THE MEN’S CLUB : Lucky Seven Friendship Club Pushes Back Deterrents to Buddyship Long Swamped by Careers and Families

On the wall in developer Bob Mahoney’s office is a picture taken of him in 1964 when he was head football coach at Glendale High School. His team had just finished a championship season and Mahoney was being carried triumphantly off the field.

Looking at that picture today, the Laguna Niguel resident says, “Nobody from that team knows where I am.”

It is not that Mahoney, 59, is complaining. He is merely illustrating a point: “When you’ve been coaching 18 years, you can imagine the booster clubs and parents and coaching assistants you’ve had over the years. I’m a gregarious guy, and I love people, but my dad said, ‘You think you have so many friends; most of them are acquaintances. How many of them would cry at your funeral? If you’ve got five friends, you’re lucky.’ ”

Actually, Mahoney can consider himself quite lucky.

He is part of a small group of married county men who have been getting together once a month for nearly two years for one expressed purpose: to nurture close friendships among one another.

They call themselves the Lucky Seven Friendship Club.

The type of friendship they are talking about is not the superficial male friendship most men have with other men--the kind where they must have a reason for getting together: to play golf on the weekend, for example, or to play poker on Monday nights. They are not talking about male friendships where there is an underlying sense of competition over who has the better house, the newest car or the fattest paycheck. And they are not talking about the kind of male friendship in which their biggest personal revelation is that they just won the office football pool.

Their goal is to develop what psychologist Herb Goldberg, author of “The Hazards of Being Male,” calls a “buddyship”: a caring, sharing and loving relationship with another man, or men--a friendship based on deep mutual respect, trust and pleasure in one another’s company.

It is the kind of friendship that most women have with one or more women and that men usually have only when they are boys.

Indeed, if Goldberg’s book is their bible, the four boyhood friends growing up in a small Oregon town in the movie “Stand by Me” are their role models.

“Basically, those kids were just getting together because they enjoyed themselves and didn’t know what was going to happen, but the friendship was there, and they went on and did something,” said Gil Thibault, 48, of Laguna Beach, who organized the club.

“When men become adults, get married and have kids, their friendships go by the wayside. They get caught up in their jobs and their own families. They spend very little time trying to promote their male friends.”

Mahoney, whose own closest boyhood chums have scattered far and wide over the years, says he enjoys the company of his new friends.

“We’re only here for a short time, and I think having a few good friends is kind of neat,” he said. “We’ve all got a long way to go to being the friends we want to be, but we’re trying to understand one another, and I think it’s real.”

Shortly before 9 on a warm Saturday morning, members of the Lucky Seven Friendship Club begin pulling into the Aliso Beach parking lot in Laguna Beach.

The Lucky Seven, wearing their baggies and prepared to get wet, are meeting this morning because Tom Eller--the only surfer in the group--has offered to give his friends a surfing lesson.

Several club members sit on a picnic table next to the parking lot waiting for the other men to arrive. The conversation, naturally, turns to friendship.

“Most of us feel men don’t have somebody to talk to and share with,” says Thibault, a senior marketing consultant for a Laguna Beach real estate firm. “Most of us are devoted to family and work, and we want to get beyond that. It’s turned out to be a super thing, as a support group such as women have. See, women can tell all and cry. We have to keep a stiff upper lip, huh Ron?”

Ron Young, 40, of Dana Point, says: “I think most of us have been through career changes, and it’s difficult to get a proper perspective. That sharing is important.”

Young, sales director for a telecommunications company, says he had met a couple of the Lucky Seven members before joining the group a year and a half ago. But he already had a head start on having a close friendship with club member Warren Gruenig.

“Warren is a very unique individual,” Young says. “He’s just the kind of person who’s nice to be around. He has very high ethical and personal standards, and he’s full of life. In fact, that license plate kind of sums it up.”

Young points to the “B Hapy” personalized license plate on Gruenig’s Camaro, which has just pulled into the parking lot with a sailboard on top. Joining his friends at the table, Gruenig, a teacher at La Paz Intermediate School in Mission Viejo, offers his views on friendship.

“I’ve just always liked a lot of people, but I always had a buddy, usually one or two close friends,” says Gruenig, 50. “I always liked to have somebody I felt I could be a true friend to. You tend to lose that when you get married and have a career. I think we all wanted to get back to that.”

Eller, 37, a sales representative, says he knew several of the men in the group and thought that the club would be “a neat way to get everybody together for events. Without it, you never have time to do it on your own, just because of work schedules and family schedules.”

With a laugh, Eller adds: “Gil’s the one who gets real esoteric and wants to discuss the psychology and sociology of it.”

Thibault comes by his sociological bent naturally: He is a former professor of sociology at Chapman College in Orange. He got the idea of forming the friendship club after reading another book by Goldberg, “The New Male.” Thibault says he was so struck by Goldberg’s observation that most men have few close male friends that he called several men he knew to see whether they thought Goldberg was right.

“They all agreed, and then I suggested, ‘Why don’t we get a group together and discuss it?’ ” he says.

When it comes to having close male friends, Lucky Seven member Michael Cole, 50, a mortgage broker who lives in Laguna Niguel, is typical of many men.

Cole says he used to have a couple of close friends who did things on a “social basis.” He also had one “lasting friendship” with someone he had met in high school. But the high school friend died, and, Cole says, “I haven’t had any real close type of friend for a number of years.”

“I’m an avid golfer,” he says, “and most of my friends are golfers. We have the sport in common, but other than my wife and I going out with friends for dinner or the movies, I would not do anything with the guys. Basically, I lead a real hectic schedule, and I never took the time. It takes time and effort to develop a friendship.”

At one of their recent meetings, the Lucky Seven discussed the reasons why men find it difficult to have close male friends: the feeling of competitiveness among men, the fear that if they show any signs of affection for another man it may be taken as a sign of homosexuality and the inability of many men to reveal their emotions.

“Women will talk about their feelings, their emotional ups and downs, and men will talk about sports and work or a new car they might have bought,” Thibault says. “They won’t talk about growing old or whether they’re lonely or scared about something going on at work.

“One of the men in the group said the reason he felt men don’t get involved in emotions with other men is because men don’t trust one another, and if they did reveal some information about their ups and downs emotionally, it would be used against them, or they’d be seen as silly or weak.”

Cole says they set up initial ground rules for times when a member may want to discuss a personal problem at one of their meetings: “We felt we could talk freely among ourselves if we had a particular problem. We would give advice, but no one would pass judgment. We created an atmosphere where we felt comfortable. We’ve kind of established a camaraderie over time where I think if one of us was in trouble the others would come and help. That’s a nice feeling.”

Although the Lucky Seven have discussed one member’s difficulties in starting a new business, and they once spent an entire meeting discussing how another member should go about rekindling an old friendship that had gone sour, Thibault says the men haven’t discussed as many personal problems as he would like. But, as he notes, the purpose of the club is not to be an encounter group.

“What I’ve found in trying to lead the group is if I didn’t bring some organization to it--an agenda for a meeting--we would start to get back into traditional things that men do and talk about,” Thibault says.

It’s during less formal gatherings--”if we’re out doing some project together or riding in the car together”--that a personal problem may crop up for discussion, he says.

“Most of the personal problems are business related. I don’t think there are any serious marital problems. We’ve talked about teen-agers--those of us who have them--and we’ve talked about our backgrounds and our relationships with our fathers.”

From the original idea of meeting once a month, the Lucky Seven Friendship Club has expanded to doing fun things together--activities none of the men have tried before. “Adventures,” Gruenig calls them.

So far, they have gone on an overnight raft trip on the Kern River in south-central California, they have played air pistol combat in Chino, and they plan to go up in a glider in May. In March they were a lot less adventuresome: They went to a car show in Anaheim, followed by a movie.

“It turns out we’re really movie buffs,” Thibault says, “so we’re all going to get together on Academy Award night and try to pick the winners.”

As has been the case with the Super Bowl, their wives will be included on Academy Award night. Thibault says the women support the men’s friendship club.

Gruenig’s wife of 19 years, Dee, says: “My husband is the type that just loves people. As an educator, he’s around a lot of women, and he loves talking to just men. It’s so good because so many times you’re with couples. Just being with men, they can talk about things they haven’t had a chance to talk about.

“And he always comes back so upbeat and just eager to share and talk. He comes back and says, ‘You know, we have such a fabulous marriage.’ He gets such a good perspective about our marriage after talking to the boys.”

Although their friendship continues to grow, none of the Lucky Seven Friendship Club members have any illusions.

“I think time is the only thing that makes a friend,” Mahoney says. “You don’t have instant friendship. It’s like trying to graduate from college. You just don’t do it in a day. It takes time. We’re willing to put that time in.”

Mahoney was also willing to let Eller give a surfing lesson to him and the rest of the club, including seventh member Bill Wedmore.

But no sooner had Mahoney waded out waist deep and climbed onto the surfboard when an unusually big and mean breaker thundered down on the two men, sending the board flying and submerging Eller and Mahoney in the churning foam.

Nobody said being a friend was easy.