Chapter 9 – Integrity Golf Company (2016)
“If you have integrity, nothing else matters.
If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters”
Surviving 2015 was primarily accomplished by not meeting financial obligations to the City of Temple Terrace for the $23,000 a month mortgage payment and it was painfully obvious the Club was on a fast track to oblivion.
The Board was soon saddled with the task of not only solving this “unsolvable” problem but doing so in a public forum at televised City Council Meetings attended by residents who were often unsympathetic to the Club’s plight. Jack Townsend had the unenviable task of serving as the Club’s primary “Slings and Arrows Catcher” at those City Council Meetings.
Enter Integrity Golf Company (IGC), LLC. , an Orlando based golf club management company that owned and/or operated about thirty golf courses from New York to Florida.
At a Special Membership Meeting on December 14, 2015, the Board was authorized “to negotiate and execute such documents as may be necessary or appropriate between the Club, the City and Integrity Golf Company, LLC to fulfill the intent and purpose of the [IGC] Letter of Intent; furthermore, to authorize the Board of Directors to make such changes to the Bylaws as may be necessary or appropriate to keep the Bylaws consistent with the terms and conditions contemplated by the Letter of Intent.”
At a second Special Membership Meeting on January 31, 2016, a three-way agreement that had been negotiated between Temple Terrace Golf & Country Club, the City of Temple Terrace and Integrity Golf Company was approved by Club membership for implementation effective February 1.
Per the agreement, the City would initially be guaranteed a minimum of about fifty percent of the mortgage payment in rent, paid quarterly by Integrity Golf Company; existing Club members would become “Legacy Members” of the new Club and be grandfathered at current membership rates for three years; IGC would have total management control of the Club and “shall in good faith endeavor to operate the Golf Club as a private golf and country club as soon as reasonably possible”
The first indication that turning the Club into their “flagship” private club was not at the top of their priority list may have been exhibited when they made the very “public” golf course move of removing the water fountains bolted to the walls of the two rest areas on the golf course and replacing them with drink machines with offerings that included two dollar bottled water. When it was pointed out one machine was priced at $2 while the other was actually priced at $3, they immediately addressed the concern by changing both machines to the higher quality $3 dollar pints of water.
I assume the timing was coincidental, but they also sprang into action almost immediately when in my self-appointed role as “management antagonist”, I sent them a letter noting that based on my extensive review of the websites from all their other clubs, we were the only semi-private club they operated that did not give members a discount on the prices non-members paid for food and beverages. In fact, on almost every comparable item, our members were paying more than the non-members were paying at every one of their other clubs.
Almost immediately, a letter that could only be described as an insult to the intelligence of our membership (or the average fifth grader) was distributed, proudly announcing they would soon be releasing a new menu that would give our members “deep price discounts averaging twenty-five percent” less than the prices non-members would be paying on all food and beverage purchases. A typical example of the difference between the old and new menus was the California Burger. (A cheeseburger topped with a slice of avocado):
Old menu – $12 New Menu – Members $13, Non-Members $17.50
As for growing golf revenues, their core strategy centered around harvesting the low hanging fruit available through selling deeply discounted on-line tee times rather than the more time and labor consuming process of recruiting new members.
On April 22, 2017, slightly more than a year after IGC took control, the Annual Meeting of Voting Members was held in the Club Ballroom and the agenda was “short and sweet”. There was no need to review the operating results from the prior year because Integrity Golf Company was now solely responsible for funding and solving any budget shortfall issues that “may” have been encountered during the prior year, and, the Club’s Legacy Members still had two more guaranteed years on the “no dues increases or assessments” agreement.
There was also no need to review and approve an operating budget because per the contract with Integrity, our Board would merely calculate anticipated annual dues and member cart revenues based on a count of current Legacy Members ($849,656), reduce that amount by certain contractually agreed to “corporate entity expenses” (estimated at $500) and our members would vote “yea or nay” on contributing the residual amount ($849,156) to Integrity’s operating budget for the coming year. (No problems there)
The rest of the meeting was devoted to all the “sweet” stuff. Integrity CEO Gene Garrote and his management team made presentations on all their prior year accomplishments and reviewed in detail their “Five-Year” Capital Improvement Plan that would be the final piece of the puzzle required to fully transition the Club from its current “semi-public” status back to the “private” Golf & Country Club status previously enjoyed.
However, it would soon be discovered that the “Five-Year” Plan presented at that meeting would actually be more of a “Five-Week” Plan because on Saturday, June 3, 2017, with approximately twenty-eight minutes notice, Integrity Golf Company walked (or ran) away from the three way agreement with the City, leaving our Board with a lot of organizational issues, a number of unpaid debts and fewer members than when IGC first arrived. (But they did do a lot of tree trimming on the golf course)
A quick internet search revealed there were about thirty other golf clubs from New York to Florida that had fallen victim to the “Mission Statement” of the now defunct Integrity Golf Company, LLC:
“Integrity is not just what we do, but how we do it”
Although the sixteen month relationship with Integrity Golf Company can in no way be considered an overwhelming success, it was definitely an invaluable step in the hundred year journey. Given the circumstances at the time it was negotiated, it was probably the absolute best option available to the Board and also served as a valuable lesson to the Temple Terrace City Council by bringing them, at long last, to the realization that contrary to sentiments expressed by previous Councils, the City assuming management control of the Club was not then and may never be a viable option.
Additionally, two of the most significant dates in Club history occurred during this period. One on February 1, 2016, when the Club’s financial arrangement with the City was rightfully modified to function as more of a “shared” burden and the other on …………
April 22, 2017 – “The End of Women’s Suffrage”
Women have played an incredibly important role in the history of Temple Terrace Golf & Country Club from the very beginning. Most “Terracites” are familiar with stories of how the Potter Palmer family of Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel fame began the process of transitioning their family hunting preserve into what is now the City of Temple Terrace on the banks of the Hillsborough River by laying out streets, home sites, a golf course and all the infrastructure required to support a “golfing community” during the Florida land boom of the Roaring Twenties.
But the truth is, Potter Palmer died in 1902 and it was many years later his widow, Bertha Palmer began the process that ultimately lead to the realization of her vision of a golfing community. It was Bertha who actually purchased the property and Bertha who was the golfer in the family.
There was also Maude Fowler, the lady who “created” the Temple Terrace Club Pro named Kid Boots. Maude was on the board of the company that developed the property and is considered a founder of the City. At one point she was even the Vice-Mayor of Temple Terrace.
We know that beginning in 1938, the Temple Terrace Women’s Golf Association, through its strength of numbers and ability to attract women golfers from other areas, was critical to the financial survival of the club during the war years of the thirties and forties and continued to be similarly as valuable throughout the “Country Club” years. In fact, research of local newspapers reflects that during much of this period, a majority of the golf tournaments held at the course were played from the “red” tees.
Consider the following events of June 10, 1957, when Temple Terrace Outdoors held its very first Annual Stockholders Meeting to elect a Board of Directors to take the company forward.
As is still the tradition, at the conclusion of the general membership meeting, the new Board held another quick meeting to elect officers for the coming year. The meeting was called to order at 10:15 pm. In addition to the election of officers and deciding which of them would be authorized to sign checks, there were only three items on the Agenda:
- Authorize use of the golf course on October 25 by the West Coast Women’s Golf Association.
- Approve the Temple Terrace Women’s Golf Association (TTWGA) tournament schedule for the coming year.
- Authorize the TTWGA to hold a Hole-In-One Tournament on a date “to be determined at their convenience.”
Meeting Adjourned at 10:50 pm (Notice what those items have in common?)
But as important as women have been to the success of the Club, they have not always been treated with the appropriate level of respect. For many years, the club was run by Committees that were given total control of a budget for their area of responsibility. Women were always a major source for staffing many of those Committees, including, among others, the Entertainment Committee, the Social Committee and the Pool Committee. Although women served on all of them, for years there must have either been some undocumented club rule that the wives of married members couldn’t have first names or maybe they were just required to keep them secret because in the first ten years of Board Meeting Minutes, married women were never referred to by their first names; it was always Mrs. Joe Byars, Mrs. Tony Valdez, Mrs. Ernest Traina, etc..
In 1957, when the committees were first formed, the head of the “Women’s Committee” was a man named Perry Gibbons. There’s no reference to the purpose of this committee, but a year later, Perry was updating the Board on what the Women’s Committee had accomplished, and he ended the presentation by, “giving much credit for all of the work done by ‘those’ who worked with me on the committee.” (I wonder who “those” referred to?)
The first documented instance I found of a married woman’s first name being recorded in Board Meeting Minutes was in conjunction with the 1966 Annual Membership Meeting. The Board had implemented a new (short lived) award and the President was recognizing the Outstanding Male and Female Non-Board Members of the Year. The Minutes of the meeting reflect the female winner as “Shelly” Jones. As it happens, her first name was really “Shirley”. (The Minutes don’t mention whether Shirley was invited to attend the meeting and receive the award in person.)
But this reluctance to personalize, at least in print, the true identities of these ladies was far from the most significant expression of chauvinism.
There were frequently small annoyances like the day in January 1963, when the lady bridge players complained about poor lighting and asked that “bridge lamps’ be provided and were told “stronger light bulbs would be used until such time funds were available” ; or the day in July 1964, when the ladies asked for a $1,000 “loan” to combine with funds they would contribute themselves to carpet their lounge to match the carpeting already installed in the men’s lounge. In fairness, the Board did vote to “give“ them the thousand dollars.
There were also discriminatory practices in providing access to the golf course that have disappeared over the years but definitely existed then. Take the scheduling of the TTWGA tournaments for example; as valuable as they were, they still had to be scheduled around what the men were planning.
The Ladies’ limited rights to “tee it up” during certain hours on weekends and holidays were a constant source of upheaval. Especially fluid were the “lady hours” on Saturdays. The Board frequently changed the allowable hours to meet the current demands of the men. At one point there was even a petition from the male members to further restrict the already restricted hours. My personal favorite was a rules change, for a short period of time, to actually expand access on Saturdays by allowing women “to play on Saturday between 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM during June, July and August” (I wonder why they chose those months!)
As the years passed, most of these issues were resolved, but I did note an interesting decision by the Board in 1989 when the TTWGA requested Board approval for their participation in a Challenge Cup Series with the Women’s Golf Associations from several other private clubs including Tampa Palms, Carrollwood, Palma Ceia, Imperial Lakes and Lone Palm.
Each Club would host ten lady golfers from one of the other clubs, “five times a year at a time convenient to the host club”, for a ten-on-ten ladies match; however, the Board rejected the matches. I assume because the rules stated the ladies would only pay cart fees. Sounds like a small price to pay considering, it was only fifty rounds of golf spread across an entire year, and our ladies would reap the same benefit at each of the other top private Clubs in the area.
However, the most significant indignity endured by the ladies, the one that in today’s world would result in a quick out of court “sex discrimination” settlement was the structure of the original membership offerings. In the original Club Charter, the only classification of membership granted a vote was the Senior Golfing Membership and to qualify as a Senior Golfing Member required being male.
If a married woman wanted to join as a golfing member, the Voting Membership had to be in the name of her husband even if he wasn’t a golfer. If a single woman wanted to play golf as a member, her only option was a non-voting, non-Saturday morning golf, Ladies Membership. (Considering the fact that on day one the Club had 282 Senior Voting Members and exactly one Ladies Member, those guys must have really been concerned about how that woman would have voted.)
The “men only” policy stayed in place for over thirty years although there was one attempt to make a limited change at the May 1981 Annual Membership Meeting when Howard Heddon proposed modifying Club by-laws to make the wives of Senior Members eligible to serve on the Board of Directors. After his proposal was voted (or shouted?) down, his response to the membership was, “In the name of Mother Eve, Cleopatra and those good women who brought all these boys into the world, these chauvinistic bastards just blew it.”
It wasn’t until the summer of 1990 when the scheduling of the US Open at the “white men only” Shoal Creek Country Club in Alabama reverberated throughout the golfing world that addressing discrimination became a priority for private golf clubs. An article in the Tampa Tribune on August 11, 1990, although aimed primarily at Palma Ceia’s more overt discriminatory practices was definitely the impetus for dropping the “male” requirement for Senior Voting Membership
Not surprisingly, of the Club’s four Lady Members at that time, no one chose to convert to the Voting Membership category, presumably because the Ladies Membership was still available and it was priced at 80% of the Senior Voting Membership (Up from the 50% price on the original 1957 offering.).
The first woman to join as a Senior Voting Member was Catherine Boswell on April 17, 1991; however, in a letter to the Board dated April 13, 1992, she requested a reclassification to the Ladies Membership because “I find that being a Senior Voting Member of Temple Terrace Golf & Country Club affords me no benefits above those of a Woman’s membership.”. (Apparently she couldn’t find a game on Saturday mornings.)
In October 1993, another milestone in degenderizing the Rules & Regulations occurred when the rule limiting Saturday morning play to “Senior Voting Members and their adult male guests” was modified by dropping the word “male”
The 19th Amendment to the U S Constitution, granting women equal access to the ballot box was ratified in 1920. It took another ninety-seven years, but on April 22, 2017. Temple Terrace Golf & Country Club reached the same pinnacle of equal rights when Sandy Alpaugh became the first female Senior Voting Member elected to serve on the Club’s Board of Directors.
