Hey, I was a regular at Burns Park tournaments from 1982-85. I lived a hundred miles away (Batesville), but would come to LR a lot on the weekends. Bet we have played together sometime. Did you play in any tournaments then?
I played one in the spring or summer of 1981 -- got up at 3 am to drive down from Fayetteville to NLR with another kid who lived across the street (I was 17, he was 16), and back home that night. It had to be 1981 because I was old enough to be allowed to drive 4 hours on my own, but we moved from Fayetteville to Harrisburg later that year. I played one in the spring of 1983 -- I was on spring break from Hendrix, and I packed up the tent we had for family camping trips that hadn't been used in several years and camped at the campground. Unfortunately, whoever packed up the tent last time it was used hadn't gotten all the poles back in the box. I ended up having to use some rope through one of the pole rings on the ridge line to essentially hang it from a tree branch. Even worse, that early in the year the ground temp was still way below the daytime air temps. I had only a light sleeping bag, and no real insulation between the thin vinyl bottom of the tent and the ground. I slept fully clothed with the sleeping bag as tight around me as I could manage. I've since been in Calgary in Feb when the wind chill was 39 below, but I've never been more miserable from cold than I was that night. As soon as it was even faintly light, I headed for the showers in the campground, turned on the water as hot as it would go, and stayed there for the better part of an hour. I know it was 1983 because I have Ted Smethers' initials, PDGA number, the date, and the official weight of the discs on my Kitty Hawks. Then I played one more, in the summer of 1986, after graduating from Hendrix, when I was living with a college buddy down on Fair Park and working as a fry cook at Chiquito's Mex-To-Go on Geyer Springs. A month after that I moved to Atlanta to go to grad school, and didn't make it back to Burns Park to play until a year ago in April.
The first tournament I don't think there were even multiple divisions. The second and third I'm pretty sure had am and pro divisions at least. At one of them (and I can't believe I can't remember for sure which) Steady Ed was there, and because I was leading the am division after the first day, I was on the card with him for the second day. Messed with my head enough I completely tanked and finished third, I think. Anyway, it's possible we bumped into each other, but I was young, shy, and frankly pretty intimidated by most of the folks playing those second two events (I'd never seen anyone throw a roller until then, when I watched a guy on my card park several holes with one). So I kept to myself for most of the time. Some of my college buddies and I would play Burns Park occasionally when we came down to LR from Conway, but not often.
Most of my dad's side of the family was from Jackson and Independence counties, up around Batesville -- I've got family buried all over the place up there: Oil Trough, Magness, Swifton, Tuckerman, Newport, Weldon, Auvergne, etc.
), and played 2 rounds. As soon as I got home, I looked up some local leagues, and have been hooked ever since.
