"That's the darndest resignation letter I've ever read," said Westwood Hills Country Club President Steve Rhodes about Tom Hoover. "I'm not sure we are going to get rid of him completely."
Hoover turned in the letter, titled "The Love Affair Is Over!!" at the end of June. Officially, he was stepping down as the longtime secretary of his beloved country club. Unofficially, the club is going to have to find a new historian, assistant superintendent and tournament director, to name a few of the duties Hoover takes on whether you want him to or not.
The letter is 90 percent biography and 10 percent resignation.
It opens in 1952 when he became a caddy at the country club. Then it waxes poetic about his favorite story, his favorite foursome, his favorite golf games and card games. He talks about high school sports, guarding future NBA player and failed presidential candidate Bill Bradley when he played for Crystal City.
Oh, and he mentioned the girls. "There were too many to name."
On to college at LSU, where he reminisces about parties, dances, Ken's Pizza, The Tiger Lounge, football games and playing on the golf team.
Still not a word about resigning two-thirds of the way through his resignation letter.
Before that, let's reflect on the summer of 1964 and his six club championships in four different decades. He became a board member in 1968 and was appointed treasurer in 1971, married his wife, Susan, the next year, and became secretary after E.E. "Bus" Carr died on Dec. 2, 1983. Hoover mentions the date specifically. He mentions all the dates specifically.
"Now, the American Dream is Gone!!" He writes in the last of 10 paragraphs. "Elvis has left the building. It is time to announce my resignation as WHCC Secretary effective June 30, 2017. The Love Affair is Over!!"
"Knowing him like I do, that is Tommy Hoover," said Rhodes, who had Hoover as his basketball coach his senior year of high school. "But it was really hard on me. Knowing him for so long and working with him for so long, and being secretary of the club, it was hard on the board. We knew it was coming, we knew we were going to accept it, but we didn't have to like it. I don't know how we are going to find somebody to replace him and I'm pretty much convinced that we won't find anybody to replace Tommy Hoover. And I'm not sure we should."
The club told him they were going to have a small banquet in honor of Hoover's decades of service to the club. Hoover wore his cstomary LSU purple and his wife, Susan, came dressed casually as well.
"It was really nice they did this. I had no idea this was going to be this," said Susan of the party that had a standing room only crowd. "He's an honest man who does exactly what he tells you. I've been married to him for 45 years and he's never told me anything but the truth, and I know that for a fact."
The club presented him with a lifetime membership, Senator Doug Libla read and gave a proclamation in his honor, and friends tried their hand at jokes and stories.
But nobody had the room laughing like Hoover and his dry humor.
"I want to thank my wife, Susan, because over the 45 years we've been married, she probably answered 2,000 phone calls concerning Westwood Hills and she had one reply. 'I do not know the answer, why don't you call back.' That was the answer," Hoover said.
"I've had love affairs with a lot of people, a lot of things. The Poplar Bluff Mules, the TRC Raiders, LSU football, it is pretty high on my list. My lovely wife Susan, she is somewhere on that list. Where are you located on that list?" Hoover continued. "Buddy was my best man at both my weddings. How often does that happen?"
Hoover's first caddymaster was Buddy Godwin, who views "Tommy" as a little brother and told him as much for the first time at a banquet in Hoover's honor Wednesday.
Godwin recalled a skinny, unhealthy 10-year-old kid who followed him around on golfing rounds, lunch at Godwin's house and dates with girls. Godwin was five years older, a high schooler who babysat a pre-teen shadow.
"First time I saw him he was pitiful looking," Godwin said.
As the caddymaster, Godwin raked the greens every day at noon. Tommy was right behind him, too weak to pick up the oversized rake.
"Bless his heart. I felt sorry for him," Godwin said.
Hoover's parents owned 303 Package Liquor. The store was Downtown back then and capitalized on the railroads. The steady stream of trains buying supplies made for an excellent business. As a member of the club, he was the only caddy who could go inside and buy a hamburger and a Coke.
The other caddies were jealous at times. It didn't help that Hoover always had an encyclopaedic memory and didn't hesitate to correct someone's mistake.
"He'll correct you all the time. If I say something that is 5 percent off, he'll say, 'No that's not right,'" Godwin said.
The family store was open 16 hours a day and Hoover's parents worked most of them. His dad took one day off a year for vacation. He took the bus to Hot Springs, Ark., took a bath, watched a movie, and took the bus home.
On Saturdays, Hoover would go to the movies and watch and some of them alone.
"He had to be (lonely)," Godwin said.
Hoover was a 6-foot, 2-inch, 115-pound freshman at Poplar Bluff High School who became an All-American basketball player. Hall of Fame coach Adolph Rupp wanted him to play at Kentucky. Hoover, who said he shot 500 free throws every day before school, thought they'd hurt him there, that he was still too weak to compete at that level. Instead he went to LSU to play golf but still ran into Rupp.
At one point Hoover was keeping stats for an LSU vs. Kentucky basketball game. LSU was up at half and Hoover handed the stats to Rupp, who threw them on the court and said, "Son, stats are for losers" and walked off.
When he returned to Poplar Bluff, Hoover embraced the community. It took half a century, cancer and chemotherapy to get him to even begin to let go.
"I guarantee. You could give him a job in Memphis for $10 million a year and he wouldn't go," Godwin said.
When Poplar Bluff alum and NBA player Tyler Hansbrough was a senior at North Carolina, Drew Brown offered to take Hoover to the Duke vs. North Carolina game. Hansbrough would be named the 2008 National College Player of the Year after the season and get drafted 13th overall by the Indiana Pacers.
Brown, who was valedictorian while Hoover was principal, offered to pay for the tickets, air fare, the whole works. But Hoover declined. The Mules were playing and he had to be there.
"If Neelyville and Doniphan are playing on a Monday and nobody else is playing, he's going to go," Godwin said.
His friends sigh at the daunting challenge of discussing Hoover's many quirks. Godwin and Hoover have played golf all over the country, spent countless hours traveling in the car and drank who knows how many beers together.
To this day, Godwin doesn't know if Hoover has $5 or $5 million in the bank, whether he is a Democrat or a Republican, or if he ever cursed.
"Tommy couldn't change a flat tire," Godwin continued. "You put a flat tire right there, and put the spare and the bolts and the lug wrench and the jack. Now, he can tell you how many times it will roll over between here and St. Louis."
Along with a gift for numbers came a need to be in control.
Hoover became a Poplar Bluff teacher in the 1960s, and administrator in the '70s, and was a coach of different sports at various times throughout. He officiated and served as scorekeeper, too. He controlled the room, he controlled the school, he controlled the team, he controlled the game, he controlled the stats.
Godwin is a Florida snow bird. When he's gone each winter, his daughter pays the bills but his neighbor, Hoover, stops by the condo to collect the mail first.
"He goes and gets my mail, looks at it and brings it over to my house," Godwin said. "He's got to know what's going on."
Despite going through chemotherapy this summer, Hoover is at the golf course every morning that his health allows, moving tee markers even though it is not and has never been his job. He puts the flags in every morning and takes them out every night, determining for everyone when exactly the club is open and closed.
"He's not just somebody who records the minutes," Westwood Hills Head Professional Jimmy Vernon said.
The club recently held its annual match play championships. Like every year, there was a discussion about how to set the course up. Hoover goes over the layout down to the positioning of individual out of bounds stakes. He wants the course to be hard, the board wants it to be easy. They think they'll have him convinced, then he'll go out and move stakes to what he thinks is correct. They scratch their heads and sigh, somewhat frustrated, but the issue slides by because they know his heart is always in the right place.
Hoover gets to run his namesake amateur tournament however he wants, though. He decides who to invite, makes and mails the invitations. He sets up the course and determines pairings and is the rules official. For years he kept scores by hand, taking seconds to mark in each number as though your problematic 82 was a work of calligraphy art.
When he took over the Ozark in 1984, it was down to 40 players. Now it features a 120-player field from around the region. He also used to write a golf column for the Daily American Republic.
Hoover is halfway through a series of chemotherapy treatments that have sapped him of his energy, he planned on retiring in the spring and letting someone else run the Tom Hoover Ozark Invitational, which was named after him in 2015.
"I would never have resigned, or retired, if it hadn't been for some health issues lately. I just didn't have enough energy to do this job as it needs to be done. It doesn't sound like very much, the WHCC Secretary, but if you do it correctly, it is almost a daily job," He said at the banquet.
Added Susan, "He's working on getting well and that's what I want him to do ... I didn't ask him to do it, I just told him I want him to give all his energy to living."
However, his health improved and he was still out there. Though Vernon managed to talk him into letting others keep scores with a computer.
"The people who come down for this tournament, they always talk about how well the Ozark is run," Vernon said. "We're going to have big shoes to fill when we take over that to ensure it goes on as well as it has in the past."
Brown, a North Carolina lawyer, has made 10 trips from the coast to play in the amateur tournament almost entirely because of Hoover. This year, he drove in from the St. Louis airport and didn't have his driver. He shipped his clubs in, no driver. So he borrowed past champion Carr Vernon's driver and hit it out of bounds twice. Brown ended up shooting a 90 and didn't care.
"It doesn't matter. We're not here for that. He is the heart and soul," Brown said.
Carr Vernon was able to loan out a club because he couldn't play in the Ozark for the first time because he turned professional this past year. Instead, he came back to help keep score with his dad, Jimmy.
"I'm sure as long as he's healthy he is probably going to be a part of the Ozark. Retired or not," said Carr Vernon, who had Hoover in the gallery when he played in the U.S. Amateur in Boston.
Similar to how Hoover was 12 when he met Godwin, Steve Shock was 11 when he met Hoover and started working in the pro shop. At 14, Shock started traveling as his caddy.
"He's one of the most loyal people I've ever met in my life," said Shock, who has known Hoover for 33 years as a teacher, coach, co-worker and now contemporary.
Hoover and Godwin were part of a group who supported Poplar Bluff golf by showing a bunch of 11-13-year-old kids what golf at a high level looked like, and in turn, teaching them how to reach that level.
Shock was later a part of the 1980 and 1981 Poplar Bluff golf team that won the school's first state championships in any sport.
"Poplar Bluff is considered one of the two or three strongest junior/high school golf areas in the state of Missouri and Tom deserves some of the credit for that," Shock said. "I think he would say that his biggest accomplishment is the things he's done behind the scenes."
Jim Markel was raised in part by the club membership, as well, and spoke at Wednesday's banquet for Hoover.
"The membership kind of raised me out here and two of the people who raised me were Tom Hoover and Buddy Godwin," Markel said. "Some of the things I learned from Tommy growing up is, I learned how to do the Louisiana two-step from the rafters, and at the same time throw a plate off the rafters ... I learned you can go on a trip on a bus, and if you're not happy with things and you're at a football game with your wife. You can just tell you her, 'I'll see you back in Poplar Bluff.' And you can leave, get on a plane and fly home."
The Poplar Bluff Sports Hall of Fame tried to induct Hoover in the past, but he always said no, saying it wouldn't be right considering he was also on the board. He finally relented when the 1980-81 golf teams were voted in.
"I think that he waited because he wanted to go in the same time we did," Shock said. "I think it is important to him that any accolades that come his way come as a by-product of things he's done, and that they come from other people, not from him."
When the Poplar Bluff girls basketball program was created in 1976, Hoover hired Kirk Chronister, who went on to set the state record for career wins and earn the Tom Hoover Award for Lifetime Achievement in the SEMO Conference in 2016.
"He was really big on how you dressed, how you carried yourself and how you represented the school and the community," Chronister said. "Mr. Hoover really took a lot of pride, not just in Poplar Bluff High School, but also in Poplar Bluff. He's always saying 'Five years from now no one will remember the score of the game, but they'll remember how you and your team acted.' It carried a lot of weight with me."
Hoover gave the same advice in the same speech to every new class of some 400 freshmen. After one instance, Brown knocked on his office door and introduced himself, saying, "I'm going to be your valedictorian in four years." And he was.
Hoover doesn't want to be recognized for what he's done. He'll donate all of his time to help you, so you can be recognized instead. He is charitable, but only when nobody knows about it. Each year for Hoover's birthday, Godwin will get his friend a small token of some sort. Hoover, meanwhile, is more likely to buy Godwin dinner and then say after the fact, "Oh yeah, that was your birthday present."
"I'll run into you at the club tonight and I'll say, 'Let me buy you a beer.' I'll guarantee you that Tommy Hoover will never buy you a beer. He won't do that. But I think he donated $50,000 to the club when they rebuilt it. He didn't tell me. Someone else told me," Godwin said. "If I went over to Tommy today, and I believe this 100 percent, if I asked to borrow $100,000, he'd write me a check. And he probably wouldn't ask me why."
In 1953, Hoover recalls in his resignation letter, as a caddy he typically got 75 cents per nine with a quarter tip. After a round, Bus Carr handed him "three dusty quarter." Hoover asked about the customary tip and Carr told the scrawny kid, "Son, I'll give you a tip. Wear a white shirt and shine your shoes every day and you'll be somebody."