It is not likely that Gleneagles Golf Course will ever end up on the golf industry's blacklist of closed courses any time soon.
The city-owned course in one of San Francisco's roughest neighborhoods has had every excuse to fail. It doesn't receive the same support as Harding Park or Sharp Park, the other municipal courses in the city's golf portfolio. Crime in the neighborhood is rampant. Tom Hsieh, who holds the management contract on the course doesn't have near the resources - in equipment or manpower - as other city course.
Despite those challenges, golfers come back day after day, month after month, year after year.
For nearly a year now, disc golfers also have been paying the nine-hole stick golf rate to play at Gleneagles. During the recent Memorial Day weekend, the course, which opened in 1962, was the site of the San Francisco Open professional disc golf event.
And get this, people, hundreds of them, paid Hsieh $10 each over three days to walk the course to watch the event. Hundreds of people, not thousands, walking along and talking with the sport's biggest names, Hsieh thought, might be similar to what other emerging sports went through as they slowly caught on with the masses.
"This is a niche sport with a lot of potential," Hsieh said. "This must be what golf was like in the '50s when you could walk along with people like Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer."
Unlike the city-owned courses at Harding Park and Sharp Park, Gleneagles at McLaren Park has struggled on San Francisco's east side. The city doesn't fund it, like it does the other two courses. So the property that is in one of the city's worst crime zones must stand alone, and Hsieh has tried many different things to make sure it does.
He brought in disc golf about a year ago, after watching a steady stream of players flood into Golden Gate Park on the city's west side. He even started playing it to see what all the hubbub was about.
"I'd been watching it for 10 years. I live next to the only other disc golf facility in the city, and I drive past it every day," Hsieh said. "I watched the crowds grow bigger and bigger, and so I started to play myself to see what I could learn about it. Then I started to wonder if there were any disc golf courses on stick golf courses, and would people pay to play it."
Turns out they will.
After about a year, disc golf comprises 5 percent to 6 percent of Gleneagles' gross income."I'm not saying this is for everyone. I'm sure it's not," Hsieh said. "But we've hit a home run.
"It's not a lot, but it's another 40 bags of fertilizer for a second application. It's another few thousand units of water on the grass."
Although Hsieh already is in talks with the Professional Disc Golf Association about coming back to Gleneagles in 2019, getting the course to where it could host an event like the SFO was no small feat.
Setting up an 18-hole disc golf course within Gleneagles' existing routing cost between $15,000-$20,000, none of which Hsieh had just lying around a year ago. Familiar with the concept of crowdfunding, but unfamiliar with it in practice, Hsieh started a page through Indiegogo and to his surprise, raised $10,000 within the first 72 hours. Within three weeks, and against the wishes of park officials, he had the money needed to carve out a course in Gleneagles' out-of-play areas with the help of disc golf course architect Leonard Muise.
Hsieh had three goals when building the disc golf course within Gleneagles.
"I wanted to make it compatible with Gleneagles, I wanted to attract interim to advanced disc golfers, because that is the kind of traditional golfer who comes here, and I wanted to make it championship length so we could attract a major tournament," he said. "This week, we checked off the last of those. We had about 70 percent of the world's top 150 disc golfers, and we've only had disc golf open since June 2017. The locals love it and so did the pros because we have elevation changes and how it winds through the cypress trees. It plays exactly like the stick golf course does, and it sucks players into the out-of-bounds areas where we as golfers never go anyway."
For those curious about who has the right of way when the traditional golf and disc golf worlds collide at Gleneagles, the answer is simple.
"We are a golf course, first and foremost, and we will always be one. Traditional golfers are my first priority," Hsieh said. "We have asked the disc golf community to teel off after 11 a.m., and if they are holding up golfers in any way, to let them through. It has worked extremely well, and our stick golfers have been incredibly supportive."
We are one less statistic that gets rung up in 2018, and there are going to be a lot of them. You can take our name off that list."
Hsieh has prior experience with emerging sports. In the 1980s, he founded the first trade magazine to cover the snowboarding industry. In those days, snowboarding was looked down upon by the skiing industry. As interest in traditional skiing waned, and slopes and retailers found it harder and harder to make ends meet, it wasn't long until the fledgling snowboarding industry sport was credited with bailing out its snooty cousin.
"I remember when snowboarding was a new upstart sport, and we were fighting to get onto ski resorts," Hsieh said. "They didn't like kids, the urban influence or the music. That went on for a long time, and we finally started getting on at mom-and-pop resorts. Skiing started losing its appeal, and new generations weren't going skiing. Everyone who was snowboarding was 15 to 20 years old, and that's who was missing from skiing. We knew then it was going to be big, bigger than skiing. Disc golfers feel the same way."
Hsieh lobbed a lot of the credit for the professional disc golf event's success to tournament director Sean Jack, who convinced him Gleneagles was the perfect venue for such an event.
"He told me we could make it as big as we want it to get," Hsieh said. "I'm a guy who's trying anything and everything to survive. We have traditional golf, foot golf and disc golf and a training academy for our workers. Nothing is too outside-the-box for me."
Indeed, Hsieh has a history of doing things differently at Gleneagles.
Since 2015, Hsieh has been working with a local labor union in the Bay area to provide unskilled labor in a pre-apprentice program that provides training and hope for at-risk residents from one of the city's worst neighborhoods. It also provides Hsieh with low- to no-cost labor and the satisfaction that comes with knowing he's doing something to help those who need it most.
And as golf courses continue to close at a startling pace while the industry seeks supply-demand equilibrium, such innovative programs help Hsieh keep Gleneagles off that growing list.
"I'm not saying I have all the answers. But for $20,000 I raised through crowdfunding, I have completely flipped my small business model," he said. "It's also taken some creativity and some risk-taking, but it has ensured that Gleneagles can make it into the near future, and that's a big deal. We are one less statistic that gets rung up in 2018, and there are going to be a lot of them. You can take our name off that list."