Richard Keene hasn’t been playing at Brainerd Golf Course since it opened 100 years ago. It just seems like it.
“I haven’t been out here quite that long,” Keene said at Saturday’s celebration of Brainerd GC’s centennial. “Just since the mid-1960s.”
Keene, a five-time winner of the Brainerd Invitational, the club’s 80-year-old signature event, was among 120 players who teed it up in a special two-man scramble. Under threatening skies and intermittent rain, Richard Brame and Bob Lawson teamed for a 12-under-par 60 and the win.
Before the tournament got under way, Chattanooga Mayor Tim Kelly called Brainerd GC a “quintessential Chattanooga place.”
“It’s really the anchor of this great, old, iconic Chattanooga neighborhood,” he said. “I think of (the course) like you would think of a historic building.