Debbie Blount must record this. The six-seat team van is zipping along toward its first tournament, the sun is beaming through the windows and Taylor Swift’s Forever and Always is playing through the speakers. The chorus hits, and the freshman’s teammates in the seats ahead of her are nodding along to the beat and singing along.
Oh, and it rains in your bedroom
Everything is wrong
It rains when you’re here and it rains when you’re gone
“I look over, and we’re blasting a song and she’s recording the whole video and she posted it to her Facebook,” Lauren Welte, a teammate, said. “And she was saying how much fun she was having with us.”
Apparently.
A few months later, the van is barrelling back from eastern Georgia, and a mix of pop, rap and country is being played over the speakers. Debbie’s teammates still haven’t dialed up her music. That’s OK. The freshman’s sitting in the second-to-last row, just in front of the golf bags, and has her earbuds in.
Then Elvis’ take on the gospel song Will the Circle Be Unbroken hits.
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky
“I just started singing on my own,” Debbie said. “And it was old-time country music, and they turned around and looked at me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ They just all started laughing because I was rocking out to some old-time Elvis country song.”
At 9:46 a.m. on a Sunday in January 2020, Debbie Blount emailed the golf coach at Reinhardt University wondering if she could be a college golfer. Now, about nine or so months later, while being wedged into a six-seat van, sitting a club’s length away from smelly golf bags and listening and laughing to music, she most definitely was one. Yes, there’s the golf and the business and history classes. But this, this makes a 62-year-old freshman just want to sing to the heavens.
There’s a better home a-waiting
Like I don’t care what you have to say to me, I’m here to beat your butt and she does her best she can to do it.
“The language here is — and these ladies are nice ladies — but what a bad-ass idea,” Debbie said of her friends’ reaction.
“I mean, they all have college degrees. And they’re decent golfers. They love playing. So they actually just thought it was a lot of fun. They said, ‘I can’t believe that. Just shoot me if I ever had to go back to school.’”
This is the ballad of Debbie Blount.
* * *
‘Cause you see I’m a dinosaur
I should have died out a long time before
Have pity on a dinosaur
— Dinosaur by Hank Williams Jr.
Meg McCord, one of Debbie’s teammates, introduced her to this song. Meg, too, is into older country, and they’ve made a connection here. The 23-year-old and the 62-year-old. They sometimes share earbuds while “everybody else listens to their rap or their pop,” Meg said.
“The funniest thing is, me and Debbie both have a love for old country music,” she said. “With such an age gap, you wouldn’t expect that.”
It’s a running theme.
Would you expect Debbie to even be playing golf over 30 years ago, let alone on a college team? Probably not. She was an X-ray technician in Georgia and a ski instructor in Vail, Colo., in the winter months. In the late ’80s, Debbie was even asked to teach Jack Nicklaus (!) and his family — “and really in my head I thought, I’m ashamed to say this, isn’t he just a golfer?”
Soon enough, she was at the ribbon cutting for Nicklaus’ Country Club of the Rockies. And shooting pool that night at Nicklaus’ lodge with Hale Irwin.
“And then I went to the Masters and caught up with them,” Debbie said. “I think it was the last year Jack played as a player and I walked around with them.”
Her own play would come a few years later. She’d marry Ben Blount, and when they came back from their honeymoon, they decided, golf would be what they’d share together on the weekends. He had played some. Ben, after suggesting she’d take lessons, offered just one tip: Don’t be slow.
“So I remember I was kind of nervous and I would hit and I would run and I would hit and run because I was not going to be slow,” Debbie said.
Soon, she was winning club championships and stocking the garage with every color of golf shoe. (She has over 100 now. “One of my teammates saw them, and she goes, ‘What is that?’”) Debbie would qualify for two U.S. Senior Ams, and Ben would carry the bag for both.
Last September, when Debbie hit her first tee shot as a college golfer, she said she knew Ben would be proud.
“I had butterflies like I had not had in a long, long time,” she said. “I mean, it was kind of an excited butterflies. And I was trying not to get choked up. I was like, don’t cry, don’t cry. I mean, happy tears. Don’t get choked up. And I was paired with two freshmen. It was kind of funny. They went first, and one of them ripped it straight down the middle like forever. And the other one put it in the woods. I was last to go, and I remember my tempo was kind of fast. I kind of hit it thin. But it went pretty far down the middle.
“And I remember thinking, well, first shot in college golf, it’s not your best shot, but it’s only going to get better from here. And walked with a spring in my step … but walked and pushed that little cart down there, there was a quiet and a peace and excitement and I remember just looking up at the sky — sorry, here I go again — thinking about my late husband. And I just looked up and I heard the birds — there was a peace I can barely describe. It just felt special. It was, holy cow, I’m really here.
“Then we had to go look for that other girl’s ball in the woods.”
* * *
Girl the way you’re movin’
Got me in a trance, DJ turn me up
Ladies dis yo jam (c’mon)
— No Hands by Waka Flocka Flame
Back to the van for a minute. So how, exactly, does a 62-year-old fit in with a bunch of older teens and young 20-year-olds?
You be Debbie. And Debbie is shimmying in the van to No Hands, though she never really listened to rap before last fall. And Debbie is jokes.
“And sometimes I solicit the laughs with them, and it’s made them kind of — I get the impression that I’ve kind of endeared myself to them with some of my goofy stuff, some of my goofy old people stuff,” she said. “I’m not that old, but … I like when they roll their eyes and laugh — it’s like, no, my mother does that.
“I had for the first time a roommate at one of the tournaments, and she was 19,” she continued. “And in the van on the way home, I said I hope I didn’t snore. She goes, well, you did. I went, ohhh no. My husband said I used to do this. She goes, no, no, no, don’t worry about it, old people snore. You should hear my grandmother. Like, oh really.”
Lauren and Meg, her teammates, have another Debbie story. It’s their favorite. The Reinhardt mascot is an Eagle, and the joke is about an Eagle’s beak. Lauren laughs. The GOLF.com censors won’t give you the punchline, but we can share the reaction.
“I can’t say that one.”
She laughs again.
“It’s inappropriate. She told us one at the last tournament. She found a joke online. That was a funny one. That was her funniest one.”
Lauren laughs again.
“They said, ‘Don’t tell the coach that one, please,’” Debbie said. “‘He’s never … please stop. Don’t tell the coach that.’”
* * *
Oh, and it rains in your bedroom
Everything is wrong
It rains when you’re here and it rains when you’re gone
— Taylor Swift’s Forever and Always
Two years after Ben died, in the summer of 2019, Debbie would pick up a catalog for Reinhardt University, which is about an hour north of Atlanta. And put it down. Then look at it again. A caddie told her that he was on the golf team at the school. It was where her guidance counselor in 1976 told her to go to college. But she became an X-ray technician. Then she got married.
Reinhardt, the caddie also said, also had a women’s golf team.
A few months later, she sent the Sunday email. Two hours later, Dan Mullins, the Reinhardt coach, emailed back. After clearance from the NAIA, a few online courses in the spring and a few phone calls to friends asking what do you possibly wear on the first day of school as a 62-year-old, Debbie stood outside of the building of her New Testament class. “And I saw that big Reinhardt sign and knew that was where I was supposed to go in 1976,” she said.
That night, Debbie had two glasses of wine.
“[I felt] like celebrating. Like I had finally arrived,” she said. “Sorry, here I get choked up … It’s a big deal for me. This is really exciting for me.”
The first team meeting would follow. And that first van ride with all the jokes and all the music. (“That was one of the highlights of my college career.”) And that first tee shot. The funniest thing happened on the way to Debbie becoming a 62-year-old freshman — she became a freshman. “It’s so funny, but she’s almost like — she is a freshman,” Meg, her teammate, said. “She’s like a little kid. Like, oh my goodness, you get to do this and this and this? So excited.”
To Reinhardt’s opponents, Lauren said, Debbie’s “like a celebrity.” “People come up to me and they’re like, is that lady on your team? And I go, yeah. She’s like, how did you do that? How is she playing on your team? I tell her the story, and she’s the highlight of the whole golf tournament.
“Everybody knows Debbie from Reinhardt. Everybody’s like, where’s Debbie? I want to go find Debbie.”
Except for one player. She may know Debbie from Reinhardt best now.
“She has said the one time she was playing with a girl and she showed up at the tee box and the girl gave her coach a look like, I’m playing with this, like you got to be kidding me,” Lauren said. “But Debbie went up and piped one right down the middle and the girl looked at her coach, like, guess I’m stuck doing this.
“She fits in and she shows them if they give her dirty looks, she shows ’em I’m here to play. Like I don’t care what you have to say to me, I’m here to beat your butt and she does her best she can to do it.”
* * *
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, Lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky
— Will the Circle Be Unbroken by Elvis Presley
Five tournaments into the season, Debbie’s music still hasn’t been played in the van. “And I wouldn’t subject them to it, either,” she said. But it might be coming soon. Meg, a senior, the new buddy who introduced Debbie to Dinosaur, said she’s been trying to line it up as the van DJ.
Old country. In a college golf van.
Could Meg or Lauren honestly have imagined at the start of last fall they’d have a 62-year-old as a friend? No, they said.
“But I’m freaking glad we do,” Lauren said. “I’m really glad we have that.”
“I just think how much of a privilege it is to play with her,” Lauren said. “I think she might look at it for her being a privilege, but I think for us, it’s something we needed to have. Just see someone with her attitude, her dedication to this game, you know, we need to see that. And I’m grateful that we have that in Debbie because I think that’s motivated all of us to try to be the best that we can be. And even if we do have a bad round, a bad day, whatever, we have Debbie cheering us on, and at the end of the day, she’s our biggest supporter when it comes to anything.
“So I just think how grateful we are that she chose us to play with us. And I’ll remember her for the rest of my life, I think, going forward with that.”
Old country. In a college golf van. After a year of new classes and new tournaments, and first van rides and first tee shots, and Taylor Swift and Waka Flocka Flame, and new teenage and 20-year-old friends. After going back to school and joining a golf team, At the age of 62. What a bad-ass idea, indeed.
This is the Ballad of Debbie Blount.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” Debbie said. “I actually expected to go into it not being welcomed, and I was welcomed with open arms. Who wants an old lady on the team? And I think there was a little of that. I think they expected that.
“But that’s not what they got.”