Fore Knowledge

While a teenager named Tiger Woods was starting college but already on the fast track to becoming golf’s next superstar, Deborah Lucas was toiling on the railroad tracks of Vancouver, Canada, as a dispatcher and yardmaster. A former member of the Canadian national skydiving team, Lucas was no stranger to challenging tasks. But this job was taking its toll: Her blood pressure kept climbing until she finally suffered a mild stroke.

Mild or not, that episode was enough of a warning signal for Lucas. “I decided to do what I wanted to do,” she says.

That turned out to be golf. She had been playing regularly since 1990 with a group of 18 women at a municipal course. But in 1994, she quit the railroad to take her passion for the game to a new level “for the sake of my health.”

Now, at 43, Lucas will not be mentioned in the same breath as the ubiquitous Woods (few are), but she does find herself in the same general club. She is here as a student at the Professional Golfers Career College--an institution where faculty and staff almost uniformly (if unofficially) describe the feeling as like “dying and going to heaven.”

None of the 128 students now enrolled at the college will probably be joining Mr. Woods and his zillionaire buddies on the Professional Golfers Assn. tour any time soon. Although many are good enough to win local golf club tournaments--applicants must be “low-handicap” golfers to even be considered for admission--this is not a training ground for the professional circuit.

Rather, it is a 16-month, four-semester curriculum designed to enable people who love golf to work in the field: as teachers, golf course managers, sales representatives, golf club technicians and in other positions.

“We have great players here,” says Tim Somerville, president and founder of the golf college, “but they come here for an education, so they have something to fall back on.”

Somerville, a perpetually smiling former basketball coach at Texas Christian University, started the college in 1990 after running the San Diego Golf Academy. Those two institutions, along with one in Orlando, are the best known among a handful of independent golf colleges.

According to the National Golf Foundation, an industry trade association, four universities also offer golf management training as part of their regular degree programs: Mississippi State, Penn State, Ferris State in Michigan and New Mexico State.

Although the students at the Temecula college come from all over the world (the Malaysian government is sponsoring two) and range in age from 19 to 56, they seem to have one trait in common: realism.

“They have a really good understanding of how very, very difficult it is to be on the [PGA] tour,” says Kent Brown, executive director and placement director for the college.

“Only 125 in the entire world” qualify for the tour, he noted. Golf college, he says, is one way to keep them in the world they love.

And that world is expanding rapidly. Golf is among the fastest growing sports in the world, particularly in contrast to tennis, which appears to be wilting in popularity.

Since 1992, an average of 400 golf courses have been built each year in the United States, according to the National Golf Foundation, up from about 150 a year in the early 1980s. “And with those come new jobs,” says Judy Thompson, spokeswoman for the foundation.

This growth has boosted the number of U.S. courses to about 15,800--about two-thirds of which are public.

“And the game is going to boom even more in the coming years because of Tiger Woods,” says Somerville, who expects more courses to be built and more youngsters to take up the game, hoping to emulate “the next Arnold Palmer.”

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The students at the Temecula college realize that no one is likely to describe them that way. Among those thus realistic beyond their years is Marcus Wilhelm, a 20-year-old “senior” from Amery, Wis. The son of a club professional, Marcus “was first on a golf course at 6 months. I’ve been swinging since I was standing.”

Many 20-year-old 2-handicappers (meaning they average just two over par for each round of golf) might have dreams of shaving a few strokes off their scores and going for the PGA tour. (Indeed, many 40- and 50-year-olds who shoot 15 and 20 over par delude themselves into believing they might someday be good enough to challenge Greg Norman in the Masters championship.)

But Wilhelm knows two things: He loves golf and he wants no part of “the tour.”

“The tour costs a lot of money and time . . . and there’s all that travel,” he says. “I couldn’t live the motel life.” Besides, shooting 2 over par at a modest course in Wisconsin is a far cry from doing the same thing with the big boys who wind up on TV Sunday afternoon.

He is among the 87% of the students who get placed in jobs by the time they graduate, according to Somerville. “And we stick with most of the others until they do get placements,” he says.

After graduation in a few months, Wilhelm will become assistant pro at Bunker Hills Golf Club in Coon Rapids, Minn. “I love the whole golf industry,” he says.

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Happiness seems to be the operative emotion in every corner of the two-story Professional Golfers Career College building. Whether they are focusing on turf management, psychology, golf club design, salesmanship, fitness or calligraphy (someone has to man the scoreboard!), these are people who are exactly where they want to be. Somerville and his colleagues chose to place the school smack in the middle of one of the most concentrated golfing areas in the state. “Temecula is overloaded with golf courses,” Somerville says.

After morning classes, each student either plays a round of golf at one of the many courses nearby or takes a lesson from one of the school’s professionals. The cost of lessons and playing is included in the tuition of $3,600 for each semester (housing and living expenses are extra).

On a recent afternoon on the Temecula Creek Inn course, Lucas pauses after hitting a tee shot, shakes her head and says, “I’ve got to work on getting away from that reverse pivot.”

She is finding what many golfers learn--that lessons from a pro can have the initial effect of worsening your score until you master the new swing techniques. Exposed here to a glut of tips, Lucas has seen her handicap shoot up into the 20s--”but they tell me I’ll be down to 12, or even single digits, by the time I leave,” she says.

“Can you believe this is my life now?” Contrasting her current schedule with the former daily grind of the railroad yards, Lucas adds, “This is the joy of what you could have been when you were 19. . . . You get to do it here.”

Lucas hopes to return to Vancouver and work for a local golf club, where, she jokes, she will “teach old women--like myself.”

Unfortunately, Somerville says, relatively few women have had the opportunity to experience what Lucas has. “Women are in big demand” in such jobs, he says, but Lucas is one of only eight women enrolled at the Temecula college.

One contributing factor may be home situations such as that of Lucas, whose husband remained in Canada. Although she has his blessing, “I still feel guilty sometimes,” she says. The couple get to see each other every couple of months.

Second-career students such as Lucas are not uncommon here. Scott Wells, 54, spent 35 years in the film business as an actor and stuntman.

“A couple of years ago I became vested in my pension, and I began looking for other things,” says Wells, who started his career acting on the “Loretta Young Show” in 1960. “I’ve been playing golf for 18 years. I like the game, but I like the places you play and the class of people who play.”

Wells, who has been a stunt double for Clint Eastwood, Tom Selleck and Fred Dryer, has his own reward in mind--a club pro’s job in wine country, preferably the Napa Valley (his wife is a wine industry executive). No tour aspirations for him, either: “There’s only one Tiger Woods, one Tom Lehman,” he says. “The tour is like acting--there’s a 1 in 50,000 chance of making it. Money is not my motivation here.”

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Indeed, few graduates of this college will get rich, at least at first. “An assistant pro might get only $7 or $8 an hour to start out with,” says Somerville, whom the students call Doc, in reverence to his doctorate in education. “They do this because they’ve fallen in love with golf.”

Although some might question the cost-benefit analysis of spending nearly $15,000 training for a $7-an-hour job, some graduates of the college will work--or already have worked--their way into the “glamour” jobs as head professionals at top-of-the-line country clubs. These positions--some of which can pay well into six figures annually--call for them to be a combination golf instructor/master of ceremonies/general manager and all-around ambassador.

But Brown, who narrowly missed qualifying for the senior professional tour last year, notes that many of the students are here for more than just finding a job.

“A lot of people are stuck in their lives,” he says. “When you’re young, you might wander into some job that a friend offers you or whatever, then you get married, have kids, then there’s divorce, alimony . . . and you’re stuck.”

Professional Golfers Career College might not eliminate all those problems, he admits, but it does get some people unstuck. Just ask Deborah Lucas about life on the other side of the tracks.