On the practice green hard by Washington Boulevard, Nick Gardner strokes chip after chip within 3 feet of the hole, his hands steady even as passing tractor-trailers rattle the ground. On the first tee, Carroll Koslowski ignores a loud bang from a distant fairway -- a train? the scrap-metal yard? -- and unleashes his hideously consistent swing. His feet stumble two steps backward, and his ball settles 175 yards away in the right rough.
The golfer, who at 77 still carries his own bag and goes by the nickname Bowser, is pleased anyway. "Let's play 12," he says.
Yes. 12.
After three-quarters of a century, Carroll Park Golf Course has emerged from segregation, neglect and dying neighborhoods to become a green diamond of Southwest Baltimore, an urban curiosity apparently unique in America. Golf courses come in nine and 18 holes. The United States Golf Association says it has no record of a 12-hole layout anywhere else.
For some, that is evidence enough that Carroll Park is holy, that the usual laws of nature do not apply in Pigtown. How else to explain the tree on the fifth hole that bears some of the juiciest apples in Maryland? What earthly reason could there be for all the putts that fall on the ninth, with St. Benedict's Church visible in the distance? And what about the juniper that, the regulars insist, blooms in February?
"Sometimes, I pray for six more holes," says the Rev. Felton Williams, a Carroll Park regular whose sermons at New Second Baptist Church are birdies but whose golf game is pure double bogey. "From Harlem to Jerusalem, from Pennsylvania to California, I have never seen another 12-hole golf course. God has done something different here."
What He has wrought is Baltimore's industrial country club, an $8.50-a-play muni tucked between warehouses, train tracks, and Interstate 95. From the fifth tee, with the old Montgomery Ward building behind the green, a golfer can hit a 7-iron and take in paint and glass factories, the container cranes of Locust Point and the giant chemical plants of the Fairfield peninsula.
Drawing from that vista, Carroll Park takes all kinds: snake-chasing, cigarette-smoking teen-agers, old incurable shop foremen who play through ice and crime scenes, retired cops who cheat on their lies, a Baltimore Colts running back, and Gardner, an old pro who will be inducted this weekend into the National Black Golf Hall of Fame in North Carolina.
Country club snobs, not knowing any better, call them hackers. But most Carroll Park regulars play slightly different versions of the same, tough, city-efficient game, turning even the most unconventional of swings into low scores with the steely putts and pitches of those who have steered locomotives, fingered service weapons, or fixed boiler valves.
"I think it's safe to say I'll never see a PGA tour event here, but some of these guys can really play," says Glenn Carpenter, the course superintendent, who is constantly and successfully battling the worms that would devour his 67,000 square feet of bent-grass greens. "This is such an oddball place, and a well-kept secret. You wonder how it got here."
Carroll Park opened 75 years ago this week as a nine-hole course, and quickly became the stepchild of city golf. Clifton Park players tried to banish their beginners there. The condition of the course -- and its sand greens -- suffered. In September 1934, the city declared the course open to "Negroes only."
That led to protests by whites, who were able to restrict blacks' use to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Businessmen like Willie Adams played there regularly -- sometimes joined by visiting celebrities like the boxer Joe Louis -- but many of the most devoted patrons were the caddies, teen-agers from the nearby neighborhood of Mount Winans, like Nick Gardner.
He made 70 cents for nine holes of caddying, enough for a couple of rounds for himself. The oldest of five children, the son of a construction worker, he was a natural ball striker, deadly with a tough pin and a short iron in his hand.
If he'd been born 40 years later, Gardner would have played on the PGA Tour, say those who saw him play. But even after the city integrated its golf courses, Gardner found he couldn't make a living playing golf. Few professional tournaments were open to African-Americans, and a small tour for black pros didn't offer enough money to cover traveling expenses.
In 1958, frustrated, he joined the Army and was sent to Germany. Four years later, he was discharged, and found his way back to Baltimore and Carroll Park. The course was suffering. A Sun story during the 1960s described the course as covered in coal dust, its greens overrun by crab grass, its rough overgrown enough to swallow golf bags whole. The city contemplated paving over much of the nine-hole layout to make way for I-95.
Still, Gardner remained loyal to Carroll Park, playing when he could but devoting himself to a job at an aluminum plant in Halethorpe. After 10 years at the factory, he quit to make another attempt at a golf career, and won a number of tournaments on regional and black tours, supplementing his income with pre-tournament matches for money.
"Nick took a lot of money from white people," says Vernon Glaviano, 76, a retired carpenter for a copper refinery. "They didn't think a black man could play."
In 1980, seeking a more stable income, he accepted an offer from Gordon Chavis, a former national junior champion from Mount Winans who had also grown up playing Carroll Park, to become the assistant pro at Forest Park, another city golf course. Five years later, the head pro's job at Carroll Park opened, and Gardner took it.
Back at his home course, the new pro watched as the new municipal golf corporation assumed management of the city golf courses and made dozens of improvements -- from new greens to a signature dogwood in the middle of the fourth fairway.
Gardner embraced all the changes, save one: the decision in 1993 to spend $250,000 to add three holes, making Carroll a 12-hole play.
He did not mind so much the two new holes -- the 10th and 11th -- that were constructed on the course's western side. But in order to reach 12, the corporation split Carroll Park's best hole -- the ninth, a 90-degree dogleg left that played at nearly 600 yards -- into two. That change eliminated the most exciting shot in city golf: a blind 225-yard carry over a warehouse to cut off the dogleg. More than a few balls came to rest on the warehouse roof.
"When they got rid of that hole, the course lost a lot of juice," says Gardner. "I don't see anything good about 12 holes."
Still, Gardner, who retired in 1996, drives here in his battered sedan almost every day, as much for the conversation and camaraderie as the golf. He and his wide circle of friends, black and white -- from some of the old Mount Winans caddies to Lydell Mitchell, the retired Colt running back who is here three days a week -- talk about everything from titanium drivers to women to, well, younger women.
They complain too -- that you can't practice long pitch shots in front of the course anymore, that the greens are too slow, that Tiger Woods is an ungrateful young cuss, that Gardner, after all he's done, can't play Carroll Park for free.
"Nick taught almost everyone out here something about the game," John Bullock, 54, a math teacher who often plays with Gardner. "He's the best. If he was healthy, he could be playing with the senior tour."
Gardner, not prone to introspection, says he doesn't see anything magical in the golf course or his game. But even with his left knee limiting his movement and his emphysema making it hard to breathe, Gardner's swing remains one of Carroll Park's marvels, and his scores are under par.
When he is not feeling well, sometimes he skips the short par-four 10th and par-three 11th that sit in the Hole, a hollow where there were a handful of robberies a few years ago. Some people still talk about the small grave discovered by the 10th green in 1995; homicide detectives, thinking it might be a baby (it was a kitten), tried to close down the hole, but two golfers played it anyway.
Others don't like the young people who sneak down into the Hole to watch water snakes and swim in the creek. Teen-agers make money by gathering balls hit into the water and selling them back to the golfers.
Even in retirement, Gardner offers free lessons and tips to regulars like Koslowski, aka Bowser, and the group of seniors he organizes to play every weekday -- a club alternately called the Carroll Park Seniors or the Viagra Control Group. Retirees from all walks of industry, they play every weekday of the year, even in sub-zero January and sometimes on Christmas when the course is officially closed. A spot in this group is a lifetime appointment. The names of two members who died in 1997 adorn a plaque on a bench near the eighth tee.
The group's obsession is not 6-irons and sand saves but money. Players earn a quarter from each other for every hole they win and every par-3 green they hit in regulation.
On the sixth fairway recently, Bowser hits a low wood shot that rolls onto the green and settles less than a foot from the hole 160 yards away -- too far for him to see how great his shot is.
"Don't look too hard at the ball when you play here," he says, looking up from the freshly mowed grass to gaze at a nearby warehouse and a parked freight train. "You'll miss the beauty."