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The fried egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out.
Onto the green here's the take.
Plat of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice clean lion a greenside bunker. You need to be aggressive on any shop weather. It's sitting cleanly for its Friday Egg.
Well, we've all faced it, regretted Frida egg.
It's not to be feared, though.
It's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.
When we think about Harding Park's demise, it's one thing to look out and of course you love and see dried out fairways and greens with daisies on them and bunkers with no sand in them. That's one thing. It's another to see your golf course turned into a parking lot. I'm bo Linx. I am a lawyer by training. I practiced law for over forty five years in San Francisco.
I've played golf for almost sixty years in San f Cisco, largely on public courses, and I've always been someone who saw great beauty in these golf courses and had so many great memories playing them. I was convinced that people had to stand up to preserve them. I've always been motivated by a phrase that I heard from Ken Venturi, where he said, without public golf, the game withers and dies.
And when they held the nineteen ninety eight US Open at the Olympic Club, which is just across Lake Marsad from Harding, they needed a place to park the cars, and somebody in their infinite wisdom decided that Harding Park was perfect for that job, and so Harding Park, this great municipal masterpiece, was transformed into a parking lot. For me, that might have been the low point.
This is Frida Egg Stories. I'm Garrett Morrison. In this episode we tell the story of Harding Park golf course, of how it went from the pride of San Francisco to a parking lot and now this week to the venue of the twenty twenty PGA Championship. But bigger picture, this is a story about city golf. When Harding Park was built, municipal golf courses were symbols of civic vitality, of affordable recreation for the masses. As public works went,
they were popular and relatively uncontroversial. Things are very different today. Most municipal courses have become casualties of budget cuts or drains on local governments, or lightning rots for debates about land use. Harding Park at different times has been all of those things. It's been the best and the worst of city golf and everything in between. With the PGA Championship approaching, I wanted to through all of this. So last week I sat down with bow Lynx. You're a San Francisco guy.
San Francisco native, grew up in the Richmond District. Used to put my clubs on my back and walk up to Lincoln Park to meet an old friend of mine named John Susco to play golf, where we'd cut intot
the seventh hole and start playing. And we knew that Lincoln was a little bit of a course, always very scenic, but sort of the place where beginners went to start out and learn the game, and when you kind of graduated to the next level, you went over to Harding, which was the big course that was the championship course, And I can remember the first time I went over there, after waiting the three four hours to play, getting out on the golf course and some of the undulations in
the course. We'd get to holes and I would look up at the green and I turned to the guys I'm playing with. Is that flag in front of the bunker or behind the bunker? You couldn't tell because it was like tricking your eye. And there was this utter fascination with seeing things like that that made you want to go out play the course and learn it and then come back and play it once you had learned it.
By the time both started playing Harding Park in the early nineteen sixties, public golf in the city already had a long history.
San Francisco was one of the early adapters to urban golf. By nineteen oh two, there was a little three hole course out where Lincoln Park is, in an area that was largely a graveyard, but there was three holes and people played it, and by nineteen seventeen had finally expanded
to eighteen holes. But there was a problem. More people wanted to play the golf course than they had room for and so they decided to build a new municipal links on the shore of Lake Mercet And in nineteen twenty two the Recreation and Park Department hired Willie Watson, who had worked on the courses at the Olympic Club, to design and supervise construction for a new course at Harding Park. What became Harding Park, But what you have to put in context historically in terms of the era
at what it was like. San Francisco burned the ground in nineteen oh six after a devastating earthquake, and yet within nine years the city was rebuilt to the point where it held the World's Fair in nineteen fifteen, and then ten years after that we had Harding Park. And Harding Park wasn't the only construction project on the books. They rebuilt City Hall, downtown San Francisco, the Opera House, the Symphony Hall, the public library, the museums, all kinds
of things. And it was an era where people could get things done, and they did get them done. And most importantly, the quality of the craftsmanship that you see is just it's almost like it's the lost art, you know, the stonework that would work, the grandiose architecture. It's unbelievable, and it transformed the city from rubble into a majestic place that say world class city was then is now. These were government projects for the average person.
You know.
Harding Park wasn't supposed to be a private country club. It wasn't a private country club. It was a public golf course played by ordinary people.
I mean it was built in nineteen twenty five, so it's ninety five years old as it hosts a major for the first time. I'm Ron Kroutzcheck and I cover golf for the San Francisco Chronicle. But it was built in nineteen twenty five. Kind of a glorious era for golf course architecture. You know, think about all the courses. You know, the same architects who built Harding built Olympic
Club right across the lake. And that was an era in the twenties and thirties when Alistair mackenzie was building tons of courses in northern California from Cyprus Point up to Meadow Club, and golf was really in an incredible, gross spurt and incredible period of architecture.
If you talk to a knowledgeable San Francisco golfer like Ron krotzcheck about the original design of Harding Park, you'll probably hear a lot about how the course is routed. That is the path it takes through the property.
You know, it starts out on the inside. All the first nine holes are all in the inner part of the course, and then the back nine kind of weaves around the perimeter. And as you go from ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, thirteen green your first view of Lake Merced and then fourteen fifteen sixteen all the way down the strets is along the lake and it sort of builds in exhilaration I guess is probably the best word. And then eighteen is the shot over the neck of the lake, and it's.
That kind of crescendo, if you will, where the music picks up, the tempo picks up. Great golf courses all have this sense of pace. It's like listening to a piece of music, except you get to walk through it. And it's a layout that from the day it opened to today has always produced great golf. It's produced exciting golf, and the people who have won there have been great golfers, and.
It goes all the way back to future major champions like George Archer and Johnny Miller and Ken Venturrey and Bob Rosberg kind of San Francisco's Grand Slam right there. Growing up on the course, Ken Venturrey's father actually ran the pro shop for many years at Harding and Venturi played Harvey Ward, who was US Amateur champion, in the title match of the San Francisco City Championship in the
fifties and there were ten thousand fans out there. It was front page news and the chronicle the next day, and that really added another layer of prestige to the course.
With golf's popularity soaring. The city decided to make an addition to the facility.
In the original layout for Harding, there was an interior gap in the architecture that was just if you will open pasture. They were practice holes. People used to go out and hit balls there. Ken Venturi's one of the great examples, Harvey Ward two. They'd go out there with their own balls and they'd beat them until dark. But here they had this area right inside Harding where they could put nine holes in for a short course. It was supervised by Jack Fleming, who was the golf superin
Tenant in San Francisco. He was on Alistair Mackenzie's crew years ago, and they named it in his honor. They called it the Jack Fleming nine. And it was a damn good little golf course. Then there something else happened. In the nineteen sixties early sixties. They started playing the Lucky International, and that was where I first saw Arnold Palmer, and he was playing my golf course, and Jack Nicholas was playing my golf course, and so was Gary player In,
George Archer and all those other great players. And to know that you could go out there on Saturday morning and play the same course that they played well, that took on a whole other meeting. You can't really describe that in words. It's a feeling you have in your heart. That's what makes places like Harding Park stick out so vividly in your memory. It's knowing that you played where they played.
There was that pride among regular golfers, that this was a special place, that this was not just another public course, and that you know, as San Franciscans, they needed to protect that when that's what Harding sort of represented. I think golf's available to common players and common people. It's not an elitist It doesn't always have to be an elitist sport. You don't have to belong to a country
club to have a good golf experience. And it was really, you know, a jewel of a municipal course then before it kind of fell into neglect.
What happened to Harding Park in the seventies, eighties and nineties. How do you explain that and what did you observe?
Well, at some point, I think the city had enough people tugging on its budget with other needs, which are all legitimate needs. Money just got diverted and Harding Park got forgotten. And after that the course sadly fell into a very bad state of disrepair. And when I say bad, I mean really really bad. If you look at pictures of what happened, there were completely dried up fairways with
huge fissures in them. It was almost like there was another earthquake that came along, but just the ground dried up. The clubhouse was run down. I mean there was open wiring everywhere, not behind walls. Things were taped to counters. There were no computers back then. It was a pretty broken down operation.
You know.
It was so sad that this had happened to a golf course that was so great. And there came this movement that said, we've got a history here, We've got something that's been handed down to us. It's worth saving. And the one person with whom that message resonates more than anybody else was my friend Sandy Tatum. When I think of Sandy Tatum, I think of the most complete human being I've ever met. The pedigree looks like this. He went to Stanford. He won the NCAA individual golf championship,
his team won the team championship. He was selected to be a Rhodes Scholar. He was educated then at Oxford and earned a degree there. He came back to the United States and became a lawyer. He became the president of the United States Golf Association. He played amateur golf competitively all his life. And when you spoke to Sandy, here's a man who spoken full sentences, not phrases. There were no catch words. It was a complete thought. And you might ask him a question and there might be
a pause. That's because he was actually thinking of his answer. And when you got that answer, you drew back on. You said, this guy really knows what he's talking about.
Do you have any specific memories of playing with him at Harding Park.
I played a lot of rounds of go off with Sandy Tatum, but the most memorable was in the first t tournament that's held every year, and this one year he invited me to play with him and with Harris Barton, who's retired from the forty nine ers, And so they stick this young guy with us, young stockbroker, nice kids, about twenty three years old. We're going out, we're having a good time, and it starts to rain on about the seventh hole, and we're going up the ninth fairway,
and Harris Barton leans over to me. He says, hey, bo, I think I'm gonna stop after nine holes. Could you ask Sandy if it's okay? And I said, Harris, you're an all pro offensive lineman. You ask Sandy if it's okay. And he didn't have the balls to do it. So I went up to Tatum and I said, you know, Harris is thinking to stop, and Sandy just you didn't get mad or he says, hell, if he wants to stop, let him stop. We're going to keep going, aren't we. I said, yeah, So Harris drops out. We go along.
We played ten eleven and it's really coming down. I've got some rain gear, Sandy's got some rain gear, but this kid has nothing. And the kid is tripping wet. And so we get to the twelve hole and Sandy, at the age of you know, ninety, he can still crack the golf ball. It echoes off his club face still and he just smokes one out there and this kid kind of hits kind of weak fade to the right and we're looking for his ball in there, and I can see he's kind of dejected, and I say, Son,
you're pretty wet. You've just been out hit by somebody who's about sixty five years older than you are. Why don't you go in? He takes off. Now it's me and Tatum and a caddy. We play two more holes and the sun comes out and Sandy pars the fourteenth hole, four hundred and seventy yard par four at the age of about ninety and he turns me. He says, links, this is why we stay out here. That's Sandy Tatum. That's playing golf with Sandy Tatum.
He never quits, And in the late nineteen nineties, the man who never quits set out to save Harding Park. At first, Sandy Tatum made quick progress. He was well connected both in golf and politics, and soon he had the PGA Tour on board. Commissioner Tim Fincham agreed to hold a future event at the new Harding Park. Tatum also got San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown involved and started
to make allies in the city's parks department. But ultimately it was the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that would have to approve the renovation, and the supervisors, along with their neighborhood constituencies, weren't exactly gung.
Ho okay, so Shan Eilsborn. I am now San Francisco Mayor London Breachs chief of Staff, but at the time of the Harding Park renovation, I was a legislative aid to then Supervisor Tony Hall, and the district he represented is the district that included Harding Park. Of course, you
had a lot of different constituencies out there. You had your old guard that liked the fact that they could pull up at seven point thirty, drop five bucks, play eighteen holes, have lunch, maybe drop another five bucks, play another eighteen holes, and they were the club and don't mess with what we got. It was their country club.
That was a very loud constituency. And then you had the plenty of folks who would look at us and say, wait a second, We're going to invest tens of millions of dollars in that rich white men's sport when I've got swings in the Southeast sector that aren't rusty and falling apart.
Shaan Alsburn's boss, Supervisor Tony Hall, basically agreed with those complaints, especially the ones from the Harding Park regulars.
I mean, he had gotten elected in a very difficult race and Some of his biggest supporters were Harding Park Men's Club folks, and they were in his ear. That was really the only perspective that he had, and it got framed initially as privatization of the municipal course give away to the PGA, and that initial I remember well, that initial hearing was a late afternoon.
And it was just bad.
He's talking about a subcommittee meeting in spring two thousand and one when the Board of Supervisors first considered Sandy Tatum's proposal.
It's a committee room, there's an elevated daist. Tony was a member of the committee three supervisors. But it was Tony's show, so they just let him run the healing and Tony Tony was not a quiet guy. If he had a problem, you knew it, and he liked to point out problems. And there was also an element of Tony as a bit of a showman, and Tony was playing to the crowd and Sandy came in in his beautiful suit. The koif Taire, the Stanford vocabulary, the Rhodes scholar, right,
he was a Rhodes scholar. I think the Rhodes scholar vocabulary and the charm of an old world gentlemen versus these guys who were showing up in there. Ben Davies and their forty nine or war ra looked like they had all played earlier in the day and were looking to get out of the hearing to go play once more. And there were probably fifteen to twenty of that group who came and denounced Wrecking Park, who denounced Sandy, who denounced the PGA. This is our course, no privatization. Believe
it as it is. And Sandy got up there by himself and tried to make a pitch. And you know, he and Tony really hadn't met yet. I don't think Tony had any real appreciation for who Sandy was and what he had done in his life. Tony was a bit abrupt cut him off, and Sandy did not win that room that day. But Sandy was, as always the perfect gentleman, and he didn't burn any bridges, he didn't take any personal lumbridge.
And Sandy, aside from being probably the smartest man I ever met, he's also the most determined man I ever met. And he wasn't going to take no for an answer. And one of the things that was very important to him is that golf isn't just a game you play, it's a life you live, and the game will teach you things about yourself that if you learn those things and adapt those things to your daily life, you will become a better citizen. And that's where the idea emerged for the First Tea.
The proposal became not only to renovate the golf course, but to establish a chapter of the First Tea at Harding Park. Now, back then, the First Tea was new on the scene of youth programming. The idea was to teach golf as well as values and to reach out to underrepresented communities.
We're not building a golf course building a school. We have to change the culture. We have to change the world. And one of the ways we change is one young person at a time, and the First T can do that. It was central to the mission of Harding Park. Harding Park is central to the mission of the First T And so slowly and with increasing speed, the movement built.
And one of the things Sandy asked me to help him with, and I wasn't the only one, mind you, was when there was going to be a meeting, he says, can you turn out the troops and what he really meant was, can you turn out folks so we'll get up to that microphone and say we need this. That coupled with the first tea and the people who would use that, you started to create something, not all at once, but with a momentum that built. Where do you want to be on the right side of history or the
wrong side of history? And in San Francisco people slowly warmed up to the concept.
And then, you know, I think we also caught a little fire. As much as Sandy was absolutely a big part of this, I think Harding Park also became a beneficiary of the early two thousands Tiger Woods phenomenon.
Right.
I don't think we were the only course that benefited from him being all over the place. And yeah, Tony turned a little bit of a corner and saw what the benefits could be and then became a great champion of pushing it forward.
The big question was who's paying for it? The board of supervisors didn't want to pay for it. I understand that. I mean, I like it. I understand that Sandy didn't
like it. He understood it. So he set out to find some way to stitch together the financing and this Open Space Fund was there, and he had a liaison in the City Attorney's office who was keen on the idea that this could be a great use of this money that could have a lasting impact because of the first t program, and so they got the money component put together. What I haven't mentioned yet is when you have a venue like Hearting that can be a major
draw for professional competition. It's the revenue it brings into the city. Look at the economic benefits, tourism, the exposure to have San Francisco flashing on television screens all over the world. That you don't have to buy that coverage, you get it for free. Now, Yes, it's a city asset. Yes there's an investment in keeping it up and restoring
it and all that. But investments pay dividends. And that's how we got all these golfers, non golfers, hotel promoters, tourism operators, unions, everybody to get on board and say this project we want to get behind, we want to see this happen. Let's go and lo and behold. Sandy got his golf course.
In two thousand and two. The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the renovation plan, but plenty of San Franciscans were still unhappy.
I'd say one of the trickiest components of the whole thing was dealing with the golfers at Harding Park because what they feared legitimately was the spike in greensvies. And I'd be less than candid if I didn't acknowledge there are people who are still upset about that.
I don't think they ever got over it. I think they're I mean, frankly, what's it been fifteen almost twenty years. I'll still run into a couple of those folks, just say, on the neighborhood corn or whatever, and still get the dirty looks. People are still.
Upset, whether they liked it or not. Though Harding Park was going to become something new.
And the PGA Tour had a guy named Chris Gray who came in and made some subtle changes that were significant. But this is basically the same golf course with some a little bit of new bunkering and obviously new new green complexes, but where the old greens were and basically took what were great bones and put new skin on the frame, and you just came out with a golf course that we all knew when we watched it being reborn how great it was going to be. But you
never know until you give it a test. You know you can build the best car. She got to turn the key and put it on the road and see how it handles. And that road test, that moment, that day, that time was two thousand and five when the AMX Championship came to San Francisco.
The World Golf Championships, American Express Championship. Take the top fifty golfers in the world, let them in a fascinating city on a legendary public golf facility, Harding Park golf.
Course, and nobody knew what was going to happen. Were they gonna shoot twenty under? Were they gonna shoot even par? Were they gonna laugh at the golf course? Would it be not up to snuff condition wise? Nobody knew, and we all know now what happened. You had what has to be one of the great competitions in the history of the PGA Tour. Tiger Woods and John Daly. You couldn't have had a greater contrast, a greater sense of excitement.
It just needs to get it on the green.
Would be old right at it it's gonna be Oh, it's.
A great shot, a quick backspin.
Nine o clowd goes not standing ovation.
You know. One of the things that I said when we were getting ready for the last round, somebody asked me how I describe it, and I say, you're not going to measure this thing with a calculator. You'll measure it with a voltage meter. The roars, the excitement in the crowd. They loved Daily just as much as they loved Tiger. To have an end the way it did when he missed that little three footer on the third playoff hole.
Was kind of sad, and Tiger Woods wins this American Express Championship.
But it was a great competition and left incredible memories in everybody's head.
Bo was in the press tent that week and he had a question for John Daily.
And I said, Hey, John, what would you say if someone told you that when they played the Open at Olympic they parked cars at Harding Park. And he said, if he asked me, they ought to play the Open at Harden and park the cars at Olympic. And he just he loved Hearten and he, like everybody else, just couldn't believe what had happened, And when he learned that, he said, how did they turn this around so fast? Only two words? Sandy Tatum, So.
What do you what do you hope out of the of the PGA Championship.
Well, number one, I hope it's a dramatic finish, and number two, I hope we get a great champion. It's going to be another test to see what Harding Park produces, and my prediction is it will produce greatness as it all.
So that's one possible way to end the story. But with city golf, things are never that simple. This is where I should lay my cards on the table. I lived in San Francisco for three years and I played my share of rounds at Harding Park or what's now known as TPC Harding Park. I don't think it's a great work of golf course design. Now I hear what bo Links and ron Kreutzchek are saying about the drama of the closing stretch on Lake Mercaid and the quality
of champions. It's produced no arguments there, but I wish the course had more whole to whole variety, more interesting greens. I wish it were just more fun to play. I mean nine times out of ten, I'd rather go to the municipal courses at Lincoln Park or McLaren Park. But you know what, that's just my opinion. The fact that Harding Park has been popular for ninety five year speaks
for itself. But the more important point is that golf courses are more than architecture, and few of them demonstrate that point more clearly than Harding Park.
I've heard so many people try to knock what Harding isn't. Oh, it doesn't have all this amazing architecture, and the greens aren't that complex.
They're very basic.
It's not about the course itself or the architecture. It's about the sense of community that it has within the fabric of San Francisco, a world class city.
Yeah.
My name is Joe Shasky, the third fifth generation San Franciscan, lifelong lover of sports here in the Bay Area. I host the show on ninety five to seven in the Game, but my dream round is me my grandfather who lives right down the street from me, My father, and my brother, and we play all over the city and the immediate Bay area every single weekend.
Joe's Memories of Harding Park go back to his childhood.
Like my dad would take this out there in the early evenings after baseball. My dad's a good golfer and we only had like a club or two, me and my brother, some sowd off clubs, and we would just hit the ball and he would say, hey, by the time I get to the green, your ball better beyond the green, like pick it up and run here or figure it out. And so that's what we grew up thinking Harding was.
Today, Harding Park looks different, but in many important ways it's exactly the same.
When I go out to Harding, I usually play the Fleming nine every Friday with my grandfather, and to me, it's one of the greatest places in the world because my eighty five year old grandfather can get around in an hour and a half. And if you're living a busy city life where you're coaching and your kids are going to school and you're working multiple jobs, it's hard to squeeze five six hours of golf into a normal work week. It's just it's really difficult. And that's where
Harding comes into play. I take my nephews and my niece's out there. They're all part of the first Tea program. You get to see all kinds of the representation of golf. Which makes it so special for me is seeing all ages, all demographics, a financial backgrounds, and it just is a melting pot, just like the city of San Francisco is for golf.
And yet, to say the least, not everyone in San Francisco feels the same way about city golf.
I'm Sasha Perago, and I'm a housing justice advocate and a housing columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. Yeah, so, honestly, I'm pretty unfamiliar with Harding Park. I've never been to the park. It doesn't necessarily have a lot of emotional wheat because of that, and I think to some people who don't use golf courses sometimes when they do encounter them, it does feel a little bit exclusionary.
Back in May, as golf courses in San Francisco were reopening in the midst of the COVID nineteen pandemic, Sasha Perago wrote an article titled keep SF Golf Courses closed. The subhead golf courses are an inefficient use of land and money that could be better used for housing.
To me, I see my column more as raising questions for people less than specific policy proposals. So there were questions in that like should golf be managed by the city at all? Should golf exist in cities at all? I would not argue that golf should not exist in cities at all. My argument would be, do we necessarily
need six city owned golf courses? Could the parks in rec department either redevelop one of those into a park that, like, more people in the city would use, or maybe even affordable housing tell me a little.
Bit about the urgency of the affordable housing problem in San Francisco right now.
So, from twenty ten to twenty eighteen, the city added two hundred thousand jobs total and just twenty four thousand new housing unit. And so a study by the Kaiser Marsten Associates estimates that eighteen two hundred and twenty nine units affordable to low wage households will need to be built between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty six in order to match the projected job growth for low wage workers.
And so only nine hundred and seventy four units have been built so far, and so that's just five percent of the amount we need. So in the next six years, we need to build almost eighteen thousand units specifically of affordable subsidized housing to make sure the problem doesn't get worse.
On top of that, when rent control departments change hands, landlords get to reset the rates, and the market rates in San Francisco right now, yeah, they're pretty high.
To conclude, not only do we have a huge shortage, not only is the shortage getting worse, but we're actually in some cases in some neighborhoods losing affordable units faster than we're building them. And kind of like the reason that people target golf courses in specific for affordable housing is, first of all, obviously they take up a lot of
land in the city. I was really surprised when doing like the back of the Napkin calculations for writing this column that when you include the private golf courses, my understanding is there's nine and private within the city limits, and that actually counts for five percent of the city's land mass, which I was really surprised by. So I think my question would be that is that too much?
And also there's been a lot of coverage about how the cost of development in San Francisco is higher than anywhere else in the nation, and one of those costs is land and so when you're looking at city owned land already, you get to skip that cost, and therefore the cost of develop is lower, rents are lower. It might be more financially feasible for the city to develop affordable housing on that property.
Obviously, this would all be more complicated to do than to say, golf course land would have to be rezoned for one thing, and then the city would somehow have to pay for it all.
We just don't have the money to build. If we rezoned all the golf courses and said we were going to redevelop golf courses and made more space to build, we would need to do that in order to close the numbers that we have. But if we did that, we wouldn't be able to develop on them today anyways, because we don't have the money. If we took out Harding Park, we would not be able to build affordable housing on that right now.
So the question is more about ideals. What kind of city should San Francisco be and should it devote as much space as it does to golf.
There is a moral question of like how do we use what is the best way to use every space.
I think it's ignorance talking about that.
It's not a good use of the land because I think if you went out there and you actually watched what people were actually playing the game of golf at these different facilities community specifically, I don't think you would get the stuffy, rich white kind of stereotype that we're accustomed to.
Maybe people see it as a little bit exclusionary because it's like, oh, this land isn't for me, this is land that like wealthy people use.
I can't tell you how many people I've met from different walks of life, from lawyers to police officers to community activists, everybody going out there playing golf.
It's the one thing that brings everyone together.
I do think there's a lot of misconceptions, Like you're saying about who golfs. I think that people think of it as a very wealthy white person sport, and I'm hearing you say that that's not always true.
African American, Asian American.
You're gonna get old irishmen, you're gonna get old Italians, you're gonna get women, you're gonna get.
Older senior citizens, young people.
So from your perspective, do you think the number of city owned golf courses in San Francisco makes sense.
You have all of these different areas and all the many different parks all throughout the city, so many different areas that aren't even being utilized by the youth or adults, or or people of any age.
I feel like we're picking on.
Golf, and so one thing is you could make that feel more accessible to people in this exclusionary And this is.
Where I tell people.
I challenge you to come out and just stay at the clubhouse, hang out at the first tea, hang out at the eighteenth hole, and just see.
The people that are coming by.
I guarantee you if you go out to Harding Park, you're going to see a group of golfers that does not represent the stereotype that so many people have in their minds.
I think that a lot of people are under there's a lot of understandably, a lot of anger about class issues in San Francisco.
There's the halves and then there's kind of like the have not, so there really isn't a middle class.
I think disproportionately golfers are white and male, But I do think it just becomes an easy target of class anger. Class based anger.
I grew up lower middle class and we didn't have a whole lot of outlets. We would just show up to the park and play ball, and that's what we had. Will they befunded all of those after school programs, and there really isn't a lot of things to do for people who can do stuff on a budget.
I think sports and recreation are disproportionally used by wealthier white people. It's frustrating for me, and that's sad, and more people should have access to that because I think there is obviously a lot of very gent, instrainable health and happiness benefits to getting outside and participating in any sport whatever it is.
None of my buddies so we got a lot of golfer friends that go all every single week and go somewhere around the city. None of them are country club guys, yet they all want to go out, bang the ball around for forty bucks and have a great three hours where they can decompress, you know, turn the cell phone off, and not think about the stresses of their normal life and their family and things like that.
They just want to go out and have fun. That's the outlet that golf gives us all.
I'm not against the Parts and Rex Department giving people affordable chances to golf. I think that's fantastic that we have to consider who in the city is not receiving any baseline services at all. And I do just think, you know, golf, the optics of golf are just particularly stark.
So there is a valid discussion about equitable and proportional land use. I get it. But where you have to at least start the discussion in a community like San Francisco is with your existing physical plant. The golf courses are there. If we were starting from scratch, these courses probably wouldn't be built because people would find other things they want. But they were built and they are there, and the question is are we going to preserve them?
Are we going to preserve our history? Are we going to preserve these things that have been so beneficial to us. It's an ongoing discussion. You have to just view it not just from an insular I'm a golfer. It's from a perspective of this is my community, what do I want it to look like? What do I want here? And if you had a community that didn't have any golf courses, that would be a pretty hollow community. To me,
I probably wouldn't want to live there. Now maybe somebody else does, and so yeah, the market's going to choose. And to golfers who like their municipal golf courses, stand up for them, fight for them, because if you don't, they won't be there.
This was the eighth episode of Frida Egg Stories. It was produced and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with editing and engineering by Jay Verrick. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Big thanks to Ron Krouchik, Shawn Elsbern, Joe Shasky, Sasha Parago, and bow Linx. Bo by the Way is the author of several books, including the novel Follow the Wind and a collection of golf poems. Thanks for listening.