By: David Gould, Contributor, Golf Business
Daily life in America a mere century ago saw the generations routinely intermingled. It was common for a child to grow up with their grandparents in the same small neighborhood or even under the same roof.
To replicate that experience these days you might have to be a teenager at a golf club working outside operations alongside crusty, 70-year-old know-it-alls like me. That’s right, sonny boy, now put your phone away!
For six seasons now, I’ve been in this country club’s bag room and cart barn, grinding away at my shifts and keeping notes out of journalistic habit. Most of the scribblings this summer have focused on attempts at mutual understanding with my youthful crew-mates. All across the golf landscape there are graybeards like me in comparable situations—old-time work ethic, trusted by management and yet no higher in rank than the high school and college kids. If that describes you, we could surely compare notes all day.
Lacking supervisory authority, one’s only recourse is persuasion, in its many forms. The younger generation displays what you might call a questioning attitude to some of what this job entails. Carts arrive at the barn needing trash removal and a pressure-wash, which is generally all good, until one of the lads reaches into a dashboard compartment and pulls out a banana peel with a blood-stained band-aid stuck to it. To an old-timer, that is what you might call mildly disgusting. For today’s 17-year-old, it’s an insult to their dignity and calls into question the entire social contract.
Down in the barn, with no A/C, it's a long, sweaty summer for these kids and some of them don’t really need the money. At least not the way I needed it, back in my middle-class household of five children in the 1970s. When a new hire comes in and is told to shadow me for training, that’s one question I’ll think about: How much does this boy need $16 bucks an hour.
We pull bags, we unplug the carts from their chargers and air-hose them, then we stock them with towels and tees and line them up along our “flight deck.” We load them with clubs as dictated by the tee sheet, we load other sets of clubs on pushcarts, and we set a few bags aside for the walk-and-carry crowd.
Then we do it all in reverse, as the day’s rounds conclude. We also pick the range, unload the picker baskets, clean the range balls and restock the dispenser crates at each hitting station. Meanwhile we’ve got a little podium where we generally keep one guy posted to answer questions, take golf bags from arriving guests, and so on.
None of the above is particularly surprising—I list the array of tasks to point out that they settle into an order of preference, one that never varies. Jumping into a lightly used cart, driving it into the barn, pressure-washing it and whipping it around to the barn’s back entrance for stowing and charging barely counts as work. Driving the picker up and down our scenic range is similarly effortless, and carries the bonus benefit of occurring basically out of sight of supervisors and co-workers.
Cleaning clubs, lugging them to the bag room and re-racking them—usually with a grunting heave-ho to the sliding bays—that qualifies as work. We old guys will just wet a towel and get to it, before the bags start to pile up. The youngsters look away from those dirty sets of clubs and beeline it toward the next cart, all morning and afternoon. Sometimes I’ll soak a towel, wring it out and just hand it to one of them, pointing at the row of clubs. They don’t like it, I don’t like doing it, and only advanced age—not job title—empowers me.
Cleverness enters into this. Last week I told one of them that “Mr. Smith just insulted me.” The kid was right away curious and asked how. “I went to clean his clubs and he said he wanted you to do it, because you do such a better job than I do.” Heh. They do know when they’re shirking, which makes a hint-hint like that go over easier.
Everyone gets range training, so anyone can strap a barrel onto one of the fleet carts and announce they’re going over to pick. That’s step one. Step two is returning with the balls you picked and digging them out of the barrel and spilling them into the hopper on top of the ball washer. Step three is to take all or most of the balls you’ve just cleaned over to the range, up the stairs to the top-level tee (you’re carrying about 60 pounds total) and pour them into the crates. Repeat for the lower level. I should mention: While you’re out picking, you can glance at the crates and check the level on them, to see how much of a hurry you’re in. Or you can just daydream.
When a kid goes and picks, then returns to the barn and unloads the barrel, only to drift over to the podium for guest-greeting duty, that is not good. Before I get steamed up I’ll remind myself that, during their training, I had every chance to give them my “range-ball-collection-and-resupply” speech, in which the Three Steps are emphasized as though chiseled into stone tablets. Over the past couple of seasons my track record on that bit of training has improved.
On a related note, any fleet cart a staff member uses—perhaps for a water-and-ice run or to solve a problem some member is having out on the golf course—you don’t take it from the line. Those carts have been pressure-washed, air-gunned, stocked up with scorecards, tees, towels and (full) divot sand bottles. Not to mention laser-aligned to give the lineup that super-neat look. Get one from the barn for staff use. You’re not a member.
The lineup of prepped carts is a sensitive topic all season long. If the weather is decent, there should always be at least five unassigned carts interspersed with the ones that have clubs loaded on them. Without warning, the members appear out of the parking lot and hop into them, for trips to our at-the-turn restaurant 400 yards away, for trips to the short-game area, trips to the driving range—trips all over. We need to constantly count the empty ones, and err on the side of too many. The boys, however, like putting them away. Well then you’re the one who’s going in there and pulling it back out.
I mentioned the podium and the greeting work, the question-answering, the friendly small talk, that sort of thing. These high school and college kids are extremely good at it—considerably better than I am, due to my obsession with even the obscure side work, such as refilling divot sand bottles, watering cart batteries and rushing to the laundry for more towels.
The club is wall to wall with extremely accomplished and influential business people, which to us retired guys is all well and good, but to the boys starting out in life it’s a chance to make important connections. Many of them do just that, and the members enjoy their role in it. It’s a cool thing and truly part of the fabric of the club. The boys also enthusiastically get trained for re-gripping and will happily head to our workshop to bang out a new set of Golf Prides. Last time I regripped clubs, the standard solvent was gasoline, and Gerald Ford was president. I’m over it.
The last two hours of a workday at our club have a flip-the-switch feeling. I’ll be double-timing it in order to square away all the little details before we run out of daylight. The young guys are double-timing it for escape purposes. Once we’ve got 72 carts plugged in, all the clubs cleaned and stored, the laundry run and the trash dump accomplished, they can clock out and leave. Even when they have no place to go they turn on the jets to complete the assignment. In my day, I’ll admit it, we would have milked the clock, and many times we did. Not these kids.
When most of your life is behind you, including the achievements but also the many regrets, there’s something satisfying about executing simple tasks as well as you possibly can. I think of the character Ken Miles, race car driver in the movie “Ford v. Ferrari,” and his longing for “the perfect lap” at Le Mans. Odd as it may seem, I’ve arrived at our club more than once wondering about a “perfect shift.” No young person should ever find themselves in that mindset. It doesn’t fit the restlessness and the yearning for new horizons that characterize late youth.
One hot July evening I was barreling across fairways in our four-man cart with Chris, a rising college sophomore, to fetch an abandoned fleet cart on the distant 11th hole. Along the way I shared a brilliant little insight of mine: “College goes by real fast—everyone says that—and I’m going to tell you the reason why: It’s because there are only three college summers.”
He briefly considered this nugget of wisdom, then let out a sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “And this is one of them.”
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