Brotherly love

Longtime Western New York turf pros Thad Thompson and Drew Thompson still talk almost every day.

About agronomy.

About management.

About life.

The second and third of four brothers, they were born just 15 months apart and have worked on golf courses for decades. Thad is the superintendent at Terry Hills Golf Course, a 27-hole public facility in Batavia, and Drew is the superintendent and general manager at East Aurora Country Club, an 18-hole private club about 35 miles southwest in East Aurora.

They love the Bills, the business and, if it isn’t obvious throughout this story, each other.

THAD: You very much have to develop a thick skin in our family. When we were young, we shoveled the pond off so we could play hockey and we were one person short, so our mother came down in her figure skates, dropped the puck and Drew runs her. She took her skates off and went back home.

DREW: Not one of my finer moments.

THAD: How did we get into golf courses? We grew up at a horse farm summer camp. That’s what we did every summer, all summer. I got to be 18 and played my first nine-hole round of golf the day I got out of high school. Kind of fell in love with it that year. That was ’88. The next year, I went to the local course, Turkey Run in Arcade, and asked the guy, ‘Do you need any help?’ It was nine holes, him and one other guy. He said, ‘I’ll get a hold of you.’ The guy’s name was Chuck Mayer and we turned out to be great, great, great friends. I worked there for two or three years, and he finally said, ‘Why don’t you go to college for this?’ I kind of chuckled and said, ‘You can go to college for this? That’s ridiculous.’ And he said, ‘No, really.’

Chuck passed away of a massive heart attack on the seventh green at Turkey Run on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend my second year of college. That’s really where Drew and my younger brother, Stacey, come into the story. Stacey was working for me. He was the first person I ever fired. Drew was selling golf clubs at the time.

DREW: Yep. I thought I was going to be a golf professional. Might be the dumbest idea I ever had in my life. It’s your fault I’m in this business.

THAD: I knew very little at the time, but this was before you knew anything.

DREW: Once you get a taste of it, it’s easy to fall into it.

THAD: It turns into a lifestyle.

DREW: Lot of late nights, we discussed my transition into the turf business over about, I don’t know, maybe 500 beers. We were drinking Coors Lights at the time, probably. I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t want people to think I was just doing the same thing you were. I guess I finally said, ‘Screw it, let’s give it a shot. I don’t have anything else going on at the time.’ The golf shop I was working at was failing. I applied for a bunch of assistant golf pro jobs and I wasn’t getting any looks because you have to know somebody. I was running out of cash.

THAD: Before I even went to turf school, we roomed together in college at Jamestown Community College. We went for one year.

DREW: I got a 1.92 GPA.

THAD: Let’s just say we sowed some of our wild oats. What were we? 19 years old? Long time ago.

DREW: It was terrible. I went back for part of the next year and it wasn’t the same. We lived off of ramen noodles and egg salad.

THAD: Lot of smokeless tobacco and beer.

DREW: Think we regripped our golf clubs in the bathroom numerous times. And occasionally we went to class.

THAD: I had decent grades there. We got a lot of street learning in those couple of years.

DREW: It was an entirely different education.

THAD: We realized there was something beyond the summer camp.

DREW: First time we had cable TV!

THAD: You dropped out of Jamestown Community College and afterward stopped in to see Chuck. Told him, ‘I’m dropping out now, but I’ll go back,’ and Chuck told you, ‘No, you won’t.’ That really annoyed you, but it also made you want to prove Chuck wrong.

DREW: If he hadn’t keeled over, I probably wouldn’t have gone back to college. But after he died, what are you going to do?

THAD: You made a promise to Chuck!

I have two pictures of Chuck in my office to this day. He was a very profound influence on my career and a lot of how I look at the world. I went to SUNY Delhi for turf and graduated with a 3.85 in 15 months. Did it in a semester and a half. And I put my final report card in Chuck’s shirt pocket before they closed the casket.

THAD: I finally got comfortable about 10 years ago — and I had been here about 15 years. I knew every stop before this one wouldn’t be my last job because they weren’t paying me enough. I loved my last job — loved it — but there was no money. My president took the pro, the clubhouse manager and me out to play golf, June 1, and he looked at us on the first tee and said, ‘You know I love you guys. Find a new job after the season because we can’t afford to pay you.’ That was the kick in the ass I needed to get me to look for a job, even though I knew I needed to do it maybe three years earlier.

DREW: I work in private golf. I never feel comfortable. I enjoy my job. I feel like they want me here, but it’s a balancing act. With the regime changes, you never know. I’ve gone from one of the youngest guys in the area to one of the oldest.

THAD: I never once felt comfortable working in private golf. That’s the biggest difference between working for an individual owner or a family and working for a membership. I really don’t have to worry about who likes me. It used to be a tightrope. We sell golf, not the country club experience, which has its advantages. I was really good at politics, but so much pressure is off me because I don’t have to deal with that anymore.

When it comes down to staying at one place our whole career, or finishing where we want to, we’re like football coaches: that isn’t up to us. At some point, somebody is probably going to kick one or both of us out. That’s just the way this business works. Would I be bitter? Yeah, probably, but you have to be realistic. That’s what happens. We see it happen with our friends, guys who have been somewhere 20 years, 30 years.

DREW: The nice thing I see about public golf is you’re making decisions with people who work in the golf business. When you work in private golf, you have committees and boards that turn over every single year. Your board chair, your green chair is different every single year, and they don’t work in the golf business. And the majority of them realize that.

THAD: And just when you get them educated, they leave the board.

DREW: I hope I can finish my career where I’m sitting right now. My members are the best of any private club in the country. They seem to respect my input, they have enough faith in me to oversee their finances and manage the club. We all know the golf business is a roller coaster. Would I ever work public? Maybe if I owned the place.

THAD: I wouldn’t want to own the place. Not me.

DREW: Our homes are about an hour apart. You don’t want to live too close to work and you don’t want to live too close to family.

THAD: An hour’s it. If we lived any closer, we would be in major trouble together all the time.

DREW: We never wanted to work together.

THAD: Absolutely not. Not now, not in the past and not in the future. You have two Type A personalities who have been beating the shit out of each other their entire lives, and that would continue if we worked together. Now we’re good.

DREW: We both have very strong personalities and are both very committed to our ideas, especially when it comes to golf course maintenance. We’d end up killing each other.

THAD: I’d be your assistant.

DREW: You’d have to work for me. There’s no way around it. I’ve answered to you for 50 years. It’s time for you to take your turn!

DREW: This is a good business. It really is. If you’re good at it and you can give the club value, private or public, it can be fun. Yeah, there’s stress, but there’s stress in management in any business. So what? You might as well be outdoors doing it. I get tired of hearing superintendents saying it’s a terrible business.

THAD: I remember getting a job and a salesperson telling me, ‘Keep your head down.’ This job was notorious for going through superintendents every year and that never phased me. No matter the reputation of a job, it’s up to you to change it. When I left that job, it was a desirable job because of what we did for a decade out there. It isn’t what the club offers. It’s what you make of it.

DREW: And if you want to work for a top 100 or 200 course, yeah, there’s going to be higher levels of stress and scrutiny. But there’s a lot of golf in this country, and there are a lot of golf holes to be maintained, and there are a lot of really, really good clubs, private and public, you can get into where you can make a fine living without destroying your work-life balance. I used to be an all-in guy. Now, when someone says they need a day off, I say OK. Because you know they’re going to take it anyway, whether you approve it or not.

THAD: I’m convinced the only way you can be successful in this business is to have a very, very strong network. You have to have your family behind you, and you have to be considerate of your family, too. Some of us learn that a little later in life, I guess.

DREW: Some of us also met our wives after we got into this business.

THAD: Some of them knew what they were getting into!

DREW: I went through the whole dating process while I was an assistant. She was aware of what I did.

THAD: You have to have people you can talk with about this business, because if you just try to keep it all inside yourself, that’s not how it works. I’m fortunate I have an ownership here I can vent to sometimes, my friends in the business, my family. You can’t do it all on your own.

THAD: I think we’re proud of each other. He’s come a long way, I’ve come a long way. We’ve gone from kids to men in what seems like a few years, but it’s been 30-plus years of doing this. I think we still rely on each other. There are very few people in the world I trust.

DREW: Yeah.