Buried with creativity

Maybe Steven Tingle’s third book will be an autobiography. There’s plenty of material, particularly for an audience with an affinity for golf and golf course maintenance.

Tingle grew up on a golf course and by the age of 12 was mowing greens and cutting cups at daybreak. He loved it. But by the time he went to college, he was tempted by the clean shirts and air conditioning of the pro shop, and so landed a part-time job in one. He hated it.

Thus, for his last three years in college, he worked back where he belonged: on the golf course. After graduating, he went all the way back to the course he grew up on, then known as Springdale Country Club. And became golf course superintendent. His parents owned it after all. They actually built it, with the first nine holes opening in 1968 and a second nine four years later.

They also helped build the National Golf Course Owners Association, as founding members, in 1986. Tingle’s father, Fred, a keen intellect and former corporate executive in Manhattan — his subscriptions included everything from The New Yorker to Smithsonian — was elected president in 1990 and received NGCOA’s highest honor, the Don Rossi Award, in 1994.

By the time Fred Tingle died unexpectedly in 2005, his son was a certified superintendent. The golf course had been his life, and he was committed to making it his future too. So, you can begin to appreciate how he felt when his mother, Eunice, fired him in 2008. It was devastating. “It’s your identity,” Tingle says, setting the head of every golf course superintendent nodding.

Exacerbating the shock and grief was the fact that he’d also divorced six months earlier and was raising his two children alone. There was also real fear. Remember what also happened in 2008. The housing market imploded, sucking the economy into a black hole with it.

The Great Recession hit as the Tingles were deep in negotiations to sell the golf course, and all prospective buyers suddenly vanished. In short order, Eunice Tingle had lost her husband, a daughter-in-law, and her grip on a payday approaching eight figures, not to mention the comfortable retirement it would have ensured.

That period wasn’t good for many people. But it was terrible for mother and son both. Already both emotionally strained, now there were grave economic tensions. Something gave, which is why, abruptly, the son found himself out of a job.

But all that is for Steven Tingle’s third book — if he wants to go there. For now, he is excited to see his second book about to hit the market, and he hopes people in golf course maintenance will be, too.

The cleverly titled “Buried Lies” is a novel, a golf course-based murder mystery. As in his first book, Tingle’s leading character is former cop and private detective Davis Reed, who gets pulled back into the investigative saddle when all he wanted was peace, an IPA and to quietly enjoy his own wit. For the setting, Tingle leans into his background at Springdale, now Springdale Resort, and his golf course superintendent experience.

Indeed, another main character is a superintendent, who is helpful enough until he finds himself among the suspects. For the record, that is not a scenario Tingle draws from personal experience. Although now long removed from the profession, he confesses there were times when he felt like leaving some golfers’ toes up in a bunker like the victim in his book. More nodding perhaps?

“I’m not sure anyone who has never been a golf course superintendent can truly appreciate what it’s like,” he says. “The golf course becomes an extension of yourself. So, when golfers mistreat it, or complain about it, it’s all you can do to not take it personally.”

Today, Springdale is the biggest thing happening in the tiny community of Cruso, North Carolina, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. The nearest sizeable town is Canton, once home to a paper mill that filled the Appalachian valley with a sour smell but paid workers well. The most famous landmark, which overlooks the course, is Cold Mountain, the peak that gave title to Charles Frazier’s best-seller and the movie starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law.

Eunice Tingle eventually sold the course in 2018 but only after some hard years. Her son never returned as superintendent but with his mother aging and in declining health, he was present and dutiful in all other areas.

Along the way, Tingle himself turned to writing because superintendent jobs were hard to get when he needed one. He’d drawn nourishment from his father’s magazines all those years before, flicked through golf publications, and read his share of mystery novels. At some point, with prospects shrinking, he told himself that writing couldn’t be that hard.

He landed his first freelance assignment before he’d written anything more than a letter. He confesses asking Google, “How to write a magazine article?” To veteran writers, that is the equivalent of a golfer searching, “How to maintain a golf course?” In both cases, those in the respective professions might reasonably ask a question of their own, “Who does this guy think he is?”

It turns out, in Tingle’s case, the “guy” is the real deal on both counts. His early writing appeared in national golf publications like this one before he moved to broader fields, covering everything from food and travel to first-person accounts in a monthly Southeast regional column, Man About Town.

“Buried Lies” is available Oct. 15 and can be ordered in advance through major online retailers.

Trent Bouts is a Greer, South Carolina-based writer and frequent Golf Course Industry contributor.