“I said it was cheating”: How 84-year-old Rory McIlroy was accused again in court after…
“I said it was cheating”: How 84-year-old Rory McIlroy was accused again in court after… One Golf Digest+ member who reluctantly moved up a tee box during a recent round was 84-year-old Curt McClure (above, second from the right), who typically plays from 6,000 yards but appeased his buddies and joined them at 5,200 yards at his home course of Lubbock Country Club in Texas. The move sparked a special round for McClure, a 2-handicap who made his third career hole-in-one en route to a three-under-par 69—a score 15 shots below his age. “I said I cheated because I was playing pretty far out,” McClure said. His average tee shots were about 230 yards, and the 5,200-yard course is about as far as Rory McIlroy plays on tour, in driving distance. “It was just a normal day,” McClure said. “I just had a birdie, a hole-in-one and a couple of bogeys on the back nine.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more humble and cheerful contributor than McClure, who has contributed to Golf Digest+ since the 1980s. He hit an 8-iron about 130 yards on the par-3 fifth hole. “I didn’t even hit like I wanted to,” McClure said. “I pushed it a little bit and it hit the edge of the green, bounced to the left and rolled into the hole.”
A semifinalist at the 1995 U.S. Senior Amateur Championships, McClure finished the round with flying colors, shooting 70, his lowest score in recent memory. He first declined his age at the age of 68, but in the next few years his feat happened many times. He has not fired more than 80 in Rabok since he moved to Texas five years ago. McClure became interested in the game as a child in Louisiana, but left it when he got married, had four children and started working as an insurance agent. When he returned to golf in his late 30s, he took lessons from Shreveport instructor Martin Stewart, with whom he still works and credits much of his success to him. Macrol played in the United States in 1996 with old -American discovery, and wore up between Arnold Palmer and Chi Rodriguez. “I was surprised at the sound of their shots compared to their sound,” he recalls. Though it remains one of his fondest golf memories, he regrets not introducing himself.
Even if McClure doesn’t quite compress it like Arnie, McClure’s longtime friend and four-ball partner Corky Yates calls him “Pipeline” for how straight he drives the ball. He likes to set up a club at home far away from the course. “I have a lot of devices on the garage, and I just like to play,” he said. “I recently changed my rods to KBS and reworked them all. The frequencies are almost perfect. »
The new shafts quickly made a difference, as McClure had no problem following up with another of his low shafts. “The next time I played, I took off 71. In the fifth hole, the pin was cut to almost the same place and hit 6 inches,” he said. “It will be a good story now.”