Senior Golf: Gus Andrews still swinging
Published 4:16 pm Friday, October 31, 2025
By Mike London
Salisbury Post
SALISBURY — Gus Andrews saw the gloomy weather forecast that promised at least three days of steady rain and viewed it not as a setback, but as an opportunity.
He yelled for his wife.
“Three wet days in a row meant it was a great time to go get my flu shot,” Andrews said. “That flu shot always makes my shoulder hurt, so I hate to get it when I can play golf. But now I’ll have three days to recover.”
This small nugget of information offers insights into an octogenerian’s life. Flu-shot shoulder pain is a very real consideration.
Obviously, Andrews, a former ball coach, politician and salesman is still hyper-organized and meticulous at 81.
This is a go-getter who in the late 1970s and early 1980s built East Carolina’s Pirate Club from a high-school-level booster club organization into a multi-million dollar foundation.
Andrews was a four-sport phenom in the early 1960s at Tarboro High and is in the Hall of Fame there. Then he did some kicking, running and tackling for the NC State football team. He once kicked six PATs in a game with Wake Forest – this was shortly before the arrival of true kicking specialists — and played in the mid-December 1963 Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia in one of the most brutally cold games a Wolfpack team has ever appeared in. So many folks froze that the Liberty Bowl moved out of Philly the next year.
After his playing days, Andrew became a coach at NC State and then at Fike High in Wilson, where the Cyclones, determined kids from the tobacco farms and steel mills, worked themselves into being a legendary program. Andrews, who had a run as an assistant and as the head coach, is in the Fike Hall of Fame, too.
Andrews and his wife, Barbara, came to Salisbury in 1985. He’d been hired to rejuvenate Salisbury High football and he did a pretty fair job of it. There was a 10-2 team in 1988 that did some things no Salisbury football team had done in a long time. He also started the swim program at Salisbury, boys and girls. The SHS boys won the 2A state championship under his guidance in 1995.
Andrews, who was listed at 5-foot-9 in his fullback/linebacker/kicker days, firmly believes that he shrinks a little bit physically every year, but he is still an athlete. He is one of the state’s best senior golfers and has proven it over and over in the Senior State Games.
But Andrews didn’t know if he’d get a chance to play in the Games this year.
“I had a bad fall at the house,” Andrews said. “I hurt both knees and both elbows and I was really sore. I didn’t go beyond my own drive way for 3 1/2 weeks. I had to build back up just to be able to play golf again. And it’s very tough to qualify for the Senior State Games from Rowan County. You’ve got to finish in the top three in the county games to go to the state and there are a whole lot of good senior and super senior golfers here.”
But Andrews did qualify through the local competition. And once he got to the state level, he surprised even himself. The state competition was held at Tanglewood in Clemmons.
“They’ve got two courses there and you play two days — 18 holes at both courses,” Andrews said. “There’s a championship course and there’s what I would call a member’s course, but it was in the best shape I’ver ever seen. I still don’t know what happened. I was just locked in, seeing everything, swinging pain-free. My wife said it’s the best golf I’ve played in 40 years.”
Andrews shot 76-77 — 153. He won his 80 to 84 age group by 14 strokes. It was like watching Secretariat run away from the field at the Belmont Stakes.
“I had a chance to shoot par when I had the 76, but I had a triple bogey on 17,” Andrews said. “No one else in their 80s shot in the 70s.”
Andrews has been competing in the State Senior Games for a long time, working his way through the different age groups, and he has won often. There’s an 85 to 89 age group, and he plans to be part of it when the time comes.
If you finish high in the state — and also make the qualifying score for your age group — you can advance to national-level games that are known as the Senior Olympics. Those competitions are held every two years. Andrews has competed in five different Senior Olympics.
The Senior Olympics have taken him to California, Ohio, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.
“You not only get to play on some great golf courses, you get to know people from all the country,” Andrews said. “There aren’t many bad days on the golf course.”
