Experiencing the turf dream

Not so long ago, Walter Chavez found himself on the receiving end of a prolonged ovation. He wasn’t the only one on stage that day but the large crowd of members at Hollybrook Golf and Tennis Club in Pembroke Pines, Florida, made it clear he was the star of their show. They were grateful for the leap in conditions he’d delivered since his arrival two years ago.

As the applause continued, Chavez admits getting a little emotional. “It made me think about where I came from,” he says.

Geographically, that was Argentina, where Chavez was raised the youngest of three brothers in a “very rough neighborhood” about four hours from the capital Buenos Aries. When he landed in Miami in 2001, he was just “18 or 19” and spoke no English. “All I knew how to say was good morning,” he says, with a grin.

Still, he found work cleaning a yacht three times a week and picking balls on the range at Miami Shores Golf Club. Outside those part-time gigs, he had a lot of hours to feel adrift and think about home. So, on a bus ride one day, his ears pricked up when he recognized an Argentinian inflection to the Spanish being spoken by another passenger. Chavez introduced himself.

The speaker happened to work on a golf course. “When I tell him I have seven or eight years of experience in golf, he says, ‘I’ll call my boss,’” Chavez says. “I never specified what type of experience. I was just looking for a job. I didn’t know what they had to offer.”

So, on his first day at Indian Creek Country Club, of all places, Chavez found himself standing in front of a walk mower. “The assistant superintendent points at it and says, ‘You know?’ I’m thinking to myself it’s probably like mowing my dad’s backyard with a little push mower,” Chavez says. “So, I said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ I am young and I am from Argentina. We think that we know everything.”

But Chavez’s “experience in golf” was not in golf course maintenance. He had been a caddie from the age of 11, and later took care of a driving range.

“So, the assistant took me to a green, and says, ‘Here it is.’ I crank it and start mowing. You can imagine what I did, right?” Chavez laughs. “I destroyed the green. He stops the mower and yells at me. Then he took off, just left me in the middle of the golf course.”

Had Chavez known his way off property, he would have taken it, at speed. “Indian Creek is very exclusive,” he says. “I’d seen a police officer with a gun when I came through the gate. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God. This guy has gone to get the police.”

Eventually, the assistant returned and shuttled Chavez back to the shop for a meeting. A translator explained that his new employers wanted to know why he couldn’t mow a green when he’d claimed to have all this experience in golf.

When Chavez detailed his time caddying and on the range, he remembers a staff member turning to the boss and saying, “See, you need to fire him.” The boss, Joe Pantaleo, didn’t hesitate in response. He said, “No. We need to train him. He’s the only one on the crew who knows the game. So, we’re going to train him.” Chavez had no idea how his fate turned for the better in that moment.

Pantaleo is one of the pillars of the profession, a past president of the Florida GCSA and recipient of the Distinguished Service Award and President’s Award for Lifetime Service. One of the secrets to the success of the best is seeing beyond the moment. Which is how Pantaleo came to give the kid another shot. Truth be told, he had to give him several.

“When I was young, I didn’t know the system, didn’t know how the real world worked,” Chavez says. “It was my first time on my own. I’m just a kid living with a bunch of young guys and girls. A party every night. All the guys at Indian Creek were showing up 30 minutes before their start time, but I was showing up at 5:59 with the nightclub clothes on.”

Over the years, Chavez has wondered what might have become of him had Pantaleo not been so patient. “He had all the right to let me go. I think any other superintendent would be like, ‘All right, man. Sorry, but you need to go.’”

Instead, Chavez spent two years at Indian Creek, learning “the system,” the job and, little by little, the language. Jim Torba, a Pantaleo protégé, offered him a chance to work for $2 per hour more at Miami Beach Golf Club. Torba, a golf nut and accomplished player, soon learned that Chavez was a great golfer. His current handicap index is 0.1.

“So, we were playing every day after work. At 2 p.m., he would say, ‘Walter, grab your clubs,’” Chavez says. “That’s how I learned a lot. Because he was not only playing golf, he was sharing a lot of things. And I would ask a lot of questions.”

Those rounds might as well have been turf classes given that just a year later, Torba recommended Chavez for the assistant’s role with a first-time superintendent, Seth Strickland, who had just taken over at Miami Shores.

“I asked Jim, ‘Why are you sending me there? I can’t even communicate properly with you guys,” Chavez recalls. “I could do the job, but how was I going to tell an employee to go and do something. Turns out, Jim was right. Seth was one of the best things that happened to me. I think we were good for each other. We started very early in the morning and worked ’til late, then 6 or 7 o’clock we’d go to the range.”

Chavez was still learning English, but he clearly commanded the language of golf, the quality Pantaleo identified as valuable back on Day 1. So, he was in his element with Strickland, another golf nut, who won his sixth national superintendent championship earlier this year.

Even though the golf industry was booming at the time, with opportunities aplenty, Chavez’s ascension to the assistant’s role at Miami Shores was exceptional. Just three years earlier, he’d been picking the range there, with nothing but “good morning” to offer anyone who spoke to him in English.

At this point, it’s worth addressing the reason he left home and his family in the first place. Those tears in his eyes at Hollybrook weren’t just because of how far he’d come. He was also remembering how tenuous life itself can be.

The driving range he worked in Argentina was across “a big empty field” from the family house. At the end of each day, after washing balls and restocking dispensers, he and a buddy would lock up and, with the day’s takings in a bag, ride their bikes in the dark.

One night, “A couple of guys come out of nowhere, push us to the ground. They have guns and they tie us up, hands and feet. They were very intoxicated, either drink or drugs.”

The robbers took everything, down to Chavez’s tennis shoes. “They left me and my buddy lying there, tied up,” he says. “And we’re freaking out. I mean freaking out. It was a big shock for me. The guns were no fun at all, no fun.”

At the same time, civil and political unrest was rising in Argentina. “I could see the country was going downhill,” Chavez says. “Within a month or two, I was here (in the U.S.).”

At Miami Shores under Strickland, Chavez felt like he’d found a home. Then Ricky Reeves, who later became Florida GCSA president, took over at Miami Beach after Torba left. Through golf and the superintendent network, Reeves had come to know Chavez and wanted him on his team. Chavez was hesitant.

“I told Seth I was going to stay with him for the rest of my life,” he says. “I said, ‘I am going to retire with you.’ Seth said, ‘No, it’s a better job, better opportunity, bigger club, you’ve been there already, you know the system.’ And the money was a lot more too. So, I took the job.”

Chavez spent several years under Reeves before taking an opportunity off course with Lake Masters, a Florida-based lake, pond and wetland management company. “It was fun, great. Early-morning starts, done by noon, no weekends,” he says. “They gave me a truck, nice truck, a better truck, bonus, full benefits. All the stuff was great.” But after several years, Chavez wondered if there was enough opportunity in front of him, like there had been in golf course maintenance.

So, he returned to golf under Bob Harper, a three-time Florida GCSA golf champion, at The Club at Emerald Hills. Then Reeves came calling again. He’d lost his assistant and had always been happy with Chavez. “I went back and after three or four years, Ricky got moved up to director of golf and they made me a superintendent,” Chavez says. “Two years ago, in May, I got the offer for this job (at Hollybrook).” His own place for the first time.

That day on stage back in March, all of the above and more flashed through his mind while the applause rang out. Of the more, much of it centered on family. As the youngest, there was always an expectation Chavez would live with his parents into their old age. “I’m sure my parents thought I would stay, like a lot of guys my age back then,” he says. “Build an apartment in the back or on top of the roof and live there. But today my parents are very proud.”

Though neither has traveled to Florida for a visit. “They’ve never been on a plane. Never left the country,” Chavez says. “My mom says she is afraid of escalators, and she is worried that she will pass out in an elevator.” In 23 years, each of his brothers has visited once. So, when Chavez makes the trip home, it is always bittersweet.

“A lot of emotions, good and bad,” he says. “You go back there, and you see the reality that you maybe didn’t fully realize when you were living there. Still, it’s always tough getting on a plane to come back. Still today, that’s the worst part. Mom always does the same thing, standing there looking at me when I’m leaving in the taxi … it’s just so … yeah ...”

“To look at where he is now and what he has accomplished, it’s incredible,” Strickland says. “He and I are similar in a way, where we don’t have the educational pedigree of some superintendents in South Florida. Both of us have worked our way up through the ranks. His passion for the game is what drives him, and motivates him, and that’s what gotten him to where he is today. All he needed was a chance.”

Chavez took GCSAA and Florida GCSA classes at every opportunity, checking off his licenses and BMP certifications — both golf and green industry — along the way. There were never enough hours to attend formal turf school. Since 2010, Chavez has simultaneously operated his own interior landscaping business, providing and tending plants for hotels and businesses, often before getting to the golf course and sometimes afterwards.

Now 43, he has set superintendent certification as a goal. “I know it’s difficult but I’ve done a lot of things so I don’t see why I cannot do that one,” he says, grinning again. “Since I don’t have a degree, I think that would a be great thing for me if I want to keep getting better.”

That would not surprise Pantaleo, who laughs at the memory of that first encounter with Chavez, “fresh from Argentina.”

“That was interesting,” he says. “We put him on a nursery green. Improper mowing lines, scalping. Basically, he didn’t know how to turn a mower. Or lift it up or set it down. Didn’t know just about everything. But he was an enthusiastic learner, and he knew golf. I gravitated toward that, the guy who wanted to be better as a player and in the profession. I’m proud of him. And I’m sure he’ll continue to grow.”

Strickland is similarly proud: “Hardworking guy who put his nose to the grindstone, and it’s paid off tremendously for him. His story is like, it’s like the American Dream, really.”

Trent Bouts is a Greer, South Carolina-based writer and frequent Golf Course Industry contributor. This story first appeared in The Florida Green.