A tourist from Arizona stopped me as I left the golf course last week, wanting to know who I'd been playing against.
Normally I'm not a name-dropper, but the man's wife and children were also curious, and all five of them were awaiting my answer. “The mayor,” I said. “Jerry Sanders.”
The father nodded. “I figured it was somebody important,” he said. “You don't see many golfers with two bodyguards and their own scorekeeper.”
We must have been an unusual sight, the mayor and I, as we played 18 holes Thursday with a small entourage in tow.
A few miles away, the best golfers in the world were competing in the U.S. Open.
But for a couple of hackers like Sanders and myself, the miniature course at Boomers!, the family-fun park in Kearny Mesa, seemed a more logical venue for a postelection chat.
A wager was struck – the loser would donate to a nonprofit of the winner's choice – and Sanders was given choice of ball. He took a blue one, studied it and traded it for another. I chose yellow.
Boomers! has two courses, and I'd given the mayor his choice: the Western course, modeled after a frontier town in decline, or the Storybook Land course, a nursery-rhyme world with a castle on a hill.
“The Western course,” said press secretary Fred Sainz, who would act as the mayor's caddie. “We're all about the frontier, leading the city into the future.”
It was an auspicious choice, if only because I wanted to ask the newly re-elected mayor about the next four years and, inevitably, that means talking about infrastructure.
Never one for building castles in the sky, Sanders assured me his goal was simply getting the city's finances in order, and success would be measured in fixed potholes, patched roofs and new water pipes.
Appropriately, the Western course took us past ramshackle buildings, broken-down wagons and rusted mining cars riding busted rails. The greens – or “blues,” as the mayor dubbed the turquoise turf we golfed on – were wrinkled from rain. Meanwhile, the town Wishing Well was bone-dry.
In my line of work, you're constantly searching for a usable metaphor, and here I was, all but gagging on them.
The mayor, however, was struggling with his putting game, so we kept the banter light – at least until we played past the barbershop and Sanders spotted a sign that read, “Knives Sharpened.”
“That sounds somewhat familiar,” he said dryly.
I pondered this reference – Was he talking about labor negotiations? The unexpected City Council alliance of Donna Frye and Carl DeMaio? – but, being a good golf buddy, I didn't push him to say more.
Nor did he need any distractions. He was two strokes over par when we reached the ninth hole, a dogleg right on which my yellow ball had rolled to a stop well short of the hole.
Sanders, sensing a chance to make up ground, put a little extra on his drive, and the ball ricocheted off a metal plate and into a planter.
With a hail of rocks, his chip shot put it back on the blue, but successive putts curled off the cup, and the mayor had his second triple bogey of the day.
After I birdied the next hole, where the cup was below a swinging log, he asked: “What am I down by? Ten strokes?”
“Fred's keeping score,” I pointed out. “So you might be up by two.”
“Fred, you're not spinning this are you?” the mayor asked.
But Sainz kept an honest card and, as it turned out, Sanders had it right: He trailed me by exactly 10 strokes. I didn't know he was paying attention.
We played on, past the cafe, the dry-goods store, the bank, the sheriff's office, the jail, the cemetery – most of them grandly displaying the names of their mythical proprietors.
Perhaps it was this life-encompassing cityscape, leading to the cemetery, or maybe it was my freakish luck at sinking long putts, but Sanders was in a fatalistic mood when I asked him about his legacy as mayor.
“Five years after you're gone, I don't think people think of you,” he said. “If you were to ask people in San Diego right now who the last mayor was, before me, I'd guess five out of 10 couldn't tell you.”
Sanders said he has no designs on building a stadium or a library or even a new City Hall, though he concedes one is badly needed, unless the projects would assist the city's economic recovery.
“When it's my turn to move on to the next world, I hope my name is not on one thing,” he said. “Have you ever been to San Diego State and looked at, like, Storm Hall? Who the hell was Storm? I mean, I don't want anything like that.”
From what I know of golfers, they usually conduct their most serious business afterward in the clubhouse. So when the mayor and I sat down for a drink, I seized on the opportunity to make a deal.
Me: “So, can I have an open invitation to drop in on your staff meetings?”
The mayor: “Yeah. . . . I don't really care. They're not that interesting, to be very honest with you. Maybe you'll inject a little life.”
Me: “Excellent.”
His caddie: “I think we'll keep that at 'no' for now.”
Damn that caddie.
(Epilogue: The last mayor was Dick Murphy. Alvena Storm was the first woman to chair the SDSU geography department. Sanders shot a 55, two over par. I shot a 46. He's writing a check to the San Diego Public Library Foundation. A rematch is likely.)
Gerry Braun:
(619) 542-4563; gerry.braun@uniontrib.com
