The Rancho Mirage, Calif. club was home to legendary performers such as the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Kirk Douglas, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra, but that history had been stored away. General Manager Chad Johnson is reintroducing it as the club looks to attract new members. “Everyone likes a good story,” he said.
When Chad Johnson took over as General Manager at Tamarisk Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., he wanted to see the history of one of the oldest and most star-studded country clubs in the desert, The Desert Sun reported. But he couldn’t find it.
“There was nothing on the walls, no history,” Johnson said. “Decisions had been made to put those things away.”
It is common in this era of golf, when selling memberships to younger people can be a difficult task, for older clubs to avoid talking about the history and lore of their courses or clubs, The Desert Sun reported. The focus tends to be on what’s new, what has been renovated and what has been added in recent years.
But at Tamarisk, opened in 1952 as the second 18-hole golf course in the desert, the trend is now to not only talk about its past but embrace it, The Desert Sun reported.
In recent weeks in both print advertising and television commercials featuring Ben Hogan or Bing Crosby or legendary starter Scorpy Doyle, Tamarisk has started to tout its history, both as one of the places old Hollywood called home in the desert and as one of the four founding courses of the Palm Springs Golf Classic, the tournament that became the Bob Hope Classic and is now the American Express, The Desert Sun reported. And the photos of that past are back on the walls of the Tamarisk clubhouse.
“I don’t necessarily want to say it is a re-brand,” said Johnson, who most recently worked at PGA West before joining Tamarisk a year ago. “To some extend it is that, but it is really to re-introduce the club and what made the club cool, if you will, in the 1950s and 1960s.”
But does the history of a course, even a history like Tamarisk, matter when selling memberships, which Tamarisk and almost every other private course in the desert is trying to do? Johnson told The Desert Sun it at least helps.
“What I have found, even with speaking with people in their 30s, everyone likes a good story,” Johnson said. “Is it enough to sell someone on a membership? No, it is not. But it is certainly helping to drive interest.”
And the history is important to social members of the club, many of them recent buyers of mid-century homes at the club designed by architects such as George and Robert Alexander and William Cody, The Desert Sun reported.
“When they come up [to the clubhouse], those buyers of those properties, they are so fascinated by the stories of the club. And I think the story has, to be honest with you, been lost over time,” Johnson said.
Johnson acknowledges that social memberships—which offer access to most club facilities and cost less than a golf membership while offering less access to the William P. Bell-designed course—are the trend in private clubs, The Desert Sun reported.
“People are now as much or more interested in dining and events and fitness and wellness and things like that as they were 30 or 40 years ago about the golf course,” he said. “We are seeing that is true.”
The Tamarisk story began in 1952, one year after Thunderbird opened as the desert’s first 18-hole course, The Desert Sun reported. Tamarisk became the desert’s Jewish club in an era when such separations still existed. Not all of the 65 founding members at Tamarisk were Jewish, and there was never a requirement that a member be Jewish. Among the members in the 1960s were the Marx Brothers, Jack Benny, Kirk Douglas, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Frank Sinatra.
“Our first entertainment committee had Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Dinah Shore, Jack Benny, I could go down the list,” Johnson said. “Ten of the biggest stars in Hollywood were on the entertainment committee here in the early 1950s, and they were in charge of setting up entertainment for the club.”
In a day when touring professionals took club pro jobs in the winter, Tamarisk boasted Ben Hogan, perhaps the greatest player of his day, as its pro, The Desert Sun reported.
“When I tell people that Ben Hogan was the first pro here and he was out there teaching our members on the first tee pretty much as it looks today, they think I am kidding,” Johnson said.
Other pros who worked at Tamarisk in its earliest days included golf and tennis star Ellsworth Vines, former PGA Championship winner Johnny Revolta and Shirley Spork, one of the 13 founders of the LPGA, The Desert Sun reported. In addition to being part of the Bob Hope Classic from 1960 through 2005, Tamarisk also was the host of the desert’s first official LPGA tournament in 1953.
Johnson insists that the club is financially solid, but that reaching out to the community to offer both golf and social memberships is just the start of the efforts to bring the club back into the consciousness of the Coachella Valley golf world, The Desert Sun reported.
“Our membership has been generational, friends of existing members,” Johnson said. “[Publicity] was never something that the club gave much thought. But as the membership gets older, well, times change. Now we have something that the existing market and industry has forgotten, what the club means certainly to Coachella Valley golf and you can even argue Southern California golf.”
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