greenkeepers Darrell Lawless and Jeff Allen were in the clubhouse eating lunch.
Lawless discovered the fire when he returned to the shop, and called it out over the radio.
"We thought he was joking," Bailey said.
"The (mower's) gas tank is next to the battery, and a hydraulic tank is next to the gas tank. That's a bad combination of things there. Everything is pretty much gone."