Manly Happy Returns at Bear Creek Golf Club

Colorado’s only “company of gentleman golfers,” proudly celebrates 30 years.

Jon Rizzi

It’s as predictable as a Sunday morning hangover. Every year in this magazine’s CAGGY Awards balloting, some wiseass votes Denver’s private Bear Creek Golf Club in the “Best Course for Women” category. In case you don’t get the attempt at humor, Bear Creek only has male members. And if anything is predictable, it’s the eyebrow-raising over that particular policy. 

Unlike, say, Chicago’s Bob-O-Link or D.C.’s Burning Tree, Bear Creek doesn’t predate women’s suffrage and invoke a century of “tradition” to justify its policy. The Golden attorney Leo Bradley opened the club 30 years ago as “a company of gentleman golfers,” and ever since his death in 2004, his son, Jeff, and the club’s board of directors, have run the club as he did.

Over the past few years, they’ve seen the venerable Augusta National and St. Andrews admit female members. They have also watched the club scene in Colorado become decreasingly golf-oriented. Prospective club members want “programming.” They want tennis, swimming, childcare, hot yoga and spinning classes—a place to bring the wife and kids, not escape from them.

At least that’s the conventional wisdom.

Located on 520 rugged acres that Bradley developed north of Morrison Road, Bear Creek has none of the above amenities. It has golf. It has dining. And guess what? It has signed on 60 new members over the past three years. “People ask how I can belong to a place where women aren’t allowed,” says Rich “G-Man” Goins, who has been a member for 10 years. “It’s not like that at all. Members bring their wives, their girlfriends and their kids to have lunch and dinner. Women shop in the clubhouse. They work here. We have girls in our caddie program. We have a woman massage therapist.” None of those women can play the course.

Two years ago, the affable Goins—a sports reporter whom Denverites might remember spent 33 days living on a billboard during a 1990 Broncos losing streak—became the club’s membership director. He always needs to set people straight on the policy. “A lot of them have heard their wives have to meet them outside the gate,” he says, shaking his head.

Another misperception “is that we’re a bunch of old, rich guys,” says Goins, who admits neither to being rich (except, well, for his name) nor old (he’s 55). “We have all ages of people here—from guys in their 20s and 30s all the way to their 70s and 80s—and many of them are just regular guys who would otherwise be spending the same kind of money playing munis.”

He says this over breakfast in the spacious, richly wooded locker room, where the procession of men reveals a range of ages. That they’re going out to play on a drizzly Saturday May morning testifies to their passion for the game. Through the window, we see Head PGA Professional Kirk Rider leading a group of 23 raingear-clad junior caddies—including a few ponytailed females—in an orientation. Bear Creek’s caddie program has produced seven Evans Scholars, including Karissa Godin in 2008.

Jeff Bradley joins Goins and me at a table a few feet from his father’s locker—No. 1 of course—which, I’m told, remains as he left it more than 10 years ago, back when Bear Creek membership was much closer to its 350 cap than it is today.

The good news is that a growing number of Bear Creek lockers now contain items belonging to younger members who have been enticed by a $1,000 trial membership offer, wherein the prospective member pays monthly dues for six months and enjoys all the privileges of a full membership. If the person converts to full membership, Bear Creek credits the $1,000 towards the initiation. “We’ve converted almost all of them,” says Goins.

The club tiers the initiation and dues for different ages. Men 26 and younger pay $3,333 to join. It jumps to $4,000 if you’re 27, $6,000 if you’re 28—and goes up in $2,000 increments until age 45, when joining costs the full price of $40,000, for which the club offers interest-free financing. Monthly dues run $675 for members 40 years old and up, but members 32 and younger pay ½ dues ($396.50); members ages 33 to 39 pay ¾ dues ($593.75).

Photo: Bear Creek, #13

In addition to unlimited golf, Bear Creek membership also comes with free lessons, membership for sons until age 25 and access to one of the most elaborate practice areas in Colorado—complete with fairway and green-side bunkers, chipping and putting greens, Pro V1X range balls, professional instruction with video, custom club-fitting programs and three-hole practice area. You never need to make a tee time, and rounds rarely exceed four hours.

“It’s such an attractive deal,” says financial analyst Chris Thayer, the club’s current stroke- and match-play champion and winner of last year’s Colorado Golf Association Mid-Amateur. A Northwestern teammate of Luke Donald’s, Thayer, 34, joined Bear Creek three years ago, a year after moving to Colorado. “I calculated what I’d spent on muni golf, and it made complete financial sense to join—especially at age 31, and also because the money I pay goes to golf, not to tennis or social events.”

Money aside, Thayer says he joined primarily because tee-time access was so easy, the practice facility was excellent, he could always get a game and “the course challenged me to a better player with every club in my bag because it makes you play them all.”

He’s got that right. Traversing streams, lakes and ravines, mature stands of cottonwoods and heaving terrain, the 7,276-yard Arnold Palmer-Ed Seay layout can humble the most proficient player. Although a few widened fairways have made the course “softer” than it was when it originally opened, it remains a true members’ course, with a number of blind and deceptively difficult tee shots, numerous forced carries, and fairways that place a premium on ball position. “You can’t pull driver on every par 4,” says Kirk Rider, “and you absolutely need to select the right club and play each shot to the correct area.”

Playing to the correct area especially applies to Bear Creek’s multi-tiered greens. Hitting one in regulation hardly guarantees par, let alone a birdie, especially if you find one of the two tiers without a pin. As equipment technology has somewhat shortened the course for longer hitters (and kept it playable for the “less ductile” ones, as the 61-year-old Bradley describes himself), these greens play a pivotal role in defending par. Superintendent Eric Woody, whom members rave about, doesn’t have them Stimping faster than 10.6 because there’s no reason to do so.

“Mr. Palmer said he wanted to design a course that when guys come up the drive they can’t wait to put their spikes on,” Bradley says. “And he certainly succeeded.” Bradley says his father had a special relationship with Palmer. “Both came from humble beginnings, learning the game of golf and all its lessons from their fathers. That’s how Dad learned; that’s how I learned. He didn’t understand ‘quality time.’ He believed in ‘quantity time,’ which I now try to give my sons Ross and Sam.”

All of which explains why Bear Creek grants members’ sons full membership privileges until age 25. “For 12 years, after my son turned 13, I got two for the price of one,” says attorney Hal Morris, a member since 1987. “It was a huge thing for me and my son, Tom. We spent more time together than we would have otherwise. And as my wife always said, ‘Where else can I drop off a teenaged boy at 7 a.m., pick him up 12 hours later and not worry about him?’  

“We’ve always been a pretty respectful, affable bunch,” Morris continues. “Everybody’s there for same reason: They’re serious about the game.” That doesn’t mean 10 of them aren’t above playing an occasional game of pig or wolf, or going out during shoulder seasons and playing “cross-country golf.” “We do stuff you can’t do anywhere else,” he says.

Moreover, he adds, the long-tenured staff really takes care of the members. He calls Woody, Rider, Assistant J.P. Hachey, Locker Room Manager Bryan Mosher and Executive Chef Dave Tannaccio his “friends” and Bradley, like his father before him, “a benevolent dictator.”

Leo Bradley had a reputation for being as tough as his course. But he wasn’t too proud to blow up and redo the fifth green when members complained that the rear tier was impossibly small. Jeff has responded similarly to members suggesting he re-route the stream bisecting the ninth fairway and cutting back—or down—the trees and bushes that compromised the playability of a couple of holes.

The one nonnegotiable item is the single-sex composition of the membership, about which, he says with a laugh, nobody has asked “this year…that is, until today.”

He sees it as a “marketing advantage” in attracting passionate golfers like Thayer and men who aren’t into the social status and trappings of a country club. “It’s recreation,” he says matter-of-factly. “We still need a place to get away from our daily concerns. You can come out here anytime you want and play. No tee times. No cliques. It’s about golf. That’s how we’re steadily bringing in new guys who want to thrive.”

RELATED LINKS

2015 CAGGYs: Private Club Winners

Living on the Green: Castle Pines Village

Private Clubs and Communities: Denver Region

The Value of Private Club Membership

Private Clubs and Communities: Mountain Region

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