INTRODUCTION: GAME ON
You can always find a game at Short Hills Country Club, where enduring friendships have been built around the great game of golf for a century and counting.
The games on summer Saturdays are a particularly special kind of fun.
That’s when regulars in the White Tee, Blue Tee, and Rotary groups find their way to the East Moline hilltop for a day of friends, fun, and the unique kind of four-lettered frustration only golf can induce. Members of all skill levels join games that welcome anyone with a handicap, an interest in a sporting wager, and a shared passion for testing their game against the Quad Cities’ most time-tested golf course.
An intrepid foursome of women stage their own regular Saturday game as well, usually slipping onto the first tee between the Blues and the Whites, and playing faster on foot than most of the men do on wheels.
Before them all lies the latest iteration of a course created in 1922 by a coalition of Chambers of Commerce from Moline, Rock Island, East Moline, and Scott County.
Newspaper records show that in the fall of 1921 those groups of business-oriented community leaders identified a need for a second local sporting club behind the quarter-century-old Arsenal Country Club, and quickly went to work to make it happen.
The earliest newspaper mention of the concept was in October of 1921 when a joint committee was formed to investigate the feasibility. By July 1922, papers of incorporation had been filed and a board of directors elected. Purchase of the tract of hilltop farmland described then as “south of East Moline” was completed in August. By September, dirt had been moved toward creation of a nine-hole layout.
How’s that for pace of play?
This year’s centennial anniversary is cause for genuine celebration because keeping the club together wasn’t always as easy as launching it seemed to be.
Competition has been a constant from the very beginning. A Davenport municipal nine-hole course on Credit Island also opened in 1922. A year later, came Black Hawk Hills Country Club — ultimately destined to be the Rock Island county-owned public track long known as Indian Bluff. In 1924, Davenport Country Club was founded on the bluffs above the Mississippi River near LeClaire, Iowa.
By the time Short Hills celebrated its golden anniversary in 1972, it was one of six country clubs in the Quad Cities, with 10 public courses in the immediate vicinity offering remarkably affordable daily fees.
The sporting club on the East Moline hilltop flourished amid the competition, however.
Through the years, it grew into one of the Quad Cities’ most popular social meccas, and served as home base to many of the region’s most accomplished amateur golfers.
With membership capped at 325 certificate holders, the waiting list of would-be members grew long as the 1960s arrived. Not as long, perhaps, as the Happy Hour line for martinis in the clubhouse bar, nor near as long as the list of Saturday night dining reservations to enjoy the best Prime Rib in two states. But lengthy, nonetheless.
Today, country club waiting lists are, for the most part, a thing of the past. For Short Hills and many private clubs nationwide, 1980s-era tax law changes lessened the value of small business memberships. And, over the ensuing decades, the proliferation of youth travel sports left young parents challenged to find the time, let alone the budget, to justify family memberships.
Meanwhile, local competition for a shrinking golf dollar has continued to grow. There are 18 public courses operating in Quad Cities proper today, including high-end daily fee courses in Silvis and Sherrard that offer their own annual membership rates.
The fact that Short Hills turns 100 holding claim to the title of oldest golf course and country club in the area is itself a poignant reminder that survival is not assured.
Arsenal closed as a private club in 2010 and the historic golf course closed for good nine years later.
Momentum Renewed
Despite it all, Short Hills is alive and more than well as it celebrates its centennial anniversary in 2022.
Club memberships have grown since the spring of 2020 when the pandemic put youth sports on pause. Meanwhile, the Board of Directors has accessed low-interest loans to help cross significant physical updates off its to-do list.
And, so, the club on the East Moline hilltop turns 100 with renewed momentum, even while remaining what it was at the very start — a people-centric place where golfers find easy access to the first tee, and all members enjoy poolside fun, lively parties, good food and generous pours of their favorite beverages.
Most importantly, Short Hills members continue to find lifelong friendships, carefree fun, and good times.
A regular in the weekend White Tee games, Marty Davis was age 6 when his family joined in 1959, and he has held his own membership since graduating college and joining the family business in 1976.
Although many other current members have been on the rolls as long or longer, Davis almost certainly has played more Short Hills rounds than most. He has frequently played elsewhere as well, he noted. Yet, he has never found a friendlier place to play.
“I’ve always said Short Hills exists for one reason only and that’s for the members to come out here and have fun,” Davis said. “And I can say I’ve had fun out here for a long time.”
Brent Haydon’s lifetime of playing Short Hills is about 30 years shorter than that of Davis, but his passion for the place is every bit as rich.
“For me — and I’m probably speaking for a few other people — it’s pretty much been home for most of our lives,” he said. “It’s a really fun place, and being a golfer, it’s a fun place to play against other golfers who just love playing the game. Who are good at the game. It just feels right.”
Deb and Bill Fitzsimmons never expected to call Short Hills home. For 30 years, their hearts were at Arsenal Golf Club, and they would have stayed another 30, Deb said, had the club not closed.
The Fitzsimmons spent a couple years mourning Arsenal’s demise and playing public courses. When finally they looked into Short Hills, they knew they’d found a new home.
“We’re so happy we’re here at Short Hills,” Deb said. “We love it. We love the people. We love the course. It’s fun. And we’re golf addicts.”
The Fitzsimmons have that in common with the vast majority of today’s members, including Jerry and Elaine Pepping, with whom they frequently play couples golf on a Sunday or weekday afternoon.
Almost never on a Saturday, however.
Let The Games Begin
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Saturday mornings, and many Sundays as well, you’ll find Bill and Jerry in the Rotary game, while Deb and Elaine are part of that diehard female foursome that may not outplay the men but definitely out-quick them.
There’s never more than pride on the line for Deb and Elaine.
“We play for the honor of a par or a birdie, for the excitement of breaking 100,” Deb said. “We’re not the best golfers but we’re out here all the time because we love the game.”
Added Elaine: “We love the fellowship. And the exercise.”
Fellowship. Exercise. Love of the game. The same things that draw Elaine, Deb, Brent Haydon, Marty Davis and a few dozen others to the hilltop on modern-summer Saturdays are the very reasons business leaders across the community created Short Hills Country Club a century before.
Founding fathers such as George Ross, O.E. Child, C.I. Josephson Jr., J.U. Barnard, Rufus Walker, and Fred Railsback were themselves looking for fellowship and exercise in the fall of 1922. And, if at the start they didn’t fully love the game Americans were just getting to know, they inevitably would.
It was golf, after all. The greatest game in the world.
Massive drivers have replaced mashies and niblicks, while supercharged golf balls have long since supplanted the featherie those forefathers teed up. Innovative means of getting the ball in the hole changed the game dramatically in the intervening years. Yet, the technology that most impacts the games of Short Hills is the smartphone you might be using to read these very words.
Text messaging keeps any Short Hills member looking for a game in the loop, and when it’s ‘Game On,’ word goes out through the wireless.
“Blues at 8,” one text string will say, and so a lively Saturday morning will dawn with 20 or more of the best Short Hills swings getting warmed up on the range.
The Blue Tee ranks have grown considerably stronger in recent years, with many of the best mid-amateurs in the area finding their way to the hilltop.
Among the newer imports is Ben Peters, who won his fourth Quad City Amateur Championship last year at the age of 48. The runner-up was Matt Schlueter, who won the Short Hills club championship in ‘21, winning one of his matches with a new course-record of 62.
Shorties got game.
“Everyone knows about the Blue Tee game here,” said 2015 club champion Ben Hanson, one of a dozen former college standouts in the game. “It’s such a good game and players are naturally drawn to Short Hills to be part of that. In the Quad Cities, this is kind of ‘The Players Club.’”
There are players in the White Tee game, too.
Tom Bracke won a club championship at age 16, went on to play collegiately at the University of South Florida, and played alongside Jack Nicklaus in a 1986 Hardee’s Golf Classic exhibition. Marc Vanderbeke has won multiple club championships with a putting stroke Ben Crenshaw would admire. Fred Lukasik is a two-time Chicago District Golf Association Senior Golfer of the Year and a few years beyond qualifying for the U.S. Senior Open.
And then there is the gentleman with a 14.5 handicap who once sprinkled his father’s ashes behind No. 1 green and is certain that’s the reason he didn’t make better than bogey on the hole for years afterward.
So, yes, there are players in the White Tee game. And duffers, too.
The White Tee game will match players with 25 handicaps against 1s and 2s, with the field leveled by the handicap system that helps make golf the game of a lifetime.
Giving dozens of strokes to half the field does bring higher math into the equation, however. So settling up after a round can occasionally take longer than it does to play the back nine.
The high-volume, high-comedy, end-of-day accounting is matched only by the agreeably disagreeable pre-game banter and the herding-cats-like challenge of pairing up White Tee teams and getting them off the first tee.
Ed Casel is among a hearty few who have accepted the unofficial role of directors of games.
“Not by choice,” he said. “If you want something done right you do it yourself, right?”
Casel joined the club in 2004 and joined the White Tee game soon after. A 20-handicap when he started, he is in the low single digits now, and, if you have a minute, ask him about his albatross on 13 in the final match for the Club Championship B-Division title a couple of years back. (Don’t ask, though, who won the match.)
If you have an hour, meanwhile, you’ll want to ask Davis and fellow longtime member Jim Smith about their holes-in-one at 14 while playing on opposing teams in the same foursome in a Saturday game in June of 2007. (Don’t ask Davis to see the ball he hit as part of the historic moment, though. He legendarily deposited it in the lake two days later while attempting to recreate the 17-million-to-1 back-to-back aces for a local television crew.)
That’s the White Tee game in a nutshell. Good swings intermingled with bad, meaning anything can happen, and usually does, on a Saturday at Short Hills. And then it becomes a story “Shorties” will tell for years.
There is no shortage of stories in the Rotary group, either.
That lively bunch of seniors typically take the tee last on Saturdays. Of course, Saturdays are just another day for a crew that consists largely of longtime members enjoying their retirements the way everybody should — playing golf three to four to five times each week.
Dick Poterack started at Short Hills in a Saturday group of Deere execs that ultimately merged with the Rotarians who played behind them.
Today, few of the Rotary game players fit in either camp. But the game plays on.“It started out and it stuck,” Poterack said of the game’s name.
So have the most loyal members of this crew, who still enjoy a good-natured laugh or two at one another’s expense.
Veteran group member Randy Neumann said the tight bonds and friendly fire among the Rotary players are a fair reflection of Short Hills itself.
“I’ve played a lot of places but nobody has the camaraderie we do here,” he said. “All of us love playing golf. We all get along together. Nobody’s got any high ideas of who they are, what they make and how much they’ve got. It’s just a good, fun group.”
Good fun. That’s Short Hills Country Club a century on. On Saturdays, Sundays, and virtually every day of the week.
Welcome to the club.