The late N.C. “Tub” Morris, who at one time labeled golf “an old ladies game”, changed his mind in 1919 and came back to devote a half-century to the advancement of the sport.
Born in Denver in 1886, Tub graduated in 1905 from West High School, where he won twelve letters in baseball, football and track, and at the same time, maintained an A scholastic average. At Colorado College, Morris played every minute of every football game for four years. After graduation from Colorado College, where he continued his interest in three sports, he began a forty-one year teaching-coaching career at Rocky Ford High School. In the twenty-five years that followed, he coached his teams to seven football championships, a like number in basketball and three in baseball.
Morris did not play his first round of golf until 1917. Three years later, he was runner-up in the Colorado State Amateur Tournament, and by 1924, he was one of the state’s foremost golfers. He won the state crown that year and repeated it in 1927. A year later, he won the Broadmoor Invitational.
In 1919, he was elected secretary-treasurer of the Colorado Golf Association. He was appointed a director of the Trans-Mississippi Golf Association in 1928. From that time until 1960, he conducted or was associated with at least seven city and state amateur tournaments each year.
Morris was appointed Regional Affairs Committeeman for the United States Golf Association in 1939. In that post, he spearheaded bringing four national championship events to Denver—a pair of U.S. Opens at Cherry Hills Country Club and the National Public Links Championship at Wellshire Municipal Golf Course in 1946 and again in 1959.
From 1950, when he retired from classroom and coaching duties, until 1959, when health problems cut his working days short, Morris worked with vigor and determination to build the sport of golf. He is credited with pulling golf through its lean years, fighting what was then an uphill struggle for municipal and private golf course interests. For his lifelong involvement in sports, he was inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame in 1971.
At the time of his death, N.C. “Tub” Morris was a golf writer for the Rocky Mountain News and a coach at West High School in Denver.
By 1924, he was one of the state’s foremost golfers.