The author spent two weeks working and living with the strange family that runs a bucolic but financially strapped nine-hole golf course in Ottawa, Ill. Winner of 2003 Peter Lisagor Award from the American Society of Professional Journalists.
By David Murray
On one cold and rainy afternoon in late May, the general manager of Pine Hills Golf Club sat in the quiet clubhouse and declared that this year’s Mike “Pro” Sipula Memorial Invitational golf tournament—the 55th annual—might be the last.
To the few men who happened to be sitting there, Jim Sipula might as well have said the world was coming to an end.
The world, to the Sipula men, is a nine-hole golf course just south of the Illinois River Valley, in Ottawa, Ill.
I first heard about Pine Hills Golf Club almost 10 years ago. A golfing buddy had discovered it—and the tournament that’s the pride of Pine Hills—in the process of playing the central-Illinois circuit known informally as the “Manure Tour.” He persuaded me to make the nearly two-hour drive from Chicago by promising that Pine Hills would offer the smoothest greens of any public golf course I’d ever played.
I probably fell in love with the golf course before I ever saw it. Just getting to the course from Interstate 80 is a trip through geological time and American history. Rt. 23 leads you down into the lush Illinois River Valley, through old Ottawa and past Washington Park, where the first Lincoln-Douglas debate took place. Then, over the bridge spanning Illinois River just a few hundred yards from where Fox River comes in. Then another mile south, across a couple of cornfields and over a set of old railroad tracks. That’s where you turn right and wind around and down into the natural bowl where the golf course is.
Pine Hills is a bowl of golf.
Many lovers of the outdoors scoff at the notion of a manicured golf course as nature, but in contrast with the cramped, house-lined urban and suburban layouts to which I, along with most American golfers, have become accustomed, Pine Hills is natural solitude itself.
Bordered on three sides by infinite woods and high shale bluffs and the wild Kovell Creek, Pine Hills is always peaceful. And on some days and in some moments, it’s impossibly charming.
In the morning sunlight, for instance, walking off of the sixth green and noticing a smoky carpet of bluebells disappearing deep into the forest. At noon, waiting to tee off on the eighth hole as two young boys climb out of the trees with fishing poles and tackle boxes after a morning of fishing in the creek. In the middle of the afternoon, playing up the first hole for the third time today, noticing a wild turkey taking shade in the trees next to the green. Near sunset, trudging down the ninth hole for the fourth and last time, watching an untethered dog galloping free down the ninth fairway.
And always, Pine Hills is hushed: no sounds except for the clinking of your clubs as you walk, the singing of the birds and the occasional thwack of a golf shot, echoing through the trees.
And yes: the smoothest greens of any public golf course I’ve ever played.
In short, this little golf course in Ottawa, Ill., is just about my favorite place in the world to be.
So with the vague notion that I wanted to write an article about the place, I asked the Sipula family if I might help get the golf course ready for the Invitational. They said yes—and then put me to work.
***
Pine Hills is a textbook example of the many homey, family-run golf courses that once dominated the U.S. public golf scene—the kind of course where you don’t need to make a tee time, the kind of pro shop that looks more fondly on playing cards than credit cards. The kind of course where, as John Updike once wrote, “workingmen, children, retirees, and housewives of modest social pretension lose themselves in the bliss and aggravation of the sport.”
At the same time, Pine Hills harbors the classic snootiness of the upscale golf course. Not the kind of high-society snootiness that predisposes many egalitarian-minded people to despise the game. Running a public golf course in the country, the Polish/Czech Sipula clan could never get away with social pretensions, and they would rightly bridle at the notion that they do.
But the Sipulas do work under the old-fashioned assumption that golf is a game that separates the disciplined, the refined, the precise men and women in this world from the coarse and clumsy and lazy among us. Thus, a sensitive customer at Pine Hills will quickly ascertain that, though he may be accepted by the Sipulas no matter how he plays golf, he’ll be admired only to the extent that he plays it well, and, like a customer at a fine bed and breakfast, trusted only to the extent that his manners merit.
“Golf used to be a game of the classes,” declares Jim’s older brother Mike, Jr., taking a pull from his cigarette. “Then, it became a game of the masses,” continues the big, bald man. “Now,” he says, hesitating in happy anticipation of his own punchline, “it’s become a game of the asses.”
Of course this man, like his little joke, is obnoxious on more levels than you can count.
But, as I would learn over my two weeks there, the Sipulas’ arrogance is intertwined with their pride, and it’s their pride that makes you want to please them. If you’re a golfer, you don’t endeavor to forgive their myopic, golf-centered worldview; rather, you want to paint yourself into that picture in a flattering light. And you know you can do this in only one way: by pleasing them with your manners and impressing them with your game.
What gives the Sipulas such power?
They maintain so thoroughly satisfying a golf course that it’s not enough to play it. You want to be a respected part of it.
“Golf as it should be,” is the slogan the Sipulas use to promote the golf course in a brochure and on a Web site.
“Golf as it once was and will never be again,” is more like it.
***
Anybody who knows Jimmy Sipula took with a grain of salt his dour prediction about the future of the Invitational.
More than any of his brothers—Mike Jr., John and Bill—the 52-year-old Jimmy is given to worrying. Maybe that’s why the old man made him boss. “I’m always in a bad mood the week before the tournament,” he said.
But this year, Jimmy had reason for concern. Only 60 players had signed up—half the number the Invitational boasted in its heyday. The Invitational field used to be jammed with top amateurs from as far north as Rockford and Chicago and as far south as Peoria; that radius hasn’t gotten smaller over the years, but the number of participants has.
And though the tournament has never been a big money-maker for Pine Hills, with so few entrants paying the $90 entry fee, this year the tournament was shaping up to be a minor financial disaster.
Adding to Jim’s worries was the fact that the course wasn’t in great shape. After a May of cold and rainy weather, the grass was getting out of control. A wild windstorm the weekend before the tournament had littered the course with tree limbs. And not all of the pre-tournament finishing touches had been completed. The brothers, like a couple trying to get the house cleaned for a party, bickered about what to do.
“We shouldn’t even bother to edge the sand traps,” growled 44-year-old Bill Sipula—Billy Joe, or BJ to family and Pine Hills regulars—as the tournament approached. Instead of trying to make the usual perfect impression on Invitational visitors, BJ thought competence was a more realistic goal. Calling the fairways “hayfields,” BJ said sharply to no one in particular, “We should just try to cut the *bleep*ing grass.”
Even that humble goal was easier said than done. A sour weather forecast threatened to inhibit the greens keepers, the thin 59-year-old pipe-smoking John “Greenie” Sipula and his barrel-chested 36-year-old son cigar-chomping John, Jr. (incongruously known as “Slim”). Even if the rain did let up enough to allow the mowers on the soft turf, Slim and Greenie were working short-handed after one of their college-age crew members had been badly hurt in a car accident. And who did they have to fill in? A writer from Chicago.
Most worrisome of all, the family matriarch, 85-year-old Ellawyn “Ma” Sipula, was in the hospital undergoing tests for internal bleeding. What if she was in the hospital over the tournament weekend? It was inconceivable.
One thing was sure: This year’s tournament would go on, no matter what. The Pro in heaven would see to that.
***
Mike “Pro” Sipula Sr. was an eight-year-old caddie at the Ottawa Country Club when it opened in 1924. By the 1930s, he was managing the pro shop, and when the club fell on hard times during the Depression and World War II, he and two partners bought the nine-hole course in an auction in 1943. He bought out the partners the next year, and renamed it Pine Hills, according to the Web site, “because of its beauty and multitude of trees.” By the time he started the Invitational in 1949, the local boy was becoming a local legend and building a local institution.
Through the second half of the 20th Century, Pro ran the golf course—and raised his family—with an iron fist and a kind heart, apparently in that order.
“If you can’t wear it and you can’t eat it, you don’t need it,” was one of his favorite lines.
Pro was an autocrat who didn’t need to explain his reasons. For instance, he wouldn’t let any of his sons play in the Invitational until they had graduated from high school—despite the fact that most had plenty of talent to compete in it by the time they were about 14. Son BJ resented that rule and still chaffs when he thinks of the years he missed. But ask what the old man’s rationale was in enforcing it, and he still shrugs as if to say, “None of my business.”
Old customers remember Pro’s standoffish demeanor, too. One recalls asking if he could use a golf cart to retrieve a club he’d left on the course. “Oh, look at this guy,” Pro said. “He never rents a cart to play, and now he wants me to give him one to get his club.”
But as the customer headed out the door to retrieve his club, Pro offered him a key to a cart. The customer decided to take the walk.
A friend of one of Sipula’s grandsons says: “He was a very stern man.”
“Golf was the most important thing in his life next to his family,” recalls Ottawa Daily Times sports editor Jeff Glade. “And he didn’t understand why it wasn’t that way for everybody else.” Glade remembers being harangued by Pro during the Invitational, when the old man would take the results down to the newspaper, plop down in Glade’s office and start talking about the tournament. “He didn’t care if you were busy. ‘That’s only baseball or softball,’ was his attitude about whatever else you might be working on.”
But like any dead hero, Pro gets the benefit of the doubt every time. A pussycat deep down, is the family line. And you can’t find a customer to conclude anything but that Pro was a good man under all that crust.
But people don’t want to talk about Pro’s heart of gold as much as they want to talk about his golden golf swing.
Pro’s elegant, athletic swing is displayed behind the clubhouse bar in a frame-by-frame series of black and white pictures taken in the 1950s. He won the Illinois State PGA Championship once, and the Peoria Open seven times. The story goes that Byron Nelson once called Pro the best iron player he’d ever seen. And naturally, he holds the nine-hole course record at Pine Hills, having once shot an astonishing seven-under-par 28.
He was certainly the best player anybody in Ottawa, Ill. ever saw. That’s why everybody called him Pro.
And it’s why Pro built a successful business despite not running the friendliest clubhouse: Pine Hills customers thought of him as a charismatic golf legend and they felt honored to be around him.
A few days before Pro died in his apartment over the clubhouse in the spring of 1999—his corpse would be carried out the front door—the cancer-stricken patriarch told his sons he had only one request: That the golf course not be closed for his funeral. And it wasn’t. Family friends ran the course while the Sipulas attended the funeral. Then all the men came back and played an impromptu 18-hole family tournament that they recall fondly.
But there wasn’t much joy in the air at that year’s Invitational. The Lord’s Prayer was recited over the PA system as dozens of startled golfers around the practice green awkwardly removed their sun visors and hid their putters behind their backs.
It was an odd moment, but moving to everyone who had noticed a broken-hearted Ma shuffling around in the clubhouse in a fog of grief.
Since then, the Sipula family has run the tournament in honor of Pro but for the benefit of Ma.
“This whole tournament is basically a party for her,” said Slim over an idling mower engine one morning. “It’s just so emotional,” he added, indicating the whole nine-hole landscape with a sweep of his cigar hand, while slipping the fingers of the other behind his thick, black-framed glasses to wipe tears from his eyes. “The whole thing.”
***
Just like their late father, the Sipula men have a sentimental side. But generally, this is not a particularly cheerful lot.
If oldest son Mike is the most outrageous of the Sipula boys—the man refers to himself as “The General,” and rides around the course with a beagle named, “The General’s Pal”—the youngest, BJ, might be the darkest. He glowers his way through the day.
A big man with a messy goatee and a patch of unkempt fuzz on the back of his bald head—all the Sipula boys are bald just like their old man—the expression of warmth does not come to him naturally. When I showed up to play golf a couple of weeks before starting work, BJ said, quietly, haltingly, “So … I guess you’re going to be around now.”
While I worked there, his communications with me had a hard edge. If he saw me on my way to play nine after work, he’d say without the hint of a smile, “So, I guess you’re just *bleep*ing off for the rest of the day.”
His sons, 27-year-old Brian and 20-year-old Bobby seem to share his hard outlook—and, in fact, direct it back at him.
“Suck this dick, Dad,” Brian shouted in front of a half-dozen non-family members during a drunken putting contest one night.
Asked how BJ felt about finishing behind him at the Invitational last year, Bobby said flatly, “My dad knows I’m better than him.”
That’s saying something. All the Sipulas play well—Jimmy is the club’s teaching pro—but BJ has long been considered the family’s best hope keep the Invitational trophy in the family. And he has won the tournament twice. But he’s played every year since 1974, and he thinks he should have won it more than twice. When I asked why he hadn’t, he said he didn’t know.
The next morning, he said, “You know that question you asked me yesterday, why I’ve only won the Invitational once? I think I figured it out. Pressure.”
***
Jimmy Sipula doesn’t play in the Invitational at all. He rarely gets out on the golf course. He’s too busy to play golf: Giving lessons, running around the clubhouse serving customers, and worrying about what is and isn’t getting done by his brothers and his nephew.
When he does get out for a round, he is a man transformed—from the slightly nervous, fast-talking clubhouse hustler into a calm, supremely assured figure.
But Jimmy plays only one nine-hole round a week—not nearly enough to maintain the scratch game he’s capable of. In a round while I was there, a Chicago writer beat him by a stroke.
He consoles himself for such humiliations by saying that, as the club pro, he’d rather teach someone how to play better than play well himself.
Jimmy tells the story of how stressful it was, running the first tournament after Pro died. On that Sunday night after the trophy was handed out, the prize money was paid, the golfers were gone and the work was all done, some of the tournament volunteers were still having drinks as Jimmy said goodnight and started out the door for home, exhausted.
He was startled by the sound of applause behind him.
When he adds unnecessarily that that humble ovation was one of the greatest moments of his life, it’s clear that he’s told the story many times. It’s also obvious that he knows the tears are coming, and that, when they come yet again, he’s happy they’re here.
***
As the 55th annual tournament grew closer, things started looking up. Ma’s medical trouble turned out to be nothing serious and she was released from the hospital on Monday morning.
Also, a small glut of last-minute tournament sign-ups had come in, and the number of entrants was now approaching 80.
The postal truck brought a welcome arrival: a package containing this year’s tournament giveaway: a heavy metal money clip with Pro’s face engraved.
Everyone agreed this was a much better idea than last year, when the whole tournament field was wiping the mud from their pitching wedges on Pro’s scowling white face, emblazoned on green golf towels.
Another important development: The weather was good enough to allow Slim and Greenie—and their writer, whose previous greens keeping experience was coming in handy—to get the mowers onto the course.
Greenie is the Sipula that the Sipulas call crusty. But you’d never know it, because Greenie doesn’t talk much since his son Slim took over the superintendent’s job in 1994. Greenie has the air of a man who doesn’t need the hassle any more. He’s newly remarried, and he keeps to himself: He drives his tractor, pulls his gang mowers, smokes his pipe, talks to his new wife on his cell phone and lets his son Slim deal with the stress of responsibility.
Slim started working at Pine Hills when he was 10 years old. He dropped out of high school to work for his dad full time when he was 16. How did the family feel about that? “I don’t think they knew,” he says.
As Slim pushes 40, his broad back is sore all the time from all those years of work. He can’t swing a golf club like he used to (though he still tries, playing in his work boots and marking his golf ball with a washer). And most painful of all, he’s often in Jimmy’s doghouse—for projects not completed and for imperfect conditions on the course. (Last winter, Jimmy took the drastic step of putting Slim’s dad Greenie back in charge of those special Pine Hills greens, after a few years of bumpiness and brown spots. “I had to do it,” Jimmy says grimly.)
Despite his various dissatisfactions and the nagging sense that maybe he’d be better appreciated if he plied his trade elsewhere, Slim says he goes home every night, eats dinner with his wife, contemplates his life working on his grandfather’s land and says to himself, “Life is perfect.”
***
Preparations for the Invitational were made easier by the fact that the grounds crew was able to work largely uninterrupted. That’s because precious few people play golf at Pine Hills during weekdays.
Play is down 15 percent at Pine Hills over each of the last two years.
With still five family members to support—Jimmy, Greenie, Slim, BJ and Ma still draw from the revenues and Brian and Bobby work part time—money is getting tight.
Mike, who owns stock in the course but does not work there—he owns a bar in town—says he gets no dividends because Pine Hills’ profits are negligible. “One year we break even, one year we lose money, one year we make a little,” he says.
The Sipula sons have made some smart moves to increase revenue, the most significant being the conversion of the clubhouse lunch counter into a proper bar.
This move has created something of a social scene at Pine Hills. A men’s league on Tuesday nights and a “Ladies Night” on Thursdays contain a core of barroom regulars who drink in the clubhouse into the wee hours—the men until about midnight, the women until 2:00 a.m. People even show up at the clubhouse to drink and play cards in the winter time.
The public golf course is their country club, and for some, it’s the social center of their lives. “The people who play out there love them,” says the Daily Times’ Glade, who has been the victim of the Sipula customers’ loyalty. “My boss’s boss is a regular,” Glade adds. And if the Sipulas are somehow upset about how they have or haven’t been covered in the paper, “they call him and it passes down to me.”
Electrician Tim Olam plays in the men’s league, his wife Nancy plays in the women’s and their son Kevin—the greens keeper hurt in the car accident—works and plays on the course every summer. The family spends so much time at the golf course that they’re moving into a house just up the driveway from Pine Hills. In fact, much of the developed land surrounding Pine Hills is inhabited by golf-course regulars.
It’s the undeveloped land—the cow pasture to the west and the woods to the north—on which the fate of the golf course turns.
***
Fact is, there’s only so much you can do to generate business at a little small-town golf course. Perhaps not wanting to give in to market forces they can’t control—like the glut of 18-hole golf courses their nine-hole layout is competing against—the Sipulas sometimes blame each other.
One by one, during my two-week stay in Ottawa, every Sipula but Ma came to me to share one or more deeply felt complaints about their family members. Each beef came with a stated or understood assumption of anonymity; one brother said that if I quoted his criticism, he’d “kick the *bleep*” out of me.
Each Sipula also seemed to hope that my article might be his chance to get a fair hearing for his or her beef: I’m the only one who really cares about this place. We’d make more of a profit it if so-and-so would do such-and-such himself instead of hiring it out. We ought to spend more to improve the golf course. We shouldn’t take tee times, because they make people feel the course will be busy. We should hustle more to find players for the Invitational. We should build guest cabins in the woods behind the seventh tee. Everybody’s lazy, nobody wants to work like the old man used to.
The Sipulas have a perpetual case of cabin fever.
But that’s not Pine Hills’ problem.
The problem is that people prefer 18-hole courses.
A short, discouraging conversation repeats itself day after day on the clubhouse telephone:
“Golf course.”
“Yeah, are you guys 18 holes?”
“No, just nine.”
Click.
With expansion not an option, the most plausible way for the Sipulas to make money on the course is the least palatable.
They could let the course go a little, or a lot. Spend less on upkeep and lay off some or all of the half-dozen or so non-family workers the Sipulas hire to help out. A lowering of standards would no doubt prompt some of the Pine Hills regulars to make another course their home, but it would also make the whole course more welcome to the masses—even to the beer-drinking, tank-top-wearing “asses,” as The General would call them--who line up to play the other course in Ottawa, the nine-hole Dayton Ridge golf course north of town. At the unkempt Dayton Ridge, the grass is filled with weeds, the trash cans are filled with empties, and the fairways are filled with golfers.
By definition, the masses exist in more numbers than Pine Hills’ current, shrinking customer base of the “classes.” And since the masses don’t require a highly manicured golf course—indeed, they’re put off by it—the Sipulas obviously could spend less and make more if they wanted to.
That won’t happen. Pro’s boys could never, will never bring themselves to settle for slovenly maintenance.
For those reasons, and because no one in the third generation is emerging to take over the operation, Pine Hills’ future is uncertain bordering on gloomy, notwithstanding Daily Times sports editor Glade’s contention that the Sipulas would keep the course open “even if they were the only ones playing there.”
***
As the sun burned the dew off Pine Hills on tournament Saturday, everything was suddenly perfect.
Almost 90 people were signed up for the 2003 Mike “Pro” Sipula Memorial Invitational, making the event economically viable. (Though the Sipulas pay out $9,500 in prize money—$500 to the winner, the rest spread over the dozens of also-rans—it’s not in cash but, instead, in clubhouse merchandise; so the golf-course profits from the exchange.)
Ma was feeling fine, busy greeting old friends in the clubhouse as the tournament volunteers served egg sandwiches for breakfast and heated up the hamburger grill for lunch.
And the course was looking good—the roughs were trimmed, the fairways were striped and all of it was lush green from all the rain. The sand traps had been edged, but not quite smoothed out. A Pine Hills neighbor and regular customer was out on the course doing a last-minute rake job.
The sky was sunny and the temperature was 70 degrees and suddenly Pine Hills was again what it had been to me for all these years: It was the sunniest, shadiest, quietest, happiest place I know.
As I always am, I was plain thrilled to be playing golf on these fairways, on the edge of these woods, at the foot of these bluffs, on the banks of this flowing stream.
I played badly in the tournament, as I do every year. (The Sipulas aren’t the only ones who feel pressure at the Invitational.)
Indeed, I had played so badly on Saturday that my Sunday round was irrelevant. I was paired with Slim, and we got through as quickly as we could in order that we could get a six-pack of beer and follow BJ, in the final group.
BJ had shot a two-under-par 68 Saturday and was leading the tournament going into Sunday. By the time Slim and I caught up with him, about 20 other onlookers were following, including BJ’s son Bobbie, who had shot himself out of the tournament on Saturday with a sloppy 75.
We followed quietly, and at a distance. I noticed that the enormous Slim walked almost gingerly in fear of distracting the man in search of his third Invitational title; BJ’s wife Bonnie told us he was one stroke ahead of his nearest competitor with five holes to go.
In a howling wind and under stormy skies on the 15th hole—the sixth, played for the second time of the day—BJ had a 40-foot putt for birdie, while his rival was about to make bogey.
When BJ’s putt rolled over a rise, swung left and then straightened and slowed and shockingly disappeared into the cup, everyone yelled at once—all the onlookers, plus Slim, Bonnie, Bobbie, BJ, and me. For only the third time in almost 30 years, BJ had overcome the pressure of being a Sipula on his old man’s golf course, and his face was dour no more.
Three holes later, BJ walked off the last green after clinching the victory, and his boys Bobbie and Brian gave him high-fives. Slim hugged BJ and Jimmy ran out of the clubhouse and hugged him too. Pine Hills regulars and the tournament volunteers shook his hand and he looked as happy as any Masters winner you ever saw.
Then, as the crowd dispersed, BJ’s boys each gave their father a hug.
The Daily Times was there, and its photographer got a picture of an ebullient Ma kissing her youngest son, and she got a quote in the paper. “I went to church on Saturday at four o’clock and again today at 7,” Ellawyn Sipula said, “And I was praying the weather would hold off today ... It did, thanks to Pro and the good Lord up there.”
BJ got a quote, too, of course. Asked if winning the tournament felt any different this time from the other times he’d won it, he replied, “I don’t think it does feel different. It feels about the same. It feels wonderful.”
I drove out of there Sunday night hoping the feeling lasts. For all of us.
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