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Home on the Range

The author, an avowed range rat, learned plenty about a mostly mom-and-pop business while searching in vain for his swing

By John Garrity

Your range rat is a man with a past. He's Bogie -- no pun intended -- bent over a bottle of bourbon in the dark of Rick's Café. He's James Stewart in Vertigo, tailing a beautiful woman through the streets of San Francisco because she reminds him of a lost love. Your range rat can be charming, even debonair, but golf has made him cynical. Like Sean Connery in a Bond flick, he has wakened too many times with a dead blonde sharing his pillow.

I speak from experience. For more than a decade I have haunted driving ranges from Minneapolis to Miyazaki, searching for a lost golf swing. I have hit balls off carpet squares, vinyl strips and gravel. I have hit off moldy mats into a night rain and watched the ball vanish above the lights and reappear as a splash in black water. I have aimed at trees, tractors, trampolines, yardage signs, fire trucks, bull's-eyes, pinball pods, rainbows and rafts. I have watched low-compression pitch-and-putt balls swoop and dart like june bugs in the floodlights. I have hit balls from wire buckets, drawstring bags and plastic paint cans. I have pushed computer cards into slots and watched balls pop up from underground. I have picked the gleaming white fruit of those elegant ball pyramids at golf schools and resorts.

Being a range rat is an interesting life, but it changes a man. Some years ago I was hitting balls at 2 a.m. at the Randalls Island Golf Range in New York City, when the cry of a baby distracted me. Turning around, I discovered that a Korean family had taken over a nearby bench. The mother was juggling baby bottles and blankets. A preschool girl slept on her grandmother's lap. Between shots, the father -- who looked like a middle manager for Samsung -- turned to his family and spoke in Korean. The women shook their heads vigorously and used their hands to show that his club face was closed on the takeaway.

A man wearing a sweatshirt and a ball cap walked up with two wire buckets of balls and took the station to my immediate right. The new arrival and I practiced for a while in silence, until he accidentally kicked over one of the buckets, sending balls bouncing down the concrete sidewalk behind the tee line. "Stop!" he yelled at the runaway balls. He turned to me and said, "I can hit O.K. when I'm a little buzzed. How about you?"

He then told me the story of his life. He was 39, married and childless. He loaded trucks for a living and drank beer most nights at a lounge. He said he had been playing golf for two years and, oh, yeah, he hoped someday to play on the Senior tour. "I don't hit it as good as Nicklaus and those guys," he said unnecessarily, "but I used to hustle pool, so maybe I can hustle golf."

He had a 7 o'clock tee time, and that's why he had come to Randalls Island when the bar closed instead of going home. He said, "I could use a few hours sleep, but when my head hits the pillow, I'm gone." He coughed. "Watch this. I can make the ball suck back like Greg Norman." He made a short, choppy swing and hit an ugly knuckleball that flew about 100 yards and hopped down the range like a jackrabbit. He shook his head and said, "Sometimes that's a hard sonofabitch to hit."

That's why I say the driving range life changes a man. You start as a kid, swinging so hard with a cut-down five-iron that you stagger off the mat. You celebrate adolescence by taking your girl to the range and showing her how to hold the club while smart guys yell "Fore!" from passing cars. Before you know it, you're a character in a campy poster, smacking balls at the towers of the Triborough Bridge in the wee hours with James Dean on the mat behind you and Marilyn Monroe just up the tee line hitting soft wedges to the 50-yard sign.

YOUR RANGE RAT is afraid of commitment. He's John Cusack in High Fidelity, tallying the women who have left him. He's Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Your range rat loves driving ranges, but he knows it's dangerous to invest too much emotion in any particular range. The two formative ranges of my youth in Kansas City -- Smiley Bell's and Sam Snead's -- gave way decades ago to a television studio and tract housing, respectively. (Range balls, oddly enough, linger for years, transmigrating through the soil by a process understood only by geologists. When bulldozers plowed up Smiley Bell's in 1969, old golf balls were found to a depth of eight feet.)

In Ireland this July I found the Ennis Driving Range padlocked and shuttered. In downtown San Diego, in August, I spied the high nets of a range from the window of my harborside hotel. When I drove to the site, I found a closed range overrun with weeds and trash. Even the Wall Street Journal keeps track of driving range morbidity. In May, Family Golf Centers, Inc., which operated 111 golf centers and 19 skating rinks in 23 states and three Canadian provinces, filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Law. Among the Family Golf assets were 21 Golden Bear Driving Ranges, operated under license from Jack Nicklaus's Golden Bear Golf, Inc.

This bleak picture notwithstanding, driving ranges are thriving. A National Golf Foundation study found that range rats spent $722 million for balls at stand-alone ranges in 1999, up more than 50% from 1994. The number of tee stations climbed 16% in the same period, to 73,158; the number of customers rose by 56% to 17.8 million; and the number of range visits jumped from 71 million to 96 million. "Practice has never been so popular," writes NBC golf analyst Roger Maltbie, co-author of the book Range Rats. "The culture is growing like some giant sci-fi creature oozing up out of the ground. It's Range Ratzilla!" A trade publication calls ranges "the golden child of golf."

It's just that driving ranges have remained unalterably small-time, defying the standardization and consolidation of other businesses. "There's a reason why only 12 percent of ranges are part of multisite operations," says Mark Silverman, editor of Golf Range magazine. "The minute you have to start paying other people to run the property, a lot of the money goes out the door in overhead."

The Rocky Gorge Golf Fairway of Laurel, Md., is one of my favorite ranges, and it is successful because its owners understand that range rats don't care about corporate balance sheets and economies of scale. "I'm the only corporate structure here," says co-owner Gus Novotny. "It's a mom-and-pop business."

Novotny is a legend. He was the first range operator to offer heated stalls to golfers. He was the first to design a mechanical ball conveyor to deliver washed golf balls to the shop. He was, and is, the only range operator to walk the aisles of the annual PGA Merchandise Show wearing a black bowler. That's why I made a special trip to Rocky Gorge -- to talk to Gus and to take a shot at his junked car.

First the car. It's parked about 160 yards from the double-deck tee line, a battered '94 Dodge with a giant bull's-eye painted on it. Hitting from a mat on a crisp weekday morning, I launched seven-irons at the car, wondering what a direct hit would sound like. (I am sadly familiar with the sounds that a golf ball makes when it strikes stucco, tile, aluminum siding, brick, concrete, wood decking and various items of lawn furniture, but I had never hit a car.) "We had a green out there," Novotny said, watching me take a few swings, "but if you hit the flag, you didn't hear anything."

So in 1978 Gus parked his '73 Olds convertible on the hillside and invited customers to rain on his parade. The new target was an instant success, and now Gus has to change the car every year. "Newer cars aren't as good as the old ones because there's too much plastic in them," he told me. "You need a '70s car to get that good old clank sound when it hits, instead of a thud." I finally planted one squarely on the driver's side door and was rewarded with the resonant peal of surlyn on sheet metal. "Bingo!" he said.

Novotny is semiretired at 63, but his mark is everywhere at Rocky Gorge. He designed the tractor-drawn baseball/softball picker. It was his idea to build the world's longest miniature golf hole, a downhill, 185-foot par-2. The animatronic figures and the benches? Gus again.

Rocky Gorge used to be a farm. Novotny and a partner leased the land back in 1964, when Gus had to decide whether he would be an industrial engineer (he has an engineering degree from Maryland) or a golf pro. "I thought this would be the ideal business," he said. "Open in the summer, off in the winter." He laughed. "I found out you have to be open in the winter and on rainy days too. You have to start at 6 a.m. and work until 1 a.m."

During his first five years, Gus had no income from the range, getting by only by teaching at a technical high school in a rough area of Washington, D.C. Now he has 23 employees, 13 of them full-time, and he boasts that he pays 100% of their benefits. "There will always be Chevrolet, apple pie and driving ranges," he told me, "but to make a living at it you have to love golf, and you have to give up your life."

YOUR RANGE RAT is a wanderer, an adventurer. He's Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles, wooing a beautiful schoolteacher while Chiang Kai-shek's soldiers riot on the Yangtze. He's Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, drinking from the container labeled DRINK ME.

I was driving a desolate stretch of California 371 between Temecula and Palm Desert. The late afternoon sun hit a peeling wooden sign by a ranch gate, and I caught the words ...LF RANGE. I didn't hit the brakes until I was a quarter mile down the road. Making a U-turn, I drove back to the gate and turned in at the sign, which read, L C VENTURES GOLF RANGE. No range was visible, but a gravel road ran down the fence line. I followed it, raising a plume of dust. A few hundred yards later, the road turned left into a cluster of sheds and mobile homes. I parked the car between a pickup truck and some rusty barrels and stared out the windshield. A field of prairie grass climbed to the south, bisected by a row of decrepit yardage signs. Unpainted and cracked tee markers pointed up the hill toward a small cinder-block house.

I wandered onto the empty tee line, picking my way between a broken-down clothes dryer and a discarded sofa. I called out, "Hello?" but no one answered. When I looked back at the closest trailer, a red curtain moved in the window -- or was it my imagination? A weathered shed caught my eye. I walked over and stared in disbelief. On the counter were a half-dozen wire buckets of old golf balls and a sign: $3 BUCKET. I felt a sudden chill. I had stumbled upon a ghost driving range.

I left my $3 under a hunk of rusted metal, got my clubs out of the trunk and, in the setting sun, began hitting balls up the hill. A cool wind blew out of the mountain shadows, making the tufts of grass shake and my skin crawl. I swung mindlessly, slapping balls up the hill with no regard for form or outcome. When the balls were gone, I took the pail back to the shed and put my clubs in the trunk. The curtain in the trailer seemed to move again. Minutes later, speeding down the highway toward the Coachella Valley, I took a deep breath and turned on the radio.

YOUR RANGE RAT is a put-upon consumer. He's Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, sweeping the dishes off the table when the waitress won't bring him a side of toast. Your range rat loves driving ranges, but he knows that most of them are sadly deficient. One range has Heinz 57 golf balls with hand-painted stripes that leave red blotches on a club face. Another range faces the setting sun, so you can't see the ball in the afternoon. Two years ago in Seattle I visited a range that had protective netting that extended out about 10 feet between stalls. You could only aim straight ahead, like a hunter in a hallway.

My experience is universal, judging from the e-mails I get from readers of my Mats Only column on CNNSI.com. "I absolutely refuse to hit off mats," writes a worked-up Steve Killebrew of New York City. "What a joke they are! They cause you to hit it fat and are hard on the joints." Max Hill of Baytown, Texas, writes that the "absolute worst driving range is Hacker's Haven, here in Baytown. No grass on the teeing areas, just hardpan, and we have been hitting the same balls for about eight years now." Pat Larkey of Pittsburgh describes a range near Cambridge, England, as "early chicken coop" and says it is tended by a middle-aged woman in curlers and a floral housecoat. "The balls are remarkably dirty, cut and ranging in compression from about five (like a Ping-Pong ball) to 150 (a cross between fieldstone and a ball bearing)."

Mats are the bête noire of range rats. Hit your shot a little fat and the sole of the club bounces into the ball, producing a misleadingly decent shot. Hit too steeply into the mat and the elbows rebel with tendinitis. Hit from the outside or toe down and the mat keeps it a secret -- there is no divot to analyze to correct one's swing faults. Still, mats have improved exponentially since the 1950s, when all-rubber surfaces caused sprained wrists and left black streaks on the soles of clubs. The nylon top cloth caught hold in the '60s, and the late '80s saw the introduction of artificial grass that simulates real turf. The best mats today, such as the $300 Wittek Quatro, have an air-cushioned underpad that softens impact and minimizes bounce.

Balls are next on the list of range-rat complaints. Though many ranges buy factory-striped two-piece balls from Spalding or Titleist, some economize with smooth, low-compression spheres that perform like petrified marshmallows. Others buy balls from ball hawks -- those brave souls who dive into water hazards and scour the woods for lost balls -- and paint on their own stripe. "The problem with range balls is not so much the balls as the quality of the landing area," says Golf Range's Silverman. "If they land in a hardpan dirt field, the abrasion grinds off the clear coat, and it's the clear coat that makes the ball durable."

Finally, you have the problem of floodlights. A fancy range opened in Pittsburgh a few years ago with lights that faced the golfers, blinding them at night. Other ranges have experimented with berm or ground-based lighting (the Karsten Test Facility in Phoenix) or just plain bad lighting (Surf 'n' Turf Driving Range, Del Mar, Calif.), with varying degrees of success. My man Novotny studied the lighting issue some time back. Observing that the interchange of I-95 and Maryland 216 was made brilliant at night with lights on 100-foot poles, he went out at 4 a.m. and hit golf balls across the highway. "It was really bright," he says. "You could throw a quarter on the ground and see if it was heads or tails."

Unfortunately, you couldn't see a ball once it got airborne because the lights illuminated only the top half of it. That experiment, along with trial and error, convinced Novotny that range lights should be on 30- to 35-foot poles aimed at a central point 150 yards out. It also helps to have covered tee stations with fluorescent lights in the ceilings to eliminate clubhead shadows. "The ideal situation would be a little of each," says Dennis Tull, owner of Smiley's Golf Complex in Shawnee, Kans. "Pole lighting, bunker lighting and canopy lighting."

Sad to say, even the ideal situation is never quite ideal. Get everything right -- the best mats, the best balls, state-of-the-art lighting, landscaped parking, a sushi bar -- and your range rat will still sigh and stare at the round rubber tee protruding from his mat. The rubber tee is always too high.

YOUR RANGE RAT is a caring individual. He's Bing Crosby in White Christmas, organizing a scheme to save the General's country inn. He's Jackie Chan in Rumble in the Bronx, delivering kicks to the jaws of the thugs who wrecked a young woman's market.

I, for example, lose sleep over the situation outside Halifax, Nova Scotia, where two driving ranges, no more than a mile apart on Highway 333, compete for a very finite customer base. The Goodwood Family Golf Center, the spiffier of the two, faces east on an appealing tree-lined site. The west-facing Halifax Golf Center, by way of contrast, rubs against gritty workyards filled with chemical tanks and stacked lumber.

I was in the Goodwood shop on a Saturday morning, talking with owner Barry MacDonald, when a woman came in to buy a gift certificate for her husband. She looked as comfortable as a kindergarten teacher at a gun show. She said, "People are content to just stand there and hit those golf balls, are they?"

MacDonald chuckled. "Well, I wouldn't say that they're content."

MacDonald is 53. He was a barber and then a fireman before he took up golf a decade ago. "I got hooked on the game," he told me, "and stupid entrepreneur that I am, I decided to start a range with a fellow fireman." The partner split after three years, but MacDonald soldiers on with the help of his wife, who moonlights as a bank clerk; his daughter, Candace; and golf pro Kevin Reid, a former Mountie. During the golf season MacDonald works 14- to 16-hour days, seven days a week. He picks balls, he mows the range, and when the season ends around Nov. 1, he starts right in on equipment repairs and maintenance. "I'm like a lobster fisherman in the Maritimes," he said. "I spend the winter preparing for the season."

I asked about the range down the road, and MacDonald answered with a tale that sounded like an episode of Northern Exposure. He said he and his partner had bought their land in 1992, but the bank needed time to act on their application for a $40,000 business loan -- like, two years. The partners cleared the property and put up a sign that read GOODWOOD FAMILY GOLF CENTER. Without warning, a wealthy contractor launched a preemptive strike, opening a range on acreage he owned in the industrial district. Just to draw the line more clearly, the rich guy opened a bar in his shop. "That's something I don't believe in," MacDonald said. So this formerly golf-free stretch of highway suddenly had two driving ranges: MacDonald's family-oriented facility (flowers in window boxes, soft drinks in the fridge, Dudley Do-Right on the lesson tee) and the contractor's place (pool cues on the wall, bikers on the tee line, Snidely Whiplash behind the register).

Two years ago, the Halifax Golf Center went out of business and Goodwood seemed to have won. But when spring rolled around a new owner, Jae Hang Kim, took over, prolonging the struggle. MacDonald had to consider the possibility that a disciplined Korean businessman might put in the long hours necessary to compete in a range war. "The hours are a killer in this business," MacDonald said.

Goodwood is a delightful driving range and MacDonald is an amiable, hardworking man, so I pledged that I would give him my business whenever I am in Nova Scotia -- which is, more or less, never. I then drove down the road to meet Kim. I found him in his shop moving boxes, a gray-haired man of 60 with searching eyes.

Kim's story was familiar. He, like MacDonald, had decided to pursue golf as a kind of exit strategy, in his case from a career as a chemist. He, too, was putting in long hours -- in at 7:30 a.m., out at 9 p.m. -- and like MacDonald he was getting help from his wife. (Kim's son, a dental student at New York University, planned to work at the range between terms. Kim's other child, a daughter, is a doctor.) "I don't think that I can make any money this year," Kim admitted. "I have to spend more to make the place better."

Moved by his obvious sincerity and his love for the game, I promised Kim that I would give him my business whenever I was in Nova Scotia.

YOUR RANGE RAT is on a quest. He's Ronald Coleman in Lost Horizon, looking for Shangri-La. He's Diogenes with his lantern, Don Quixote with his impossible dream. The range rat knows there is one perfect place to practice, and he will find it: El Dorado Driving Range. Holy Grail Hit 'n' Sit. The tees will be sod cut from Augusta National's fairways. The balls will be Titleists, right out of the sleeve. The target green will resemble the 16th at Cypress Point, with pounding surf and sea lions.

Bill Scott, an East Coast lawyer who has taken more than 250 lessons from more than 40 teachers, has practiced at a number of ranges that he classifies as mystical -- places like Pine Valley in Clementon, N.J., or Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, where the range grass is as green as Ireland and the air smells like summer watermelon. "Some go to the range to correct swing flaws," he says. "I go to the range because there I am free to hit balls in quiet seclusion for the pure pleasure of feeling that solid hit and watching the flight of the ball against a blue sky to a landing place not as carefully selected as it should be."

A surprising number of these mystical fields are open to the public. Albuquerque, for instance, is a destination resort for range rats. You can hit off Tour-quality grass and gasp at sunsets at the city-run Puerto Del Sol Golf Course, the state-owned University of New Mexico Golf Course and the Native American-owned Isleta Eagle Golf Course. Pass through California's Coachella Valley and you can pig out on range balls at the Westin Mission Hills Resort -- $7 for a day ticket to either of two scenic, double-ended ranges -- or at the new Cimarron Golf Resort, where a range attendant rebuilds your ball pyramid, gives you exact yardages to the target greens and cleans your clubs, all for $10.

Or you can call off the search and go straight to World Woods. I heard about this place last fall when I was in Florida. The assistant pro at a club in Sarasota told me about an emerald city of practice where you could hit shots from all points of the compass to natural greens; where the all-grass tees were smooth enough for lawn bowling; where forest creatures crept out of the woods to watch you swing. "It's in the middle of nowhere," he said, "but that's part of its charm."

I set out the next afternoon in a rental car, driving north into Florida's hill country. It was raining and I got lost, but I finally found the little town the pro had told me about. I asked for directions to the course at gas stations, and glassy-eyed clerks shook their heads. I drove for almost an hour in a hardwood forest, looking for a sign. Then, without really understanding how, I found myself in front of the modest clubhouse at World Woods. The rain had stopped, and a handful of golfers were motoring out to resume their rounds on the two championship courses and the nine-hole short course.

Minutes later, I was driving a cart through a haunt of moss-draped trees, following signs to the west tee of the practice range. I emerged behind two large, perfectly turfed tee grounds overlooking a tree-bordered valley. The middle of the magic field was dotted with mature trees and steep-faced bunkers filled with white sand. There were greens at various elevations, set into slopes the way they are on real courses. The mowed area extended into the woods and curved around hillocks, suggesting fairways.

The two west tees had about 20 stations each, but no one was hitting balls. I emptied my two drawstring bags onto the perfect, springy turf and looked in all directions. No one was visible. No balls flew from the north, south or east tees, which were hidden in the distant trees. No tractors chugged back and forth, picking up balls. This empty Eden was all mine.

I hit balls for more than an hour in the long shadows and the golden glow of sunset. After 20 minutes or so, a young woman and her swing coach joined me. "Do you think we could camp here?" she asked. "This is heaven." I hit eight-irons at a hillside green for 10 minutes straight, loving the way each well-hit shot cleared the front bunker and hopped around the hole. The exposed soil of my divot field, sandy and yellow, gleamed like simmering porridge.

Then the sun went down.

YOUR RANGE RAT moves on. He's Mel Gibson in The Patriot, putting away his guns and raising what's left of his family on a barrier island. He's Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior, cruising down a postapocalyptic highway in a bullet-ridden Mack truck. He's Mel Gibson in Payback, driving to Canada with the money, the blonde and a couple of broken toes. He's Mel Gibson at the end of Lethal Weapon 3, already thinking up dialogue for Lethal Weapon 4.

I saw ...ING RANGE out of the corner of my eye and whipped my rented car into the parking lot of the Emerald Court Hotel and Resort, a motel-cum-driving range in Rancho Mirage, Calif. Barrels of sorry-looking balls were lined up in the sun. The tee line consisted of mats laid right on the desert floor. The target field had no grass at all, but dozens of painted yardage signs were set out in 10- and 20-yard increments, like airport landing lights. You couldn't hit a shot without hitting a yardage sign -- unless your ball landed in one of the crumbling concrete target ponds, which had no water in them.

It was the pits. No, it was the pits squared -- ring four of Dante's Inferno and Family Fun Center. A dozen old farts in shorts and sunglasses were hitting balls under the merciless midday sun.

I joined them.

Issue date: Nov. 13, 2000 Golf Plus

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