If you ever teed it up at Paris Mountain Country Club and didn’t have the good fortune to play with, compete against, trade stories, drink a beer or just have a good laugh with Johnny League, you missed one of the best parts of playing golf at the old club.

By Stan Olenik. Editor-Publisher. The Golf Club

Johnny League was a descendant of Greenville golfing royalty, of a sort. He was the son of Mary, one of the eight Traynham children, and the grandson of J.P. Traynham, considered by many to be the father of golf in Greenville.

But around Paris Mountain, Johnny League was simply John Boy.

He was a bigger-than-life figure at the neighborhood golf club on the mountain. He was tall and could hit the ball a mile, but good shots or bad shots never seemed to change his bearing.

He was playing the game he loved. The score was important, but never more important than the opportunity to play.

League did his share of winning over the years. He put his name on the trophies from events at the club named for his grandfather, the J.P. Traynham Invitational, and his uncle, the Dillard Traynham Memorial.

Golfers who played in those tournaments knew they needed to beat the mountain-like course — and probably beat John Boy, too.

While Paris Mountain Country Club is open to members from anywhere, there remains a large group who have played the course since they were old enough to pick up a club. The Traynham family stayed particularly close to the mountain and to golf.

League’s lifelong friend Joey Patterson remembers something Johnny’s uncle, Dillard Traynham, a South Carolina Golf Association Hall of Fame member, once told him.

“Once the mountain gets into you, it never gets out of you.”

That was the way it was for League and for many of the Traynhams and their friends who grew up together on, around or in the shadow of Paris Mountain.

Patterson remembers the good times he and John Boy shared, from growing up together to playing golf together, camping, fishing or just getting together for breakfast on each others birthdays and eventually watching each other’s families grow up.

“He might have been my first real friend,” Patterson said. “I know he was a good golfer from being a kid, and he was the one who helped me learn how to play the game.”

League had enough talent to win tournaments just about anywhere, but his love for his home course — whether it was called Paris Mountain, Somerset or Paris Mountain again — never changed.

If there was a tournament, a scramble, a dogfight or just a quick nine, Johnny League was there.

And if he wasn’t, he was missed.

“Johnny never met a stranger, and before long he had a new friend,” recalled his cousin Lloyd Nelson, who now runs the course.

Last week, the friendly neighborhood course near Furman University was selected by Greenville News readers as the top local golf course in Greenville. It was an honor Nelson was glad to share with the members, but one muted by the untimely passing of his cousin.

“Johnny had a way of making fellow golfers laugh. Sometimes it was with him, sometimes it was at him,” Nelson said. “He had an impish sense of humor and could carry a big needle to get after people.

“He would say some things sometimes and you’d think it was a shot, but then you’d look at him and see his big red face smiling and you knew he never meant any harm. And when you shot back, he could take it.”

Unlike the doctors, lawyers and businessmen who make up a good portion of almost any country club membership, League spent his working life as a plumber.

Patterson joked that with all the Traynhams around Paris Mountain, Johnny probably had enough business just taking care of the family.

And not many weekend golfers can say they once gave a PGA Tour player a lesson in their specialty.

Johnny League could.

He taught Jay Haas how to plumb.

Haas married into the Traynham family. His wife, Jan, is the daughter of Winona, one of J.P. Traynham’s daughters.

Johnny liked to tell the story about working on something at the Haas home. Jay wanted to know how it was done, so Johnny explained how to plumb to him under his house — it turned out not to be considerably different from the plumb-bob method Haas sometimes used to line up putts on his day job.

When club members and Paris Mountain friends learned of League’s condition, they gathered on the putting green at the club to pray for their friend.

“Kyle Turner spoke, and I was amazed there were well over 100 people there on very short notice who wanted to give Johnny their support,” Nelson said. “We all were praying for Johnny.”

League died Monday. He was 69.

Years ago, his uncle Dillard told Patterson that once the mountain got into you, it never got out.

It never got out of Johnny League.

And now all those who still have a little of the mountain in them will miss one of their own.

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