Golf is the ultimate refuge of the creatively mad and the madly creative. It is infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

It’s a game with the right mental stuff, creativity, a steady putter and enough clubhead speed that the very young and even the very old can be successful.

When 85-year-old Vicksburg resident Jamie Robertson heard the clink of his ball striking the flagstick, it likely meant his tee shot on No. 4 at Clear Creek was off the green, or worse, in the sand trap.

But his playing partners, Kelly Bryant and Mike Moses, saw the ball implanted in the cup and the feeling was one of shock for Robertson, who used a pitching wedge for his amazing ace.

“I don’t see quite as well as I did,” Robertson said. “I thought ‘Lordy, I’m probably in the sandtrap’ when I heard it hit, because it takes the spin right off it.”

Not only was it his second lifetime hole-in-one, it was his first after a series of surgeries derailed his game five years ago. He was playing some of the best golf of his life and then, the wheels came off.

“I felt this pressure in my chest at first,” Robertson said about the beginning of his woes. “I’d been playing the best I’d ever played. I was hitting better than I did 40 years prior. I was making the greens with my driver and my gap wedge.”

He needed a triple bypass. Two months later, he had surgery on his carotid artery and two stents put in his heart.

“I haven’t gotten back what I had since then,” Robertson said. “But you really can’t get that back once you lose it. But I still play five times a week if I can.”

Robertson, who worked as a fireman and as an engineer in the railroad industry, found the game by accident after moving to Vicksburg from Meridian in 1953. In a lot of ways, the game found him. His job gave him the opportunities to play famous courses all over the Southeast, like the Greenbriar in West Virginia and Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Va.

His reason for getting into it was simple. But from there, he couldn’t escape the game’s snare.

“My job was a sitting job, primarily,” Robertson said. “I wanted to get a chance to exercise, nothing more. But I got addicted. It’s a good game, a mind game.”

Speaking of that mind game, Robertson isn’t one to get too high on a great shot or too low after a shanked drive or a missed putt. He keeps his focus on the present shot and not on the next shot or his overall score.

“I’ve shot a 69 in a club championship, but I’ve never really gone that low since, but I haven’t shot that high, either,” Robertson said. “I’m not going to have a lot of birdies, but I’m not going to have a lot of bogies, either. Just right there in the middle.”

He prefers the harder courses to the more wide-open ones. It’s a thought that almost runs counter-current to logic.

“When it’s wide open, my game goes south, fast,” Robertson said. “I have no attention to detail when I hit the ball. I’ve found that when I play a demanding course, I score just as well. Your game goes when you let your mind wander.”

Any secrets to longevity on the golf course? Robertson doesn’t have many answers.

“Just good genes,” Robertson said with a laugh.

A good game doesn’t hurt either.