If Harding Park appears to be a cut above the city’s
other munis, it is. It’ll host the ’20 PGA Championship.before the challenges of running it. Pick
your favorite poison. Budget-cuts, droughts,
soaring water bills. In recent decades,
Gleneagles has endured them all.
“This is really the story of a course that
would not die,” Tom Hsieh says. “So many
forces have conspired to kill us, it’s amazing
that we’re still around.”
It’s a Tuesday morning, and Hsieh, a
fiftysomething San Francisco native who
leases Gleneagles from the city, is standing
by the clubhouse, a low-slung building with
a time-capsule bar that was patterned on a
Scottish pub. Inside, two off-duty firemen are
downing whiskey. On the first tee, a fivesome
of seniors, all cargo pants and denim, is setting
off on their regular skins game. Otherwise,
there’s not a whole lot doing.
From our elevated vantage, several
fairways are in view, yellowed from the heat.
But the greens are green. A few years back,
Hsieh bootstrapped a renovation of them
with pro-bono help from the superintendent
of the California Golf Club, a prestigious,
nearby private course. The upgrade gave
Gleneagles a much-need boost. Hsieh has
taken other creative measures, including the
addition of Frisbee golf. But creative measures
only go so far when maintenance costs keep
rising and the city has him locked in on the
$20 greens fees he can charge.
“You give me the money to do this right
and I’ll give you an absolutely world-class
course,” Hsieh says. Long pause. “But I’m
not holding my breath.”
So it goes for munis. Existential crises are a
way of life. Sharp Park only recently escaped
one, despite a pedigree that you’d think might
protect it from such threats. Owned by the city
of San Francisco but located just south of the
city limits, in the surf town of Pacifica, Sharp is
a rarity of rarities: a seaside, Alister Mackenzie
course, open to the public at a modest price.
None of which prevented an environmental
group from suing to have the course shut
down. The fight dragged on for years before
resolving in favor of the golfers. A push is
underway now to rustle up the financing for
long-deferred course improvements, but
bureaucracies aren’t easy. Many say that it
will happen; no one knows just when.
Clarence Bryant will be happy if it does.
Then again, Clarence Bryant is pleased
with golf in almost any shape it takes. At
the moment, he’s at Lincoln, moving up the
seventh fairway, toward a high point of the
course with commanding vistas that take
in the downtown skyline. Time was when
the TransAmerica Pyramid was the tallest
building, a noted landmark, as much an
emblem of the city as Alcatraz. But last year
it was dwarfed by another structure, the
Salesforce Tower, a gleaming edifice of glass
and steel that looks to some like a giant cigar
but is seen by others as an obscene gesture:
the architectural equivalent of the super-
rich flipping everyone the bird.
Bryant has no beef with the building.
“Cities change,” he says. “That’s just what
they do.”
Meantime, he has the munis, and he might
as well enjoy them. They’re not making them
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