Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by our friends over
Speaker 1: at b Dratty. Recently, Will Knights and I were watching
Speaker 1: The Masters together and Will Knight never had one of
Speaker 1: the long sleeve be Dratty shirts and he was watching it.
Speaker 1: We were watching and he turned to me in the
Speaker 1: middle of the telecast and he said, hey, man, this
Speaker 1: might be the best golf watching shirt there is, and
Speaker 1: I totally agree. It's made with soft Peruvian pee mccotton,
Speaker 1: and one of the great things about is it offers
Speaker 1: up a little bit more dressed up, look like you
Speaker 1: don't look like a schmuck like you would if you're
Speaker 1: wearing a regular T shirt and you're somewhere. So we
Speaker 1: have some of these T shirts up in our pro shop,
Speaker 1: or you can get them online at bdraatty dot com,
Speaker 1: or hopefully you can get them at your local club
Speaker 1: or courses pro shop and if they don't have it,
Speaker 1: ask for it. Now on to episode one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty three of the podcast. Today, I am joined by
Speaker 1: Al Jamison and David Normoyle. Al is a member at
Speaker 1: the California Golf Club and was club president in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six when the club decided to overhaul their
Speaker 1: golf course with Kyle Phillips. They underwent a restoration plan
Speaker 1: on the holes that the original holes that remained of
Speaker 1: their AV McCann and Alistair McKenzie designed golf course, and
Speaker 1: then they renovated a few of the other holes that
Speaker 1: were non original. The project has been revered among the
Speaker 1: golf community as one of the most influential and ambitious
Speaker 1: projects seen by a club. So the end product has
Speaker 1: been a smashing success, and one of the things I
Speaker 1: find most interesting has been the drastic culture change that
Speaker 1: occurred at the club within the membership. So L comes
Speaker 1: on to talk about the process, the highs and lows
Speaker 1: of the restoration, and the end results. And after our
Speaker 1: conversation with Al, revered golf historian David Normoyle points UH
Speaker 1: to give us some background on the California Golf Club's
Speaker 1: unique history. He works with the club as a consulting historian.
Speaker 1: This pod UH will lead with a line from David
Speaker 1: before it goes into our conversation with Al. I just
Speaker 1: love this line from David. I thought it would be
Speaker 1: a great way to set the tone for the podcast.
Speaker 1: Hope you guys enjoy the podcast, And without further ado,
Speaker 1: here is Al Jamison and David Normoyle.
Speaker 2: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
Speaker 1: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in a egg Frida egg,
Speaker 1: the dreaded Frida egg, fridagg bride egg Lie, I'm about
Speaker 1: ready to run off the golf course.
Speaker 2: When we started working on all the historical stuff and
Speaker 2: trying to find a way to use the past of
Speaker 2: the California Golf Club to create its future, the thing
Speaker 2: that I said to Al Jamison and John McGovern, folks
Speaker 2: who are involved at the long range Planning Committee, was
Speaker 2: how can you honor the name of your course? It's
Speaker 2: the most ambitious name you can have, apart from the
Speaker 2: national golf likes of America. It's the California Golf Club.
Speaker 2: It's not San Francisco or Los Angeles or San Diego.
Speaker 2: It's the California Golf Club. And so how can you
Speaker 2: in everything you do from golf course to clubhouse, to
Speaker 2: the quality of your membership, all of your principles that
Speaker 2: you care about, how can you honor the name of
Speaker 2: your club by offering the high in this private golf
Speaker 2: experience you can in.
Speaker 1: California, that might be a good place to start. So
Speaker 1: you guys work with David Normoyle, who's a esteemed golf historian,
Speaker 1: and he's been putting together for a couple of years
Speaker 1: your history. What has been kind of the most what's
Speaker 1: then the most shocking thing that he's discovered, And you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of what is the membership as the membership
Speaker 1: appreciated what he's doing.
Speaker 3: He unearthed some aerial photos at the UCLA Library in
Speaker 3: Los Angeles that we didn't know were around, and those
Speaker 3: are very interesting. But I think what David has done
Speaker 3: is articulated for at least the board members and all
Speaker 3: the members that he's had a chance to interact with
Speaker 3: the importance of understanding your history and how it relates
Speaker 3: to the culture of the club and changing the culture
Speaker 3: of the club is the real goal. Took fifteen months
Speaker 3: to build a golf course, but it's taken us ten
Speaker 3: years to slowly adopt the culture of commensurate with where
Speaker 3: we are in the eyes of the rest of the
Speaker 3: golf community. And David, he has good tastes, he's very articulate.
Speaker 3: The pieces that he writes about golf in general and
Speaker 3: us in particular, I think have been very informative and educational.
Speaker 3: As I said, he can't discover things that weren't there,
Speaker 3: that were lost to history, but he can put these
Speaker 3: things in perspective and give some guidelines going forward on
Speaker 3: what we need to do.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the critics of golf courses
Speaker 1: your ranmore sets of the world would say that CAL
Speaker 1: Club has undergone one of the biggest transformations, not only
Speaker 1: with its golf course over the past fifteen years, but
Speaker 1: also the culture of the club. You've been a member
Speaker 1: here for forty two years, forty six years and were
Speaker 1: instrumental in this transformation that's happened. Talk to us a
Speaker 1: little bit about what CAL Club was like, say in
Speaker 1: the late nineties.
Speaker 3: I'd like to go back a little earlier than that,
Speaker 3: because my perspective is when I joined in nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: three as a junior member, many of the older members
Speaker 3: they weren't that old at the time, but these were
Speaker 3: greatest generation people the World War Two people, and several
Speaker 3: of them took me underwing because I had been in
Speaker 3: Vietnam and they appreciated that. In nineteen seventy three that
Speaker 3: wasn't too popular and I gathered from them that if
Speaker 3: you look at what's happened in America at various periods
Speaker 3: in history. So there was the Roaring twenties, which we
Speaker 3: call the Golden Age of architecture. Then there was a depression,
Speaker 3: and then after World War Two there was a lot
Speaker 3: of golf course construction that was sort of mediocre. And
Speaker 3: in this particular area, all major metropolitan areas as it
Speaker 3: relates to golf, seemed to break down into a club
Speaker 3: that is very established, sort of old money generational clubs,
Speaker 3: which would be San Francisco Club here, and then Olympic
Speaker 3: Club was sort of the everyman's club and a large membership,
Speaker 3: very active. And then in most major metropolitan areas you
Speaker 3: had clubs that were founded in the twenties and thirties
Speaker 3: that were primarily Jewish clubs, because in those days many
Speaker 3: of those other clubs were restricted. It was just a
Speaker 3: fact of life. And be lake merced here. My reading
Speaker 3: of this club was that it had allegiances with San
Speaker 3: Francisco at one time before my time. For instance, Eddie Lowry,
Speaker 3: Francis we Met's caddie, was the president of this club
Speaker 3: in nineteen forty seven and simultaneously was the club champ
Speaker 3: at San Francisco Club, and he was also a cypress member.
Speaker 3: Ken Venturrey told me many stories about regular games Tuesday
Speaker 3: at San Francisco with Eddie Harvey Ward and others. Friday
Speaker 3: would be here. There was a recession in the sixties
Speaker 3: that was very severe around here in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 3: I came to this Bay area in nineteen seventy, and
Speaker 3: you know, fell in with people who played golf, and
Speaker 3: so anecdotally I heard about clubs that had fallen upon
Speaker 3: hard times. And it was in that period of the
Speaker 3: early seventies that one could get into this club merely
Speaker 3: by picking up somebody's dues and maybe paying two thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: The club underwent a big transformation, and there were lots
Speaker 3: of people who joined the club as their first experience
Speaker 3: in golf or in a private club, and they really
Speaker 3: weren't steeped in the game, didn't play it as kids,
Speaker 3: didn't play competitively, and their idea, my observation, was that
Speaker 3: this was their country club. However, this location was never
Speaker 3: conducive to country club activities. It's called in Windy In
Speaker 3: the spring and summer, most of the members live a
Speaker 3: few miles away, and with all the microclimates we have,
Speaker 3: the weather is much nicer just ten miles south or
Speaker 3: in Marin County. And so the club struggled in its
Speaker 3: identity and the So these people who eventually became the
Speaker 3: leaders of the club, in my opinion, didn't have a
Speaker 3: lot of what we call golf i Q or what
Speaker 3: I call golf i Q. So your first question was
Speaker 3: what was it like in the nineties when we undertook
Speaker 3: to gain control of the board of directors and try
Speaker 3: to reverse the direction of the club. So by the
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties there was the first tech boom that was
Speaker 3: let's say ninety six to two thousand. All of the
Speaker 3: clubs around here maybe tripled their entrance fees and accumulated capital.
Speaker 3: There was one club down the peninsula where there was
Speaker 3: no set fee. It was a bid and ask like
Speaker 3: a stock. They had a membership trade at four hundred
Speaker 3: and sixty thousand dollars. Col club went from thirty five
Speaker 3: thousand dollars to one hundred and two, but some people
Speaker 3: overbid at one hundred and twenty. I had been on
Speaker 3: the board the first time in nineteen ninety two. From
Speaker 3: ninety two to ninety five, and that was the beginning
Speaker 3: of that period. The the problem was that most of
Speaker 3: the other clubs around here undertook improvements to their facilities.
Speaker 3: Lake Merceid brought in Rhys Jones in ninety six. Of course,
Speaker 3: the Olympic Club, you know, always had resources and opens
Speaker 3: and they were always doing work. San Francisco Club did work.
Speaker 3: The Peninsula Club in two thousand and one closed down
Speaker 3: for the better part of three seasons and brought in
Speaker 3: ron Force to bring back some of the Donald Ross features.
Speaker 3: And so we had done nothing, and worse than that,
Speaker 3: the additional capital that had been accumulated by the rising
Speaker 3: entrance fees had been squandered to subsidize operating losses. And
Speaker 3: in my opinion and the opinion of my friends, the
Speaker 3: outrage was that the directors of the club made no
Speaker 3: distinction between capital and operating money, and they did not
Speaker 3: want to raise the dues because they wanted to be
Speaker 3: popular with their friends. That's maybe the nature of a
Speaker 3: voluntary organization. And so they took much of the fresh
Speaker 3: capital that came into the club and subsidized operating losses
Speaker 3: well by one to two thousand and three, through a
Speaker 3: couple of elections. We organized some like minded individuals to
Speaker 3: run for the board and did in fact get control
Speaker 3: of the board and started down this path of being
Speaker 3: more fiscally responsible, but also to address our golf course,
Speaker 3: which showed the effects of what I call amateur tinkering.
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety one, there was some ill advised lakes
Speaker 3: put in that were done with little architectural input. Not
Speaker 3: only were they ugly, but they were completely out of place.
Speaker 3: The place was a ribbon of asphalt. It was very
Speaker 3: wet in the winter because the trees had overgrown the place.
Speaker 3: We took out about two thousand trees in nineteen ninety seven,
Speaker 3: and that was because the USGA recommended it. But also
Speaker 3: there was a Green's chairman by the name of Bill Zirkle,
Speaker 3: and you know, God bless him. He found a company
Speaker 3: that would remove the trees for the salvage value of
Speaker 3: the lumber and treework is extremely expensive and that's why
Speaker 3: it gets neglected. So you have all this deferred maintenance
Speaker 3: with trees around here. So that helped a great deal.
Speaker 3: But that was long before we thought of the Kyle
Speaker 3: Phillips restoration. In two thousand and three, we had Bradley
Speaker 3: Klein from Golf Week as a dinner speaker, and Brad
Speaker 3: had a wonderful PowerPoint press presentation about the restoration of
Speaker 3: classic courses and the whole concept that we were trying
Speaker 3: to imbue in the membership is to make them realize
Speaker 3: what a gem they had and what it could be.
Speaker 3: And that was a hard sell because, as I said earlier,
Speaker 3: many of the members just just didn't have that kind
Speaker 3: of a golf background. Well, once we got that conversation going,
Speaker 3: then we knew that we were about we were going
Speaker 3: to lose our greens because there was a chemical for
Speaker 3: nematodes that was going to be outlawed by two thousand
Speaker 3: and seven. And so we made the case that our
Speaker 3: greens needed replacement, and most people said, okay, that sounds reasonable,
Speaker 3: won't be too much money. And then of course I
Speaker 3: liken that to dragging the voting public, you know, from
Speaker 3: the goal line to the other end of the field,
Speaker 3: and so, okay, we need new greens. And then you
Speaker 3: say to them, okay, but you can't tear up a
Speaker 3: green without doing the bunkers. Well, okay, so now you've
Speaker 3: got them to the ten yard line. And then you
Speaker 3: remind people that well, our irrigation system was done thirty
Speaker 3: years ago and it's past its prime. And then reluctantly
Speaker 3: more people say, well, okay, that sounds reasonable. Now you've
Speaker 3: got them to the thirty yard line and so forth,
Speaker 3: and so because the other clubs with whom we compete
Speaker 3: for members had all done something and we had done nothing,
Speaker 3: there was that competitive thing too. It's like, you know,
Speaker 3: how is the club going to be vibrant if you
Speaker 3: don't keep pace. So in two thousand and five we
Speaker 3: interviewed ten architects and the idea was to hire somebody
Speaker 3: to give us a master plan and a proposal for
Speaker 3: a Greens renovation. And that was the thinking. It was
Speaker 3: pretty modest then, and we went through two rounds of interviews.
Speaker 3: We cut the field to five. That's a great story
Speaker 3: in itself, and I think I remember most of them,
Speaker 3: but they were all interesting fellows. People you would like
Speaker 3: like that. You've probably met Mike Devrees, Brian Silva, David Essler,
Speaker 3: John Vote US Amateur winner, Tom Lehman, who spent two
Speaker 3: hours with me here on Saturday. And Kyle Phillips, you know,
Speaker 3: clearly won the day with his presentation, his demeanor, his maturity,
Speaker 3: his background, because when he was being interviewed right in
Speaker 3: this room, it was evident to me, with my history
Speaker 3: at the club, that he had the maturity in the
Speaker 3: background to handle our members, because I knew that it
Speaker 3: was going to get ugly, and it did, and so
Speaker 3: he made us think outside the box. We in our
Speaker 3: amateurish ways, had a rough idea of a part of
Speaker 3: the golf course didn't look right, and that was the
Speaker 3: corridor along Westboro that had been altered by Robert tren
Speaker 3: Jones in the sixties. And I know Ken Venturi was
Speaker 3: a great help during this period. He said the same thing.
Speaker 3: And so we asked all these architects to come back
Speaker 3: with a drawing that we ordered, said what would you
Speaker 3: do in this corner here? And they all dutifully complied
Speaker 3: except for Phillips. And when Phillips came back for his
Speaker 3: second interview, he wouldn't take the bait, and people said, well,
Speaker 3: we're the drawings, and he as much as said, you
Speaker 3: know what, you don't get to look behind the curtain
Speaker 3: until you hire me. I'm the pro you're not. And
Speaker 3: he had a wonderful PowerPoint presentation saying, look, this was
Speaker 3: the old golf course it was wonderful, but this is
Speaker 3: the land you lost, and you're never going to get
Speaker 3: that land back. However, you guys are lucky because you
Speaker 3: have seventeen acres in the middle of the property that
Speaker 3: you never used for golf, which was true, was up
Speaker 3: on a hill, was the highest point on the golf course.
Speaker 3: In nineteen twenty six, they didn't do that. And so
Speaker 3: when he walked out of the room, there was a
Speaker 3: fellow on our committee who had played the tour, made
Speaker 3: a lot of cuts. I was a member named Dennis Trixler,
Speaker 3: and Dennis turned and said, is there any doubt this
Speaker 3: is our guy? And Dennis was good friends with Tom Lin.
Speaker 3: In fact, he caddied for him a lot on the
Speaker 3: senior tour. So we hired Phillips. He came up with
Speaker 3: the plan at the golf course you see today. He
Speaker 3: did have some other plans, but we wanted to stay
Speaker 3: as true as we could to the nineteen thirty eight
Speaker 3: aerial photograph, and part of that was our consideration with
Speaker 3: We had been on the Golf Week Classic one hundred list,
Speaker 3: and I asked Brad Klein, how much can we change
Speaker 3: and still stay on the list, And he said, well,
Speaker 3: you know, you can't change the routing, and so our
Speaker 3: goals were rather modest. In our wildest dreams, we didn't
Speaker 3: think we'd be where we wound up, and so so
Speaker 3: Phillips was constrained to that and he restored well. I
Speaker 3: remember I went with Phillips to Ken Venturi's house at
Speaker 3: Rancho Mirage. We spent a day with Ken, because you know,
Speaker 3: Ken had offered to help. He came up here for
Speaker 3: several meetings. He had been a friend of mine. I
Speaker 3: coached his grand children in the Little League. His son,
Speaker 3: Matt is a very good friend of mine. And I
Speaker 3: knew that Ken's opinion would carry some weight with our
Speaker 3: older members because we needed to get a vote of
Speaker 3: the members to borrow the money and that's we needed
Speaker 3: to finance this. And so Ken we went to his house.
Speaker 3: We spent a day with him. Then Ken came up
Speaker 3: here and along with Aaron Oberholzer, who I know you've
Speaker 3: done a podcast with. And Aaron is he's just he's
Speaker 3: like a son to me. And Ken loved Aaron because
Speaker 3: Aaron was like him. Public course, Golfer self taught Santase
Speaker 3: state and so Aaron had won the at and t
Speaker 3: the year that we were going to take the vote,
Speaker 3: and so Aaron and Ken and Kyle, we had a
Speaker 3: professional videographer and they made a CD which we sent
Speaker 3: to all the members where they he toured the golf
Speaker 3: course and they looked at different spots and they were
Speaker 3: down on what is our driving range today used to
Speaker 3: be the eighth hole, and that was it became very
Speaker 3: a bone of contention with the members of why are
Speaker 3: you moving the driving range? They liked it close to
Speaker 3: the pro shop and so forth and so on, and
Speaker 3: of course they have a driving range like we do
Speaker 3: that doesn't require any netting, is a bonus that I
Speaker 3: think most members just don't understand. And it's forty by
Speaker 3: fifty all grass, and our old driving range was squeezed
Speaker 3: in between the first and second fairways with an asphalt
Speaker 3: hitting pad and a slice wind. So that really was
Speaker 3: a pretty easy decision, but it was just a huge
Speaker 3: shock for people to hear that they had to take
Speaker 3: a cart and drive four hundred yards down to the range.
Speaker 3: So we then after those things, we had a dinner
Speaker 3: here and Venturi addressed the members and at that dinner,
Speaker 3: Overhoulzer gave the club his at and t trophy, and
Speaker 3: of course we all thought it was the first of many.
Speaker 3: And Venturi stood shoulder to shoulder with Kyle Phillips and
Speaker 3: Aaron and he said, you know, folks, you get one
Speaker 3: shot at this and you don't get a mulligan. And
Speaker 3: to me that was profound because there were many members
Speaker 3: that while they they would go along with it, they
Speaker 3: wanted to do a piecemeal approach, maybe do nine holes
Speaker 3: at a time, or just fix a few greens. And
Speaker 3: of course it ken understood, and he explained to them,
Speaker 3: what you don't want is cereal fixes that could go
Speaker 3: on for years. Just close it down, completely, blow it up,
Speaker 3: and do it right. And so that's what we wound
Speaker 3: up doing. We the vote carried to encumber the property
Speaker 3: with a mortgage, and the Board of Directors had a
Speaker 3: great deal of leeway in what happened next. There were
Speaker 3: no more votes to be taken about process. When they
Speaker 3: scraped the whole place. It was actually it was frightening
Speaker 3: to me as someone who had been, you know, the
Speaker 3: proponent for this, when I came out here and it
Speaker 3: was all bare dirt, and I said, how, how in
Speaker 3: the hell do you build a golf course in the
Speaker 3: middle of an urban environment. I just didn't understand. I
Speaker 3: didn't understand it because I had never seen it, and said,
Speaker 3: a lot of people, you know, just don't to this day,
Speaker 3: they don't understand that the place was just ground down
Speaker 3: to bare dirt, big drainage ditches, you know, trenches, and
Speaker 3: every fairway pipe millions of feet of pipe underground. You
Speaker 3: never look at a golf course the same way in
Speaker 3: your life until you've seen one built. And this was
Speaker 3: the first time I had seen one built from the
Speaker 3: ground up. Most people just thought, well, you're just going
Speaker 3: to give it a nip and a tuck. It wasn't
Speaker 3: the case, and the work went so rapidly it was shocking.
Speaker 3: I think we were lucky because while we have neighbors
Speaker 3: on three sides, we have no housing on the Westboro
Speaker 3: Boulevard coming in from the freeway. And we brought in
Speaker 3: five thousand truckloads of sand and so that wasn't a
Speaker 3: big impact on the neighborhood. Just we created a lot
Speaker 3: of dust and a lot of mess. And you know,
Speaker 3: we went around to neighbors and we we powerwashed a
Speaker 3: few houses and we gave them, you know, free coupons
Speaker 3: for the car wash. And so forth. But they actually
Speaker 3: they started. We got a little bit of a late jump.
Speaker 3: It was closer to May, but late April or May seven,
Speaker 3: and by the last green was seated in December. We
Speaker 3: did have some terrible rains in October and we had
Speaker 3: some setbacks there where we washed away some seed and
Speaker 3: we had to do some things. It would have been faster.
Speaker 3: So the longest period of time was in the construction.
Speaker 3: It was growing the grass, and so the growing period
Speaker 3: was until July of eight when we reopened. However, we
Speaker 3: all know what was happening in the economy, and O
Speaker 3: seven Lehman Brothers blew up, and then but eight Lehman
Speaker 3: Brothers might have been owait. But the point is it
Speaker 3: was starting to go south.
Speaker 1: It was the worst time for a would have been
Speaker 1: for a golf course to open, or in your case,
Speaker 1: exactly just have Undertiken had taken a large sum of debt.
Speaker 3: Yes, and and plus we had a lot of older
Speaker 3: members who put themselves on the resigned list. And even then.
Speaker 1: Talk about the contention you guys face from. You know,
Speaker 1: obviously I imagine going from greens to greens and irrigration.
Speaker 1: There was there was some members that were on the
Speaker 1: other side of the fence of of we need to
Speaker 1: completely you know, blow it up and restore, slash, renovate
Speaker 1: a few holes of this. What what was that battle like?
Speaker 3: When you have an equity club where the members own it,
Speaker 3: you know people obviously they're invested in it. And I
Speaker 3: think our biggest bonus contention was that we were going
Speaker 3: very rapidly, and the people who opposed it most vociferously
Speaker 3: wanted more input. They wanted more voting. For instance, one
Speaker 3: one of the opposition's proposal was, well, have Kyle Phillips
Speaker 3: submit five plans and we'll vote on the one we
Speaker 3: like best. It's sort of like this rank choice voting
Speaker 3: they do in San Francisco. All of these objections, some
Speaker 3: of them were personal, quite frankly, people that just you know,
Speaker 3: disagreed with the board for a number of reasons. There
Speaker 3: were people that you know, felt there was an agenda
Speaker 3: to price them out of the club and it would
Speaker 3: be more expensive. There's all these little, sort of petty
Speaker 3: things that happened at a club. And it's interesting because
Speaker 3: obviously private clubs are a certain slice of America, maybe
Speaker 3: you know, upper middle class or upper class. But yet
Speaker 3: when it comes to their golf course, people can get
Speaker 3: in terrible fights over it and be very petty. But
Speaker 3: our contention always was that we we hired a pro
Speaker 3: and he didn't need micromanaging from us, And the idea
Speaker 3: that you know, a bunch of amateur golfers would be
Speaker 3: voting on a plan was absurd. And the resentment came
Speaker 3: when I think that the people who wanted more input,
Speaker 3: when they realized that the bylaws gave the board tremendous
Speaker 3: authority to do everything except borrow money. Just once the
Speaker 3: vote passed to borrow the money, a lot of these
Speaker 3: people said, well, let's vote on doing nine holes at
Speaker 3: a time, like they did at Peninsula Club, and we said, no,
Speaker 3: you got to read your bylaws more carefully. You don't
Speaker 3: get to vote on that. So there was a lot
Speaker 3: of acrimony around that. When we had the rainstorm and
Speaker 3: we had we had a mudslide on seven, there was
Speaker 3: some of the I told you sos.
Speaker 1: And then when and probably during this time, you know,
Speaker 1: more and more members are kind of being the silent
Speaker 1: or the vocal minority.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, very vocal.
Speaker 1: More and more are dropping out at this time.
Speaker 3: To correct because they still had to pay dues while
Speaker 3: the place was closed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you have to couple on top of
Speaker 1: that the financial you know, crisis that went happened.
Speaker 3: That's correct now they're obviously the financial crisis didn't affect
Speaker 3: our financing per se, because that was locked in. But
Speaker 3: as far as recruiting members at the previous one hundred
Speaker 3: thousand plus price, that went out the window. And so,
Speaker 3: like I said, there were some people that said, see,
Speaker 3: I told you so, this was a bad idea, and
Speaker 3: so forth and so on. And then, of course, as
Speaker 3: I said, they paid dues the fifteen months that it
Speaker 3: was closed. A lot of people didn't like that. But
Speaker 3: you still, we still ran the operation. We painted the clubhouse,
Speaker 3: we had lunch every day, We left our chipping area open.
Speaker 3: And the thing that I'm really the most proud of
Speaker 3: is that the golf course contractor, who was the Olephant Company,
Speaker 3: it was a wonderful guy. He took on our crew
Speaker 3: and they did about forty or fifty percent of the work,
Speaker 3: so we never laid off anybody. We had our bartenders
Speaker 3: and locker room attendants. We taught them, you know, how
Speaker 3: to paint and scrape, and they got the place ready
Speaker 3: for paint. But when we reopened, I remember our green screw,
Speaker 3: many of whom had been here twenty years plus. They
Speaker 3: had a hat made and on the back of the
Speaker 3: hat it said we built it, so they had ownership.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I completely invested and and you know, part of
Speaker 1: the project that can't be overstated. I feel like with
Speaker 1: any project having the the Green's crew be a part
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 3: Well, especially with the tenure. I think we had half
Speaker 3: a dozen guys with twenty years plus. We had one
Speaker 3: fellow it was here almost fifty years, so I mean
Speaker 3: it was unconscionable to think that you could just lay
Speaker 3: them off and call them back fifteen months later and
Speaker 3: expect them, you know, to be there a or to
Speaker 3: not be bitter.
Speaker 1: So they come back and whatever you're you're for example,
Speaker 1: you switch to fescu grass. So also of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's new ways of maintaining it. They whenever you change
Speaker 1: something at somebody's work, they usually get upset, you know.
Speaker 3: If that's correct.
Speaker 1: But they were all a part of building it, so
Speaker 1: they understood why the change happened, and they understood, you know,
Speaker 1: they were a part of the you know, different maintenance
Speaker 1: practices that you were going to put in place.
Speaker 3: That's correct and to you know, further make their lives
Speaker 3: a little more difficult. The maintenance building that they had
Speaker 3: used for years was in the middle of some property
Speaker 3: that Phillips wanted and it was better for golf, and
Speaker 3: so we moved all of our personnel to these temporary
Speaker 3: structures you see in the parking lot. And it's taken
Speaker 3: now ten years. We're finally going to build a maintenance building.
Speaker 3: But so for all these years, you know, they worked
Speaker 3: out of a I call them tents, but their tent
Speaker 3: buildings and trailers, and we had a mechanic working outdoors
Speaker 3: in the winter, so you know, they really this was
Speaker 3: their baby. And I never heard a complaint about those
Speaker 3: working conditions, which clearly were not what you would like.
Speaker 3: So that was a great success. So when we opened
Speaker 3: up for play, recession was kicking us in the teeth.
Speaker 3: It was September of eight.
Speaker 1: So how many members before, say, when you were in
Speaker 1: the process of voting to get to take out the
Speaker 1: loan versus when the course reopened.
Speaker 3: We probably had forty resignations and maybe another sixty or
Speaker 3: seventy people who had their name on a list to
Speaker 3: get out. But they had to keep paying dues because
Speaker 3: there was nobody coming in. So yeah, there were a
Speaker 3: lot of unhappy people. And thankfully for us, the economy
Speaker 3: rebounded faster in Silicon Valley than maybe the rest of
Speaker 3: the country, and we started to get some notoriety. We
Speaker 3: immediately got back on the Golfway Classic list. Ran Marrisett
Speaker 3: from Golf Club Atlas gave us a big spread in
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight. Actually that's when I first met him,
Speaker 3: and I really think that that drove a lot of
Speaker 3: high IQ golfers to visit here, and especially raiders. And
Speaker 3: so as the economy improved, young people who could afford it,
Speaker 3: were looking for a place to play, who were serious
Speaker 3: about the game started to come around. And that I
Speaker 3: think saved us financially is that we have probably turned
Speaker 3: over two hundred and fifty people in those years. We
Speaker 3: modified the bylaws in twenty ten, which I think has
Speaker 3: had a huge impact on the club because we created
Speaker 3: a special category for young men under forty and we
Speaker 3: call that the Byron Nelson category because Byron Nelson was
Speaker 3: a member here and was Ken Venturre's mentor and a
Speaker 3: good friend of Lowery's. And so when we overhauled the bylaws.
Speaker 3: We gave the board the latitude to create some ancillary
Speaker 3: categories other than the owners. So we have national members,
Speaker 3: We have these byrons who are under forty and are
Speaker 3: paying their way gradually to full status, and we have
Speaker 3: about three hundred and fifty owners. And that that structure
Speaker 3: has given us a demographic balance. The club's gotten a
Speaker 3: lot younger anyway, and as I said before, the the
Speaker 3: preponderance of new members that have come in are either
Speaker 3: you know, in the tech business or the financing thereof.
Speaker 3: So there's there's the finance community, the venture community, and
Speaker 3: the people in technology, and that seems to be the
Speaker 3: you know, the main occupation of our members. And that
Speaker 3: that's that's all you could ask for. Because right now
Speaker 3: the club is full. It has a younger, more vibrant membership.
Speaker 3: We went from a club that had a very heavy
Speaker 3: cart culture to a club that is eighty percent walking.
Speaker 3: We have a caddy program. Caddies aren't mandatory like they
Speaker 3: are at some places, but more and more people are
Speaker 3: taking them. We have the youngsters who caddy in the
Speaker 3: summer from youth on course and it's it's become a
Speaker 3: place one of our older members. Who's one of my
Speaker 3: favorite people. He's a retired heart surgeon. He said to me,
Speaker 3: this is a club for people who are serious about
Speaker 3: the game, and I think that's true. It's doesn't mean
Speaker 3: that everybody's a five handicap. The most high golf IQ
Speaker 3: people I know are seventeen handicappers. But it's it's people
Speaker 3: who respect the game and respect what we have here.
Speaker 3: We have brought back one of the Golden Age classics
Speaker 3: which had wandered so far afield from what it was
Speaker 3: intended to be. That's that's the greatest accomplishment of what
Speaker 3: we are today.
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Speaker 1: learn more. Member SIPC. I think the story of cal
Speaker 1: Club and one of the reasons I asked you'd come
Speaker 1: on is such a with the culture shift, you know,
Speaker 1: how the membership has changed, the type of member you
Speaker 1: have now is such a worthwhile story for the rest
Speaker 1: of the golf world. You know that looks at renovation,
Speaker 1: whether it's a club and another city, a municipal course,
Speaker 1: where putting the golf, you know, really it was a
Speaker 1: example of putting the golf first and prioritizing the golf
Speaker 1: rather than the rest of the club's activities, and putting
Speaker 1: forth the best club a golf course product possible.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely true, Andy. The the golf is the priority
Speaker 3: in it. It had not been the priority by some
Speaker 3: people who felt they could force country club activities on
Speaker 3: members who didn't want to do it. And you know,
Speaker 3: they came up with all kinds of schemes. You know,
Speaker 3: they would if you brought a couple on Sunday, you'd
Speaker 3: get no green fees, if you stayed for dinner, and
Speaker 3: this sort of business. And like I said, you know,
Speaker 3: the old thing about real estate is location, location, location.
Speaker 3: This location was never meant for country club activities. It's
Speaker 3: just it's very harsh here in the spring and summer.
Speaker 3: So by putting the focus on golf, I think we're
Speaker 3: identifying the people who appreciate that. As far as the culture,
Speaker 3: it takes longer to change, and obviously you turn over members,
Speaker 3: but you have to educate the new members. And I
Speaker 3: think a big turning point was twenty twelve when we
Speaker 3: hired our general manager, Glenn Smickley. I've said this before,
Speaker 3: I've said it publicly, and Glenn knows how I feel
Speaker 3: after Kyle Phillips. He's the best thing that happened to us.
Speaker 3: And the reason is that Glenn was a superintendent by education.
Speaker 3: He was to grow in superintendent at the Robert tren
Speaker 3: Jones Golf Club in Virginia over twenty two years, rising
Speaker 3: to be the general manager, and he oversaw the first
Speaker 3: three President's Cups, two as a superintendent, one as a GM.
Speaker 3: So he's very well versed in all aspects of running
Speaker 3: a club, but moreover taking care of a golf course.
Speaker 3: He also knows everybody in golf and when he came here,
Speaker 3: the management of our club, like a lot of clubs,
Speaker 3: had fallen on various boards of directors who tend to
Speaker 3: want to micromanage a club's activities. So we had a
Speaker 3: GM who was really not much of a golf guy,
Speaker 3: and then you had the club pro and the superintendent.
Speaker 3: And what happens at a lot of clubs. It's sometimes
Speaker 3: it's comical, but it's tragic. They get like Bushwood and
Speaker 3: you have a president with a big ego, may or
Speaker 3: may not know anything about golf.
Speaker 1: It's kind of similar to what you were talking about
Speaker 1: with who are we to tell this pro architect what
Speaker 1: he should do? Correct amateurs? You know, like nobody comes
Speaker 1: to your job and tells you what to do that
Speaker 1: you know, does something completely different in life.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. And so the shift, the paradigm shift,
Speaker 3: was to get the board to buy into the fact
Speaker 3: that they're there for governance, not management, and we have
Speaker 3: a general manager who is capable in all areas of
Speaker 3: the operation to be the chief operating officer of this club.
Speaker 3: Now the trick was over, you know, several turnovers of
Speaker 3: board members to get board members to buy into that, because,
Speaker 3: let's face it, at clubs like this, you have, you know,
Speaker 3: people that own their own businesses, so it's their way
Speaker 3: or the highway. You have you know, corporate executives who
Speaker 3: are important people and very capable people. But exactly and
Speaker 3: so right now we are there. And I think when
Speaker 3: when Glenn came on board, the big thing was his
Speaker 3: background as a superintendent, because we were going through a
Speaker 3: period where the golf course budget was not commensurate with
Speaker 3: the growing status of the golf course and that was
Speaker 3: a tough sell to some board members. And wait a minute,
Speaker 3: what do you mean we need this equipment, that equipment?
Speaker 3: Why does it cost so much more to keep this
Speaker 3: rescue this way, to keep it well? Because we're a
Speaker 3: top one hundred golf course. Now we've got to start
Speaker 3: acting like one. And so for many years, as I
Speaker 3: alluded to, before the dues were artificially suppressed, there was
Speaker 3: a big culture shock in getting the monthly costs where
Speaker 3: they need to be to be who we are. And
Speaker 3: we're there now. And a lot of that credit goes
Speaker 3: to Glenn, where the board said, Okay, here's a list
Speaker 3: of equipment, what do we really need, how can we
Speaker 3: do this? What can we buy? What can we lease?
Speaker 3: So forth and so on, And now you know, he's
Speaker 3: assembled his staff, he's hired our pro or food and
Speaker 3: beverage director. We have great staff, a great clubhouse engineer.
Speaker 3: We just we have so many great people. I mean,
Speaker 3: I kind of pinch myself every day hoping that none
Speaker 3: of them go away. And we have a great board
Speaker 3: of directors who understands the difference between governance and management,
Speaker 3: and so, you know, knock Wood, we can keep going
Speaker 3: in that direction.
Speaker 1: I think you touched on it a little bit, but
Speaker 1: hiring Glenn who had a clear expertise in your core
Speaker 1: product again once again, you know that focus on your
Speaker 1: core product is something I you know, if you tried
Speaker 1: to put this on to say a public golf scale,
Speaker 1: it would be say, you're a municipality, You've got your
Speaker 1: your parks and recreation board or you know, part of
Speaker 1: the municipality is almost like your board. And hiring a
Speaker 1: GM that really gets golf should be their chief focus,
Speaker 1: as opposed to a GM that might know how to
Speaker 1: run a restaurant.
Speaker 3: Right. No, there's there's no doubt about it. And you
Speaker 3: know there's other clubs around here that are more country clubbish,
Speaker 3: but they have professional food people and they have a
Speaker 3: director of golf, and big budgets and so forth and
Speaker 3: so on. That's not who we are. We're all about
Speaker 3: the golf in a way.
Speaker 1: A country club or any golf course, especially one that
Speaker 1: has food service, apool tennis. It's a business that's got
Speaker 1: more variety than most businesses. You know, most businesses outside
Speaker 1: of like very large companies, are very focused on what
Speaker 1: they do. So in a way, you should almost run
Speaker 1: all the businesses as separate siloed businesses and allow somebody
Speaker 1: to run those businesses that have specialize in that.
Speaker 3: That's true. However, the practical side is most of these
Speaker 3: clubs I have memberships between three hundred and fifty and
Speaker 3: five hundred people, so you have a limited audience. So therefore,
Speaker 3: you know, the food and beverage can't make money, so
Speaker 3: they have quarterly minimum. And you know, there are certain
Speaker 3: things that are particular to private clubs that are just
Speaker 3: it's a luxury. It's not intended to be a profit
Speaker 3: making sort of thing. What we're seeing here, I'm seeing
Speaker 3: it with some of our new members. This is their
Speaker 3: second club, believe it or not. And most of them
Speaker 3: live further south where in the summertime the weather could
Speaker 3: be twenty or thirty degrees warmer than here, and so
Speaker 3: they'll belong to a club closer to home that has
Speaker 3: all those amenities that the family would like, and then
Speaker 3: this is their place for serious golf, And to me,
Speaker 3: that's that's a heck of a formula if somebody can
Speaker 3: afford it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there might not be a ton of people
Speaker 1: that can afford it, but the I think the balance
Speaker 1: of having the golf and nobody joins a country club
Speaker 1: and nobody joined a country club without golf, right, those
Speaker 1: were like there's very few. There's a few social clubs,
Speaker 1: but that's a very small number. Nobody's joining in a
Speaker 1: country club for the food, that's correct, like the food
Speaker 1: in the pool and the tennis at most country clubs
Speaker 1: are a sales tool to get to play golf there,
Speaker 1: you know, and to get the whole buy in of
Speaker 1: the family.
Speaker 3: That's correct.
Speaker 1: So that's you know, I think that's where every you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of its losses where you know, and this
Speaker 1: is my opinion, is focusing on that stuff is ancillary
Speaker 1: to the golf course. The golf course should always be
Speaker 1: your priority because without the golf course, you don't have
Speaker 1: a club.
Speaker 3: Yes, and bear in mind though that even at private clubs,
Speaker 3: I remember the statistic that the average handicap is sixteen.
Speaker 3: I think people appreciate a good golf course if it's
Speaker 3: a great club, that's highly ranked. So if you belong
Speaker 3: to well, what are great courses that are also country clubs.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of them you can name. There's Oak
Speaker 3: Hill and maybe Madina and have you know, a full
Speaker 3: menu of family activities. But you're right, people take pride
Speaker 3: in the golf course and part of it is its
Speaker 3: reputation and what other people tell them about it. And
Speaker 3: so that's all we have is the golf course. But
Speaker 3: I agree with you that you know, the primary function
Speaker 3: of a country club is the golf course, and you
Speaker 3: have to focus on that and make it as good
Speaker 3: as it can be. There are some locations that, you know,
Speaker 3: the golf courses the land is not quite right or
Speaker 3: but we're so lucky that we still have the majority
Speaker 3: of this original golden Golden Age golf course.
Speaker 1: We've talked a lot about the overhaul and you know,
Speaker 1: all the successes. Is there anything if you could go
Speaker 1: back in time, would you do anything differentrently from the
Speaker 1: way you guys went about the process?
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. There were some things along
Speaker 3: the way that we may have negotiated a little differently
Speaker 3: with finances and so forth, but it's all. It's water
Speaker 3: under the bridge now. And I know Kyle Phillips doesn't
Speaker 3: have any second thoughts. He's you know, he wants to.
Speaker 3: We're tweaking the AHT a little bit. He was never
Speaker 3: quite happy the way that came out, and we're going
Speaker 3: to raise that a little bit. We've taken out car
Speaker 3: pass here and there. But no, really, there's no regrets
Speaker 3: about how this came out.
Speaker 1: We've talked a lot about culture. It's always like for
Speaker 1: any whether you're a company or whether you're a club,
Speaker 1: always something that's evolving changing. What type of stuff are
Speaker 1: you guys working on now to continue to evolve the
Speaker 1: culture in the direction you want to go.
Speaker 3: You know, I observe this now I'm not a board
Speaker 3: member anymore, and I think we have a terrific board
Speaker 3: and we have a reputation as a fun a fun club.
Speaker 3: I remember during the Open, Sports Illustrated does the Golf
Speaker 3: Plus edition, and you know they said the best of
Speaker 3: this in the Bay Area, best of that, and of
Speaker 3: course they always vote us the best bar. It is
Speaker 3: a place that people can come and have a great
Speaker 3: deal of fun and camaraderie. I think what the board
Speaker 3: is we're constantly sensitive to is you can't become a
Speaker 3: frat house either, So yes, you should have fun, but
Speaker 3: it's still a gentleman golf club and I think that's
Speaker 3: where we're evolving a little bit. And it's a fine line.
Speaker 3: You can't have everybody be a scold and say you
Speaker 3: don't have any fun. But you and I have been
Speaker 3: to clubs where you know things are very quiet and staid,
Speaker 3: and you know people don't talk above a whisper. Well,
Speaker 3: this club's not like that. We have a younger membership,
Speaker 3: they have fun. We're very welcoming to the kids. I
Speaker 3: know a local country club here where there's no kids
Speaker 3: under eighteen are even allowed in the locker room. We're
Speaker 3: not like that. This is a place for the members
Speaker 3: to enjoy. We try to treat a guest like a member,
Speaker 3: and we get comments about that all the time. You
Speaker 3: see a perfect stranger sitting at the bar, and if
Speaker 3: you looks lonely or he's waiting for his host, one
Speaker 3: of our members will invariably go up and say hi, welcome.
Speaker 3: You never want to lose that. And but still it's
Speaker 3: it's a gentleman's club, and for instance, the culture. We've
Speaker 3: had a few tournaments where we have coat and tie
Speaker 3: for dinner. Well, coat and tie is a tough sell
Speaker 3: in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley single handedly killed fashion in America.
Speaker 3: But it just adds a touch of class, I think,
Speaker 3: And so you know, those are the little things.
Speaker 1: It's kind of it's probably the hardest thing is is
Speaker 1: towing the line between being with tradition but also being
Speaker 1: you know, up with the times.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: So it's somewhere people want to hang out and people
Speaker 1: want you know that are younger that are your future
Speaker 1: owners of the club.
Speaker 3: Well, that's correct, and so we when new people them in,
Speaker 3: we asked them to purchase a club jacket. And I'm
Speaker 3: sure that there's some of our younger members that sort
Speaker 3: of wrinkle their nose and go, well, that's that's so Bushwood.
Speaker 3: That's old, stuffy East Coast clubs. But you know, there's
Speaker 3: something to be said for tradition and being well dressed
Speaker 3: and well mannered. I hope that hasn't gone out of style.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, you talked about it, and when the
Speaker 1: club fell the furthest from its prominent was probably when
Speaker 1: you had the least amount of members that respected the
Speaker 1: tradition of the club and the history of the club.
Speaker 3: I think so or they were maybe well meaning, but
Speaker 3: their notion of what a golf club should be was
Speaker 3: not what it should be. They just didn't know. Nice people,
Speaker 3: but no golf I Q. Unfortunately, you know, some of
Speaker 3: them gotten positions of governance. And that's another thing I'd
Speaker 3: love to insert here, is that I've been around the
Speaker 3: game my whole life, and I remember even hearing this
Speaker 3: from my dad in the nineteen fifties on the East Coast,
Speaker 3: that the better players at a club, the people who
Speaker 3: knew the game anyway, usually didn't want to be bothered.
Speaker 3: They go, come on, I come up here to play golf.
Speaker 3: I want to be left alone. I got enough trouble
Speaker 3: at work. I don't need headaches of being on a
Speaker 3: volunteer board. That is what causes clubs to go downhill,
Speaker 3: because I saw it happen here. The people who should
Speaker 3: be running the affairs of the club don't want to
Speaker 3: be bothered, and so into that vacuum go to the
Speaker 3: people who serve, who either don't have the back or
Speaker 3: they have ulterior motives of ego, of this, of wanting
Speaker 3: to make a statement, and you know they serve for
Speaker 3: all the wrong reasons, and so you know, not to
Speaker 3: be melodramatic, but I think it was Edmund Burke who
Speaker 3: said tyranny succeeds when good men do nothing. Well, this
Speaker 3: golf club went pretty far down the wrong road because
Speaker 3: good men did nothing. And in the years since, we
Speaker 3: have a wonderful member who was in the CEO of
Speaker 3: a professional search firm, and he taught us how to recruit,
Speaker 3: and we've recruited board members. We've gone to those good
Speaker 3: men and said you need to serve and a lot
Speaker 3: of them were reluctant, but they're glad they did it
Speaker 3: once they did it. But we actively recruit, as we say,
Speaker 3: look for the best athlete, because the guy that raises
Speaker 3: his hand and says I want to be on the board,
Speaker 3: I'm always suspicious of that guy. We want. We try
Speaker 3: to get people involved early on in the process. Get
Speaker 3: on a committee, get on the greens committee, get on
Speaker 3: the finance committees, see how the place really works. Most
Speaker 3: members have no idea what it takes to run a club,
Speaker 3: what it takes to grow the grass. And you try
Speaker 3: to get people involved and then from that will bubble
Speaker 3: up to the top, your best people because it's a
Speaker 3: big commitment. It's you know, the president of the club
Speaker 3: winds up here every day and one spell or another,
Speaker 3: and right now we're in the process of building a building.
Speaker 3: But it does take a commitment, and finding the people
Speaker 3: who are willing to make that commitment is the key
Speaker 3: to sustaining what we have here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that I mean putting stock. I'd never even thought
Speaker 1: about that before, but when I was a member at
Speaker 1: a club, I would go and didn't want to be
Speaker 1: talk to you about anything. It's like almost a refuge place.
Speaker 3: That's how you get Judge Mails.
Speaker 1: Bushwood. Bushwood is actually a perfect thing for people, a
Speaker 1: perfect example of what not to do for everyone.
Speaker 3: That's correct.
Speaker 1: Beyond a you know, a comedic masterpiece, it's actually a
Speaker 1: great movie to watch and say, this is where everybody
Speaker 1: goes wrong for a sec.
Speaker 3: The old saying in humor there is truth. You know
Speaker 3: what makes comedians funny, They're usually reflecting on something very
Speaker 3: true about the human condition. And while it was hyperbole,
Speaker 3: Bushwood was the model for how many clubs operated.
Speaker 1: You've obviously invested a ton of time thought, and you've
Speaker 1: been out at cal club for you know, such.
Speaker 3: A long time, half a century almost.
Speaker 1: I'm getting there. And when you are out on the
Speaker 1: golf course, is there a spot on the course where
Speaker 1: you stand and you're like, wow, it gets you kind
Speaker 1: of every time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, on the back of the sixth hole, because you
Speaker 3: look out over the entire back nine, and of course
Speaker 3: you've been here. But for people that are listening that
Speaker 3: haven't been here, if they look at the aerial photos,
Speaker 3: they can find online that the front nine originally was
Speaker 3: a counterclockwise loop, kind of a link that went around
Speaker 3: the hill in the middle, and the back nine has
Speaker 3: six contiguous fairways, so they're really two different architectural styles,
Speaker 3: and the front nine had been compromised by the street
Speaker 3: beginning put in. But Kyle Phillips with what he did,
Speaker 3: now the front nine is as good as the back nine.
Speaker 3: Everybody that played here ago say, boy, the back nine
Speaker 3: is great. The front nine is just so. So now
Speaker 3: the front nine is equal to the back. But there's
Speaker 3: something majestic about the back because you see it all
Speaker 3: from the sixth screen and you've seen that. It's just
Speaker 3: it's fabulous. And even though there are six contiguous fairways,
Speaker 3: it doesn't feel cramped. It's not a back and forth
Speaker 3: golf course because there's tremendous scale from the center line
Speaker 3: of one fairway to the center line of the other.
Speaker 3: And this is another thing that I learned from Phillips.
Speaker 3: And he's just brilliant. He's become a friend. We made
Speaker 3: him an honorary member, and nothing gets done here without him.
Speaker 3: And that's another bit of advice that I would give
Speaker 3: to people who are thinking about doing this. Once you've
Speaker 3: got the work done, and if you've left it to
Speaker 3: a pro like Phillips, then you can't have amateurs come
Speaker 3: back in and start to fiddle with it. Be goes,
Speaker 3: I can tell you. I mean, we weren't open three months.
Speaker 3: People would come up to me and say, geez, you
Speaker 3: think we ought to change this over here or cut this.
Speaker 3: So Phillips was made a member immediately and we have
Speaker 3: stuck to this. Now. It's not in the bylaws or anything,
Speaker 3: but everybody buys into the fact that nothing happens to
Speaker 3: this golf course without Phillips signing on.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense, you know. Speaking to
Speaker 1: that back nine, I think what's so cool is that
Speaker 1: from that point from six, then you kind of descend
Speaker 1: down and then you pop back up, and then you
Speaker 1: play back down in eleven, and then it's like you're
Speaker 1: climbing up a ladder, and then you get the dramatic
Speaker 1: clothes of the short part three, the par five that
Speaker 1: crests over the hill, and then eighteen plays right back
Speaker 1: down into the bowl. There's just so much variety in
Speaker 1: the topography and the roles of the land that it
Speaker 1: do you know while you're playing back and forth for
Speaker 1: a stretch of holes, each one the the content words
Speaker 1: that cut through the fairway, where the greens positioned, how
Speaker 1: the bunkers are arranged, are so varied that it's not
Speaker 1: back and forth.
Speaker 3: Golf that's correct. And of course the wind is the
Speaker 3: defender of the golf course against the good player, and
Speaker 3: the prevailing wind coming off the ocean is in your
Speaker 3: face on some very hard holes, like thirteen. Fifteen is
Speaker 3: a short par five, but it's dead uphill and it's
Speaker 3: into the wind most of the time. I don't want
Speaker 3: listeners to get the impression that this is a hilly
Speaker 3: golf course. The land has nice movement, but the difference
Speaker 3: in elevation. The sixth green is two hundred and twenty
Speaker 3: feet above sea level and the first fairway, the first
Speaker 3: green is eighty feet so this is about one hundred
Speaker 3: and sixty, you know, so it's not a hilly place,
Speaker 3: but it's got nice movement. It's got enough so it's
Speaker 3: easy to walk, and you know, it's just it's just
Speaker 3: a pleasure to play every day. And the wind it's
Speaker 3: never plays the same every day. You don't get tired
Speaker 3: of play in here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then you get different weather so much here
Speaker 1: and that it's that it's always changing. Even in the
Speaker 1: middle of your round, it can shift. I've had it happened.
Speaker 1: So Al, I really appreciate the time. I hope all
Speaker 1: of our listeners enjoy and and can take a little
Speaker 1: bit from this to their home course, home club, because
Speaker 1: I think Cal Club's been one of the in the past,
Speaker 1: you know, two decades, clubs that have elevated themselves and
Speaker 1: golf courses that have improved the most over time. So
Speaker 1: AL appreciate the time, and I hope everybody enjoys the story.
Speaker 3: Well I hope so too. I just hope that somebody
Speaker 3: can say that, you know, he left the place better
Speaker 3: than he found it. That's all I ever want to
Speaker 3: be said. Thank you.
Speaker 1: The club moved around a little bit and there was
Speaker 1: a lot of intertwining of some of San Francisco's most
Speaker 1: prominent clubs with different properties tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about the early days of the California Golf Club and
Speaker 1: the different sites before they finally settled where the golf
Speaker 1: course is today.
Speaker 2: Oh. One of my favorite quotes is from an article
Speaker 2: in one of the California periodicals in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 2: which said, if ever a club was born with a
Speaker 2: silver spoon in its mouth, it was the California Golf
Speaker 2: Club of San Francisco. And the reason for that is
Speaker 2: because it inherited both already made golf course and already
Speaker 2: made club out that they didn't have to acquire it
Speaker 2: to leased it. Because the San Francisco Golf Club left
Speaker 2: the Ingleside property to go pursue their ultimate and final destination.
Speaker 1: After Ingleside, then they moved over to the current location.
Speaker 2: Exactly when the California Golf Club was created, it was
Speaker 2: in an attempt to fill a gap in the market.
Speaker 2: So you had the country Club, the San Francisco Golf Club,
Speaker 2: which contrary to its current state of affairs, really focused
Speaker 2: much more on social activities at the time, and then
Speaker 2: you had municipal golf and for the keen golfer who
Speaker 2: wanted neither the social side of things nor the overcrowded
Speaker 2: beginners on the municipal golf course. There was nothing in
Speaker 2: the middle, and so that was really the original intent
Speaker 2: behind the creation of the California Golf Club at Ingleside.
Speaker 2: But they had one fundamental flaw in all of that,
Speaker 2: which is they didn't own the land. And so in
Speaker 2: the early nineteen twenties, taking a look at the landscape,
Speaker 2: there was a general assumption that all of the land surrounding,
Speaker 2: Lakener said, which included the Ingleside Course which is now
Speaker 2: San Francisco State University, and included San Francisco Golf Club,
Speaker 2: the Olympic Club, Harding Park, all of that, that the
Speaker 2: land was going to become too valuable for golf course
Speaker 2: and was going to be turned into housing. So in
Speaker 2: a bit of sort of innovative thinking, they decided to
Speaker 2: move further down the peninsula, seven miles south of Lake
Speaker 2: Merced and the land that they found in south San
Speaker 2: Francisco was they thought the best land available close to
Speaker 2: San Francisco, and so in nineteen twenty four they acquired
Speaker 2: the property and spent two years building it in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty six open for good. And of course there's no
Speaker 2: way they could have forecasted the Great Depression and everything
Speaker 2: that followed, which changed everything. And I think one of
Speaker 2: the things, and this is a bit of a tenuous link,
Speaker 2: but I think it's worth pursuing, is that the creation
Speaker 2: of the hetch Hetchy Reservoir, which provided water to the
Speaker 2: San Francisco Peninsula, changed the value of Lake Merced as
Speaker 2: a source of water for the citizens of that peninsula.
Speaker 1: Interesting with the evolution of California Golf Club to think
Speaker 1: about how the San Francisco Golf Club, which now is
Speaker 1: like a strictly golf club, and what the California Golf
Speaker 1: Clubs morphed into over time before the you know, undertaking
Speaker 1: of the renovation, they kind of flipped roles in a
Speaker 1: way a little bit.
Speaker 2: I think there are lots of different ways to look
Speaker 2: at it, and clubs can go through different lives. And
Speaker 2: there were periods of time when at the California Golf
Speaker 2: Club it was intended to be thirty six holes, the
Speaker 2: land was more than four hundred acres, but only eighteen
Speaker 2: holes never built, and so through time it just sort
Speaker 2: of shrank and shrank and the land was whittled down,
Speaker 2: either through the sale of properties to keep the club
Speaker 2: going or eminent domain for a variety of different reasons.
Speaker 2: But there was a time when tennis courts were considered,
Speaker 2: which would be a mass to the club today. And
Speaker 2: so I think everything's backwards in a straight line when
Speaker 2: you look backwards. But at the time the kind of
Speaker 2: high golf IQ culture that currently defines the California Golf Club,
Speaker 2: that's not the story throughout its entire history with.
Speaker 1: That golf IQ. So the course originally when they moved
Speaker 1: to the South San Francisco location, the architectural lineage so
Speaker 1: originally was laid out by Vernon McCann avy McCann well.
Speaker 2: Even earlier than that, it was actually Willy Locke, who
Speaker 2: was involved with a number of other golf courses on
Speaker 2: the San Francisco Peninsula. He routed the golf course. And
Speaker 2: it's interesting to go through the minute books because literally
Speaker 2: two days on the job, Willi Locke was let go
Speaker 2: and Vernon McCann replaced him as the architect of record
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable two days. It's got to be one of the shortest,
Speaker 1: shortest stints as a golf course architect in the history
Speaker 1: at time.
Speaker 2: Who's to say, but a lot was happening. And then
Speaker 2: what McCann did over the course of the next year
Speaker 2: and a half was build a golf course that, again
Speaker 2: going back to the minutes, the board said, was changed
Speaker 2: materially from the one that Locke had laid out originally,
Speaker 2: even though some of the holes and routings might have
Speaker 2: been the same. Essentially, when it opened for play in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six, it was a golf course by Bertan McCann.
Speaker 1: Okay, so then it opens in nineteen twenty six, and
Speaker 1: shortly after Alison mackenzie came in.
Speaker 2: Right, I think Alison mackenzie and Robert Hunter. It should
Speaker 2: also be said, through the American Golf Course Construction Company,
Speaker 2: they were the ones who and the details on exactly
Speaker 2: what occurred are a little bit light, but there was
Speaker 2: general reconstruction. At least a couple of greens were rebuilt,
Speaker 2: and all of the fairway bunkering and bunkering style was adopted.
Speaker 2: If you look at photographs from nineteen twenty six, before mackenzie,
Speaker 2: Hunter and the American Golf Course Construction Company got involved,
Speaker 2: there was none of the sort of mackenzie style fingering
Speaker 2: and capes and bays and really dramatic artistic bunkers. There
Speaker 2: was much more oval plane and straightforward in shape.
Speaker 1: So what year was that that they came in?
Speaker 2: Nineteen twenty eight is generally when it's all sort of ascribed.
Speaker 2: There's a newspaper advertisement, sorry, magazine advertisement from the late
Speaker 2: nineteen I think it's November December of nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 2: which has a photograph of the tenth Green at California
Speaker 2: Golf Club and lists a number of other projects that
Speaker 2: the American Golf Construction Company is working on, including the
Speaker 2: work at Cyprus Point, so that gives you your date
Speaker 2: for that work. Plus there's a nineteen twenty nine aerial
Speaker 2: photograph that shows the McKenzie style bunkers still relatively raw
Speaker 2: in shape.
Speaker 1: It's amazing with all the aerials you can kind of
Speaker 1: track it all nineteen twenty nine. Then you know shortly
Speaker 1: after that the Great Depression hits. How does the club
Speaker 1: go through that?
Speaker 2: I don't think. The interesting thing is there's since photographs
Speaker 2: from nineteen forty and it's easy to look back on
Speaker 2: the twenties and the thirties of this golden names of
Speaker 2: golf course architecture, and there's no way to anybody sort
Speaker 2: of a reasonably right mind would compare the photographs of
Speaker 2: the sort of post Mackenzie era in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 2: when the trees were growing and filling up, and nobody
Speaker 2: would say that that golf course is better than the
Speaker 2: golf course that the members played today. No chance, both
Speaker 2: in the beauty of the landscape, the architectural features, the
Speaker 2: balance of the trees, the open spaces, the views, none
Speaker 2: of that. But the club weathered the storm of I
Speaker 2: think did a great depression of World War Two in
Speaker 2: a fun way, so that a lot of the leading
Speaker 2: citizens of San Francisco were members of the California Golf Club,
Speaker 2: not just the California Golf Club. One of the interesting
Speaker 2: things I'm not sure if al covernt or not it
Speaker 2: was how Eddie Lowry was both the president of cal
Speaker 2: Club in nineteen forty seven and the club champion at
Speaker 2: San Francisco Golf Club.
Speaker 1: He didn't so that was into the fifties. And when
Speaker 1: did they start to make major golf course alterations.
Speaker 2: Well, the fundamental change from a golf course standpoint comes
Speaker 2: in the middle nineteen sixties because of eminent domain, So
Speaker 2: the County of San Mateo claims the land on the
Speaker 2: north side of the golf course, which encompassed the old first, second,
Speaker 2: or third, fourth holes all the way along what's now
Speaker 2: Westboro Boulevard, and county paid for the Robert Trent Jones
Speaker 2: Senior design firm to come in in the late sixties
Speaker 2: and rebuild those holes. So some of the great holes
Speaker 2: from the early days in the McCann and mackenzie era
Speaker 2: were lost forever along the creek that's now under Westboro Boulevard.
Speaker 2: And it was that change architecturally to the golf course,
Speaker 2: along with some economic challenges in the San Frusco Bay
Speaker 2: area in the nineteen seventies that really started to change
Speaker 2: the culture of the club away from the kind of
Speaker 2: players golf club that had attracted Ken Van Curiy and
Speaker 2: Harvey Ward and Eugene Salvage and George Archer in the
Speaker 2: fifties and sixties, into a different kind of local golf
Speaker 2: club in the next couple of decades.
Speaker 1: And so then the club goes on and there are
Speaker 1: pretty minimal changes until the renovation from Kyle Phillips or
Speaker 1: is there.
Speaker 2: More no I'd say there was some substantial changes. So
Speaker 2: keep in mind that the club hosted the nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: c USGA Senior Amateur Championship, which is its one and
Speaker 2: only USGA championship, and this was all post Robert Trent
Speaker 2: Jones changes and ponds had been installed. There was a
Speaker 2: drop shot part three, and it was generally accepted that
Speaker 2: this was an outstanding course. In fact, if you look
Speaker 2: at the club's archive, there's a letter from Frank Hannigan
Speaker 2: at the USJA, the long time executive and executive director,
Speaker 2: talking about the quality of the golf course as the side.
Speaker 2: An interesting point is that Gene Andrews, who won that
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy Senior Amateur, is believed to be the first
Speaker 2: person to win a USG national championship using an anchored
Speaker 2: long putter. Nineteen seventy events pretty wild. But as the
Speaker 2: golf course matured and trees grew in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 2: and finances were difficult and the focus wasn't put into
Speaker 2: maintenance like it is today. I think the club shift
Speaker 2: did from and this is all due respect to the
Speaker 2: people who did the best they could at the time
Speaker 2: they had it shifted away from a club where golf
Speaker 2: first came together as a club to just simply a
Speaker 2: place where people played golf. The membership was much more transitory,
Speaker 2: coming and going, and the priorities were not about golf,
Speaker 2: they were about other things. And one of the byproducts
Speaker 2: of this was in I can't remember the exact dates
Speaker 2: right now, but the installation of the ponds on the
Speaker 2: eleventh and the eighteenth holes, and if you look at
Speaker 2: some of the photos into the nineteen nineties and early
Speaker 2: two thousands, when you played that famous twelve hole looking
Speaker 2: away from the clubhouse, you had a pond on either side,
Speaker 2: right and left of you as you were approaching the
Speaker 2: par three.
Speaker 1: Definitely a stark contrast to today's version. Would you say
Speaker 1: about go ahead?
Speaker 2: Well, I was just going to say. One of the
Speaker 2: other things is the introduction of things that you wouldn't
Speaker 2: see a cow Club now, such as hedges around the tees.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of visual clutter and interference in
Speaker 2: a way that seems completely alien now because the Cow
Speaker 2: Club landscape is one of the cleanest, tightest, most open
Speaker 2: anywhere in American golf.
Speaker 1: How would you say what Cow Club was doing? And
Speaker 1: you know what kind of happened with the trees, the hedges,
Speaker 1: the ponds. It was more following the trends really of
Speaker 1: the industry at the time. Correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the idea that golf clubs exist in
Speaker 2: a vacuum is completely unreasonable. Golf Clubs are cultural byproducts
Speaker 2: and people live in that culture, and so they're looking
Speaker 2: around and they're seeing what's fashionable. And if water and
Speaker 2: trees are fashionable, and fountains are fashionable and hedges are fashionable,
Speaker 2: then it's hard to resist those forces.
Speaker 1: And then with the changes that they made, so in
Speaker 1: a way they were somewhat reactionary in this period. And
Speaker 1: would you say, you know, from a historical standpoint, looking
Speaker 1: at what we're seeing now at the you know, the
Speaker 1: last twenty so years of golf architecture. In a way
Speaker 1: they were on the forefront when they underwent the renovation
Speaker 1: with Kyle Phillips, where they were on the leading edge.
Speaker 2: Well, I think where they were in a forefront position
Speaker 2: is in the category that I think you could best
Speaker 2: describe as a retrovation. It's not truly a renovation because
Speaker 2: you're not there's an effort to restore elements, features, routing,
Speaker 2: the appeal of the original routing and to try and
Speaker 2: fix the problem with the five holes. So there is
Speaker 2: a restoration element to it. But when you're stripping it
Speaker 2: down to the studs and putting the sand amendment that
Speaker 2: you did and rebuilding all the infrastructure underneath, I mean,
Speaker 2: that's completely a reconstruction of the golf course, but it's
Speaker 2: being done in an older style. And so I think
Speaker 2: col Club is absolutely one of the leaders in the
Speaker 2: clubhouse when it comes to not accepting what you were
Speaker 2: and not accepting what you are, but trying to imagine
Speaker 2: the best that you could possibly be and having the
Speaker 2: willingness to take the risk to find out what that is.
Speaker 1: I think that's the core at its core, what's so
Speaker 1: special is that line, you know, not accepting what you are.
Speaker 1: That is the core of what you could learn like
Speaker 1: and what everybody from a municipal to the club down
Speaker 1: the street can learn from cal Club in the sense of, hey, like,
Speaker 1: we're going to be our own thing, and it's going
Speaker 1: to be, you know, the best we can be, not
Speaker 1: what somebody else is down the street.
Speaker 2: Right absolutely, and remember what's the name of the place,
Speaker 2: California Golf Club. And so it shouldn't it represent all
Speaker 2: the best of the pioneering spirit, the frontier ambition of California.
Speaker 2: I mean it's not locked into the European traditionalism of
Speaker 2: East Coast clubs and the patriarchy and patrimony and all
Speaker 2: these things. I mean, it's California. It's at the edge
Speaker 2: of Silicon Valley. It's at a risk taking place, a
Speaker 2: culture of innovation. All of these buzzworthy things that go around,
Speaker 2: but these aren't These aren't new ideas of the One
Speaker 2: of the great quotes to me in thinking not about
Speaker 2: the California Golf Club, but just the environment itself, comes
Speaker 2: from of all people, aw Tillinghast, who says in February
Speaker 2: of nineteen twenty, when one stands on a California course,
Speaker 2: he almost invariably impressed with a magnificent panorama. The country
Speaker 2: seems so very big. Everything is on such a gigantic
Speaker 2: scale that it makes itself felt as well as seen.
Speaker 2: The trees seem bigger than those usually encountered, and they
Speaker 2: are the mountains loom high and extend far. How is
Speaker 2: it possible to put pawky things in the very heart
Speaker 2: of such surroundings? And I think if you stand on
Speaker 2: the back patio at the Cow Club, and you take
Speaker 2: a look at that expansive view in the heart of
Speaker 2: some of the most densely populated urban areas in the
Speaker 2: United States, and you've got San Francisco Airport to the south,
Speaker 2: and you've got the San Bruno Mountains on the other side,
Speaker 2: and you've got the ocean breezes, and you've got these
Speaker 2: high moderny pines and cypresses and open spaces, and it's
Speaker 2: exactly the same view that Tilling has had nearly one
Speaker 2: hundred years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's an unbelievable quote. And that's I think
Speaker 1: California golf in general, and it's just such a different
Speaker 1: flavor of golf than the majority of the United States
Speaker 1: and the rest of the world.
Speaker 2: When we started working on all the historical stuff and
Speaker 2: trying to find a way to use the past of
Speaker 2: the California Golf Club to create its future, the thing
Speaker 2: that I said to Al Jamison and John McGovern, folks
Speaker 2: who were involved at the Long Range Planning Committee, was
Speaker 2: how can you honor the name of your course. It's
Speaker 2: the most ambitious name you can have, apart from the
Speaker 2: national golf likes of America. It's the California Golf Club.
Speaker 2: It's not San Francisco or Los Angeles or San Diego.
Speaker 2: It's the California Golf Club. And so, how can you,
Speaker 2: in everything you do from golf course to clubhouse, to
Speaker 2: the quality of your membership, to all of your principles
Speaker 2: that you care about, how can you honor the name
Speaker 2: of your club by offering the highest private golf experience
Speaker 2: you can.
Speaker 1: And Calvin, you've been listening to the fried Egg podcast.
Speaker 1: We do the digging before you