By the 1970s, with the golf boom waning and profits thinning, the city was ready to let its layout in McLaren Park go to seed. Enter a savior named Erik De Lambert, San Francisco character out of central casting who earned his keep as both a hotel maitre d’ and a lighting technician at a strip club.
Swedish by birth, De Lambert fancied himself a Scotsman, and he had a tweed jacket, an adoptive brogue and a handlebar mustache to prove it. Though he’d never run a golf course, De Lambert offered to take over at McLaren Park, which he did, bringing a host of changes with him.
He fine-tuned course conditions, built a moody little pub inside the clubhouse and renamed the place Gleneagles, in honor of his favorite course in Scotland. He also enforced stringent rules, ejecting players on the spot if they failed to replace divots in the fairway or pitch-marks on the greens.
“He was part superintendent, part soup Nazi,” Hsieh says. “He did the kind of things you couldn’t get away with nowadays with Yelp reviews.”
This was the Gleneagles Hsieh fell for as kid, and the one he kept returning to in adulthood, until 2004, when De Lambert retired. The lease was up, and margins on the property were vanishingly lean.
Like De Lambert before him, Hsieh had no experience running a golf course. But no professional course operators wanted in.
“It was totally silly, completely ridiculous,” Hsieh says. “But this moment of passion overwhelmed me and I submitted a bid.”
And won.
With that sudden act of irrationality, Hsieh embraced a life of unpredictability, of lean balance sheets and byzantine leases, of withering droughts and economic downturns, of rising water bills and dwindling revenues—a business that rarely makes financial sense but which, after 16 years, Hsieh, who is 54, can’t think of anything he’d want to trade it for.
“I’ve always tried follow my heart in what I do,” he says. “And my heart is in this place, 100 percent.”
This is a time that tests the strongest bonds. In recent weeks, even as the clouds of crisis grew, it seemed that golf might remain a refuge, an open-air escape that could be pursued safely. But no more. The shelter-in-place order that came down on Monday for San Francisco and five surrounding counties (and which since has been applied to the entire state) required the closure of all non-essential businesses, and no matter what you think about golf’s essentialness, this was not a mandate open to debate.
As with so much else, the fate of Gleneagles is now uncertain, and Hsieh is trying to figure how it might survive. A provision in the government shutdown allows staff to stay on duty at businesses with perishable goods, and a golf course is nothing if not perishable. But with bills piling up and no revenue coming in, Hsieh has been able to keep only two part-time positions, one a maintenance worker, the other a facility manager. He’s been forced to lay off his other seven employees.
Tomorrow is an unknown, as is the day after. The shelter-in-place order is through April 7, but indications are that it might be extended.
“The entire world is upside town, and we don’t know what the future holds,” Hsieh says. “So like everybody else, we’re just trying to take things day by day.”
A sound mantra for coping with insanity.
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https://www.golf.com/travel/2020/03/23/gleneagles-golf-san-francisco-muni-monday/
2020-03-23 12:51:15Z
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