JOHNSTON, R.I. – Should you wonder if it’s possible to do a lot with a little, please take some time to be introduced to arguably the coziest and most golf-happy place you’ll ever find. It is called Button Hole, where a big mission plays out on a daily basis on the tiniest of stages.
“Just 26 acres,” said Don Wright spewing out such a small number in a matter-of-fact manner after quoting some massive ones, such as more than 20,000 rounds played in a year at the nine-hole par-3 or the 1,500 golf balls just brought in by a local gentleman that will be part of the 20,000 that are used annually at the driving range.
Oh, yes, the big mission that has been on this small stage every day for 25 years: “Make golf affordable, make it accessible. Give kids a lesson golf, give them a lesson in life,” said Wright, who in another life had dreams of playing the game professionally but since 2015 has been at Button Hole helping to carry out that endeavor that too many in golf say they want to do but don’t really do it.
Growing the game.
“This is an oasis of green,” said Manny Tutu, who can offer eyewitness testimony that Button Hole is the real deal. He was a neighborhood kid who was brought here when he was 11, part of a local Boys and Girls Club summer camp.
Tutu was “a basketball kid” and golf wasn’t part of his world. But he went through the Button Hole program and was part of the first graduating class, so to speak. The curriculum that debut Summer of 2001 is still very much in place.
“We put the kids in a program for a week, six classes. Six 90-minute lessons. The basics, swing, posture, grip. We give them a taste, let them use U.S. Kids equipment,” said Wright. “At the end, we give them a test, written questions, and if they pass they are ‘Button Hole’ kids and whenever they come back they can play for $1 or pay $2 and hit a large bucket of balls.”
That ends when they are 18 years old, but guess what? Manny Tutu is positive proof that Button Hole kids are forever. After graduating from Northeastern with a degree in psychology, Tutu came back to the neighborhood and became an an eighth-grade teacher in the Providence, R.I., school system.
And Button Hole is still in his blood. Tutu can still be found at here, playing the nine par-3 holes, hitting balls, or even hosting his first tournament last summer. Community teachers and many of Tutu’s friends were part of it and the vibes were very real.
“This is a sport I’m supposed to be doing,” Tutu said to himself years ago. “This is where I can feed my competitive nature, where I can get my edge.”
There’s no denying the affordability factor to golf, but at Button Hole, that is not an issue. Tutu and so many other residents can play and experience the game and thanks to those weekly classes that are always filled, 300 new Button Hole kids are graduated every year.
To spend a morning at Button Hole is to savor a sense of belonging and there’s little doubt that the heartbeat of golf is a vibrant one. Consider that the head professional, Tyler Piekarski, years ago was a Button Hole kid and now he’s overseeing a program that has a healthy corps of youngsters who can choose one of two tracts.
“We introduce kids who have an aptitude and a desire to get into competitive golf,” said Piekarski.
“But if the kids just want a fun experience, that’s very much available.”
The competitive angle can be measured by the PGA Junior League teams that play out of Button Hole. Or a longtime Button Hole youngster named Elizabeth Kue, who spends a lot of her summer days at the back of the range, teaching a community junior golf clinic, and she will pursue collegiate golf at Bryant College after graduating high school in 2027.
Then there’s another talented Button Hole kid, Kailer Louangxay, 14, who was a medalist at a Rhode Island State Amateur qualifier and also played in the U.S. Junior World tournament out in San Diego.
Not that Piekarski and his director of instruction, Arys Batista, aren’t committed to being mobile with this growing the game mission. Their bays are set up in the basement, “but we’re funded and go around to area schools,” said Wright.
“We have donated equipment. You don’t have clubs? No problem.”
Want a sense as to how much Button Hole is utilized? Here's part of the 1,500 balls that are used at the facility's practice range.
All of this – from the parade of young Button Hole graduates on a weekly basis, to the Manny Tutus of the world who still embrace the neighborhood feel and the affordable golf, to kids who got a taste of golf here and have kept the game in their life – must been seen as a rousing triumph for a man by the name of Ed Mauro.
“This was his dream,” said Wright.
It was born at a time when the USGA was launching its “For The Good of the Game” initiative. Mauro, the 1965 R.I. State Amateur champion and deeply involved in all things golf in his home state, accepted an invitation from then David Fay, then the USGA Executive Director to discuss short courses as a future path golf needed to take.
Mauro was all in and it was he who found the former gravel pit on the Johnston-Providence line and he who then formed the Rhode Island Golf Foundation and gathered a group of supporters, including PGA Tour stars Brad Faxon and Billy Andrade.
“There are nine par-3s, the longest hole being 142 yards,” said Wright. “It’s a two-sided range. We can have the public on one side, kids on the other.”
Now 92, Mauro spends most of his time in the Pinehurst, N.C., area, but his heart will always be in Rhode Island and his fingerprints and footprints will always be at Button Hole, which hosted a 25th birthday celebration yesterday.
It was well-deserved and so is Mauro a deserving hero of sorts. “He is the man,” said Faxon. “He’s incredible.”
So, too, is his brainstorm, this small-in-stature-but-gigantic-in-spirit facility. It is home to hundreds of neighborhood kids, not to mention college students who make their way up from Brown or URI or Providence or Bryant.
There is story posted near the clubhouse, telling how buttons – used as fasteners in shoes at a local mill – were swept down a river and came to rest in the banks where children swam. No surprise, the children called this area Button Hole and even though the mills and the industries went away and the area became blighted, Mauro’s brilliant vision returned green space and beauty and added in golf to different generations of children.
“My father is 78 and when I took him here for the first time,” said Manny Tutu, “he told me that he wished I had told him about this a long time ago.”
