ITEM PHOTO BY SPENSER HASAK
Jay Richards, serving as a marshal at the Salem Country Club for the U.S. Senior Open.
By STEVE KRAUSE
PEABODY — It doesn’t take much imagination to squint and decide that Jay Richards, with his long, bushy beard and white hair to match, looks like someone very familiar.
Hale Irwin, a professional golfer who is at Salem Country Club this week to take part in the U.S. Senior Open, picked up on it immediately.
After teeing off on the eighth hole during a practice round, Irwin sidled up to Richards.
“What do I have to do?” Irwin asked him, Richards said.
“I thought he wanted to know what he should do on his next shot,” said Richards, who is familiar to local sports fans as a hockey and lacrosse coach for Lynn Tech and several other schools. “So I started to tell him what I’d do.
“I’m a 29-handicap,” said Richards, with a laugh. “I’m terrible.”
Before he could go on, Irwin, according to Richards, said, “Oh, no, I mean what do I have to do to get on Santa’s list. I’ve always wanted to be on Santa’s List.”
Such is the life of a gallery marshal at a championship golf tournament. Most of the time, they stand on the fringes of the action, putting their hands up to admonish the crowd to be quiet when golfers putt or tee off, and opening and closing the roped off walkways that lead from one hole to the other. Often, marshals are tasked with finding errant balls that miss the in-bounds parts of the course completely and land in the woods.
Both Richards and his wife, Colleen Kelly Richards, a retired dance teacher who taught in Lynn, are at Salem Country Club this week to act as gallery marshals. They did it in 2001 too, the last time the tournament came to the club.
“Marshals make sure the crowd stays pleasant,” said Colleen Kelly Richards, who was on the second hole this week. “This is my third time doing this. We were here once before, and the other time at Ferncroft (in Danvers) with the ladies.”
She is no stranger to Salem Country Club. Her family belonged to the club since she was a child, “and I started swinging a golf club when I was 5 years old.”
But when her parents divorced, she stopped going to Salem. These days, she belongs to Gannon, “where I golf just about every day.”
Her husband, also a member at Gannon, was the varsity hockey coach at Tech during the 1990s, and later assisted at both Bishop Fenwick and Peabody. He later was Tech’s varsity lacrosse coach until three years ago, when he stepped down. Although he has retired from teaching and coaching, he is still active in the Lynn area as a plumber.
He too is a golfer at Gannon and tries to get out three times a week. Otherwise, he said, “I’m like most people, I’d say. I love to watch golf on Sunday afternoons on TV.”
He says he always enjoys the interaction with the pros while he’s serving as a marshal.
“The last time we had this here (2001), Raymond Floyd hit a shot that landed on the top of the green and rolled all the way down to the bottom.
“He was furious,” Richards said, “He says ‘what the heck do you have to do to get the ball to bite on this course?’”
Steve Krause can be reached at [email protected].