Unassuming Driving Range Offers Lessons for the Future of Golf

My favorite hole-in-one story involves my buddy Patrick and Montclair Golf Course, a time-capsule facility just up the road from me in Oakland, Calif. Depending on your priorities, Montclair is either a dive bar with a driving range or a driving range with a dive bar. There is also a nine-hole par-3 course, squeezed onto a hillside, with fake-turf tees and greens that run like bearskin rugs.

One afternoon a few summers back, Patrick — having plunked down $7 for the pleasure of a round — arrived at the 9th hole, where magic happened: his half-wedge hopped into the cup for an ace. Moments later, he burst into the bar, elated, and announced, “Drinks on me, everybody. I just made a hole in one!”

Silence.

After a few beats, a woman slumped on a nearby stool looked up from her cocktail and said with genuine surprise, “There’s a golf course here?”

For golfers, the bar is harder to miss. A dusky, dark-wood-paneled space whose brightest lights are its neon Budweiser signs, it occupies the same low-slung building as the pro shop, separated by a thin wall but connected by two doorways. On any given day, regulars on both sides start showing up early to nurse beers or bang buckets.

Montclair offers range balls in the literal sense. They range from newish Pro V1s to battered archaeological finds that look as if they predate the gutta-percha. Some bear the winged logo of the Olympic Club, the prestigious private enclave across the bay, which sells its practice balls to Montclair once they become too scruffy for its membership. At their new home, the Olympic balls get scuffed up quickly. Montclair’s ground is sloped and rocky, and because the terrain is also tough on the facility’s lone mechanical range-picker, the staff mostly collects the balls by hand, raking them into piles and hauling them away like leaves.

In the old days, the bottom of the range, some 225 yards away, featured an abandoned VW bus, which customers delighted in using for target practice. The dimpled shell rang satisfyingly when struck, though the sound wasn’t quite as gratifying — or as common — to me as the metallic ping produced by shanks that caught the fence posts on the right. At one point, management tried to add a few more derelict vehicles, but local officials, citing a blight ordinance, had them all hauled away, VW bus included. You can fight a slice, but you can’t fight city hall.

Around that same time, Montclair renovated its double-decker hitting bays, which are made of wood. For seismic reasons, the support beams in the lower-level stalls are close together — so close that it’s hard to swing a driver without whacking them. Some 35 years ago, new to the area and unschooled in the quirks of my local range, I dinged the head of my new Big Bertha in exactly this fashion. As I inspected the damage, a graybeard in the next stall flashed a rueful smile.

“Welcome to Montclair,” he said.

Back then, Montclair attracted an eclectic mix of range rats — blue bloods and blue-collar types alike. That’s still the case, though there’s less denim on display than there once was. The characters I no longer encounter are the lone-wolf golf instructors who used to roam the bays offering freelance lessons. The one I knew best was Bob Kessler, a round-faced, white-haired, Buddha-bellied man who, by his own account, woulda, coulda, shoulda played for a living if only his putter had cooperated.

He first came to my attention on a foggy evening under the lights, when he plopped down in a lawn chair behind my stall and watched me hit a few shots before noting, casually, that my shoulders were too open and that my backswing went crazily across the line. I was pretty broke back then, but of course I hired him anyway. This was still the era of analog instruction, but Kessler employed what struck me as sophisticated methods. As I hit, he would lean back and flutter his eyelids, an action he likened to the workings of a high-speed camera shutter, snapping frame-by-frame images of my swing — mental pictures to be analyzed on the spot.

Kessler was a wellspring of advice, not all of it related to mechanics. Once, when he caught me looking pleased after flushing several consecutive shots, he wagged his finger at me.

“Walk quietly with it or they’ll snatch it away from you,” he said, pointing skyward toward the golf gods. His voice sounded heavy with experience.

BOB KESSLER IS GONE NOW, moved on to the great driving range in the sky. But the people who permitted him to work those stalls are still around. For as long as I’ve been seeking answers in its Astroturf, Montclair has been run by the same family, the Lees, who lease the facility from the city. On top of its other endearing traits, Montclair is a muni.

Pillim Lee, the patriarch, did not grow up a golfer but became a golf junkie. Born and raised in Korea, he moved to Oakland as a young man and cycled through a series of scrappy retail ventures — a burger stand, a fried chicken joint, a dry-cleaning shop — until the day he got held up at gunpoint and decided that enough was enough. An existing driving range in the green hills above the city didn’t sound half bad. That was 1980. Not long after signing on to run the golf, Lee took over the bar, too.

I did not get these details from Pillim Lee himself. Over several decades and numberless encounters, he and I have exchanged maybe a dozen words, which have mostly involved him telling me that he’d rather I pay in cash. He tends to do this without looking up from the Korean soap operas that stream nonstop on a computer behind the check-in counter. Like many things Montclair, I’ve come to see the TV shows and the father’s gruffness as part of the property’s charm.

The more communicative family members are the sons, Cliff and James, both of whom are in their 50s and have been working at Montclair since grade school. James manages the bar. Cliff oversees the golf. If you need a club re-gripped, Cliff is your guy, though he is also an engaging raconteur. As a kid, when he wasn’t sweeping the pro-shop floor, working the register or filling buckets with balls, Cliff spent many of his non-school hours playing with friends in an underground creek that spills through a giant pipe beneath the range.

If that setting was like something out of Stephen King, the scene above ground evoked more Hunter S. Thompson. In those days, Montclair was a popular watering hole for motorcycle-gang members, who were often hard to distinguish from the off-duty cops who also hung around. Both groups still make up part of the regular crowd, but the ambience has mellowed over the years.

“Everybody’s older now,” Cliff says.

Even back then, Montclair was not the kind of place where trouble found purchase. It looked tougher than it was. And it didn’t look tough at all on Wednesdays, when the bar hosted weekly banjo night — solo performances that invariably metastasized into jangly quartets.

“One banjo, okay. I get it.” Cliff says. “But four going on for hours will drive you insane.”

Historically, Montclair patrons have stuck to one side of the business or the other. Inevitably, though, there is some crossover, especially on summer weekends, when Tour events screen on a TV behind the bar and warm weather draws barflies, blinking, into the outdoor light to try their hand in the stalls. Cliff recalls an incident some years ago when a guy who’d had a few too many decided to hit a bucket and wound up tumbling off the upper deck. More embarrassed than injured, the man stumbled into the pro shop screaming that he planned to sue.

“But when he came back the next day,” Cliff says, “he’d forgotten all about it.”

Cliff speaks of Montclair with a blend of tenderness and weariness that calls to mind the way a lot of people talk about their families. Growing up, he never expected the range to become his career. In retrospect, though, he makes it sound like it was his destiny. A good enough golfer to play on his high school team, he was a strong enough student to attend UC Berkeley, where he planned to major in computer science but switched to business and economics when he realized that those fields would better prep him to help around the shop.

“It’s classic immigrant story,” he says. “Parents come over, start a business and the kids get involved. I basically got a college degree so I could punch range cards.”

IT IS ALSO A DISTINCTLY AMERICAN STORY, unfolding at a distinctly American kind of venue. Driving ranges are a New World invention, unconnected to the origins of the game; 15th-century Scottish shepherds weren’t big on them. They require three things that early 20th-century America offered in abundance — open space, disposable income and a compulsion to monetize everything. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the first commercial driving range on record opened in New York in 1915. After World War II, ranges proliferated across the country alongside suburban sprawl, their popularity propelled further in the 1950s by the introduction of the automatic ball-dispenser.

Montclair Golf Club came along soon after that. “Most complete practice facilities in the Bay Area,” an ad in a local newspaper announced on Jan. 11, 1961, one day before the opening of what was hailed as “28 acres of golfing pleasure for the entire family, set in beautiful wilderness 10 minutes from downtown Oakland.” An illustration above the text showed a golfer posing in a Hogan-esque finish on grounds blanketed in lush turf.

By the time I stumbled on Montclair, a better avatar for the club would have been a plumber in blue jeans skulling a long iron off a mat. But the spirit of the ad still held true. Montclair captured a bygone era, preserved in amber in the green folds of the Oakland hills, unchanging as the world raced past. Maybe that’s an overly romanticized view, but, really, what’s the harm in it?

What’s indisputable is this: driving ranges in busy, expensive urban areas are increasingly rare. Mom-and-pop ranges rarer still. From coast to coast, driving ranges are being reinvented as entertainment venues, their stalls outfitted with ball-tracking technology, video screens and point-scoring games designed to keep customers lingering — and spending. Cliff has looked into leasing similar systems. But he’s worried it would require him to pump up the price of his buckets.

A couple of years ago, as a concession to modernity — and a way to test it out — he installed two TrackMan-equipped hitting bays at the front of the building. They can be rented by the hour and have proven popular. A respected local pro now gives lessons there, students poring over launch angles and spin rates while, out back on the range, golfers still bang away at battered balls. Outside, things look pretty much the same as ever, with the exception of the old wooden support beams, which are now wrapped with old driving range mats to minimize driver damage.

The lease will come up in a few years. Cliff’s dad is 80 now. His mom, Grace, who puts flower arrangements in the bathrooms and occasionally prepares Korean dinner specials for the bar, is around the same age. But Cliff doesn’t see himself retiring. “I don’t know how else I’d make a living,” he says. “Besides, I’ve known a lot of the customers here all my life. This place is home.”

I get what he means. I’ve been a regular for nearly four decades, and what keeps me coming back is not the promise of improvement.

I’m not alone in my fondness for the place. Friends who frequent it even more than I do have pet names for it: Montclair National. Tin Cup.

A few weeks ago, I heard another moniker. After hitting a bucket, I dropped into the bar. It was uncrowded. A cat named BeeBee, one of four resident felines, was perched on a stool. I sat down and got talking to a retired bus driver who’s been coming for years. He doesn’t hit balls anymore. His back is balky and cocktail hour is more his speed. “The atmosphere is great, people are friendly,” he said. “And the free parking doesn’t hurt.” He calls the place The Hole, he told me. “As in sh-t hole,” he clarified, lovingly.

When he left, one other guy remained at the bar. We, too, started chatting. At Montclair, people still do that. When our beers were nearly empty, I offered to buy the next round.

He looked up and grinned.

“What,” he said, “did you make a hole in one?”