A Rower Hits a Hole in One

Doctor Rowing received a phone call from our bowman, the captain of my 1973 college crew.

“I understand all the excitement about The Boys in the Boat, but how come you haven’t reviewed Curtis’s movie? It’s great.”

Ric was right. Our five-man, Curtis Jordan, wrote a screenplay and co-produced the film Playing Through. I saw it at a film festival during the summer of 2022. So why haven’t I celebrated it?

It’s about golf.

There are any number of jokes that can be made about golf—i.e., “a good walk spoiled.” But there’s a great story here, and it deserves to be heard. Jordan retired in 2009 from a long career coaching both the women and heavyweight men at Princeton.  He coached U.S. crews at the ’88, ’92, ’96, and 2000 Olympics before heading to Australia, where he coached a boat for the 2012 Olympic Games. He returned to the States and served as USRowing’s high-performance director through 2016. When he decided it was time to retire from rowing, he decided it was time to try his hand at writing a screenplay. No, he wasn’t one of those guys who had been planning to write the Great American Novel.

“I wasn’t a writer. The idea that I might write a book never occurred to me. I had enough trouble getting through high school and college with term papers. But I was at the women’s sprints in 1991 when someone came up to me and said, ‘Did your mother ever play golf?’ I said, ‘She did. Why?’ He said, ‘It’s in Sports Illustrated. She played a big match against Ann Gregory, the first great African-American woman golfer.’

“And that got me thinking. There’s a good story here.”

Curtis’s mother, Josephine Knowlton “Dadie” Jordan, the Georgia state champion, had played in the finals of the U.S. Women’s Amateur Championships against Ann Gregory, a Black woman from Gary, Ind., in 1959 at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md. Upper-class white woman from the South versus middle-class Black woman from a Midwestern steel town. Privilege versus disadvantage.

Curtis thought, “Maybe I could write a screenplay. Short sentences. Dialogue. Movements. I Googled ‘How to write a screenplay.’” Curtis has always been a good storyteller; ask anyone who rowed with or for him.

But there was a problem: his mother would never talk about the match. In fact, shortly thereafter she had left her golf career behind. If the subject came up, she would say she didn’t remember much about it. But that didn’t deter Jordan.

“I realized that this couldn’t be a story about my mother; maybe she inspired it, but this was going to be creative nonfiction.” So, over the years, he imagined what that match might have been like and what challenges each of the two women golfers would have faced.

The other challenge was that it was difficult to find out much about Ann Gregory. There wasn’t a lot of coverage of women golfers in the ’50s, especially Black women. But without rowing, Jordan needed something new on which to focus his attention. After thinking about this for almost 30 years, he began to write in 2017.

It came together slowly. Because he had coached women for eight years, he wanted the script to have a female perspective.

“We engaged two women, professional screenwriters. But they weren’t athletes and they wanted to change the story, to make the two golfers become friends, to share recipes, to work together. But that’s not what sports are about. This was competition. Like any real athletes, they were intense; they weren’t baking cookies together.”

The professionals were fired.

Along the way, he met someone who would help produce it, and he engaged a woman director. They auditioned actors and got lucky.

“We had a hard time finding an Ann character—acting and golf! I found Andia Winslow, the woman who would play Ann Gregory, on Instagram and DM’d her. Andia had been the first Black woman to play Ivy League golf, at Yale. And one day early on she said, ‘You know my family is good friends with the Gregorys. I could introduce you.’”

Because Ann Gregory had died in 1990 at the age of 77, this was Jordan’s chance to find out more about her.

“The family was great; they contributed a lot. But still, this movie had lived in my head for so long that I knew I was writing a story that was imagined. It’s not my mother; it’s not exactly Ann Gregory, either.”

The two actors, Andia Winslow and Julia Rae, contributed their own take on how these competitors would have spoken to each other, how they would have acted in public and in private.

“We rewrote so much of the film because of their great input,” said Jordan.

I asked Curtis if he saw any connection between having been a rowing coach and a filmmaker.

“Just this: I’m pugnacious. I’m a ditchdigger. I didn’t have brilliant new insights into what makes boats go fast. I just worked and worked at it. And that’s the essence of rowing. Nose to the grindstone. Keep working.

“We had a lot of setbacks—budget and finding places to show it. But when we began to take it to film festivals, we got a lot of acclaim. It won the best-film award at the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival. Awards in Vienna, Austria, South Africa, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Chicago, and Naples, Florida, followed. A highlight was showing it at Howard University, coinciding with a Black golfers’ tournament. About 25 Gregory relatives attended and they were very supportive.

“The work ethic that you develop in rowing—the idea that you don’t stop, just keep pouring on the energy and good things will come. That, and a strong production team that was just as passionate about making the film, kept me going.”

The movie is made beautifully, the story inspiring. It has helped bring Ann Gregory out of the shadows of golf history. She is being celebrated by the LPGA and the UBGA, the United Black Golfers Association.

With the film festival run over, Jordan for the past year has been working to upgrade the music, the color, the sound quality, and little imperfections that were not visible when I saw it. But in order to find a platform where it can be shown, it must be flawless.

Beginning Feb. 1, Playing Through will be available on Amazon Prime. Do yourself a favor and keep your eyes open for it. It’s a superb movie, and knowing that it comes from a rowing coach who didn’t have millions of dollars in financing behind him, who rolled up his sleeves and kept digging, makes it even more inspiring.

The movie ends with a photographic coda of the real-life Ann Gregory, who says, “Sometimes in life, all a person needs is a chance to prove themselves.”

Not long after this match took place, Ann Gregory walked into the clubhouse of Gary’s Whites-only public golf course. She paid her greens fee to a startled clerk and said, “My tax dollars take care of this course. You can send the police out to get me. I’ll be on the first tee.”

The police never came. Ann Gregory went on to win over 300 golf tournaments around the world.

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