They were mostly a bunch of baseball players and one track man who were convinced to give up those sports and play golf in high school.
How Gerald McCarty got those kids to make such a drastic move in their young lives is still one of the great recruiting stories in Flint sports history.
It’s also a great success story, as those boys went on to win three consecutive state golf championships for St. John Vianney High School from 1963-65.
Fifty years later, as those teams go into the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame as a combined entry, the tale of how they came together is one for the ages.
“Jerry was a great salesman, and he somehow convinced us all to play golf,” said Mark Christenson, one of three Hornet golfers who played on all three state
championship teams. “Had it not been for him, it never would have happened. I’m glad in retrospect the way it worked out, but it was quite a promotional job to get us to do it.”
How does any 14-year-old kid give up the action and excitement of baseball or track for the relatively staid, slow pace of golf?
Christenson, Jim Glowski and Andy Wittbrodt had all been good baseball players on St. John Vianney’s eighth-grade team in the spring of 1961 and were projected as starters on the high school team the following year. Dave Park was a year ahead of them and already the fastest kid in school as a freshman, running the 100-yard dash, the 220 and the 880 relay for the track team.
All had also grown up playing in the Flint Junior Golf Association and lived close enough to Mott Park that they spent a lot of summer days on the course. But golf took a backseat to summer baseball and was viewed as a sideline.
“Football, basketball and baseball were the three big sports at that time,” said Christenson. “Nobody was too dedicated to golf.”
McCarty, though, had the vision and eye for talent to see bigger things for the boys. Glowski remembers him staging an eighth-grade golf tournament at Mott Park for about 25 SJV kids the summer before he was appointed golf coach.
“He probably saw something in us that led us down that path,” Glowski said. “That’s when that perfect storm started to come together.” Still, McCarty had to persuade them to make the switch — a skill that was right up his alley, according to his wife.
