The “Olde Pro” is a Millwood Classic

The “Olde Pro” is a Millwood Classic

By Leonard Shapiro

His business card reads “Golf Lessons with the Olde Pro,” because Eddie Cassidy says he’s an “old school” kind of guy, an experienced teacher many of his students believe is exactly what they’re seeking when searching for an instructor who can help improve their games.

Eddie Cassidy

Photo by Leonard Shapiro

“Everyone is an individual,” Cassidy said. “And anyone can hit a golf club. I’ll give them a club and tell them to go hit it, and then I tell them ‘I’m going to teach you how to swing this club. And if you swing it properly, it’s amazing, but more times than not, the club actually gets in the way of the ball.’”

Cassidy’s words of wisdom are mostly heard these days at Millwood Country Club, a 9-hole gem that’s been around since 1924 and located about 15 miles east of Winchester. There’s no practice range or formal teaching area, just two tees set up in front of a net about five yards away. So Cassidy, 73, usually takes his students to a spot not far from the first fairway and has them hit their shots over toward two other adjacent fairways.

He can do that at Millwood, where he was hired in 2015. His clients range from teens to 90-yearolds, boys and girls, men and women. Or, as he once told his players on the golf team he once coached at a Winchester high school, “golf is a sport for ladies and gentlemen.”

His students are totally enamored with his approach.

“His style is to take what you have and adapt it to what you want,” said Andrew Stifler, a past president at Millwood who has taken a number of lessons from Cassidy. “He doesn’t try to change your grip, your swing, your stance, unless it’s really horrible. He doesn’t try to make you over, as some people do. And the main thing is that he’s just low key. No tension around him. And he is very wellliked at the club.”

Cassidy’s boyhood included caddying at Brockton GC, a private club that had several distinguished members. One was Herbert Warren Wind, considered the pre-eminent golf writer of his and most other eras. It was Wind, writing in the New Yorker magazine, who once described holes 11, 12 and 13 at Augusta National as “Amen Corner.”

“Monday was caddy day at the course, and I’d play all day,” he recalled. “Then I started sneaking on the course and my dad said to the general manager, how about we get him a junior membership? It was $75 a year. I would play 18 holes in the morning, 18 in the afternoon and nine at night, 45 holes a day in the summer.”

At age 17, Cassidy won the Brockton city amateur title, still the youngest winner of the event. He played on his high school golf team and competed in junior events at the local and state level. He was recruited to play golf at the University of Oklahoma, but described his one year in Norman as “total culture shock,” including having to learn to hit low, wind-cheating shots he rarely faced back home in Massachusetts.

Unhappy as a Sooner, he returned to Brockton and worked for the state of Massachusetts on a surveying crew until he came home one day and his father announced, “Uncle Sam wants to see you.” That was a draft notice and he decided to sign up for three years. He spent 1968 and ’69 in Vietnam deployed with the Army’s First Infantry.

Once discharged, he came back home and enrolled at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he studied turf management. One summer, he had an internship at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland and met the late Bill Strausbaugh, the legendary head professional there for 31 years until his death in 1999.

Strausbaugh helped Cassidy get his first teaching job, as an assistant pro at Carper’s Valley, a now-closed public course in Winchester. Cassidy said he worked 80 hours a week and earned $80 a week back then. He also started drinking heavily, and in 1975 entered a 12-step recovery program that eventually got him sober and back into helping golfers hit the dimpled ball.

“I just always had an eye for teaching,” said the Olde Pro, and still sober after all these years.

A version of this story appeared in Virginia Golfer magazine.