The fruit picker

Every spring, from the years before he was old enough to remember to the year before he married his wife, Nicolas Garibay traveled with his family from Florida to Michigan and back again to pick fruit.

Garibay climbed in the back seat of a Ford Econoline van with his brother and his sister, his parents up front splitting the drive time. The journey normally started around dawn, everything they owned packed in a trailer hitched behind them. Sometimes extended family joined in, as many as a dozen or 15 other cars filled with aunts and uncles and cousins. Somewhere along the ribbon of highway they would all stop at a McDonald’s or a Taco Bell for the largest meal of the year. Garibay remembers his father, Eduardo, ordering 50 hard tacos and 50 soft tacos, the feast emerging from the back in a cardboard box. Eat up, his father would say, and Garibay would would tell him, This is too much food, but the tacos seldom survived. They might all pull off at a rest stop every couple hundred miles but more often they pushed through the day, then the night. Everybody not behind the wheel nodded off sooner or later. By the time they woke up again, the roll of the road had transformed into the stillness of a farm. New state, new home, the cycle of the land pulling them in.

After unpacking their lives into their next temporary home — only beds, tables, a couch, and major utilities were provided in the mobile homes they inhabited for about six months at a time — they settled in for maybe a day or two, acclimated to the weather, the neighborhood, school again, then got back to work.

Of course, there were challenges. In Michigan, Garibay and his siblings, Eddie and Adriana, were the only Hispanics in their school, and even though they counted plenty of friends in both states, every trip felt like starting over. When they reached high school, their class credits almost never transferred from state to state.

And the work was physically hard. There were hot days, cold days, wet days, long days. Equipment busted. Sometimes work poured in by the bucket or the bushel, sometimes by the hour. No two days were ever quite the same. But, Garibay remembers, “everywhere we went, you would see family. That was the beauty of it.

“Nowadays, where can you have your entire family working together?”

Years before he first worked on a golf course and decades before he became the superintendent of the Legend course at The Club at Ibis in West Palm Beach, Florida, Garibay worked alongside his family, planting corn, squash, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, even watermelon in Michigan. The family picked strawberries from the ground, then cherries from the trees. Garibay remembers picking fallen fruit for juice at 5. He remembers sheathing himself in a rainsuit and climbing higher and higher in a picker to pluck leaves from cherry trees at 8. He remembers running a tractor at 12. Oranges filled their Florida winters. “Everything had its calendar,” Garibay says.

The Garibays last trekked north in the early 2000s, their shift mirroring a larger national trend. Migrant farmworkers who traveled from state to state, following the harvests and the work, accounted for about 15 percent of hired hands throughout the 1990s. That number plummeted in the early 2000s and today sits around 3 percent, according to the U.S. Labor Department’s most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey.

Two decades of travel and work took a toll on the family. Eduardo and his wife, Esther, were approaching their 40s and had started to slow down. Eddie had already stopped traveling with them, remaining in Florida to work his own jobs, and Adriana was starting high school. Garibay had recently fallen in love with a girl named Miriam whom he was certain he would marry. And their youngest child, another son named Ezequiel, was new to the world.

Garibay already knew a few years earlier that he didn’t want to push his body to work his whole life.

“We had a supervisor, a guy from Texas, probably 75,” he remembers. “Any time he would give me and my brother a ride to a different crop or a different field, he always gave us a pep talk and asked us what we were going to do with our future.”

Work, the boys said. Keep coming up here and working.

No, the old man replied. No, no, no, no. You cannot be like your father and your mother. You need to think differently. You don’t want to be out here, 50 years old, digging a trench with a shovel. You know English. You don’t have to work out here in the fields. You can do something different. You need to do better in life.

“He would talk to us like we were sons,” Garibay says. “That’s when we thought about doing things differently, about not killing ourselves for work.”

Garibay remembers the name of the man who persuaded him to not work himself into pain, paralysis or something worse. Ovidio Chapa.

“We didn’t think it was wrong,” Garibay says. “We just didn’t know any better. I’m thankful he told us those things.”

Garibay is almost 40 now, nearly the same age his father was the last time he headed north, and he still wakes up as early as he did during those years on the farm — earlier, probably — though he no longer grinds physically every day, just mentally.

The alarm beeps at 4:15, he locks the front door on his way out by 4:50, and is normally at The Club at Ibis, a 54-hole private community, where he started as the Jack Nicklaus-designed Legend course superintendent in November 2021, around 5:40. “I sit at my desk for 10 or 15 minutes, brainstorming, thinking of what needs to be done today or the next day,” he says. He finalizes the day’s plans with his assistants, then passes along first and second jobs when the rest of the 23-person crew arrives around 6:30.

He still works with the land, but with far less stress on his body these days than his parents endured. Most mornings are filled with rides around the course, his focus on details.

“What needs done, what isn’t getting done, he’s got a real good eye for all that,” says Matt Masemore, the club’s director of golf course maintenance for the last 16 years. “Not everybody does. Some people can drive past an irrigation head that hasn’t worked for a week and not see anything.

“There’s room to improve and he’s always looking to raise the bar.”

Garibay talks throughout the day with his assistants, Trent Thomas, a recent convert to golf course maintenance, and Anton Vergottini, a native South African who moved last month from Ibis to Lemon Bay Golf Club in Englewood, near the Gulf, to work on a major renovation. He never wants to micromanage them. He wants to give them the room to try, fail and succeed. But he still pushes them as he was pushed when he was younger.

“My job is not to develop them to be an assistant here,” he says. “My purpose and my goal is to develop them to be promoted. That’s what I want.”

Thomas says Garibay holds high expectations for them, “but never unreal expectations. He does really work to develop people.” Vergottini calls Garibay a great leader. “When you do something wrong, he’ll tell you, but he’ll also give you the necessary equipment to know how to do the job the right way, and why it’s being done like that. He sees everything. There’s not a thing he misses. There are times I’ll do something and ask him if he saw it, and he’ll tell me, ‘I saw it a long time ago.’ We need leaders like that.”

How did a first-generation Mexican American — a Michican, he sometimes calls himself, blending his birth state with his national heritage — who never finished high school and only later earned a GED and a certificate from a University of Georgia turf program, climb from picking fruit to leading a team of almost two dozen at an elite private club? How did he trade up from working with his body to working with his brain?

Chapa and his message certainly helped. So did the love of that girl, Miriam — turns it really was love at first sight: They married two years after meeting at Frog Leg Festival in Fellsmere, which is affectionaly called Little Mexico and where they both lived, when he was 18 and she was 16. And there were mentors who pushed and pushed and pushed for years.

The first and most frequent was Carlos Arraya.

Garibay dived into work the first spring, summer, and fall he remained in Florida — and he started out on a golf course maintenance crew.

Still just 15 years old, he followed a couple uncles and a couple cousins to Hawk’s Nest Golf Course in Vero Beach, Florida. Arraya remembers hiring the four of them and then hearing about “this kid who worked hard and was in love with this girl.” Even then, Garibay impressed Arraya. “This is a good-looking kid,” Arraya remembers thinking. “A little wet behind the ears, but he looks like he can run a fly mower. Let’s put him on the team.”

Garibay worked most of that first season on fly mowers and weed eaters and edgers — still the kind of hard, physical work he was used to on the farms — all for about $7 an hour.

“I felt like I needed more,” he says, so he left to work for the next five months at Orchid Island Golf and Beach Club, also in Vero Beach. No longer spurred by Arraya or his family, he left the industry for the only time to work alongside Eddie on concrete jobs for the next seven months for $14 an hour. “We were having a great time,” he says, “and then jobs started going down, we got less hours and fewer jobs, our checks were cut in half.” They switched gears again, this time working in air conditioning for about eight months. The money in that industry was even better, until it wasn’t. He returned to Hawk’s Nest months after Arraya returned from his own stint away from the club and, for the second time, asked Arraya for a job.

“I told him, ‘If you want to come back and you want to make it a career, you have to make a commitment to people,’” says Arraya, now the general manager at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis. “That’s how it all started. We were sitting at 10 tee looking at 11 green, and I said, ‘If you’re going to do this, you’re going to do this the right way. I’ll do everything I can to give you everything I know.”

They worked together most of the next 13 years at Hawk’s Nest — most of them with Eddie, who followed his brother into golf and is now an assistant superintendent at John’s Island Club in Vero Beach — and later at The Venice Golf and Country Club in nearby Venice.

Arraya listened to Garibay on the radio most days, talking with the assistant superintendent and the rest of the team. Even then, Arraya says, “I knew he had what it took to lead people. And he had that strategic vision to look beyond right now. He had a skillset you can’t teach in the classroom. You just know when you see someone who has that ‘it factor.’ When you’re around him, he makes you want to be a better person. And you cannot teach that.”

Arraya pushed him to earn his spray tech certification. He pushed him to earn that turfgrass certificate from the University of Georgia — which he finished in half the suggested time. He pushed him to finish three, four, five jobs when others on the team finished one or two. He pushed him to set goals. “I certainly yelled at him enough,” Arraya remembers.

One day, about seven years into their second run together, Arraya called Garibay into his office, dropped his work file on the desk, told him to read it, and walked out for a few minutes. Certain he was about to fired, Garibay left the file where it was. If you’re going to fire me, he remembers thinking, just fire me. When Arraya returned, he asked Garibay if he had read it.

“No.”

“Nick, you’re so hard-headed. Just read it.”

Garibay opened the folder and on the top sheet spotted the words “assistant superintendent.”

“I can’t remember if I shed a tear or not,” Garibay says. “I was very grateful. I wanted to have a better work life than my parents. For me, it’s very emotional, because I saw what they went through. They suffered. They worked in the rain, they worked in the snow, they worked when it was cold, wet feet all the time. It was brutal. I’m accomplishing what I wanted.”

That promotion sparked the next decade for Garibay. He moved to PGA Golf Club in Stuart, where he worked as assistant superintendent under Florida legend Dick Gray. Despite working together for just six months, Gray describes Garibay as “unforgettable.”

“His curiosity is endless,” says Gray, who retired in 2020 after 53 years in the industry. “He’s very humble, he has a ton of pride, and he’s very curious. It’s not enough for him to know what, he wants to know why and how and when and where. He’s a special person. He calls me or sends an email every now and then, and he always thanks me.”

He reunited with Arraya at Venice for nearly four years, then landed his first superintendent position in November 2018 at Jacaranda West Country Club in Venice, working under corporate director of agronomy Augustin Lucio. Three years there earned him the position at Ibis.

“The accomplishments I have had in my career have been emotional, just because I never thought I would be where I’m at. I didn’t think I had the potential to be a superintendent, especially at a club like Ibis,” he says. “I didn’t think I had the capability of becoming a superintendent. And then within a month or two afterward, I was like, ‘I was ready a long time ago.’ I called Carlos and told him that.”

Yeah, man, Arraya said. I know you were.

During that same stretch, Garibay’s life off the course reflected his life on it: disciplined, dedicated to family, ever growing and improving. He and Miriam, who also traveled every year throughout her childhood from Florida to Texas, where father sold cars around citrus picking, became parents when they were young — Nicolas Edwin is now 19 and Yoseleen is 15. After being baptized as Jehovah’s Witnesses, they welcomed Amarayah in February 2022. He shows off videos of her dancing in the kitchen.

Words of wisdom “There are a lot of Hispanics probably in the same boat I was, working in agriculture with their parents. Becoming a golf course superintendent is something that’s reachable and it’s probably something they would enjoy. There are a lot of operations that are bilingual and it’s a great opportunity. If this is something you want, go for it, because it’s definitely worth it.” — Nicolas Garibay

He mentions a few favorite Bible verses — Proverbs 27:17, As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another … Proverbs 3:5, Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding … Isaiah 41:10, Do not fear, for I am with you; … I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

He clutched to those last two verses throughout three harrowing days last year, less than a week after Amarayah’s birth, when Miriam was admitted to the hospital with post-partum hemorrhaging that nearly killed her.

“She was already cold, she was shivering, and she was telling me to take care of the family, take care of the kids,” Garibay says. “That’s the last thing you want to hear. We could have lost her. That would have changed my life completely. I wouldn’t be here. Golf? No, I’m done. That’s why I say, and why I tell my staff, you can’t take anything for granted.”

“I think it brought us even closer together,” Miriam says. “We appreciate everything even more.”

What might be next for Garibay? He turns 40 this year, though as a Jehovah’s Witness he won’t celebrate the day. Fatherhood should be more fun than ever, especially with his son starting to study electrical engineering after excelling in his first job as a two-time McDonald’s employee of the month, and his daughters starting high school and walking, respectively.

On the course, Masemore is set to retire this month, opening up a director of agronomy position. Garibay has already added his résumé to the pile.

“If I were a GM, I would hire him in a heartbeat,” Gray says. “I would tell him, ‘This is what this membership expects, here’s what they want, and I know you can do it.’”

“He’ll be a director somewhere,” Arraya adds. “He’ll be at one of the big clubs.”

Will Garibay’s nontraditional background and climb hinder him? Gray says it might. Arraya says Garibay should lean into what makes him different — especially his quarter of a century of boots-on-the-ground work.

“Being Latino helps him tremendously because it helps him relate to all cultures, not just Hispanics, because he understands the challenge to overcome the optics,” Arraya says. “That’s a reality that people are uncomfortable talking about, just like gender, just like race. I think he will leave a mark in 10 or 15 years in Florida as one of the better directors and one of the better leaders in our industry. I would be shocked if that didn’t happen.

“His climb, it’s pretty special. There are a lot of guys in his shoes who maybe didn’t have the personality or the leadership skills and never got an opportunity. Nick’s pretty courageous. It takes a lot of courage to step outside that comfort zone and say, ‘Yeah, I don’t have a degree.’ I remember for so many years trying to camouflage that in his credentials and finally saying, Own that. You don’t have that but here’s what you do have. It gives people hope, and that’s what we all need.”

Whenever and wherever that next step happens, Garibay will be ready. He has been working on the land since he was 5. He learned about responsibility through all those years on the farms and the courses. He learned about loyalty. He learned through experience.

“That’s what I think I gained,” he says. “And what did I lose? I don’t think I lost anything. I never felt like I lost. I always felt like I gained.

“Everything I’ve done I feel has prepared me for where I am.”

Matt LaWell is Golf Course Industry’s managing editor.