By Doug McPherson
Steven Tingle worked for years as a superintendent and GM on his family’s course. Then his mom fired him. Now he’s living a new chapter: a novelist who’s returning to that course with a kooky cast of characters including a real estate agent killed (murdered?) by an errant golf ball.
You’d hope Steven Tingle has a good story. After all, he’s a novelist. But his real-life tale in the business of golf has some pretty good twists and turns, too.
It’s a story that begins one year before he was born. In 1968, his dad, Fred Tingle, hit a mid-life crisis: stay in New York’s bustling business world or do something else.
A few weeks later Fred was in rural North Carolina building a golf course. “He didn’t know anything about golf, other than how to play it, poorly,” Steven says. “But he did it. He built nine holes, then another nine, then some rental cabins, then a restaurant.”
It became the Springdale Country Club, a public course a couple of hours west of Charlotte.
Fred had a knack for the work. And the name Tingle may ring a bell. Fred was a NGCOA founding member and a past president. In 1994, he received NGCOA’s Don Rossi Award for his many contributions to golf.
For Steven, an only child, the course eventually became his life. He was raised in a house on the 15th hole where as a kid, he washed golf carts and mowed greens. And as an adult, he served as superintendent and later GM for 10 years. It was during this time―in 2005―that Fred died.
After a couple of years, Steven’s mom decided to sell the property. “Her heart wasn’t in it anymore after my dad’s passing,” he says.
The timing was perfect: Late 2007 with real estate, golf and travel all booming. And the Tingle property, according to some real estate agents, was approaching eight figures.
But in 2008 the market crashed and the housing bubble burst. “Suddenly our valuable asset was practically worthless,” Steven says. “My mom told me to go get a new job, then handed me my last paycheck.”
Steven was 39-years-old, recently divorced and completely responsible for a 14-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son. His house was foreclosed. He filed for bankruptcy. He eventually cobbled together a meager living as a freelance writer for golf trade publications, and in his spare time, wrote a crime novel, “Graveyard Fields,” that was published in 2021.
Today, he is celebrating his second novel out this fall, “Buried Lies.” It’s set at Springdale (which in real life, Steven’s mom finally sold in 2018) where a real estate agent is killed by an errant golf ball. Former policeman turned private detective Davis Reed has no reason to suspect it wasn’t an accident. But then a wealthy couple hires Reed to prove the death was murder and catch the killer.
“In my first book, I mentioned the course, but in the second book, it’s almost a character,” Steven says. “It was cathartic to write about it. It was my entire life. When I was forced out, my identity was gone. It took a long time to come to terms with it. It was like a death. I’m grateful that the new owner kept it going.”
Steven says his time at the course proved useful in writing. “The golf business is the hospitality business. Your job is to take your customers out of their normal world for a few hours. The same goes for novel writing. I want my readers to have a good time and lose themselves for a while.”
And another piece of advice: “Allowing yourself to be creative and not caving to the latest trend or fad is a lesson I learned when I was writing my second book. My agent always tells me, ‘Don’t write what you know. Don’t write what’s currently selling. Write what you would want to read.’ I think that advice transcends the world of writing. Do what feels right to you. Create the experience that you would enjoy if you were the customer.”
Up next for Steven? He’s working on a new novel and says he plans to stick with writing. “If I ever do give it up, I’ll probably go over to the local public golf course and see if they’ll let me mow grass a few days a week.”