Golf pro Jimmy Hanlin lets me play the first three holes without saying a word. He mercifully doesn’t comment when I swing and miss on the first tee. There’s not a peep when I drive a worm-burner across the ground that comes to rest just beyond the women’s tees on my second try.
But three holes and a few more sad shots later, he steps in to help.
“Pull the club back,” he says.
I do, and just as my driver reaches the apex of my backswing, he grabs it and holds it in place just long enough for my muscles to start tightening.
“This is what it should feel like,” he says. “Now relax those arms and release the club.”
A few holes later, he moves my shoulders and feet, dancing me around the tee box like a ballroom instructor. Apparently, in the 15 years I have been playing golf, I never really knew how to aim my shots. He fixes this part of my game in about 30 seconds.
This, Hanlin says, is what he lives for.
“I get more out of the guy who shoots 100 that I can get to shoot 95 than the guy who is a 2 handicap who I can get down to 1,” he says. “Those low-handicappers don’t get as excited as the really bad player who hits one good shot and looks at me like I’m the greatest person in the world.”
Hanlin owns Stonewater Golf Club, where we’re playing today. He’s also a damn good golf instructor if the way he cleaned up my game is any indication. But he’s also more than that. He’s morphing into a golf personality who’s on the fast track to becoming the face of the game in Ohio. He has two shows on cable network SportsTime Ohio and a weekly radio program on WKNR 850 AM.
See, Jimmy Hanlin isn’t just any golf pro. He’s also a savvy businessman when it comes to the dollars and cents associated with the game. And all of this — the three golf courses under the Hanlin Golf Group umbrella, the television shows, the notoriety — all of it started nine years ago with a shattered elbow and a grim prognosis that he’d never play golf again.
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There’s a 2-inch scar on Jimmy Hanlin’s right elbow. The day he got it, he was 30 years old and playing in a recreational basketball league in Willoughby.
Although he was a golf pro at Little Mountain Country Club in Concord at the time, Hanlin had also played Division III college basketball and still liked to hit the hardwood occasionally.
He was going for a rebound when it happened. Another player undercut him, and Hanlin landed hard, shattering the radial head of his elbow and permanently changing the course of his professional life.
“The first prognosis was that I would never play golf again,” he recalls. “I was petrified. Golf had run my life. What was I going to do?”
Hanlin had first fallen in love with the game at Spring Hills Golf Club, a tiny public course in Jefferson County, a few miles west of Steubenville. The man who owned the course was a friend of Hanlin’s father and invited young Jimmy to play any time he wanted. Or as Hanlin remembers it today, “Dad dropped me off, and I didn’t leave for 16 years.”
After high school he went to Methodist College in Fayetteville, N.C., where he played basketball and majored in business administration and professional golf management.
Upon graduation, he stayed in North Carolina and took a job as an assistant pro at the famed Pinehurst Resort in 1993, where he earned about $1,000 a month. He played on minor league professional golf tours such as the Hooters Tour, PowerBuilt Tour and the Tarheel Tour.
Today, he can’t remember exactly how much he earned playing golf in those days, but it wasn’t much. He remembers winning $10,000 once. It was the most he ever cleared.
“I did that for about three years,” Hanlin says. “Then I figured out how great those guys are out there. I didn’t have the work ethic or the focus.”
So he came back to Ohio, where he ended up at Little Mountain after a brief stop at Quail Hollow Country Club. Then came the injury, which resulted in elbow replacement surgery. But instead of using the traditional plastic prosthetic bone, Cleveland Clinic surgeons used one made from titanium.
Hanlin’s outlook improved, and he learned that he would eventually be able to play golf again, but first he faced two years of rehabilitation.
So what was a man who had done nothing but play golf since he was 6 years old and who would later name his sons Hogan and Palmer to do? Jimmy Hanlin focused his attention on the business of golf.
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During my round with Hanlin, I hit four or five great shots, shots I have never been able to pull off purposely in my life. They all come after he’s helped me modify my stance and swing.
Watching my golf ball sail into the distance, I start to understand what Hanlin is talking about when he says golfers with whom he works sometimes look at him like he’s the greatest guy in the world. I’m doing it myself.
It doesn’t hurt that he’s just a likeable guy. It’s part of the Jimmy Hanlin brand, and it’s part of how he has endeared himself to golfers throughout the state via his cable television shows. A third is in the works, a Par 3 Challenge that will pit Cleveland celebrities against one another. For people like Brian Hricik, director of operations for the Hanlin Golf Group, it’s a boon to have the face of the franchise reaching thousands of recreational golfers each week.
“Other courses see our strategy and try to mimic it,” Hricik says. “But with Jimmy, we have a marketing advantage. These other courses don’t have an icon.”
Part of Hanlin’s marketability and accessibility is that, for him, there are no stupid questions when it comes to your golf game. Ask him why your ball slices, and he can boil it down so even a novice can understand. Square your shoulders. Move the ball back in your stance. Relax your hands.
Even if the ideas aren’t so easy to instantly incorporate into a golf swing molded by 15 years of bad habits, the concepts are easy to grasp. Hanlin is patient and always quick to point out what you’re doing right, no matter how dubious the achievement.
On Stonewater’s fifth hole, I hit my 4-iron fat, chunking up a huge divot. The ball hops about 50 yards, but Hanlin is excited because my shoulders were square and my hands were relaxed. He even points out evidence that I was aligned properly.
“Look at that divot,” he exclaims. “It’s pointed straight at the hole.”
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Thanks to a titanium rod inserted into his elbow, Hanlin would ultimately be able to golf again. But he didn’t play any golf for two years as he rehabbed from his injury. In those two years, he studied the business of golf. He looked at ways to make Little Mountain a better golf course, and he thought a lot about the overall golf experience.
He also started doing guest spots on ESPN radio and offering golf tips on Channel 3 and Fox 8. “They started asking me to do more and more, and then the radio thing really got going,” he recalls.
By the time SportsTime Ohio launched in 2006, Hanlin was pretty much a regular face and voice in Cleveland sports media.
“They needed programming, and they wanted to do a golf show, so I was the guy they came to,” he says. “It’s flourished from there.”
In 2005, Hanlin became a partner at Little Mountain when one of the course’s owners was looking for someone to buy him out. “I begged, borrowed and stole, and somehow scraped enough together,” recalls Hanlin, who declines to discuss the amount of his investment. “I literally mortgaged everything I had in the world.”
Five years later, the Hanlin Golf Group now owns Little Mountain, Stonewater and Cumberland Trail Golf Club in Pataskala, which is northeast of Columbus. Hanlin says he’s looking to acquire new courses, too, possibly before the end of 2010.
Hanlin’s hope is that he can put a new face on golf in Cleveland and Ohio, one that gets away from the stuffy country club stereotype that businesses such as his often have to fight. When Hanlin’s group took over Stonewater at the end of 2008, the clubhouse restaurant was a white tablecloth, fine dining place. Those tablecloths are long gone, and a large outdoor bar opened the first week of May.
Several years ago, Hanlin also changed the way his clubs sold memberships, which has helped his courses stave off some of the pain others have experienced from members bailing on their several-thousand-dollars-a-year memberships. Instead, Hanlin’s members buy 25, 50 or 100 rounds or more of golf and have full run of the club on the days they visit. They can also give those rounds to whomever they like.
Hanlin Golf Group director of operations Brian Hricik says that because of this change, the club’s membership base is more than 40 percent higher than last year and is continuing to grow. The Hanlin Group’s two Cleveland-area clubs have more than 400 members combined.
During this year’s offseason, the ownership team began looking for new profit centers for the company. Stonewater has a large driving range and two practice putting greens. It also has an experienced staff and good teaching pros. So they thought, Why not a golf school?
The Jimmy Hanlin Golf School will launch in June. Hanlin sees it as a way to increase the number of rounds of golf played at his courses.
“The golf school is about making people better at the game, which will help them enjoy it more,” he says. “We have to make this game fun, and playing better golf is definitely more fun.”
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I stand at the 10th tee, staring down the 331-yard par 4. My arms already ache after nine tough holes. And every time I stand over the ball, a thousand thoughts swirl through my head — don’t shank it, don’t swing and miss again, you only have one golf ball left, why are my clubs so old? All of these thoughts compete with Hanlin’s voice.
“Square those shoulders.”
I square my shoulders.
“Move your feet up.”
I move my feet up.
“When you bring that club back, just let those arms relax and release.”
This time, it all falls into place. The ball soars right down the middle of the fairway in a straight line, hitting the ground and rolling to a stop less than 100 yards from the green.
Hanlin steps into the tee box and hits a towering shot down the right side of the fairway. We climb into the golf cart, which is outfitted with a GPS system to let us know exactly how far we are from the pin, and drive to where each ball landed. The first one we come to is in the first cut of rough along the right side. It’s Hanlin’s.
He pulls out his phone and tweets from the golf cart, generously neglecting to mention he was teeing off with a 4-iron while I had the full power of a trusty driver.
“Matt Tullis on[e] of my twitter friends out drove me on number ten at Stonewater today,” he types.
Sure, there’s an asterisk next to my accomplishment, and I’ll be paying for all of this dearly with sore muscles tomorrow, but I’m having fun, and that’s exactly the way Jimmy Hanlin wants it.