22 minute read
SWING INTO SUMMER
HITTING THE LINKS
INSIDE OAK CLIFF’S RICH GOLF CULTURE
Two Oak Cliffers were among the original members of the LPGA. One PGA champion is from here. Oak Cliff was home to the tournament now named for Byron Nelson. And the only PGA championship ever held in Dallas was played here.
A country-club sport that’s perceived as elite became accessible to most of Oak Cliff decades ago.
Today our neighborhood is home to two highly regarded public golf courses whose history and influence are part of the fabric of life in Oak Cliff.
Here’s why Cedar Crest and Stevens Park golf courses are more than just places to catch a round.
HOME COURSE
Cedar Crest Golf Course serves the neighborhood
Ira Molayo first played Cedar Crest Golf Course as a 10-year-old after his mom took up the sport and enrolled him in a golf camp there.
He grew up 2 miles from the City of Dallas-owned course where he’s now director of golf. Since 2008, Molayo has driven to make golf accessible to kids and teens.
Three years ago, he founded a nonprofit, I Am a Golfer, which provides lessons, equipment, team golf and course access to Dallas kids ages 7-17, at little to no cost to them.
“Golf has been so exclusive that we don’t create those avenues for kids,” Molayo says.
Beyond just teaching them the game and hopefully inspiring lifelong play, Molayo also wants to show kids that golf can lead to careers.
Every year, I Am a Golfer hires about 35 paid high school and college interns to help run the pro shop and the many summer tournaments held at Cedar Crest.
Interns learn customer service, inventory, retail transactions, management and professionalism. College students run marketing campaigns, including social media, printed materials and signage.
Sometimes they’re just shagging balls, but there are lessons at every turn.
Black kids are more likely to face discrimination, and often, they’re not given as many chances to make mistakes, so it’s a safe space for them to fail, he says.
The nonprofit, whose major funders include the Trinity Forest Golf Club, the Jordan Spieth Foundation and AT&T, also has awarded about $45,000 in scholarships to its interns in the past three years.
Ira Molayo
LEGENDARY STATUS
The 1927 PGA Championship at Cedar Crest remains the only major championship ever played on a Dallas course.
Legend has it that Walter Hagen, known as “the father of professional golf,” woke up late on the penultimate day of the tournament after a night of drinking. He was down five on hole 13, and the sun was shining in his eyes. The flashy Hagen rarely wore a hat because he was known for his attractive black hair. He was getting ready to tee off, when a kid in the gallery shouted, “Mr. Hagen, would you like my cap?” He showily took the cap, birdied the hole and won the match. He won again the next day, capturing the fourth of his career 11 majors. And who was the kid who loaned Hagan his cap? A 15-year-old Byron Nelson.
“Byron Nelson was here in 1927 to watch his favorite golfer on tour,” Molayo says.
Back then it was Cedar Crest Country Club. It went downhill after the Great Depression, and the city bought it in 1946.
Homes in the neighborhood were originally built for the families of white businessmen who could commute by streetcar to Downtown Dallas. After World War II, it became home to Black doctors, professionals and business owners.
Somewhere around the 1980s, Cedar Crest became known as “the course in the hood,” Molayo says. The original clubhouse had been destroyed in a fire, and a glorified shack served for decades until the current building went up in 2001.
But before that, it was notorious for gambling.
“It was to the point where you could just show up and ‘rail,’” Molayo says. “Rail means you can rent a cart and just ride around and watch people play,” to bet on them.
Because of that, everyone knew it was the place to be when caddies had their day off from the Colonial and Byron Nelson tournaments, Molayo says.
The days of illicit gambling are long over.
The course was renovated in 2004, and the greens were updated in 2016. Both renovations were done by D.A. Weibring and Steve Wolford, highly regarded course architects who stayed true to A.W. Tillinghast’s original design.
Many of nearby homes have remained in the hands of Black middle-class families who’ve lived there since the 1940s.
But the neighborhood is changing again. A brand-new two-story modern home was recently constructed across the street. And townhomes are going up nearby with prices starting in the $300,000 range.
Golfers come from all over Dallas to play Cedar Crest, and the course is home to many tournaments throughout the year, including the AT&T Byron Nelson Pro-Am.
Molayo says he thinks the golf course is the main asset of the Cedar Crest neighborhood, and he works to bring the community in as much as possible.
Cedar Crest Golf Course
Where: 1800 Southerland Ave. Course rates: $13-$45 More info: golfcedarcrest.com, iamagolfer.com
DID YOU KNOW?
Cedar Crest hosted the United Golf Association’s Negro National Open in 1954, during a time when Black people were barred from the PGA. It also hosted the only Dallas Open, which was on the PGA tour in 1926.
Aside from the municipal courses, our neighborhood is home to two private golf clubs, and each tells a unique story about Oak Cliff.
Oak Cliff Country Club, later renamed to Golf Club of Dallas, was built in 1954 and hosted the Dallas Open Invitational, the tournament now named for Byron Nelson, from 1958-1967.
It is notable in that context as the only place where a golfer has won a PGA tournament on his home course. Sunset High School alumnus Earl Stewart Jr. worked as a pro there when he won the Dallas Open Invitational in 1961. (See page 30.)
After years of declining membership in the club, developer Huffines Communities considered buying it to build 500 homes there in 2017, but neighbors overwhelmingly opposed the idea, and Huffines dropped it.
Megachurch Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship bought the club last year.
The church didn’t respond to inquiries for this story, but golf ministries have become popular in Christian congregations.
A letter from the club to members in May 2020 stated that the church planned to keep the 200 acres as a golf course. “It’s clear they just want what is best for the club,” former director of golf Philip Bleakney said at the time.
Dallas National is the golf club so exclusive that you might not even know it’s there. Built in 2003 and designed by Tom Fazio, its original members, which included Tom Hicks, Lee Trevino and Roger Staubach, paid upwards of $100,000 a year to join. You can’t play there unless you’re invited by a member. And when you’re inside, you won’t know where you are.
“They don’t want anyone looking in on it,” says Jim Henderson of Stevens Park, who has played the course. “And they don’t want their members looking out on the neighborhood there.”
It was built on about 700 square yards inside a former cement quarry and is said to have striking vistas from every tee box. It’s strictly golf — no pool, no tennis courts, no big clubhouse, no weddings, no engagement photos.
Ira Molayo of Cedar Crest says it’s very challenging and unlike any other course in Dallas.
“It’s one of my top favorite courses, the few times I’ve had the privilege to play there,” he says.
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The National Youth Administration, a New Deal agency, built the original Stevens Park caddie house in 1937. The Works Progress Administration built the clubhouse and pavilions in 1942.
Jim Henderson
NO MEMBERSHIP NECESSARY
Stevens Park Golf Course belongs to the neighborhood. When it and everything else was closed during the coro navirus pandemic, it became a workout center, picnic spot and walking course for neighbors. It is the downhill sledding headquarters of North Oak Cliff snowstorms. And when it was time to modernize the course in 2005, neighbors stepped up to get it done.
A handful of neighborhood residents raised money and pushed the city to use bond funds to fully renovate the course all at once.
The Stevens Park course was originally built with 9 holes in 1924. It was later expanded to 18 holes, but it had sand greens that were raked.
“It was a funky course,” says director of golf Jim Henderson, who has worked at the course since 1988.
They didn’t want to do the job piecemeal, so it was completely overhauled to the tune of $8 million, including new greens, fairways, sprinklers and a maintenance barn, as well as erosion control in 2011.
The group of neighbors who spent five years working for that project formed a nonprofit called North Oak
Cliff Greenspace that still raises as much as $50,000 a year to maintain the course and surrounding areas, including the Kessler Parkway trail, amounting to about 2.5 acres of garden beds, plus signage and cart paths. The nonprofit partnered with
Kessler Neighbors United to raise half the money needed to renovate the tennis courts on the parkway, with the city paying the other half, and they raised $60,000 to place a pedestal clock near the clubhouse. “Even though we’re in a big metropolitan area, our individual neighborhoods pull together, and it’s amazing what we can get accomplished,” Henderson says.
From the beginning, neighbors have driven the park’s development. An Oak Cliff business association pushed the city to acquire land from what was then the Bishop Dunne Memorial Home, an orphanage, to expand to 18 holes in 1926.
Stevens Park has never been the most difficult course in town, but the environment is unbeatable — unfenced in a beautiful historic neighborhood, with views of Downtown and rolling hills. It’s a unique urban golf experience.
Since it’s hemmed in by the neighborhood, space didn’t allow Colligan Golf Design’s 2011 rework to make the fairways longer. New technology allows anyone to drive the ball farther. You couldn’t play a pro tournament there, but it’s a fun course that’s meant to be entertaining for golfers of any level, Henderson says.
It hosted high-school tournaments back when Sunset High School was a golf powerhouse (see page 30), and at a time when women were excluded from many golf spaces, Stevens Park was a hub for women’s tournaments.
Henderson says municipal golf courses were overbuilt in the 1990s and by the year 2000, there was a bit of a lull in the market. But since its renovation, Stevens Park Golf Course has always been very popular, he says.
The popularity of the sport swung upward after the pandemic because it’s easy to maintain distance outdoors on a golf course.
Stevens Park Golf Course
Where: 1005 N. Montclair Ave. Course rates: $12-$57 More info: stevensparkgolf.com, nocgreenspace.org
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Ride the warm current
Life is not all earth-bound
Ilike to joke that hawks are my spirit animal. I’ve had several semi-mystical encounters with them over the years.
On two of my birthdays, I’ve had close encounters with two separate hawks, in ways that felt like messages from God.
The message was something like: “take courage…have strength…fear not…”
Also, years ago now, I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for the door to open and biopsy results to be revealed. I gazed out the window amid anxiety and fear, to see a lone hawk perched upon the corner of an adjacent building.
She was just looking off into the distance.
And again, I heard… “take courage… have strength…fear not…”
But the most memorable moment I’ve had with a hawk was watching one deal with its own moment of crisis.
As I pulled up to church after lunch one day, I looked up to see a lone hawk, being “dive bombed” by two large black crows.
It was an amazing sight. I put the car in park and sat there transfixed. Those crows were really, really mad about something. (I cannot deny that the hawk might well have been guilty.)
It was “two against one,” and they repeatedly circled and dove toward the hawk. I had no idea how the hawk could possibly get out of this situation.
But slowly, effortlessly, the hawk spiraled higher and higher into the sky. It caught the upward current of the warm breeze. It barely flapped its wings, and never pecked back and its attackers. In fact, it didn’t even seem like the hawk was paying them any attention to them at all.
It just kept going higher and higher, until it was but a mere dot in the blue Texas sky.
What happened, of course, is that the crows couldn’t go that high. It was beyond their physical capability.
The hawk got away from the crows by going HIGHER.
In Romans 12, St. Paul says: “Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
I love this Common English Bible translation. It suggests there are “patterns” to this world.
The world’s patterns are earth-bound, repetitive, depressing, and fear-filled. The world would lock us into believing it will never change. The world’s patterns are filled with random violence and distrusting hearts. And it can easily feel like we’re being “pecked” to death by adversaries both outside us, and within our own hearts.
But through the Spirit of God within us, we have the capacity to be “transformed,” even amid the world’s depressing patterns of attack.
We can “go higher,” and find a way to be renewed.
Obviously, we can’t live way up in the air. We have to come back to earth. But it strikes me that our particular problem these days is being so “grounded” that we never really see beyond what is right in front of us.
We see plenty of trees, but very little forest. Our vision is clouded by endless lists of “to dos,” and the demands of life.
The hawk knows it can always “go higher.” St. Paul knew that there is spiritual wisdom that can help us transcend our earthy cares.
So, when you’re feeling especially attacked, under siege, or just stuck in the rut of every-day life, let the hawk be your guide. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that the repeating patterns of the earthbound world are all there is to your life.
Ride the upward lift of God’s Spirit, and go higher.
ERIC FOLKERTH is senior pastor of Kessler Park United Methodist Church. The Worship section is underwritten by Advocate Publishing and the neighborhood businesses and churches listed here. For information about helping support the Worship section, call 214.560.4202.
WORSHIP
BAPTIST
CLIFF TEMPLE BAPTIST CHURCH / 125 Sunset Ave. / 214.942.8601 Serving Oak Cliff since 1898 / CliffTemple.org / English and Spanish 9 am Contemporary Worship / 10 am Sunday School / 11 am Traditional
GRACE TEMPLE BAPTIST Come to a Place of Grace! Sunday Worship: English Service 9:30am / Spanish Service 11:00am 831 W. Tenth St. / 214.948.7587 / gracetempledallas.org
CATHOLIC
ST. CECILIA CATHOLIC PARISH / StCeciliaDallas.org / 1809 W Davis St. / Saturday - Bilingual Mass 5PM; Sunday – English Masses 7:30AM & 11AM; Spanish Masses 9AM & 1PM
DISCIPLES OF CHRIST
EAST DALLAS CHRISTIAN CHURCH / 629 N. Peak Street / 214.824.8185 Sunday School 9:30 am / Worship 8:30 am - Chapel 10:50 am - Sanctuary / Rev. Deborah Morgan-Stokes / edcc.org
EPISCOPAL
CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH / ChristChurchDallas.org Sunday School: 11:15am /Mass: 9am & 10am English, 12:30pm Español Wednesday Mass: 6pm English, 8pm Español / 534 W. Tenth Street
METHODIST
KESSLER PARK UMC / 1215 Turner Ave./ 214.942.0098 I kpumc.org 10:30am Sunday School/11:00 Worship /All are welcome regardless or race, creed, culture, gender or sexual identity.
NON-DENOMINATIONAL
KESSLER COMMUNITY CHURCH / 2100 Leander Dr. at Hampton Rd. “Your Hometown Church Near the Heart of the City.” 10:30 am Contemporary Service / kesslercommunitychurch.com
TRINITY CHURCH OAK CLIFF / Love God. Love Others. Make Disciples. Sundays 10:00 am / Worship & children’s Sunday School 1139 Turner Ave. / trinitychurchoakcliff.org
PRESBYTERIAN
PARK CITIES PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH/ 4124 Oak Lawn Ave Sunday Worship 9:00 & 11:00 A.M. To all this church opens wide her doors - pcpc.org
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