What (a) character

Lake Chobot Golf Course Is Back in Its Many Lovers’ Arms

by Andrew Hidas

Remember the angles, idiosyncrasies, and beautiful riddles of your home court, for which you always had the answers when interlopers came from afar, thinking they could ruin your day? Makes no difference whether it was basketball or bocce, tennis, tiddlywinks or golf. When you knew the lay of your particular land, you came to love its every single peculiarity, its unique rhythms and ridges, the better to claim as your own.

It’s the kind of partnership that calls to mind an enduring love affair, but we shall speak here of the golf variety alone, in particular the affair countless golfers have carried on with Lake Chabot Golf Course since it opened in 1923.

This is a storyteller’s course, Lake Chabot is. Set back into the densely wooded hills abutting Lake Chabot Regional Park, it’s a crown jewel of the City of Oakland’s recreational lineup, offering golfers a highly entertaining hill-and-dale romp that will bring to mind, well, no other course at all.

With its jaw-dropping views of San Francisco Bay, uphill climbs on most of the holes (an additional 9-hole executive course simply adds to the attraction), and a par-6 finishing hole that goes 673 yards straight downhill and is sometimes reachable in two, the course has character to burn. That’s one reason why its devotees were becoming a tad dispirited in recent years as a host of factors combined to see it slowly fall into disrepair.

But to its everlasting credit with the golfing gods, the city and its Parks & Recreation Department, under the direction of Audree V. Jones-Taylor, took stock of what was being lost and then took the dramatic step of closing the course last fall for a five-month renovation/rejuvenation. The program focused on the basics of a golfer’s experience: comprehensive reseeding and fertilizing of fairways, roughs and tees, improving irrigation, and then modernizing the clubhouse and pro shop. When it reopened April 7, longtime aficionados flocked back enthusiastically, their joy even more pronounced with news that the exceedingly modest rates ($26 Mon.-Thurs., $22 Fri., $37 weekends, less for residents) weren’t being jacked up in wake of the renovation.

Of all the returnees, probably no one was more gratified than Gloria Armstrong, a kind of unofficial Course Mother, historian, and longtime keeper of its spirit. Still spry and voluble at 87, Armstrong spent 11 years on the LPGA tour, but has always maintained her born-in-Oaklandand- loves-Lake Chabot-roots. “I played my first-ever 18-hole round on Lake Chabot. The date was December 10, 1942,” says Armstrong, who still helps run the course’s Junior Golf Academy and plays when she can despite protests from a chronically sore shoulder. She learned to golf during the Depression, when her father, an avid golfer whose linotype operator’s job at the Oakland Tribune had been reduced to two days a week, decided to use the extra time to hone his and his family’s golf game.

“My mother won the handicap section of the Lake Chabot Ladies Club Tournament in 1932. That was the same year I lost my father’s 8-iron on the eighth hole. I was 3 years old, but he never let me forget it,” says Armstrong, still chuckling at the memory.

Things have changed aplenty since those days, but Lake Chabot’s blissful essence remains. That includes its wooded retreat backdrop, its w o n d e r f u l l y whacked out No. 18 (think Bodie Miller with a golf club rather than ski poles), five fairways dissected by the entrance road (giving special urgency to cries of “Fore!”), a 60-foot fall from No. 9 on a 120-yard hole, small greens, and an up-and-down character over its 6,000 yards. Despite the hills, the course is highly playable and even a boon for beginners or vets ready to cop a good score.

Put all those elements in the blender, give it a shake, add in your own trials-and tribulations stories, then tell your cronies all about it at the fully redone 19th hole. Armstrong will be happy to pitch in with the likes of this: “In the early days, the rough hadn’t grown in yet. They had a contest in 1932 to see who could hit the longest drive, and (course superintendent) Joe Giusto got it to the bottom of the hill. You couldn’t do that now. There’s still a plaque for him out there. I think he won an airplane.”

She chuckles again as she observes, “Players here were complaining in recent years that the rough was receding from lack of maintenance. The renovation has changed that, and now they’re complaining because of all the high grass. That’s golfers for you.”

Those complaints, of course, are exactly what you’d hope and expect to hear from briefly jilted lovers who were easily coaxed back to their inamorata and her seductive charms. As Bogie might have said to Ingrid in another context, “We’ll always have Lake Chabot. We’d lost it…but we got it back last month.”