Loyal "Bud" Chapman, 1923-2020

Minnesota

By Mike Fermoyle (mikefermoyle@gmail.com)
 
Bud Chapman was a genius with a paint brush and pretty good with a golf club, too. He had a remarkable run as a competitive tournament player that lasted for more than seven decades. In his late 50’s, he began using a 54-inch driver and was surprisingly effective with it. The driver was dauntingly heavy, felt more like a long shovel than a golf club, and any normal human being who used it would have been sent to the orthopedic ward after nine holes. But Chapman employed that monster club for years with no ill effects, until the USGA changed the rules in 2004 and established a 48-inch limit on clubs (except for putters).
 
When the U.S. Senior Open was held at Hazeltine National in 1983, Chapman not only qualified, he was on top of the leaderboard after 15 holes on the first day of the tournament. He won the Minnesota State Senior Open in 1989, when he was 66, and the State Senior Four-Ball in 1990 and ’95 (both times with Karl Dosen). In 1978, he won the State Senior Amateur for the first time, and he won it again 12 years later, in 1990. Chapman earned the MGA Senior Player of the Year Award four times (1978, ’84, ’89 and ’90) and is the only person to have claimed that honor in three different decades. He won the Grand Masters Division at the State Senior Amateur eight times, most recently in 2013 — when he was 90!
 
Besides that, he shot his age nearly 4,000 times. The first time he did it, he was 68. When he was 92, he beat his age by 21 strokes, shooting a 71. About a year ago, when he was 96, he shot 76 at Southview Country Club and told Pioneer Press columnist Charley Walters that it was the 3,826th time he’d matched or beaten his age.
 
Of course, Loyal Bud Chapman was best known for his Infamous 18 Holes, a series of paintings depicting fictional — and terrifyingly difficult — golf holes that he envisioned in some of the world’s most spectacular natural settings, such as Victoria Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Alps, Big Sur, the Redwood Forest and Lake Superior. They looked absolutely real, so real, in fact, that he once got a call from Africa. The caller had been searching for some time but had been unable to locate the Victoria Falls hole that existed only in Chapman’s imagination.
 
What most people don't know about Chapman is that before he did a two-year stint in art school, worked at a commercial studio and then started his own studio, he had been a pilot during World War II. He flew trainers while in the Navy Air Corps, then transferred to the Army Air Corps and became a B-29 pilot. He was on a runway in Tucson, preparing to take off for the Pacific Theater in 1945 when Japan surrendered to the Allies.
 
His mother lived to be 104, and until not that long ago those who knew her son fully expected him to make triple figures, as well. He seemed indestructible. If the 54-inch driver didn’t kill him, then nothing could. So it came as a shock to a lot of people when the news got out last week that Chappie had died on Thursday of a heart attack, at the age of 97.
 
Chapman was introduced to the game of golf when he was 11 years old and began caddying at Interlachen CC. He often caddied for Patty Berg, who paid him the going rate, 75 cents, plus a 10-cent tip. She would go on to become a founding member of the LPGA Tour and win 15 women’s majors, which remains a record. 
 
By the early 1940’s, Chapman was playing in tournaments himself, and in the mid-40’s he began what became something of a crusade — his attempt to qualify for the U.S. Open. He tried 47 times but never quite succeeded. 
 
“It’s a history of horror stories,” he lamented in an interview with Sports Illustrated in 1998. 
 
To make the Open, you have to get through two qualifying tournaments, a Local and then a Sectional. Chappie got to the sectional twice and came close to advancing both times. In one of those sectionals, he needed to par the last two holes to qualify for the Open but hit his drive through the fairway and into the trees on the 17th hole and made a double bogey. In the other, he hit a 6-iron shot on the 36th hole, a par-3, and it buried in the bank in front of the green.
 
“The imbedded ball rule wasn’t invented yet,” he explained in that Sports Illustrated interview, “so I go up there and just tap the ball to get it out — and it goes a little deeper! So I tap it again, and it goes even deeper.” 
 
Eventually, after two taps and a couple of swipes, he was able to gouge the ball onto the green, but he ended up missing the Open by a single stroke. 
 
As John Garrity, who wrote that Sports Illustrated story, described the interview, Chapman was laughing in a rueful kind of way while telling his sad tale, and that was typical Chappie. For all the success he had in golf, there were the inevitable failures, but he always managed to take them in stride. Unlike virtually every other golfer in the world, he never seemed to get mad.
 
And that was the way he dealt with every aspect of his amazing life. There were financial bonanzas and financial disasters, such as the time he did a batch of Japanese-language calendars, but the guy who was managing the project absconded with the money.
 
“About a million dollars,” Chapman estimated at the time. He then shrugged, smiled and said: “I take things well.” 
 
On an even larger scale, he had a similarly benign reaction when a Russian won the bidding during an auction for the originals of the Infamous Holes in 2007. The Russian agreed to pay $20 million for the full set of paintings — but the deal fell through.   
 
Maybe it helped that Chappie tended to be a bit forgetful. 
 
“I know that there was at least one State Amateur, or it might have been a Players Championship that he entered twice,” recalled Lisa Overom, the Operations Director of the MGA, “because he forgot that he’d already entered. He also showed up a week early for the MGA banquet one year when he was getting the Senior Player of the Year Award. And I’m pretty sure that when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame (1994), he showed up on the right day, but at the wrong club. That was Chappie. He was a classic, and we’re really going to miss him.”
 
His senior golf accomplishments would have been even greater if there had been more tournaments for him to play in. The State Senior Open, as an example, was first played in 1985, by which time Chapman was 62 — and 12 years older than the youngest competitors in the field. By the time the MGA Senior Players Championship came into existence, in 2000, Chapman was 78.
 
Although he never won a State Amateur or a State Open, Chapman competed on even terms with the best amateurs in the state for more than 40 years. The Mankato Invitational — now the Krugel Invitational — was and still is one of the biggest amateur tournaments of the summer. Chapman won it in 1960, and he also had multiple runner-up finishes there. In 1974, when he was 51, he tied for second (behind Rick Ehrmanntraut) against what was possibly the strongest field Mankato has ever seen. On that weekend, he finished comfortably ahead of John Harris and Jim Ihnot, who would go on to finish 1-2 in the State Amateur four days later. 
 
It was also in 1974 that Chapman got the idea of creating the Infamous 18 Holes, while he was prospecting for gold  in New Mexico. The idea came to him after another financial setback. Actually two setbacks. He had just gotten a bleak assay from a geologist, and that same week he learned that his stock portfolio had been pretty much wiped out. 
 
“The oil wells that I thought were worth a couple of million dollars,” he said, “turned out to be phony.”
 
Once again, however, Chapman was undaunted. Instead, he was inspired by the spectacular landscapes he was seeing in New Mexico, and soon after that, he started working on the first of his imaginary golf holes. 
 
A few months later, in early 1975, he made a deal with Golf Digest. In exchange for running an ad for him, the magazine got the rights to publish his artwork. The first four of his Infamous Holes paintings appeared in that first issue, and orders for his prints began pouring into Chapman Studios.
 
When the 18 holes were done, in 1982, the scorecard said the course was 6,056 yards, par was 69, and the course rating was 118. 
 
Basically, the Infamous 18 tend to demonstrate Chappie’s attitude toward golf — that in the end, the course is going to win. In his paintings, the golfers are small and the obstacles are enormous.
 
The descriptions of the holes show his wry sense of humor, as exemplified by No. 7, Desert Winds, a 39-yard par 3. It is said to be:
 
“Deceptively difficult, involving a 682-yard descent through often dramatic changes in temperature and winds. Indeed, the weather factor can be absolutely damnable, making club selection difficult and crucial. Depending on wind directions tee shots may be stroked lightly with a putter or thunderously with a driver. The imbedded ball rule applies on this No. 5 handicap hole.”