“Do you realize that you just spent two hours totally destroying a bed of desert wildflowers?” Richard Bermudez was the Vice President of American Golf Corporation and oversaw golf course maintenance of the company’s entire portfolio. I had noticed him watching me intently over the past hour so I really made sure that I did the most thorough job ever of clearing the area of “weeds”. “I thought they were weeds.” I replied. The year was 1991 and I was working on the golf course maintenance crew at Painted Desert Golf Club in Las Vegas. As the above conversation indicates I was not very good at what I was doing. Bermudez said, “I don’t think we can afford to have you on our maintenance crew. There is an opening over at Sahara Country Club for a Head Golf Professional/Tournament Director. Take the day off tomorrow and go interview… and please leave the flowers alone.”
Bermudez must have put in a good word for me as I was hired immediately at the Sahara Country Club. For some reason, Painted Desert did not want any notice and allowed me to leave their employ the next day. I think that if I had stayed much longer at Painted Desert that they would have had to change the name to just Desert. The Sahara CC, now Las Vegas National was one of the original courses in Las Vegas and being located just two miles from the Las Vegas Strip it was very popular with both tourists and locals. It is a true Championship Course having hosted both PGA and LPGA tournaments. As I started to work, the sheer volume of golf outings that the course hosted almost overwhelmed me. My predecessor had not kept up with the job so I had over 100 contracts to send out that required an old fashioned typewriter and triplicate copies. I dug in with exuberance, as I was better at this than I was working on a maintenance crew. Over the next year we were a very successful operation that was becoming more successful as the Dunes Golf Club and Tropicana Country Club were bulldozed to make room for the Bellagio and the MGM Grand resorts. I had been at the Sahara CC for less than a year when the GM of the property, Gary Klein, dropped a bombshell that would change my professional career. “Bruce, the company is moving me to Phoenix where we have several new properties coming on board. This place needs a full time General Manager and I choose you.” This was September of 1992 and the course was starting to get inquiries several years in advance from many of the events that had played at the Tropicana and the Dunes. We had already taken our Green Fees from $65 to $75 and still we seemed to be turning people away. As I assumed the duties of GM the natural market pressures of decreased supply of golf courses and increased supply of rooms continued to drive fees upward every three months. In less than a year we were a $100 golf course. At this time, I was blessed to have a Regional Manager and true leader named Steve Harker (currently President & CEO of Touchstone Golf). He became very involved in the Las Vegas market but really let me take the reins and fly. He suggested that we needed to find a way to keep our local clientele to fill times in the summer and to fill early morning tee times that tourists in Las Vegas typically shied away from. I don’t generally like to take credit for good ideas but since I received the kudos I will on this one. We created a club for Las Vegas residents with a newspaper ad that screamed “Free Golf”. For $100 a local resident could purchase a card that allowed them to make tee times 3 days in advance and pay a much-reduced rate. When purchasing the card they received a “Free” round of golf. We made it a true club and partnered with Las Vegas Golf Magazine to mail their magazine to our members with a monthly newsletter and special offers just for our members. Since we sold 1,000 of these cards in July and August ($100,000 in sales) Steve Harker was very happy. As a reward he sent my wife and I on a trip to Pebble Beach with a room at the lodge overlooking the 18th green. The golf portion of that trip will have to wait for another story. While working under the guidance of Harker the property flourished. The course changed its name to Las Vegas Hilton Country Club, hosted the Re/Max Long Drive Championship and the PGA Tour Las Vegas Invitational and boosted green fees to $145. This was a fun, almost giddy time of working 70 hour weeks and loving it because success occurred daily and trips to Pebble Beach aside Steve Harker knew the value of simply saying, “Thank you. Nice job team.” By 1996, Harker was reassigned and the magic, at least for me, ended. For four years I had been given goals and it had been up to me and my team to figure out how to achieve those goals. The new regional manager gave me similar goals and told me how he wanted them achieved. I might have missed out on another good mentor but at the time it felt like the difference between driving a team of horses 70 hours a week and pulling a wagon 70 hours a week. I like to drive.
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