The Wise Man of Rancho Park

Carolyn Glassman’s smile broadens into a full-blown grin as her solidly struck iron shots ascend against the morning sky. She steps away from the ball as though she can’t believe what’s happening. But her next swing is yet another foray into that transcendent realm of pure pleasure that golfers feel when their club sends the ball on a long, arcing flight.

“I’ve learned more in one lesson than I have in 12 years of golf,” Glassman says of her first session with John Edmond Jr., a teaching pro at Rancho Park Golf Course’s driving range. “He was peeking at me while I played the par-3 course earlier today. From that one little glimpse, he knew immediately what to tell me.”

For months, Glassman’s friend had nagged her to see this teacher who was like no other. That friend, Wanda Brown, was inspired by how Edmond “instills confidence that you can do it. Other teachers are too technical. He taught me to trust the club, to let the club do the work.”

For most golfers, nothing about the game is easy. It is likely the most chewed over, dissected, analyzed and cursed sport--some would say mania--invented by man. Golfers spend a lifetime looking for the magic swing, often enlisting the help of a teaching pro, or two, or three.

What makes a good pro is a puzzle. Why does one pro have success with a student while another doesn’t? What seems to matter is that an instructor and student “click,” and from that a fierce loyalty develops. It is most often a one-sided affair--the student rehashing the instructor’s words long past the end of the lesson, while the instructor may not give another thought to the student until the start of the next session. Not so in Edmond’s case. Rather, his students say, his involvement has taught them about living.

Edmond smiles when he hears those comments, insisting that there is no hocus-pocus in what he does. For nearly 30 years he has taught grip, stance and posture--the golf pro’s mantra. But, he quickly adds, golf is “about the person, getting the person to believe in himself. My teaching is all about positive reinforcement. I teach to the person. I do not have a system where I say, ‘This is how you have to hit a golf ball.’ I believe in a lot of different methods--body rotation, swinging the club head. There’s no one thing I believe in. I believe they all work.

“Golf is like life,” he says. “It’s about being comfortable with who you are. The more comfortable you are with who you are, the better your chances of success.”

Edmond strides about the range in an easy, rhythmic gait belying his 61 years, smiling as though lit from within. “My earliest recollection of John is tall, striking, elegant, patient,” says San Francisco marketing executive Dean Catalano, who took his first lessons from Edmond and went on to play on the Canadian PGA Tour. Edmond’s laughter, say his students, can erase a frustrated player’s foulest mood, and he can deliver a single word or gesture that converts butchered shots to soaring works of art.

“I’ve taken lessons from other pros, including well-known guys,” says FBI Special Agent Mark Hunter. “They didn’t make a difference.” Hunter was a teenager when he started nine years of lessons with Edmond, and he later won a golf scholarship to Cal State Fullerton.

“He is straightforward, a man of integrity,” says Hunter, crediting Edmond with teaching him on and off the course “about dedication, discipline, hard work.” Hunter was 13 and about to throw a club after hitting a bad shot when Edmond told him: “The first club you throw will be your last because I’m not going to work with you.” That lesson, Hunter says, “has always stuck with me. I’ve never thrown a club in my life.”

For all of his success as a teacher, John Edmond Jr.’s days at the Rancho Park Golf Course--and those of other popular pros there--may be numbered, the fallout from a management change earlier this year at the storied municipal course on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

Ron Weiner, who hired Edmond and ran Rancho Park’s pro shop and range for 35 years, is gone, the loser by a margin of a single point on a city evaluation to Yong “Steve” Oh. Under his contract, Oh, who also operates the pro shop and range at Alondra, a Los Angeles County course in Lawndale, will run Rancho Park’s pro shop and range for the next 15 years.

The city’s Department of Recreation and Parks required that the winning bidder demolish Rancho Park’s dilapidated driving range and build a new facility--one that Oh estimates will cost as much as $2.8 million. That construction is scheduled to begin early next year and should be done within 90 days, he says. The new range, part of an ongoing face-lift at Rancho Park, will feature artificial turf landing areas, target greens and simulated sand traps and water hazards.

When it opens, several of the teaching pros will be out of jobs unless they become members of the Professional Golfers Assn., Oh says. The city does not require PGA membership at its courses, but Oh feels that it will improve the teaching at Rancho Park. “I’ve operated driving ranges long enough to know who can teach better. I want the public to be able to trust whatever PGA teacher is here. I get a lot of complaints about the pros at Rancho.”

The complaints, says Rancho Park pro Scott Reid, aren’t about the authorized instructors. “They’re getting complaints about the bootleggers who are hustling lessons here,” Reid says. Nearly every range is plagued by a number of unauthorized instructors who approach golfers, offering their services for a fee.

Oh says he has asked the authorized pros to police the range. The pros say they are there to teach golf--not to act as cops. The contentiousness says a lot about Oh’s relationship with the pros, men he refers to as “those teaching people down there.” Oh has no legal obligation to retain any of the pros, but he has not fired any, he says. One of his first moves in taking over the range was to change the status of the pros from employees whose sole responsibility was teaching to independent contractors. If they stay on once the new range opens, they will be Oh’s employees and required to work up to 25 hours per week in the pro shop--time they would rather spend teaching.

The pros say they are frustrated by the new management. They complain that Oh is inaccessible. Oh says they have only to pick up the phone and call. Under Weiner, the pros received free range balls for their personal use, a common practice at golf courses; now they have to pay for them. Oh also stopped the practice by some pros of offering reduced prices on a series of lessons, saying he feared the series would be interrupted by the closure of the range. But of all the sniping between Oh and the pros, nothing has caused more bad blood than Oh’s ultimatum that they join the PGA.

When Oh announced that decision, only one Rancho pro, Ed Coleman, was a PGA member. Reid and another pro, Derrick Allen, have renewed their memberships. Nearly all of the Rancho Park pros, including Edmond, have belonged to the association at one time. One, James “Junior” Walker, is a former PGA touring pro and played twice in the Los Angeles Open in the 1960s, when it was still being held at Rancho Park. He seems bemused when asked if he will renew his membership and says he hasn’t decided. Nor has another pro, Kwang Chang.

Edmond and longtime instructor Earl English have no plans to renew theirs. English, a full-time teacher at Rancho since 1988, says his earlier stint as a PGA member “made no difference in how I taught,” and that many of his students have told him they will follow him wherever he goes.

Edmond spent eight years as a PGA member in the 1970s and ‘80s, but says he will not rejoin for two reasons: time and money. A half-hour lesson at Rancho Park costs $25, with the city and Oh taking 20%. Completing the three levels of PGA membership costs about $5,500--up to $2,200 for the first level alone. The biggest expense--nearly $4,200--pays for three trips to Florida for testing after each level. To apply, instructors must have worked full time (about 35 hours a week) at a golf facility for the previous six months and continue that schedule once they are accepted as apprentices, says Sharon Cursman of the PGA’s Southern California section.

So as the days count down to construction, Edmond and Oh remain in a standoff. Meanwhile, some of Edmond’s students have complained to the Department of Recreation and Parks and the City Council, and they are talking about forming a picket line and demanding Edmond’s return if he is forced out. “We students of John’s are like a cult,” says Marlene Singer, a member of Brentwood Country Club. “We would never be there if it weren’t for him. I’ve bought balls, merchandise and lessons at Rancho. I wouldn’t do that if he were not there. He’s a superior teacher.”

Edmond was a toddler when his father, nearly a scratch golfer, gave him a plastic club and balls. But he didn’t seriously pursue golf until after his family moved to Los Angeles from southern Illinois when he was a teenager. Still, as a student at Los Angeles High School, his first sport was basketball. He went on to Los Angeles Community College, where he competed in both sports.

In 1962, Edmond became the first black pro hired to work at a city course under an agreement between the Department of Recreation and Parks and the NAACP. He spent two years at Griffith Park, working under pro Paul Scott, until he was drafted into the Army.

Upon his return to Los Angeles he couldn’t find a golf teaching job. He got married, had a daughter, Victoria--now a physician in Indiana--and worked for the city as a soils analyst and later as a surveyor before the siren song of golf proved irresistible.

“In 1972,” he says, “I decided I wanted golf to be in my life. I’d get out of work at 3 or 3:30, and go to hit golf balls. I did that for three or four months before I bought a van, went on the road and started playing golf tournaments all over the country.”

He tested his game in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Indiana, Georgia, Iowa--wherever there was a tournament he could enter. “I just had to go out there and do that,” he says. “I took my few dollars and went and played in every tournament I could play in. Every tournament I went to, they had touring pros there. I had been out of golf for about eight years. I was happy with what I was doing. I was living in my van. I had a little two-burner stove. I showered at golf courses or at a trailer park.”

Those months on the road, trying to build a game that would get him on the PGA Tour, also taught him enduring life lessons. “Most of the places I went, people were so nice it was unreal,” he says. Golfers saw his California license plates during a tournament in Massachusetts and invited him to spend an evening with them at their private club. The owner of a driving range near Syracuse, N.Y., invited him to play an exhibition with some of the area’s better players. “It was pretty incredible considering I was the only black person in sight,” Edmond says. “A whole bunch of people came out. The newspaper came out. I still have the clipping somewhere at home.”

Edmond did not make it to the PGA Tour, but when he returned to Los Angeles at the end of that summer, he says, “I could basically do whatever I wanted to do with a golf ball. I had recaptured what I had before. I worked my tail off. I didn’t get any money for it, but that didn’t matter.”

Financially broke, he still wanted to play golf. But his summer expedition had taken a toll. He and his wife separated. They did not divorce until 10 years later, he says, and they remain friends. Edmond began spending his days at Rancho Park’s par-3 course, where the staff, knowing his financial straits, let him play several rounds for the price of one. He met Bob Kardell, the pro shop manager at Rancho Park, and the late teaching pro Ben Haggin. On their recommendation, Ron Weiner hired him.

At Rancho Park, Edmond says, “word got around that I could play, that I could hit the ball a long way.” Haggin once described a prodigious drive Edmond hit on the uphill 372-yard 5th hole. A maintenance shed sits atop the hill, adjacent to the 6th tee. Haggin said Edmond’s drive bounced off the shed’s roof, more than 300 yards away. This monster drive came unaided by the high-tech clubs that long-ball hitters use today.

Edmond shies away from talk of his golfing prowess, preferring to reminisce about Deuce Irving, a man he calls a “magician with a pitching wedge.” He says he once saw Irving hit a ball from the rough to a downslope with enough backspin to send the ball back uphill. “Now, whether he could do it again, I don’t know,” Edmond says. “But I saw that with my own eyes.” He’s just as fond of describing how Solomon Phelon, a teaching pro at Westchester Golf Course, once hit a seven-iron over water to the peninsula green on a 235-yard par-3 hole at the Valencia Golf Course.

As a new teaching pro, Edmond struggled through lean days. Then he met Carol Park, a Brentwood Country Club member. “She wanted to learn, and I wanted to teach,” he says. “We worked hard every day, except weekends. After about a year, she shot 90 in her first competitive round of golf, and that was with four putts on the last hole. She was probably in her late 40s, and that was a hell of an accomplishment.”

When people saw her swing, they wanted to know where she had learned to play, Edmond says. “When she said ‘John Edmond,’ everyone from the country club wanted to come take lessons. That’s how I got hooked up.”

When Dean Catalano’s parents first wandered around Rancho Park asking after instructors, they were directed to Edmond. “I know I got lucky,” says Catalano, the former Canadian PGA Tour pro. “He has been a very important person to me all these years.”

Edmond “is what’s right about the game,” Catalano says. “He’s not about commercialism. He’s about imparting something to a student that becomes [the student’s] own.”

Those golf lessons Hunter took as a teenager have turned into a lifelong relationship, says the FBI agent, who invited Edmond to his wedding. Elaine Latimer has been Edmond’s student and friend for more than 20 years. “I always invite John whenever we have a holiday gathering or other family functions,” she says. “He was at my daughter’s wedding. He’s now part of the family.”

Ruth L. Hoffman, one of Edmond’s earliest students, has “adopted” him. “John and my son are about the same age,” she says. “I told him he’s my lost son. He mischievously introduces me as his mother, making people do a double take.” David Lucky, another student, calls him a second father, and Marlene Singer makes it a point every year to get together with Edmond on his birthday.

Edmond is famous for his phone calls, the ones to the student’s home, during which he pronounces how proud he is of a student’s progress, how he “got goose bumps” watching them hit.

So until the range closes, Edmond will keep teaching 12 to 15 hours a week--Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. He has no desire to disturb the rhythms of what he describes as his “blessed life” and no desire to leave Rancho Park. His students see no reason why he should.

“John doesn’t have a PGA card; big deal,” says Latimer. If Edmond is not allowed to stay at Rancho, she says, “that would be very disastrous. This is the most unfair thing. There is no one else there I want to hook up with.”

Sandy Pressman, who plays at Hillcrest Country Club just east of Rancho Park, sees the threat to Edmond’s job as a reflection of how “we tend to not cherish those who have given so much of their time and energy to improving whatever they’re working on. To say he has to have a PGA card typifies this throwaway society. No one has taken as much time with me. Even when he was busy with someone else, he would stop to give me tips.”

When Edmond is not working, he is still promoting Rancho Park, promoting the game, says Singer. She fails to see the logic in his being forced to leave, especially in light of how many people--including country club members--he attracts to the city course. “He’s more than golf,” she says. “He makes golf part of your life because he’s part of your life.

“I don’t know what they could be looking for in a teacher, but they won’t find a better teacher than John.”