"You know, no matter how good you’re doing, ‘The Claw’ will reach out and grab you."
The septuagenarian former golfers sit in a shaded area of a desolate parking lot on a morning mercifully light on humidity.
Age has left them tattered in some areas and scarred in others. Just like the course directly behind them — the one whose birth they witnessed and whose wake they now attend. In a previous life, this old track afforded them moments of triumph and misadventure, slapstick and conquest. At various junctures, they hailed its pristineness and cursed its perplexity.
“It was an impossible golf course,” 76-year-old Mike Curtin says.
“The Claw” has been put out to pasture, and on this day it looks like one: unkempt, frayed, weedy and neglected. USF’s public golf course, opened in 1967 next to a forest preserve on the campus’ northern fringe, closed for good on Labor Day. School officials said it had been hemorrhaging money for years.
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