Babe Lind didn’t really begin to concentrate on golf until the ripe old age of 20. After claiming three straight Colorado Junior Championships starting in 1936, he became one of the area’s premier amateur players of the 1940s. He went on to rack up such titles as Colorado Stroke Play champion three times, 1946 Colorado Match Play champion, and quarterfinalist in 1946 U.S. Amateur. In 1947, he became the first native Coloradan to play in the Masters.
In 1956, the former University of Denver golfer was appointed the city’s first official director of golf. Except for a four-year interlude in the late ’50s and early ’60s, he kept that job until his retirement 31 years later, on June 30, 1987. Lind gained national attention and was probably best known when in 1985 he began his fast-play program at Wellshire and Kennedy Golf Courses. The following year he brought all of Denver’s municipal golf courses in line with the fast-play program.
Lind added bunkers and enlarged greens and tee boxes at many of Denver’s public courses, planted more than 8,000 trees, and supervised the restoration of Overland after the 1965 flood destroyed much of the course, including 16 greens. He also helped design and supervise the construction of Harvard Gulch Golf Course, the renovation of Evergreen, and he supervised the construction of the back nine at Kennedy, which bears his name.
