No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 917: NLU Special Projects - LA's Public Tee Time Scandal

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

In the latest episode of NLU Special Projects, we take our first hard look at the state of public golf, and what is working and what needs to change. KVV talks to people about why tee times just stopped being available in Los Angeles, and what a group of fed up hackers did about it If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining The Nest: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at nolayingup.com/join Support Our Partners: Rhoback The Stack System Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be the right club. Be the right club today. That's better than most. How about in? That is better than most. Better than most. Expect anything different? Better than most. Expect anything different? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the No Laying Up podcast. Solly here. I am going to be brief. I am going to turn it over shortly to Kevin van Valkenburg for the first of a series of podcasts we're going to do on public golf in America.

Kevin's going to look into what happened out in LA recently, talk to some people involved, maybe you know, sprinkle a little bit of nuggets on some future stories you might be looking into but really, really enjoyed this work from KVV. We greatly appreciate everybody's feedback on this one. But without any further delay, here's Kevin. Is there any feeling golf is perfect snagging in early morning tea time at your local Muni with three of your friends on a weekend? There might be a hint of dew on the ground. There might be a couple beers in your bag.

You almost certainly will change your shoes in the parking lot. But nothing feels as peaceful or as exciting as putting a tea in the ground and seeing open holes in front of you. It is the nirvana of public golf, the true state of enlightenment. How would you feel if someone stole that from you? Or more specifically if they blocked your access to it without any explanation? You'd probably be livid and obsessed with getting some answers. Well that's exactly what happened in Los Angeles during the last two years. And that story

is something we're about to explore in this, the latest edition of NLU Special Projects. What happens when your local Muni gets ensnared in a web of public and private corruption? It's a story that's close to my heart because I love public golf even though admittedly I belong to a country club. Several members of NOAA laying up to. I pay a premium for the convenience of not having to scramble or fight for tee times. But I realized this year that I never have as much fun there as I do when the guys in my regular weekend foursome, Matt, Tom and Micah, tee it up at Northwest Golf Course in Montgomery County, Maryland.

A course that's about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, DC. No matter where you live, I suspect you have a course like Northwest, a place that, as my friends and I like to say, punches above its weight. It's not going to win, punches above its weight, is not going to win any awards for its architecture. It's not a hidden gem. It's something more important. It's a public trust. Places like Northwest probably best represent the soul of golf in America. They're open to everyone. They don't take themselves too seriously. And because they're run by a municipality and partially funded by tax dollars, they're

not going to charge you obscene prices. During COVID, Northwest was one of the few places that felt like safe harbor for me and my friends. No matter what stresses we had to endure during the week, we could look forward to a teatime on the weekend, a chance to hit some mediocre golf shots, a chance to win or lose a few bucks in a Nassau, and a way to spend four hours, in the words of Billy Joel, forgetting about life for a while. There were times when it felt like the only thing helping me keep it together,

helping me be the dad and the husband I needed to be in a stressful, uncertain time, was looking forward to those Sunday morning tea times. There's not a place I'd rather be at that particular time, especially if you're playing well, there are other times where I said I can't wait for this round to get over. But, you know, for the most part, when you have a group of guys that you that you you know, and you love and you appreciate their

friendships, there's just no place better to be really. That's my friend Tom Haliba. He's an editor at the Washington Post. I once climbed up a tree in Northwest to retrieve a five iron he had chucked in anger. I've taken more money off him in Northwest over the years than either of us can remember. We kind of joke that, you know, we would pay each other by PayPal

and I think you've told me more than once, I believe you have the address. For 15 years, we've been playing golf, laughing our way through job changes and divorces. We both get pissed when we hit bad shots, and we often follow up the rare birdie with a boneheaded double bogey. We are, as one might say, kindred spirits. There are golfers like us everywhere, friends just hoping to get out early, beat the heat or the sunset, and get home quickly and dedicate the rest of our day to yard work or parenting or napping. There were certainly thousands of golfers

like us in Los Angeles until a few years ago, when the tee times at popular munis like Rancho and Griffith Park and Balboa, they just stopped being available to the majority of the public. It didn't matter how far ahead you tried to book or how quick your fingers were. You could not get a tee time even on a weekday before 4pm. The second they became available, they were booked. An entire block would disappear within seconds on the website. Even though golf's popularity was booming, something about it seemed fishy to Dave Fink, a native Angelino who gives golf

tips and lessons on his popular Instagram account at Dave Fink Golfs. The more he and his friends looked into it, the more they, well, smelled bullshit. Here's the thing golf exploded during COVID. You know, people wanted something to do that was outdoors, that was with their friends, maybe something they could do and drink while they were doing it. And so they found golf. And honestly, there was a lot more demand, but at the same time, it felt like something had changed. It felt like something else had changed besides just the demand. Now that everything had moved to digital, all these times that were seemingly available prior to this system getting put into place,

were now gone, never to ever be seen again by anyone. And that felt weird. In this, the latest edition of NLU Special Projects, we're taking the temperature of the state of public golf in America. The sport has experienced unprecedented growth in the last four years, but is it healthy? Sure, we grew the game, but in doing so,

did we also create more headaches and more choke points? What, if anything, can we do about five and a half hour rounds? And why do I have to ride in a golf cart even when I wanna walk? We'll try to unpack many of those questions in this series, and we welcome your ideas and input. But for our first installment, we wanted to take a look at the one piece of public golf that is arguably its most universal element.

The one thing we all have to think about every time we head to the course. The tea time. Why in some cities has it become so frustrating to secure a tee time? Is it because golf is so popular? Or is it because mysterious forces are putting a thumb on the scale behind the scenes? What happened in Los Angeles was unusual, but there's a good chance it isn't singular. It might even be a warning to the rest of the country. We'll explain why after word from our sponsors.

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Rancho Park, Harding, and Wilson. If you've never been to LA, there's a good chance you've seen Wilson. The reason? It's the place where Tiger filmed arguably his most famous Nike commercial, the one where he's bouncing the ball on his wedge for 30 seconds before launching it towards the horizon. Rancho has been the backdrop for an episode of Seinfeld, an episode of Batman, even an episode of Dynasty. But more importantly, it's been an important piece of golfing history. It hosted the Los Angeles Open 17 times. Arnold Palmer won there three times. Charlie Sifford won there. Joanne Carter and Nancy Lopez each won tournaments there.

The first check that Jack Nicklaus ever cashed as a professional golfer, $33.33 for finishing 50th in 1962 at the LA Open at Rancho Park. Golf has a reputation and for good reason of being like a sport that is only for rich people. Like this is, it does have a sort of high bar for equipment. It does. I mean, like most people can't afford and especially in LA can't afford a golf club membership. But I do kind of love that the city was

like, No, are you into this? Like we are going to provide this for free. This is what like municipality should do. That's the voice of my friend Timothy Simons. You might know him from the HBO sitcom Veep where he played Jonah Ryan. Tim is a golf sicko and for years he's played most of his golf at LA Munis. I know what you're thinking. Doesn't being part of an Emmy winning show pay well enough that everyone can afford a membership at Riviera or Wilshire or Bel Air?

Spoiler alert, it does not. And that's what makes LA Munis great. You can tee it up with famous people, and you can tee it up with working class retirees. I love that there are like two 18-hole golf courses that if you're like a Los Angeles retiree, you can play them for $20. They're beautiful. They have history. Like, you know, one of them, I was playing with one of the men's club guys, they just got randomly paired up with a men's club guy. And he was telling me that like the 18th hole at Harding is where Babe Ruth was told that he was traded to the Yankees.

And they have like a little plaque there. I mean, like, so there's legitimate, like the history at even the public courses. And yeah, it is also like a pretty amazing smash together of the community of Los Angeles, like most of the time, I wouldn't end up playing with elderly Korean men or retired cops. Or sometimes you would meet other actors. Sometimes you get paired up with working actors. Sometimes you get paired up with writers who were just starting out. Like it's, it's a pretty amazing smash together of the community of LA. T times at LA's famous munis were never exactly easy to snag.

You still had to plan ahead, often call ahead, particularly on weekends. There were subtle ways you could game the system, but it really felt egregious. Some level of minor corruption in our society has always been more or less shrugged at. It's a bit like slipping a 20 to the major G at Dan Tanna's asking if there's any chance you could land a table tonight. That stuff might be frowned upon, but not really. I know because I talked to someone happy to admit it. My introduction to bribing pro shop people was as the receiver of the bribes originally.

The voice you just heard belongs to Los Angeles resident Tim Owen. Tim grew up about a mile from Tiger Woods' childhood home. He's been playing the game his entire life. In college, Tim used to work at a golf course in Long Beach Recreation Park, one of the oldest Munis in Southern California. It's not technically the city of Los Angeles, but he assured me that Long Beach public courses face the same issues that Rancho and Wilson did. If you wanted to secure a weekend time, Tim was your guy.

So there was a big skins game of mostly like former baseball players. So some guys who played in the minor leagues, some guys who played at Cal State Long Beach, good good baseball program. And they were in like their 30s when I was 19. And they wanted, you know, five back to back tee times on a Sunday morning. And like, that just ain't happening. And even back then, it was busy enough to where that just doesn't happen. But they started paying me off. And just ain't happening. Uh, and even back then it was busy enough to wear that. That's just, that's not happening. Um, but they started paying me off and then it started happening.

Um, so, um, you know, and my manager who was a Korean American guy, and that was my first introduction to sort of Korean golf culture, he was basically like, look, I know, like, I know what's happening, but like, don't worry about it. It's fine. Like, you know, the teacher is going to be full either way. So if you're, if you're making a little money on top of it, cool. So he was very cool with it, about it. And so, you know, once I started my real job,

my career and stuff, I wanted to play on weekends. And so I knew how it worked as the receiver of the palm gracing. And so I started greasing palms. Golf operated this way for years, mostly without much controversy. Weekend tee times at the best courses were still coveted, but if you were a beginner or didn't plan ahead, you could still snag a tee time at Balboa Golf Course or Woodley Lakes, the kind of places LA golfers lovingly referred to as goat tracks because of their inferior

conditions and layout. And if you were lucky, you could play Wilson or Harding or Rancho on a weekday. That's how Dave Fink ended up at Wilson for what turned out to be the most memorable and important round of his life. I didn't start playing golf until I was 26 years old. So that's 10 years ago now. I had had like a dozen knee surgeries on both my knees. I was a baseball player and a skateboarder. And, uh, so I had these double knee surgeries done and the doctors told me like, you can never do any lateral movement again, like no more baseball, no more basketball for fun, no more running. Like your knees are fucking done. And then right after that happened, I got pancreatitis from drinking too much because I was depressed that I couldn't walk. And I drank myself,

I almost drank myself to death. I've always had an addictive personality. I am an addict. I don't wear that proudly, but I'm also not a denier. And I was at the lowest point in my life. I was like immobile. I was killing myself with alcohol. So I went into the hospital for the pancreatitis, which is really serious. And when I got out, I was like, I don't have anything to live for right now. Like I don't have a career.

I was an act was a struggling actor. I can't do any physical activity. Like it was the lowest point in my life and my dad sent me his old golf clubs and he sent them through UPS or FedEx like the next day air. Vink was annoyed. His father had tried to get him into golf previously, but he had no interest. It seemed boring. But if he was being honest with himself, he was bored. So he took the clubs to the driving range. I hit some balls and I was like, this is actually kind of fun. I played baseball into college, so I get the whole swinging a stick thing hitting a ball this ball's not moving a little more fun for me and then I went out and I was like fuck it I'll just go play he showed up at Wilson and booked a tee time he didn't have money for a cart so he carried his clubs the bag didn't even

have a strap so he carried them like a suitcase first drive ever hit the fairway probably went like 240 I have no idea was like had persimmon clubs. Fucking get to the ball. I tee it up again. The three guys I'm with are like, what are you doing? And I was like, brother, I have no idea. Is this not allowed? Fink shot 142 that day, but he counted every single stroke, every whiff, every top, every shank. It felt important for some reason. He was discouraged, but something wouldn't let him quit just yet. He played again with similarly shitty results. He booked a third tee time, this one at Harding, the other Muni course in Griffith Park, and

made a vow to himself. He had to improve or he was done. And it was like, my life was already at such a low point that this thing that was nearly impossible as we all know to be good at, it was like, I don't need another thing that makes me feel like shit. So I told myself, I'm going to go back for a third time. If I don't shoot better than 142, I quit golf forever. Cause I don't need another thing like hurting me. On the fifth hole at Harding, he was already 17 over par and losing hope. It was 190 yard par three.

The guy he was playing with was hitting a six iron, so Fink shrugged and chose the same club. He flushed it. The ball knifed through the air, bounced on the green, and disappeared into the cup. I'm like going crazy. I'm like, let's fucking go. I'm like, how often does that shit happen? That's fucking awesome. And the guy is like, I'm a scratch golfer.

I've never done that. So fuck you. And I just didn't understand. I shot 99 that day. Third round ever hole in one 99. And probably he made another hole in one a week later. This time at Los Feliz, a par three course run by LA City Golf where everyone hits off mats. It's the quintessential beginner's muni with no holes longer than 135 yards. You might recognize it if

you've seen the movie swingers. After that second hole in one, I think was hooked for good. I replaced my addictive personality. I quit drinking and I started rehabbing my knee and golf gave me a reason to like wake up every morning. And I like, I wanted to practice, you know, my life got healthier. The people I met through golf, I would play golf with random old Korean women, you know, and like a random black guy like it's a melting pot, especially public golf. Like now I'm exposed to like the world. And I'm spending time with people that I would never spend time with I'm spending time with people that I would never spend time with otherwise. And it's just like, it's just, it saved my fucking life without golf.

I, I seriously, I was suicidal and like, I try to talk about it occasionally because not everybody grew up being in a country club or great at golf. And it's not impossible to pick it up and get good, but it takes a different level of dedication and for an addict, like I know a lot of other people like me who are addicts who could make the switch into golf and it saves your life. Los Angeles turned out to be a pretty good place to fall in love with the game. There were plenty of ranges and affordable courses in every direction and the weather, well it was great. Fink threw himself into learning everything he could. He'd go to Griffith Park where the putting green was lit up at night, and he'd putt

until 5am. Anything to distract himself from the temptation of drinking. He read Ben Hogan's book Five Lessons hundreds of times. Within six months of picking up clubs for the first time, he went from a 30 handicap to a 12. Six months later, he was down to a three. He found modern golf instruction overly complicated. So he started a YouTube channel, started making content, found a way to make a living off his obsession. He even came up with a hook he'd say at the end of every video, simplify shit, understand shit, so you can get better at golf right now.

It was all going great. And then COVID changed everything. More when we return right after the break. Hopefully you got a chance to listen to our interview with Dr. Sascha McKenzie from the Stack System. You guys have heard my endorsement for the stack system. My club head speed has gone up by my measurement by 10 miles an hour.

I don't even believe myself when I say that, but I've stuck to the routine. I have done exactly what the app has asked me to do. It is so, it's just not intimidating. It's very simple. It tells you how many swings to make, how long to rest, what weights to put on the stack. Just do that and you will gain speed.

I promise you, I don't even know if they will guarantee that but I will promise you if you stick to the routine, you will gain club head speed. Listen to that interview, he details why everyone could afford to gain some speed. It's not just about hitting it farther, it's about being able to hit it the distance you're currently hitting it,

but at less stress on your body, easier to control. I've seen great benefits from it. You can go to thestacksystem.com, use code nolayingup to get 10% off. I got a ton of great features in the app. There's a stack putting aspect of it as well. I cannot say enough great things about this system. The benefits I'm seeing, my club head speed is up,

my ball speed is up, my distance is up, my confidence is up. Somehow I'm hitting it a little straighter. If you learn to swing it fast, you're gonna learn to swing it better. So again, check out that podcast interview and check out thestacksystem.com, code no laying up if you wanna gain some swing speed.

Maybe use it as a winter workout tool. I don't know. I promise you it's gonna work. Thestacksystem.com, code no laying up. Back to KVV. The city of Los Angeles, because it was following the advice of public health officials,

was trying to cut down on person to person contact during the pandemic. Golf was seen as a safe way for people to spend time together, but the city had an obligation to protect its employees, so they changed their booking policy. Going forward, golfers could only book tee times digitally. They could not call the course or show up and talk to a starter. If you couldn't book online, well, you were mostly out of luck. There wasn't much, if any, pushback at the time. People understood the logic. Besides, in order to book a teatime, you needed a Los Angeles resident card, which cost $30 to acquire. That gave you a number, and with that number you could book teatimes online. The regulars, who'd been playing LA City courses for years, they welcomed it. You're about to hear from one of them.

John, who works in tech, asked that I only use his first name for reasons that will become apparent in a few minutes. I actually started playing a lot of these courses, Rancho, the Wilson Harding courses in Griffith in high school, because I was on the high school team out here in LA. And so I've been playing these courses forever. never had an issue getting on these courses, moved back to Los Angeles when my wife was pregnant with our first child. And so I didn't play much through the beginning of the pandemic. I think I started playing again around June of 2020. And we first started kind of booking tea times as a group.

We really didn't have that much trouble. I mean, Rancho has always been kind of the, the course of choice for, for Southern California golfers, public golfers. Um, but we could book Rancho every once in a while we got Wilson Harding pretty regularly. Um, it was, it was busy. I know a six hour round on a Saturday morning, but like we got tee times. Uh, and then somewhere around, you know, five, six months in, we just stopped getting tee times at Rancho and kind of explain the

booking experience. And then we focused more on Wilson Harding. That kind of went away. And then we were scrambling. The tee times were just gone the second they became available. It didn't matter if you logged in at 5am, 7 days in advance, you couldn't get through the system to grab a morning tea time. A lot of golfers, including John and his friends, suspected something was amiss behind the scenes, but they couldn't prove it. Complaints went unanswered. John began to wonder if he and his friends could find their own work around.

So what steps did you guys take to try to sort of figure out a way to game the process? Everyone disappeared to be so we did a bunch of things. Maybe some less less savory than others. Like a lot of us are in tech. You know, one of my buddies is a as an investor and other ones an operator. I've run a bunch of tech teams. So my first thought was like someone's built a bot. So like let's build a bot. Let's do that ourselves and see what we can do. And we had a friend who's an engineer who tried to help us build this. And like the bot was effectively like an auto clicker. So it looked at the system and it figured out what data needed to be submitted and how it would effectively run through the process

before the web page even loaded. So it's faster than you and I could ever be. And it still wasn't working. Like something, it couldn't, it would still error, it would still pinwheel, it would still lose the tee times. So like, it just didn't make sense. So something about the whole story that like, there's a bot, some guy built a bot. Like I think that's bogus. I don't really believe that to be true.

There was widespread speculation that brokers would have blamed. Every time John would show up at Rancho, which was five minutes from his house, see if there were any cancellations, he'd see the same three guys just hanging out, loitering around the clubhouse, but never playing. John didn't really have the time or the energy to turn into an investigative reporter and try to get to the bottom of things. But Dave

Fink did. And when the seasons changed, he grew even more determined. A lot of people who play golf in California stop playing as much because they get off work at that time. Now it's dark, they can't go play. So there is just, it's a fact that there's less play in the winter months. And when those months came around, now it was like, not only can we not get a morning time, we just can't play golf at all because the only tee times that were available now were 3., 345. I mean, what are you going to play two holes?

Like, and this was not just at Rancho and Wilson. This was at Hanson Dam, Harding, Woodley Lakes, Encino Balboa, every single course in LA. All of these courses were no key times available until 345. And so honestly, myself and dozens of my friends in Southern California that are year round, you know, dedicated golf addicts, we're like, this is insane. We're not members at country clubs. We can't afford it. We understand LA is a big city. I understand there's a lot of people here, but we realized that something was going on that wasn't right. And so we contact the city

and they basically tell us, fuck off, everything's fine. Golf is popular, like tough shit. And so I accepted that and we all did for a long time. But eventually when there's no tee times available, not even at the worst course in Los Angeles, now we're like, something is going on and we're going to get to the bottom of it. There is a delicate cultural and racial element to this story that we haven't discussed yet, but for LA golfers, it became the elephant in the room. Virtually all the golfers showed up to play in those tee times at Rancho Wilson, and Harding, the ones that no one could figure out how to get, they were Korean-American.

Korean golfers have always been a fixture of the LA City golf scene, dating back to when Siri Pak won two LPGA majors in 1998. Anthony Kim's ascendance was a catalyst for a younger generation. Koreans in Southern California just loved golf. There were always rumors that Korean brokers could find ways to secure blocks at tee times. This, however, felt different. Tim Owen was, on some level, impressed at how well they had figured out how to game the system. It was, if nothing else, the American way. Taking care of your people while making a little profit. LA is famous, at least I perceive it that way,

for having pockets of first generation communities that have an area where they're the predominant population. I think of the Persians in Westwood and the Armenians in Glendale and the Vietnamese in Fountain Valley and so on. So I think all three of those, I think, are the largest communities of those people outside of their home countries. So there's, you know, there's kind of a thing

there where it's like, you know, there are there are industries or parts of town that are predominantly run by or like, participated in by certain communities. And golf is very much that way with the Korean. So I don't think it shocked anybody that the apps and stuff that they had figured out away because they love golf and they're just they were fixtures on the golf scene in LA for decades. And everyone to you know, I don't want this to seem like like I'm criticizing the Koreans. I don't blame them at all. We were all frustrated and they're the ones who figured out a way to get to get tee times.

So you know, I wish I would have thought of it. Meanwhile, Fink and his friends started asking questions in the Korean markets in Los Angeles. They even started asking friends to sort through the classifieds of Korean language newspapers. It went nowhere. Eventually, one of Fink's friends decided to camp out

on a park bench near the first tee at Rancho for an entire day, with the goal to politely ask every single group that came through, Hey, can you help me understand how you got this tee time here? It took hours, and he got dozens of rejections. But eventually, one friendly Korean woman pulled out her phone and opened up an app. It was called K-Cow Talk, a messaging app similar to WhatsApp or WeChat, except on K-Cow, you can also make payments, hail taxis, go

shopping, schedule meetups with friends and even enter chat rooms dedicated to numerous topics. Finally, a woman told us, I got this tea time from my Kakao app and she pulled her phone out and showed us the app and like what it was called. And that was the first step. And then her group came over and was like, what are you doing? Don't, what are you doing?

You know, like you don't talk about Fight Club. What the fuck? Like, and she was like, oh, sorry. I didn't like my bad. But that was enough to like, we're like, okay, what the fuck is a cacao app? The woman's friends quickly whisked her away, but not before she showed them what was on her screen all of the times that we had complained about being like, where

are they? They were all there on a private server. You could select any time you wanted at any one of these courses on the weekend, weekdays. It didn't matter. You want three, four groups, no problem. They have all the times from basically 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. at any course. Of course, you couldn't just download the app and start booking tee times.

You needed to speak Korean to navigate it. Fink and his friends didn't speak Korean, but that didn't stop him from continuing to dig in. We had a Korean friend who spoke Korean, did not play golf. And we had him make an account on this app and get him. He contacted the guy. The guy said that back and forth in Korean. And then eventually he said, Hey, I trust you. I can tell that you actually speak Korean. We can switch to English. And he said, this is how it works. Here's all the tee times. I'm going to send you a picture of the next three weeks. You just select the times. Here's my Venmo handle.

Here's my phone number. So you can put in the last four digits. Once you select the time, you just Venmo me and then I'll put the time in your name. On one level, Fink felt vindicated. After months of city officials telling him there wasn't anything malicious going on, that he was wrong and golf was just popular and he had slow fingers, here was proof that he and thousands of LA golfers weren't crazy. It turns out there was even a QR code for the group being advertised in Korean language newspapers. Vindication, however, was quickly overtaken by anger. The reason why we were so upset and entitled to be upset is because these 12 courses that I went after specifically are LA City courses that are owned and operated by LA City, which

means that all the maintenance that happens, all that you want to get some new flag sticks, you want to update the clubhouse, this is all paid for by tax paying dollars, not just golfers who pay taxes. It's not how that works. It's part of the parks system, the public park system. So it's not like these people were stealing tee times from Riviera and reselling them for $10,000, $20,000 a tee time. It's basically like they were standing outside of a public library and stopping you before you go in and saying, do you speak

Korean? That was the first thing. If you don't, you can't even come in. Second, if you do, okay, now you have to pay me $40 right now. And then you can come into the public library to get some books. For someone who believed that golf had saved his life, the scam offended Fink on a deeply personal level. Where would he be now if he hadn't been able to book tea times back when his father sent him that first set of clubs? How many Dave Finks out there were being blocked from similar salvation by someone trying to make a profit off a public good? Mostly though, he felt betrayed by the city of Los Angeles, the parks officials and the bureaucrats who let this happen, then denied there was a problem. Every time he complained, he felt blown off, gaslighted into thinking he was crazy. It was either laziness or corruption or both. He started a social media campaign he dubbed free the T and made a series of Instagram stories unpacking the scandal.

I'm a muni golf type of guy. I learned how to fucking play golf at Wilson Harding in Los Angeles and all the other munis around town. It's affordable. It's local. And the courses are actually fucking great, like Wilson and Harding both great setups. Rancho Park, awesome setup. One of my favorites is Hanson Dam. There's a bunch of other courses and they're all municipal public courses. Fink even got the alleged broker on the phone and filmed their interaction for his YouTube channel. He distorted the broker's voice in the video because he wasn't sure about the legal implications of recording the call, but their interaction,

which you'll hear next, was illuminating. The tea time scandal in LA is heating up. Like, it's getting crazy. This guy just called me because I think he's figuring out that I'm the one that's outing him. I'm gonna call him back and we're gonna put him on speakerphone.

I wanna see what he has to say. If anything happens to me, that looked like an accident. Hey, how you doing? Hey, I just wanted to get a tee time. Are you Dave? Yeah, I just wanted to get a tee time. Are you Dave? Yeah, I just wanted to get a tee time. Are you Dave? Who are you?

What's your name? My name is 10-----. Oh, man. Can I get a tee time at Rancho for 9 AM on Saturday? Hey, are you Dave? Are you working with the Dave or something? No, I'm just wondering if I could get a tee time for Rancho this Saturday at 9 a.m. Aren't you working with the Dave?

Do you know how to get me a tee time though? You called me. You texted me earlier. Yeah, I did. I was just asking about tee times. Thank you very much. You're on your free end. I'm very famous now. You're very famous now. No, no. Why? Is that because you're stealing t times and reselling them to people? Seven dollars per person. That's it? That's cheap, but you're stealing the times and then you're making it impossible for other people to book times.

You think that's okay? You get more clients somehow? Oh, so you think this is a joke. You think this is all for fun. Hey, we don't appreciate it, man. So I wish you all the best. But you just got caught on camera confessing to the whole thing. And did you know that it's federally illegal to do what you're doing? And you just

admitted to it on camera? Oh my god, now you're really going to be famous, dude. Eventually, the Los Angeles Times got wind of the controversy and two staffers wrote a story about it. They even talked to the broker, Ted Kim, that Fink named in his videos as the culprit. Kim admitted to the reporters that he'd been selling tee times,

but he claimed he was just doing it to help out senior golfers. Sure, he'd been profiting from it, a few thousand dollars a month, but he insisted he wasn't using bots. He claimed he was manually inputting their player card numbers. It's not like I'm taking advantage of technology, Kim told the Times. I'm booking myself. I'm not doing anything illegal.

LA's Korean language newspaper, Korea Today, wrote a follow-up to the Times story and found 10 brokers in a Korean chat room who were selling tea times at local munis. When the reporter tried to ask follow-up questions, they were immediately kicked out of the chat room who were selling tea times at local Munis. When the reporter tried to ask follow up questions, they were immediately kicked out of the chat room. Plenty of people, particularly online and forums like Reddit, were quick to paint Korean golfers as the villains in this story. But as with most controversies, there's far more gray there than black and white. Sean Yoo is a Korean American who works as a podcast

producer in Los Angeles. He started playing golf during the pandemic and quickly fell in love. I found out quick how tough it is to book a tea time. And so I was playing a lot of Twilight rounds. And as I, you know, got deeper into the world of golf and met more people and made more connections, it's all about like, Hey, can who has this time? Can someone book Wilson Harding at 8am? This and that.

can who has this time can someone book Wilson Harding at 8 a.m. this and that and You know I came across a buddy who? He basically was like I have a guy Who has a guy and this guy books out t-times for everyone? in Los Angeles and he was a Korean American and he basically said it's Caters to a lot of Koreans in the community use friends showed himrenz showed him the tee times available on Kakao and how to book them. Yusefrenz's father had been an avid golfer when he was young, but he died before the two of them ever had a chance to share the game together. So playing with older Korean Americans felt like a way to connect with him.

So for me, seeing it from that lens, I was like, wow, this is great. He's like kind of helping out middle-class Koreans who, you know, a lot of these Koreans, immigrant families working really hard. This is genuinely their only kind of outlet, especially in the community. There's not much that Koreans do outside of golf and hanging out with their friends or going to church. And so for me, yeah, the lens I looked at, it was like, whoa, this is cool. I told a couple of my white friends and they were like, whoa, how do we, how do we get in?

Is there any way we can get it, take advantage of it? And for the record, I maybe only took advantage of this service two or three times. Other times I was able to find T times on my own. But it didn't really feel like, I guess, the way the public was talking about it, of like taking times away from people. I never felt that energy only up until a couple months until everything obviously blew up. Both in the time story and online,

Fink encouraged any golfer frustrated by the situation to show up at the next city golf advisory committee meeting, normally a sleepy affair with very few people in attendance and no public comments. The following Monday, the meeting was packed, standing room only with a lot of pissed off golfers as well as local news reporters. I'm just a guy who loves golf, who other people how to play but somehow in one week of Posting of my stories. I've been able to uncover so much more than an entire city investigation So it's a little concerning to the people but we've done the hard part which is getting on the news and I thank you so much

Yeah, giving people like us a voice Normal nine to five workers who are just trying to enjoy a public work with our kids, our family, our friends. We all pay for this with our tax dollars. Even if you don't play golf, you're paying for this. So let's keep it free to everyone. Yeah. And full disclosure, I mean, for viewers who have been watching me for years, they know

that I do golf at these courses. And in fact, my husband and I haven't golfed in a long time because we can't get a tee time. The city promised to investigate and promised to make changes. But in March of this year, five golfers filed a class action lawsuit against LA city golf, alleging in the complaint that,

despite the repeated reports with evidence in detail, LA city did not take any action to prevent illegal teatime bookings. Accordingly, the situation has become worse than ever to the extent that it is now impossible for the player card holders to book a teatime at LA City golf courses. And in what proved to be one of the saga's most interesting twists, the five golfers who filed the lawsuit were Korean Americans. Joseph Lee, the lead plaintiff, is the president of the SoCal Dream Golf Club,

which is made up almost entirely of members of the Korean American community. I don't want you to misunderstand us Koreans, Lee said during the city golf public meeting, according to the LA Times. Not all Koreans are doing this shit. We're chasing them to the end. Let's use this opportunity to put the brokers out of business. In response to the lawsuit, the city did make some changes. They booted hundreds of suspicious accounts from the computer system. They began charging a non-refundable $10 booking fee to risk their tee times. But how the tee times were acquired by brokers is still a mystery. That's sort of like the very final piece of the puzzle was how were you getting

all these times early? There's a couple of different possibilities. So when this website was built, the LA city website, it was really created by like one or two guys who just kind of like did the coding. And those guys easily could have just input away into the system to siphon off, pre-siphon off all these tee times and then only release a certain amount onto the general system. And then, so you actually pay the guy who coded the website to do this.

And either it's you give them a cut of whatever you're making or upfront you're just like, I'll give you $100,000 to write this into the code that like these times just go to me. The other possibility is that starters were doing it themselves. They were siphoning off the times before they hit the public and then they were selling it themselves. This option, second option, a little more believable at this point in everyone's investigation, just because we figured out that before all of this happened, if you were a starter, you could just log in on any computer at any course, and you didn't even really have your own user ID, like you could just kind of like press enter and the system would open and you could like do shit

and like move times around, probably a mixture of both, but there's this huge investigation into LA city right now. And it's become legal because they're being sued now. So we're only gonna find out about this like last piece of the puzzle once that court case goes to court and is like figured out because LA city, the second they got sued, they went quiet

and they won't release any statements to the public. Not everyone is a fan of the way that Fink has gone about publicizing the problem. You acknowledges that the brokers needed to be reined in, but he was a little annoyed when he saw Fink selling free the tee shirts as part of the campaign to force the city to take action. It felt very, you know, electiony, politically charged statement. And you know, when you start putting that on a t shirt and hats, and you start at the

end of your video, hey, make sure you check the link in bio. It's like well what are you actually doing this for? Maybe originally you had some journalistic integrity but as you got viral and as you got a little more publicity you know you started turning this into your own personal brand and your own marketing all all for the sake of villainizing a community who was just trying to play golf like anyone else. And ultimately, I think his original intent was pure and came from a place of wanting to do good.

And I think those things kind of snowball. And I might not have been a better man in that situation as well, if I'm getting all these extra views and eyes and being like, what person wouldn't be like, well, how do I turn this into some extra cash? And so I, you know, I don't put a lot of blame on him, but I do think in the moment, looking back on it,

there are better ways he could have gone about it. Fink is aware that he can come across as bombastic, that he's not for everyone, but he wanted to make it clear during our interview that one of the main things he loves about public golf is its diversity. The way it allows people from all races and all walks of life to connect and find community. He truly believes that golf saved him. So you can forgive him if this whole thing feels personal. And that's why I got so emotionally upset about it. Because you can't take that from other people. Because if this had been

going on when I started, I never would be where I am today because I wouldn't have been playing. I would have gone oh, there's no tea times. This seems too complicated. Fuck this. Hoarding tea times and reselling them for a profit felt different to think than say, restaurant reservations or sneakers. A dinner at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant or a new pair of fucking Nike Air Jordan Limited Max, it's not going to save your life, dude.

You know? And so like, I'm sorry, but golf, for me, it is life or death. This is not just some bullshit hobby like a dopamine rush. It's like, this is important. It's important. Six months after the scandal broke and changes were promised, have things gotten better? A little, but it also depends on who you ask.

When the city of Los Angeles did an audit of residence cards, they booted hundreds of phony addresses. People who had signed up and paid their $30, but then put their home addresses in Florida Los Angeles did an audit of residence cards. They booted hundreds of phony addresses. People who had signed up and paid their $30 but then put their home addresses in Florida or Italy or Japan. Unlike some munis like in San Diego where you need to bring a utility bill to prove you actually live in the zip code, LA City didn't even require a driver's license. You could just pay in cash and get a resident card.

In theory, you could buy a new one every day as long as you hand it over your 30 bucks. But with the changes, Simon says he's seen some improvement. At least for now, it kind of seems like they've solved the issue. Like, tee times can still be pretty hard to get because they're in demand,

because so many people play golf, but it's not impossible anymore. Whereas before they were gone immediately and it was impossible to find them. We should note here that we reached out to Rick Reinschmidt, the golf manager for the City of Los Angeles Recs and Parks Division. He referred us to LA City's Public Information Office and the office did not respond to our request to make Reinschmidt or anyone else available for an interview. Fink, who's been frustrated with Reinschmidt's inaction for more than a year, says the changes haven't been enough.

Yes, you can occasionally get tee times now at Harding and Rancho. He's played it twice this month for the first time in years. But times are still scarce. It seems clear to him the scam hasn't been shut down entirely. I personally think the fugazis happening again. They've started it up again. They think it's quieter. They think people think this is fixed. And they're like, let's just start with these two courses and not touch the other ones for now. But I am directly working with the LA City Golf

Advisory Committee. And we are investigating that, me and them and a bunch of other people. And so we're on it and we're like, I'm not, this isn't over and I'm never going to stop because I started this and I'm going to finish it because this isn't a fad and it wasn't for me to get followers and I don't give a shit about this, you know, influencer bullshit. I just want to help people in golf with tips or whatever I can do. When I started talking to people for this story in early September, I thought it might be a broad look at how frustrating it can be to snag a weekend tea time

at a public course all over America and how common it is for golfers to feel like there are shadowy forces behind the scenes rigging the system. I talked to people in Austin and in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Brooklyn, and we'll tell some of those stories as the series evolves. But the story of what happened in Los Angeles seemed like an important place to start, because ultimately it's a story of how people can make a difference if they refuse to go away,

if they refuse to be quiet when something feels amiss. Some version of what happened in Los Angeles is almost certainly happening right now in New York at the state park system. T Times at the famous black course, host to two US opens at a PGA championship, disappear instantly the second they become available without explanation. They aren't much easier to get at the red, green and blue courses either. No one is sure whether bots or brokers are to blame, just the taxpaying golfers are clearly

getting squeezed. Eric Benyak, a Brooklyn resident who plays all his golf at the state park courses, has made it his personal crusade to get to the bottom of what's going on. He's filed the Freedom of Information Act requests. He's written to the state's attorney general multiple times. And so far, he's got no answers. It's clear there is something going on. And now, you know, you can make the argument golf is bigger than it's ever been.

There's more people trying for these two times than ever before. I understand that. But when you're seeing 436 on Wednesday, you know, September 4th, be booked seven days in advance, you have to wonder what's going on with these systems, right? Anecdotally, there's been companies that have been flagged, that are booking tee times for people, reselling them in the black market. I've played with plenty of people there who fully admit to botting the system, whether it's botting it upon release or botting cancellations that drop. We'll tell Eric's story in a future episode.

And we'll also tell some uplifting stories too. There's a lot of good being done in the public golf space. There are cool courses making magic on shoestring budgets and passionate communities finding ways to beat the bots and welcome women and juniors into the game. If you think your public golf course has a great story that deserves widespread attention, reach out, tell us your story.

In the meantime, we know there are twists and turns still to come in the LA City Golf Scan. We'll share them as we learn more. There is hope that the lawsuit will bring more information to light in the coming months. And hopefully, it will serve as a warning. The people trying to turn public golf into their own cash machine or private fiefdom, they're not just stealing. They're messing with a bond that ought to be sacred.

The idea that public golf should be open to everyone. What these brokers, bureaucrats, politicians and hustlers are doing isn't just illegal. It's immoral. It's time to fight back, collectively. Thanks for listening. I'm Kevin Van Valkenberg, Editorial Director at NoLayingUp. You can email me with your public golf frustrations or ideas at kvv at nolayingup.com. This episode was written and reported by me. Sound editing and mixing was done by Charles Van Kirk. Additional editing by Chris Solomon, DJ Pajowski, and Todd Schuster.

We'll see you next week. Be the right club today. That's better than most. How about in? That is better than most. Better than most!