He tees it up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at Adams Springs Golf Course on Cobb Mountain. He always plays in the same threesome and they always start their round at 9:30 a.m. Unlike his playing partners, who are in their 60s and 70s and more often than not take a motorized cart, he walks and carries his own bag. He has had a long and fulfilling journey in the world of golf and now is as good a time as any to tell the story of Joe Vallee.
Joe Vallee lives on Cobb. I first crossed paths with Joe in the mid-1980s when we played in a lot of one-day tournaments on the Golden State Tour, a mini-tour for professionals with future tour alumni such as Scott McCarron, Kevin Sutherland and Esteban Toledo. Joe was a “retired” caddie who was a very competitive golfer. He later moved to Cobb from the Bay Area and won the senior flight of the Lake County Amateur in 2001, 2003 and 2004. The interesting golf portion of Joe’s life happened well before he was dabbling on the Golden State Tour and winning senior titles in Lake County.
Joe was born 88 years ago in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec. He moved to Mexico with his mother as a 6-year-old and had to quickly learn to speak Spanish while going to school. At age 12 his mother decided to move back to Quebec where Joe stayed for another three years. When he got to the age of 15, the family made a decision for Joe to live with an aunt at the far western end of Canada in Vancouver. Joe recalls taking the transcontinental railroad as a teenager to his new home in an English-speaking province of Canada. It was time to become fluent in a third language. Joe remained in Vancouver until he was in his early 20s and decided to live on his own in the United States. He settled in California, got his citizenship papers and within six months he was drafted into the United States Army. He spent two years in the military, was stationed at Ford Ord and Barstow, and played golf on military courses.
Joe bounced around California, initially living in Van Nuys and then Santa Cruz. He was a barber by trade. When he was 35 years old, a friend of Joe’s suggested that he consider working as a caddie as a sidelight to his barbering. Joe protested, saying he knew nothing about being a looper, but his friend persisted. He went to the 1970 Bing Crosby National Pro-Am at Pebble Beach and picked up the bag of a rookie golfer by the name of Gary McCord. Vallee followed McCord to the Phoenix Open and the next thing he knew, he was part of the caravan that included PGA Tour pros and their caddies. Joe drove what he described as a “hippie van” and picked up the loops of beginning and struggling pros. He acknowledges that he caddied in a lot of Monday qualifiers and that he looped for a lot of golfers who missed cuts.
Joe ended up as the regular caddie for Bobby Wadkins, the younger brother of top-notch tour pro Lanny Wadkins. Bobby drove a motorhome across the country and Joe followed him in his van. They lasted as a pair for two years. Joe then started to caddie for tour regular Terry Diehl. His most entertaining memory with Diehl was in the Thursday round of the Bob Hope Desert Classic where they were paired with the amateur threesome of Hope, Dean Martin and Jackie Gleason. Diehl and Vallee just missed out on the winner’s circle at the 1976 Philadelphia Golf Classic, a regular PGA Tour event from 1963-1980. Diehl ended up tied atop the leader board at 7-under-par with Tom Kite after 72 holes. Kite won the five-hole sudden-death playoff for the first win in his Hall of Fame career and Diehl would have to wait another year for his one and only win on tour at the Texas Open. Sad to say, but Vallee wasn’t on the bag.
From November to February when the tour was on hiatus, Joe worked in Palo Alto as a barber. He got the idea to set up the back portion of his van with a barber chair and decided to supplement his caddie income by cutting hair. Although Joe caddied for a lot of bubble boys and rabbits, his array of haircutting customers included a bevy of Hall of Famers, including Johnny Miller, Lanny Wadkins, Tom Watson and Ben Crenshaw. He cut hair for the pros and the caddies alike, charging $10 per session. Vallee stated that he was making a lot more money as a barber than as a looper. He ended his caddie and barber career on tour at the 1987 Western Open in Chicago where he decided that the summer heat was too hard to handle. Joe went back to Palo Alto for the next decade or so and resumed his barbering career as well as hitting the links every chance he could.
Vallee’s brother-in-law had a vacation home on Cobb. Joe and his wife would occasionally vacation up on Cobb and decided that they really enjoyed the ambiance of the mountain community. They bought a house up there in 2000 and Joe has lived there ever since, playing regularly at the old Hobergs Golf Course and most recently at Adams Springs. Sad to say but Joe’s wife died this past March at age 77. They were happily married for 27 years.
The strength of Joe Vallee’s golf game was as an iron master. He was deadly accurate to the point that he has registered 12 hole-in-ones during his amateur golfing career. He had a costly ace at the Del Monte Golf Club in Monterey, one that set him back $500 for after-round celebratory drinks. His last hole-in-one (as of now) was five years ago on his 83rd birthday when he was playing golf at the River Lodge Resort at Parker Dam alongside the California-Arizona border. Aside from brilliant shot-making, Joe can also go low. He has broken his age on four different occasions, doing so for the first time in 2016 at Emerald Canyon Country Club in Arizona. He was 82 years old at the time and shot a 79 on the par-72 course.
It seems pretty apparent that Joe Vallee has led a full life. He moved around as a child and learned to speak three languages. He became an American citizen and was promptly drafted into military service. He took up caddying on the PGA Tour as a way to see the world and ended up inside the ropes during golf’s golden era of the 1970s and 1980s. He parlayed his barber shop skills to make real money on tour at a time when bubble boys and their caddies scraped out a living. He knew the Lake County contingent of John McMillan, Ron Kenneally, Jim West and this columnist while competing on the Golden State Tour and he had success on the Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit, finishing atop the senior leader board on three occasions at the Lake County Amateur. He still follows the three professional tours as if he were still out there. On top of all that, Joe Vallee is a great conversationalist, an entertaining story teller, and a really good guy. He’s 88 years old, walks the course, carries his bag and still has game.
