Abel puts life back together after heart attack

BY SPENCER CAMPBELL
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER

ABINGDON, Va. – His heart began to seize up a few minutes after midnight on a November morning in 2007.

Ben Abel was jarred awake, as if someone had scared him out of his yawning slumber. When he rolled out of bed, his legs buckled and he fell into a heap.

Lying there on the floor, Abel realized the seriousness of his situation. He yelled to his wife: “You need to call somebody. Something ain’t right.”

An ambulance rushed him to Johnson Memorial Hospital in Abingdon. There, doctors informed Abel that he was suffering a heart attack. A defibrillator was placed over his torso four times, sending electrical charges to his heart, shocking it and him back to life. Once his heart was stabilized, Abel was transferred to Bristol Regional Medical Center in Bristol, Tenn.

Abel was active almost everyday of his life. He spent most of his days working the turf he manages as the superintendent and general manager at Glenrochie County Club in Abingdon, Va. The 95-percent blockage in one of his ventricles was precipitated by his family’s history of heart disease.

News of Abel’s heart attack spread quickly, rendering a dark cloud wherever it was heard.

“Shock, total shock,” Glenrochie club director Wendy Owens said. “No one expected it, he didn’t even expect it. The day that it happened, everybody walked around like they lost their best friend.”

Golf course architect Dan Maples, a long-time friend, said: “I didn’t hear about it from him, somebody told me about it passing through Pinehurst, N.C. I said, ‘Man, I can’t believe that.’ But the best thing that came out of his lips was, ‘He’s still alive.’”

Summer work

Much of Abel’s personal history is linked to that of the Glenrochie Country Club, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008.

In 1957, a group of Southwest Virginia residents began to construct a 9-hole golf course on top of what used to be the Glenrochie Girls Camp. In its original incarnation, the club lacked all of the accoutrements usually associated with ritzy private clubs – no towering clubhouse, no swimming pool, not even a tennis court.

The founders placed the club’s well-being in the hands of Bill Webster, who served as the course’s superintendent and also as general manager until 1990. Golf course maintenance wasn’t the lush job it is today, Webster said. Almost every patch of Glenrochie in those days was tended by hand.

In 1977, Abel, then 15, heard that Webster wanted to hire some maintenance workers. It was supposed to be a textbook summer job for the Abingdon teenager, but Webster put Abel to work under the scorching Southwest Virginia summer sun.

Abel removed fallen branches and brush from the course, pushed a mower across the course’s nine greens and spread topsoil and fertilizer with only a shovel and his hands.

Webster soon took a shine to the young Abel, coaching him on the finer points of course management.

“Attitude, work ethic, he was honest and prim and polite,” Webster said. “I slowly worked him into the job, passing along my knowledge, all about the preparation of a golf course.”

Abel, too, liked the feel of the sun on his face and beamed pride at the finely clipped swatch of land he produced. Within two years, he’d settled on turf management as a career. Club members sent him to Virginia Tech for two semesters, during the winter, to study the trade.

“I’m not being redneck about it, but I’ve been fortunate or blessed to be able to do what I want to do,” Abel said. “It’s nice to get up in the morning with a smile and get ready to go to work. I’d hate to go through life being miserable. If it hadn’t been for [Webster] who knows what me future would’ve been.”

Moving on up

Abel’s position with the club grew considerably in 1984, when he succeeded Webster as the course’s superintendent. Besides organizing the turf’s daily maintenance, Abel also presided over Glenrochie’s expansion to an 18-hole facility when construction began in 1987.

As the new course’s architect, the club chose Pinehurst’s Maples. His grandfather had been construction superintendent for Donald Ross, the famed creator of Pinehurst No. 2, and his father designed more than 70 courses, including Pinehurst No. 5. Maples, himself, has designed 32 courses in the United States, Asia and Europe.

“The whole time we’re together we just talk shop – about building greens, maintaining them,” Maples said. “[Ben] just has an instinct, he’s been doing it for so long. Some guys I work with just have tremendous egos. You want to help them, [but] they just don’t really want to listen. Ben, he’s like a sponge.”

Glenrochie continued to grow, and Abel kept toiling in the grass. As the club’s roster eclipsed 300 members, a clubhouse, tennis courts and a heated pool were added. The club partnered with Food City to provide lunch for members and opened a banquet hall (where Abel’s eldest son was married).

But, while Glenrochie flirted with the luxuries of bigger, more prestigious country clubs, it never incorporated the airs of the bourgeoisie.

When the new clubhouse threatened the grass around the 18th green, Abel halted the encroachment. The remains of Ninja, the course’s venerable blue-eyed Australian shepherd, were buried somewhere near that green, and his grave was considered holy ground.

“Guys, I have a dog buried right beside the green,” Abel told the construction crew. “You aren’t touching that.”

Abel was made the club’s superintendent in 2001, and assumed control of the grounds, the restaurant and the pro shop. A lover of all challenges, Abel assumed the position with fervor.

He worked from 7 a.m., when he’d organize the maintenance staff, until 10 p.m., when meetings with the club’s board required his presence. Decrying the invention of cell phones, Abel would routinely be snapped from his sleep by a faulty trigger in the club’s alarm system. When Abel’s wife was in labor with their second child, a vendor kept calling to sell him sand for the bunkers on the course.

“Sir, right now my wife’s in labor, if you don’t mind call me back,” Abel told the salesman, but the calls kept coming. The vendor’s perseverance didn’t pay off.

“I didn’t buy any sand from him,” Abel said.

Possibilities

Abel has fielded several offers to vacate his post at Glenrochie, but he never seriously entertained any of them until a few years back, when Maples asked him to manage several of his courses.

Abel recounts his time spent with Maples as “my most enjoyable memory” during his tenure at Glenrochie, so at the course designer’s behest, Abel traveled to Pinehurst for a tour. In one of the premier golf cities on the East Coast, Abel was surrounded by green, plush grass on courses designed by some of America’s greatest masters.

The decision was made even more difficult by the close friendship Maples and Abel had developed – a relationship between designer and superintendent that is rarely seen – not to mention the boost in take-home pay.

“I’m always trying to offer him a job,” Maples said. “I tried to get him down here. People don’t know what they got with someone like him. You don’t find people like that everyday.”

In the end, however, Abel couldn’t leave his home. Lessons from his father about the importance of people over money and his family roots in Southwest Virginia were too strong and deep.

“The area, here, with my family?” Abel said. “I don’t think you can get a better area to raise a family. Money ain’t the answer. Doing what you want to do is the answer. Hopefully, though, you get both of them.”

Rehabilitations

Before his heart attack, Ben Abel raised cattle on his Abingdon property as a hobby. No longer able to physically handle those demands, he sold off much of his herd last year. But he kept two around, as pets, for his 16-month-old granddaughter.

She cannot pronounce the word cow, so instead she bays “Moo!” at the animals. Abel takes her often to see her pets during feeding time. “The cows weight 1,200 pounds,” Abel said, “and she’ll stand right next to me and throw them feed.”

That’s just one of the many lifestyle changes Abel’s had to make in the 15 months since the heart attack. True, he’s been forced to change his eating habits (no more beef), but his heart also coerced him into being a different person.

The club did everything it could to accommodate his rehabilitation, even naming Owens as club director last April. But Abel didn’t want to accept his limitations. He didn’t want to admit that this challenge could kill him, because he’d triumphed in every other battle of his life.

When he tried to return to work too early, his head was willing, but his heart just couldn’t bear the load. Abel came into work at the normal time, but would grow too tired to even shuffle papers. He then would return home, nap, and race back to the club a little more rested. Finally, he let Glenrochie repay him for his 31 years of loyal service.

“I think that’s what made me heal quicker, because once I accepted I wasn’t the same person and things weren’t going to be the same, I took what God’s gave me and made the best of it,” Abel said.

More than a year later, Abel and the club are thriving. Looking at the man’s suntanned face, the wrinkles lining his eyes and the crooked smile he wears for each guest and employee, it’s hard to imagine Abel being on death’s door more than a year ago. He claims to be nearly all the way back, ready to resume his manic pace.

The club, meanwhile, had more members this January than it did at the same time a year earlier. The course remains in top shape, quietly hibernating for spring.

And with Abel’s last word on his life’s work, there’s the feeling that he’s speaking about more than Glenrochie.

There might be a little of himself bubbling to the top when he says: “We feel like we have our own place. We’re not the very, very exclusive club, but I feel like we’re a very nice club. If you like us, that’s great. But we don’t change; we are who we are.”

scampbell@bristolnews.com|(276) 645-2543