Groundskeepers chip in their golf wisdom
I was afraid I might kill the gardener. A golf ball cutting through the air about 120 mph is a dangerous projectile. Even more so in the hands of a rank beginner like me.
The gardener was standing to the right of my target about 100 yards away and wouldn’t move, despite my polite wave of warning. Look out, I’m going to shoot. He simply lowered his idling leaf blower and waited.
Generally speaking, golf-course groundskeepers lay low. This is, of course, true of most people in the largely Spanish-speaking army of laborers who keep our plants, gardens and lawns alive. They mow, they rake, they water, and they try to stay inconspicuous.
But now this guy was waving at me. His gestures spoke clearly. Go ahead and hit the ball.
So I did.
My ball curved comically to the right, a real Three Stooges shot. Like a brave officer on the battlefield, the gardener did not flinch as my tiny white cannonball headed toward him. He merely watched it bounce to his left, very far from the green indeed.
I walked toward my ball, hanging my head in shame. Being a notorious loner, I was playing solo. Now the gardener knew my secret. I stink at golf.
We met at my ball, which lay in the rough. He was a Latino man, with greenish-brown eyes and the sun-wizened stare of an actor in a spaghetti western. He squinted down at my ball and then at me. When he finally spoke, it was in English spiced with a very faint flavoring of Mexico.
“You need to keep your head down!” he commanded. “That’s why you’re slicing the ball!”
At that instant, it was clear that this man in his work uniform was right and that he knew more about the game than I ever could. I was surprised, though I probably shouldn’t have been.
Supposedly there are great social and cultural barriers between us, between those who play golf and those who earn their living with mowers and leaf blowers. But at the Arroyo Seco Golf Course in South Pasadena, I found this supposed truism of Southern California life not necessarily true.
The people who keep the greens green and the fairways fair at the Arroyo Seco course are nearly all of Mexican heritage. Many were born in Jalisco, the heartland region that gave Mexico mariachis and tequila.
Most are seasoned players, willing to dispense golf wisdom if you ask. “A lot of people think the swing is in the arms, but it’s not,” one of them told me. “You have to move your whole body.”
They all learned the game by studying the paying customers.
“I used to stand out there and just watch everybody hitting,” Richard De la Torre told me, remembering his own transformation from course handyman to player extraordinaire. “I thought, if they can do it, I can do it.”
There are six members of the De la Torre family working at the Arroyo Seco course. Four of them, including Richard, are brothers from Chapala, a town on a lake where their father worked as a fisherman and raised corn and onions to feed his 11 children.
In Mexico, they were poor. The oldest of the De la Torres, John, 57, shined shoes and caddied as a 9-year-old at a Guadalajara golf club.
On an American golf course, the De la Torres found a good living and the prestige that comes with being smooth, solid strikers of the ball.
The Arroyo Seco is a par-three course, with none of its 18 holes more than 120 yards or so from the tee. It’s a place where beginners like me come to learn. In the hands of the De la Torres, the course is child’s play.
Richard once hit a hole in one on the 90-yard first hole in which the ball fell straight into the cup without ever having struck the ground. It took him almost 20 years, he says, but he eventually managed to “ace” the other 17 holes as well.
After some prodding, Armando De la Torre, a groundskeeper at the course, admitted to a best-ever round of nine-under, a score no pro would be ashamed of.
“How to get the ball on the green, how to hit the ball straight, it was interesting to me,” Armando told me in Spanish, one of two languages he speaks fluently. Like his brothers, he never took a golf lesson. “I spent three years hitting balls on the [practice] range before I ever played the course.”
Golf is an infinitely more democratic game in California than it is in Mexico, where there are few public courses. In Mexico City, where I recently lived, every course is private.
At the Arroyo Seco, you can play 18 holes for about $15, no membership or fancy equipment required. You can play with rusty clubs bought at a thrift store. Some of the groundskeepers own nice sets -- Armando plays with Pings -- but they’re not golf snobs. They don’t look down at beginners.
On a quiet weekday morning, you might see one of the crew members teeing off in his pale green shirt and black work shoes.
“That’s my nephew,” Armando said as twenty-something John De la Torre Jr. took a club from the utility cart he was driving to strike a ball. His shot plopped elegantly onto the green.
John Jr. is carrying on a family tradition that goes back to the 1970s, when his father John Sr. and uncle Richard both started with the grunt job of picking up balls at the practice range.
Now Richard, 45, runs the clubhouse and John Sr. is superintendent. Together, they manage a course of shimmering Bermuda and rye grass once described in a magazine as “Augusta National meets Riviera meets the Incredible Shrinking Machine.”
It’s the De la Torres’ labor and passion for the game that keeps the Arroyo Seco looking good.
Like a father tending to a feverish child, John spent two sleepless nights last summer trying to keep the delicate grass from dying during a heat wave. A water pump had failed, and the course had to be watered manually. “I could have lost the greens in just one day,” he said.
The De la Torres keep an eye on the greens and watch the players too.
Not long after my impromptu lesson, I returned to the course. I kept my head down but improved only a bit. Then, on the 18th hole, I chipped the ball from 30 yards and watched it bounce three times and land magically in the cup.
It was my first birdie ever. I let out a howl of surprise and triumph and looked around to see if there were any witnesses.
On a high ridge to my left, two men in green uniforms smiled and clapped.
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