Our July/August issue includes a feature on our quirkiest golf courses. We gathered several beautiful photos of the fine fairways, hazards and greens around our state. Here are some that didn’t make the magazine.
Editor’s Note: Oscar Austad’s entrepreneurial spirit was unmatched, as evidenced by the golf empire he founded in Sioux Falls 1963. Austad’s Golf remains headquartered there, but has grown to include 10 locations in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota and Iowa. We visited Austad in 1991, five years before his death, to find out how he became South Dakota’s mail-order millionaire.
Many Norwegians in South Dakota work too hard, shun alcohol and tobacco, shy away from golf courses, vote Republican and make lots of money. If they ever gather under one roof and form an association, it is likely to be called the Oscar Austad Society. Nobody exemplifies their values like the mail-order millionaire from Sioux Falls who started by selling cardboard golf club tubes from his car trunk.
Austad’s early background seemed ideally suited for business mediocrity. His father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a Fargo, North Dakota carpenter. Austad considered a law career but quit college after three years.
He was fired from the insurance business twice. (He had the unpopular habit of advising superiors on how to run their firms.) He disliked salesmanship, avoided social occasions where alcohol was served and couldn’t resist telling prospects where to find the best deal, even if it wasn’t from his company.
Just the kind of guy you want to do business with if you’re buying golf equipment by mail, apparently, because 770,000 people placed orders with The Austad Company in 1990 and total sales exceeded $50 million.
The Sioux Falls firm has been the largest user of UPS ever since the brown trucks started rolling on South Dakota roads, and Oscar’s WATTS line phone bill runs about $1 million annually. Telephones are manned 24 hours a day by a team of 160 people.
Austad once candidly told a newspaper reporter his weaknesses may have also been his strengths. “I had been a failure at a lot of things and I had five children to support (when he was fired again in 1963 as an insurance adjuster in Sioux Falls.) But I had no antagonism … it merely spurred me on: Anytime I got fired or had a bad break, it became a good break because it made me buckle down like nothing else.”
Austad’s parents were Norwegian Lutheran immigrants. He learned how to work at an early age, earning 11 cents an hour as a bellhop at the local hotel and peddling newspapers on the street for a nickel.
He married Dorothy Hansberger and as the years passed, they found themselves with a houseful of kids (six, eventually). To earn extra cash, he sold golf equipment for his wife’s brothers, who founded Ram Golf. His first product was a cardboard tube that golfers used to protect their clubs.
Initially he sold to retailers, but the idea of going directly to the consumer by mail intrigued him, so he got a list of Minnesota bankers and sent a postcard which advertised the tubes. “I thought bankers probably had the money to buy and the time to golf,” he recalled. “To my pleasant surprise, they bought.”
He added a few more products, mimeographed a flyer that his 12-person art department would laugh at today, and found another list. The phone company helped by providing free directories for every city in the United States. Gradually, he developed one of the hottest mailing lists in the sports world, with well over 2 million names of people who buy by mail.
“We experimented with 30 categories,” he said.”Bankers are probably the best. We also tried savings and loan executives, dentists, doctors, lawyers and stockbrokers. Doctors have the money, but they don’t have the time so they haven’t been that good. I would say stockbrokers and CPAs are among the poorest. I guess they’re working too hard. We also tried insurance agents, funeral directors, teachers and ministers, with not such good results.”
The Austads keep the list “clean” which means if you don’t buy from them in two or three years, you get a letter asking if you want to continue to receive their mailings. They also collect data on the type of person on their list. The average catalog reader is male, middle-aged, earns $49,000 a year and, of course, plays golf.
Though business has mushroomed from year to year at Austad’s, it has not grown without some crafty moves. Austad tried to expand into other types of sporting equipment but he eventually came to the conclusion his niche is with golfers. However, expansion has been continued by the development of Austad lines of golf clothing under the names Linksport and Sycamore Hills (the company headquarters is at Sycamore and 10th in Sioux Falls.)
“We have our own people who draw up the designs,” he said. “We hire our own models and do the photo sessions in California and Hawaii and other resort locations.”
A variety of golf-related products aside from clubs and balls have also increased sales. For example, linksters can order fur knit head covers for their clubs, a Caddy Plus electronic scorekeeper, a Sure Catch plastic gizmo which retrieves balls “from murky and deep water” and an $84.95 electronic Pro Golf game of the country’s toughest holes. Personalized golf tees, monogrammed towels and a 24-karat gold plated putter are other products stocked and sold at Austads.
The products and price are important, Austad says, but the real trick to success by mail is service. Before employees can take orders for Austad’s, they must complete an extensive two-week training session that includes directions to service but not sell. “We don’t hire a single salesman in the entire company,” he says. In fact, even the clerks in the company’s three retail stores are directed to simply greet customers and then allow them to browse without interruption. Service is stressed, not salesmanship.
“The key to mail order is to get the message across to people who want the product, and then have the right product at the right price and get it out to them quickly,” Austad says.”That impresses people.”
Most orders are in the mail within 24 hours after arrival. Dissatisfied customers are a rarity. “We give faster attention to complaints than we do to new orders,” he said. Buyers can receive a full refund even if they don’t like the shade of pink. And it’s not uncommon for the company to throw in a dozen golf balls to soothe a customer.
Austad seems to have been born with a knack for treating people like he would like to be treated, a nice sales trick that many big corporations wish they could emulate. But he doesn’t consider himself a commercial genius, and he points to credit cards as proof. “I was kind of stupid along that line. I fought it for years and my son, who was then in junior high school, finally convinced me that we had to accept credit cards. He was right. No mail order company could stay in business today without them.”
Unlike the characters in a lot of rags to riches stories, Austad says he never experienced a doubt in his mind or a serious crisis once the mail order business was under way. When he left his final insurance job in 1963, he figured his customers would buy enough golf balls to feed the kids. Today he employs two of those kids and 460 other people.
Dave is president of the company. Under his leadership, the mail order business has expanded internationally and two retail stores were recently opened at Minneapolis. A third store is located in Sioux Falls.
Randy, a former state senator from Minnehaha County and by many estimates a rising star for the state GOP, is executive vice president. Oscar served as a state senator during the Kneip administration in the early 1970s, and the Austad political tradition gave rise to a line of clubs and balls called Senator, which is gaining in popularity.
Politics has been but one of several of Oscar’s causes. He has also been active with the National Right to Work Committee and the Center for National Labor Policy, which furnishes attorneys for workers who are being discriminated against because they refuse to join a union.
His employees have always been non-union, maybe because the boss is an advocate for more benefits. Austad’s features profit-sharing, health coverage, protective glasses for computer operators, liberal leave policies for vacations and illnesses and such perks as free milk and orange juice during breaks.
But when the company asks workers to specify their favorite fringe benefit, they often write in one that is not even listed on the questionnaire: clean air.
Which leads to another Oscar Austad cause. He has never permitted smoking in his stores or offices ó by customers or employees. “In our 28 years of business, we have not allowed anyone to smoke in our building. People once thought I was crazy, but now they’re coming around to our way of thinking,” he said.
For the past five years, it has been company policy to not hire anyone who smokes. “Somebody is probably going to take me to court for discrimination on that one,” he said with a determined grin. “Let them. I’ll enjoy every minute of it.”
His no smoking rule knows no exceptions. “We even kicked two governors out of here (Richard Kneip and Bill Janklow) for lighting up. They took it very well.”
For many years, Austad served as board member and chairman of a national group called Action on Smoking and Health. He has also been a local advocate for the rights of non-smokers and has spoken at many business and health conferences on the subject. “It irritated me every time I was sitting next to a smoker, breathing impure air.”
Austad also isn’t a fan of alcoholic beverages. According to one story, as a 9-year-old he promised his mother he would never drink or smoke, and when he found that their church was using wine at communion, he tried to convince the minister to substitute grape juice. Although The Austad Company has hosted employees at numerous social functions, alcohol has never been served.
Although Austad says South Dakota has been a good place to build a business ó primarily because of the honest and hardworking labor force ó he is glad he doesn’t have to rely on his home state for income. Only about 2 percent of the company’s mail order sales are from South Dakotans. The rest come from the remaining 49 states and from 53 foreign countries. Business from Japan and Sweden has grown so much that the Austads now publish catalogs in Japanese and Swedish.
Austad also investigated the potential of publishing a catalog for his parents’ homeland, Norway, but he discovered there aren’t many Norwegian golfers. It might be in the blood. He never golfed until he started selling golf equipment, and he jokes that he quit a few years later “because I was such a poor advertisement for our equipment!”
Today, he says, his sons handle the responsibilities on the golf course, as well as most of the other duties at the company. “They have been doing a great job, a tremendous job. I know they are because every few weeks, some big outfit contacts us and wants to buy us out.”
There’s no chance of a sale. Dave is 30 and Randy just 34. “And we’re all having fun in this business,” he said.
That includes the employees. There is remarkably little turnover at the firm. Austad’s first employee, Sharon Stahl, whom he describes as “a farm girl from Yale,” is still on the payroll. In fact, she is now corporate treasurer and a member of the board of directors.
He and Sharon recall those early days when they both answered the phone, opened the mail and greeted customers in a dumpy Eighth Street warehouse in the industrial section of Sioux Falls. In those days, he was discouraged from answering the phone because if he didn’t have exactly what the caller wanted he was quick to recommend a competitor. “I never was much of a salesman,” he claims modestly.
He can say it. But he isn’t fooling many people today. The quiet Norwegian from Fargo might be one of the smoothest salesmen of our times.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 1991 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
When you drive by a golf course in some small town along a South Dakota highway, it’s hard to slow down enough to see and appreciate the tradition and character that are part of where that community and its course meet. To the highway observer, the Webster Municipal Golf Course is just another traditional side-by-side course, indistinguishable from a hundred others across the state. With a slope rating of only 110, and 2921 yards from the men’s tees, it won’t intimidate too many golfers. And the locals will tell you that if you stay out of the National Guard parking compound (it’s fenced), away from Highway 12, and don’t hit Don Mahlen’s house or the cart shed, you can’t get in too much trouble. But that little glimpse wouldn’t tell you much about the traditions and the character of the course.
In Webster, Kids learned to golf in the summer rec program. Nobody I knew had their own clubs, although most had a few balls they’d found by scrounging in the roughs. On golf day, the community’s young’uns gathered at the course and were paired up in three or foursomes, along with a bag of clubs. The summer rec’s clubs were those left at the course through the years, so the”set” included a wood of some type, an iron in the 3 or 5 range, maybe a 9 iron, and a beat-up putter. A”round” of golf was about 3 holes — anything longer would have tied the course up for the whole day. This was about the joy of swinging and running around something like a big lawn. For our parents, it was probably about getting us out of the house for a few mornings a week. Nobody from my summer rec days went to college on a golf scholarship, but they all enjoyed learning a version of the game.
Decades of Webster Bearcats football players dressed in the armory locker rooms, and charged off to the stadium, running across the golf course, helmet in hand, seeking Friday night fame and glory. The same golf course padded their tired trot back after the games, even on those occasions when the glory may have been fleeting.
The Bearcat cross-country runners got their taste of hometown fame on the golf course too. They streaked off down #1 fairway, covered the 9 fairways, and then looped back around three more holes to make the 2.2 mile course — and end with a lung-searing kick to the chute near the 9th green.
Only a community golf course could give you the opportunity to wave to Great Uncle John and Aunt Anna in their room at the nursing home on # 2 or 4 tee boxes or #3 green, or maybe even take your cart over and tap on their window to make their day.
The club house at the course doesn’t have any columns and there is no Magnolia Lane, but it’s hosted a robust life of senior citizen meetings, card parties, and class and family reunions. It sports a deck looking out over the ninth green, where advice is freely and loudly dispensed — particularly on men’s night — to the duffers finishing their round.
You don’t need to look at the paydays for majors on the LPGA and PGA circuits to understand that golf is still a male-dominated world. When we lived in Webster, my wife golfed and I didn’t, and I would get to hear about it after every Lady’s Day. Women golfed on Wednesday. Men’s Day was Thursday. Without all the modern watering devices and timers and things happening in the nights, sprinklers had to be turned on when somebody was around at work to do it. Greens and fairways had to be watered so they looked nice on Men’s Day. No greenskeeper dared mess that one up. It probably made complete sense to the groundsperson that the best way to have good greens for Men’s Thursday was to turn the sprinklers on during Women’s Wednesday! I’m not sure where the phrase”mad as a wet hen” originated, but I saw and heard where it fostered and grew.
There are two unique attributes about the Webster course. It is famous for its crowned greens that are the size of a quarter. If you can go”up and down” there, you can go”up and down” anywhere. When Webster golfers get to courses with bigger greens of more modern designs, they feel like they are being asked to hit into the Dome or something.
Also, Webster has a barber pole — but the haircut you get with one of these is a little different in golf. There are only two in the state– Webster and Clear Lake. (Of course I’m inviting readers to respond that I missed one.) If your ball doesn’t fly past the barber pole before cutting towards the green, you have to hit backwards and go around it. The barber pole allows a course to use a dog leg to make its course longer, without letting the unscrupulous cut the corner and make a mockery of the par 5.
After finishing up some business, I buzzed over to the Webster course for a quick nine, and the tradition and character of the community were in full bloom.
At the clubhouse there was only one group about to tee off — of about 12 golfers! It was the warmup for the Bob Wiley Classic, an event to raise funds and commemorate the most dedicated baseball supporter Webster has ever seen. Webster prep stars Bart Wiley, Lonnie Stover, Scottie Hanson and probably some others I didn’t recognize, were there enjoying home on their community course.
Webster’s a wrestling town, no secret to anybody in the 5-7 zip code. It seemed only right that out on the course I would come across Maurice Bierschbach, father of about 3 or 4 of those state champions. On the same fairway I again came across the 12-some, playing a spirited game of what appeared to be”worst ball” and laughing the whole time.
As I looked across those collections of people that embodied so many great memories for a community, I couldn’t help but think that this little piece of ground wasn’t really so much about birdies and pars, as it was about an opportunity to every once in a while, in some small way, bring a community together.
Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.
Heading west towards Spearfish at interstate speeds is a tough way to take the full measure of South Dakota’s newest and most fun golf course: Elkhorn Ridge. The course opened its first 9 holes in 2009, which probably wasn’t the best market timing for the residential development that accompanies it. But the golf layout, nestled into the elevations on the east side of a ridge on historic Frawley Ranch in Centennial Valley, four miles east of Spearfish, is South Dakota’s best.
From the blue tees the course plays 3254 yards, an average length, and sports a 125 slope, a tougher than average layout. You know you’re someplace unique when the cart path from the driving range and modern clubhouse takes you to the first tee box through a tunnel under the interstate! Lest you fear the trip, the carts are equipped with modern GPS, so the yards to and from trouble are clearly spelled out. And when you decide to look for your ball in one of the residential yards or corrals near the course, the cart slows to a crawl and tells you to get back to the business at hand.
The fun really begins on the #2 tee box. The hole is a dogleg left up the ridge, but with two special twists. The landing”target” for your first shot is about 210 yards ahead — and above you! The hole rises over 120 feet in elevation to the target. If that long uphill poke isn’t enough of a challenge, be careful not to hit too far or too left, as there is a ravine. 210 yards — good shot; 211 yards — bottom of ravine. The second shot (if that whole first thing worked out) is through a cut in the brush and across a ravine to a green cut into the mountainside.
At this point sea-level folks may need to get the Dramamine out, as you are going further up the mountain to the #3 tee box. At #3 you have a par 3 to a landing pad on top of the next hill, 200 yards away. Note the rattlesnake habitat warning signs as you approach the green — there are more ways to get stung here than a bad bunker shot.
#4 is from an elevated tee down to a lush green fairway 230 yards below, and then a second shot up to the green. The gentleness of 4, nestled in the trees along the side of the mountain, is a set-up for the magnificent par 5 that follows — from the top of the world. The cart path shows an arrow straight up, and it understates the climb. From the tee box, you feel like you can see seven zip codes. It takes binoculars (seriously) to really pick out the green structure, far off in the allegedly 500 yard distance. (They must measure from the base of the mountain — it looks like a half mile from the top.) The signature elk print sand traps line both sides of the fairway, way down below. More imaginative minds interpret them differently — a few years ago, my youngest exclaimed,”Those look like bear butt prints, Dad!” Whatever animal or anatomy, they are an impressive sight to see and frame the fairway perfectly.
As your ears pop on the descent back to mere mortal golf, the course still has a few surprises. On the par three #6 you can see the imposing water along the left side, but not the pond wrapping around to the back — an unfortunate ball-washing for the more aggressive swinger. #7’s sand feature is one of South Dakota’s largest, and is pretty much unavoidable.
The pro, South Dakota native J.R. Hamblet, warned about the elevation. The 285 feet of elevation change on the course is more than the uninitiated will first appreciate, and playing it is trickier than most are used to. Ok, I’ll give him that elevation greater than a step-ladder challenges we flat-lander South Dakotans, but that’s not the main secret to know. The real local knowledge is that you have to play the course more than once. There are so many blind shots, hidden gulleys, tricky traps, and other things that hate my bogeyness, you just can’t figure it out the first time around. I lost count of how many blind shots I had to trust to the hope of hitting somewhere near the barber pole marker visible over a rise out in a fairway.
This fall Elkhorn Ridge is going to start construction on another nine holes in, over and around a canyon on the south side of the interstate. If their first effort is any indication, South Dakota golfers have some great fun ahead of them on an exciting and affordable golf track.
Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.
Editor’s Note: Welcome to Fore South Dakota, the first in a series of columns showcasing South Dakota’s special places to play golf.
Nestled in a development just outside of Rapid City on Sheridan Lake Road is South Dakota’s only golf course that is open for play parts of every month of the year. The Golf Club at Red Rock is a public course that will let you enjoy all the golf you can handle for the day during the winter months for $49. Most South Dakotans don’t know about this little golf secret kept by our Western brethren. But this past week, when the snow in our front yard measured over waist deep, my son, Jake, and I checked out the rumor of winter golf in South Dakota. Red Rock did not disappoint.
The five sets of tees play from 5038 yards (manageable for any golfer) to the tips of 7114 (a long ways to go). The slope for the blue tees (4th longest) is 138. Slope is a universal measurement established by the United States Golf Association (USGA) to advise a golfer how hard it is going to be to find their errant golf shots. 113 is an average slope, and you probably need only two golf balls to make a round on a course with that slope. To play a 138 slope you would be advised to have a whole bag of balls along. For Red Rock, once the rough grows up on the hills’ sides in the spring, plan on using every ball in your bag.
Red Rock snakes in and out of — and over — valleys and canyons that are, well, red! Almost every hole plays along the side of a canyon, over a canyon, into a canyon, or from ridge to ridge across a canyon. Other than small, tame creeks, the only water your ball will see is in a pond that guards the front of the 10th hole.
The March days that we played there was an ice storm at home on the Coteau, and Red Rock was a pleasant 70 degrees for our golf sandals and shorts.
Jason Young, a Pierre native, is the PGA Professional at Red Rock. Since Jason answers the phone in the pro shop in the winter when you call to make tee times, he is also the most popular person for any South Dakota golfer to get to speak to between Thanksgiving and Easter. Jason is quick to get to the essence of Red Rock with the advice that, like no other course in South Dakota, the key to this course is to learn to use the slopes that exist on almost every hole. Here are a few of his pointers.
On #8, a par 3, hit to the right side of the green (or off the green) and let the ball roll down to the pin. Aim for the green, and when your ball stops rolling it will be somewhere in the gulley to the left.
On #9, a par 5 with a blind approach shot, either set it up to the right (where you will be able to see your way into a tough green structure) or land it off the green on the top of the hill and let it trickle down to the green and pin. Aim for the green, and if you find your ball, it may be down the hill and across the street.
On #14, a long par 5, you don’t need a driver. The 580 yards are designed to be played crest of hill (200 yards), to crest of hill (200 yards), to the green — which of course slopes in a manner that may send your ball down the hill and back to where you came from. Be warned, the second shot is over the second canyon — there is no fairway on the left side! If you aim to where the middle of the fairway would seem to belong, your ball will be recovered days later somewhere down the canyon sloping to the north.
Every hole at Red Rock has a similar story. Probably more than any other course in South Dakota, local knowledge is serious currency at Red Rock.
This writer is a very mediocre 15 handicap. A 15 handicap means that there are rare times when by some miracle a shot lands where Tiger Woods might hit it. More often, it lands where Mr. Rogers would hit it. But in the twists in turns of the slopes at Red Rock, every golfer has a chance for a Tiger Woods moment.
The 287 yard #7 plays around and tight against a hillside. If the golfer is blessed with a good fade (which on other days might be called a lousy slice), the ball can hit up on the hill to the right, power forward past the trap, and roll down to the green. I speak the truth — and have a photo to prove that on #7, a 15 handicapper can come within two yards of driving the green on a par 4 hole! Setting up the perfect opportunity, of course, for a three putt!
The 555 yard #14 does not require a driver, according to the club pro, Jason, but who goes all the way to Red Rock to lay up on a spring day? If you hit it just right, bounce over the ridge on the right, and catch the down slope, an average 220 yard drive, on the right day and with the right wind, can roll out to 305 yards! For one moment, you’re tour eligible. The next shot will disappear into the canyon (see Local Knowledge above).
Funny thing about golf — you get paired with strangers on the first tee box, and you always end the round with friends. We were joined on one round by Dick and Gavin Fawbush. Dick has a clothing store in Madison and his son manages a hotel in Rapid City. Gavin golfed for USD, and is a Red Rock regular, i.e. local knowledge. For example, on the par 3 downhill #15, Gavin explained that the hole punishes good shots and rewards bad ones. If you hit the big pine tree in the rough to the right front of the green, your ball will gently drop and roll to a place near the pin for an easy birdie. (Jake lucked into one of those.) If you hit a solid 3 iron into the 190 yard away green, you will find your ball somewhere in the woods, down the hill behind the green. (Jake got one of those too.)
When the snow is up to your windowsill in eastern South Dakota, remember that out west, in our state’s banana belt, there are hackers and duffers teeing it up at Red Rock. But no matter what time of the year, Red Rock is a great place to play challenging golf. And while the weather was different, some things in South Dakota never change. Since Madison was playing in the semifinals of the State A in Rapid City that day, like true South Dakotans, the Fawbush father and son picked up after the 12th hole — can’t risk being late for the state tourney tip off.
Lee Schoenbeck grew up in Webster, practices law in Watertown, and is a freelance writer for the South Dakota Magazine website.
