How common is it to find the thing you are passionate about at an early age and just roll with it?
Well, Daryl Matheny did just that. He found love on the golf course and, despite a small interruption life presented, found his way back on a course to the course.
For the last 10 years Matheny, a 1984 graduate of Olympic High School, has been general manager of Gold Mountain Golf Club, one of the finest public links in the state and perhaps among the best in the country. His current position is the accumulation of 40 years of living and breathing golf.
Born in Ventura, California, Matheny moved with his family to this area in 1975, when he was nine. He got on golf courses soon after, acting as caddy for his golf-playing step-dad, Jim Clifford (his biological father died in a car accident when Matheny was just a few months old). On weekends, he would be with his dad playing on various courses around Kitsap, pushing and pulling his dad’s golf cart while learning to love the sport.
Before even hitting their teen years, he and a close friend, Eric Johnson, would ride their bikes to Rolling Hills at the first sign of dawn and play on the course with a junior membership until dusk, getting in at least 36 holes during summer days .
“It was a lot of fun,” Matheny says.
He took his first golf lessons from Rolling Hills Golf course PGA pro Tedd Hudanich, who has now been there 44 years. By the time Matheny was eligible to play golf as a freshman at Olympic High in 1980, he was good enough to be the No. 1 player on the school’s team, a position he maintained for four years.
Matheny was about 140 pounds as a high school freshman, but could hit a golf ball longer than his physical size suggested.
“By my senior year, I could hit it,” says Matheny. “I could always hit it a long way, but sometimes I didn’t know where it was going.”
Twice Matheny made the state golf championship, his sixth-place finish in 1984 helped the Olympic Trojans finish second as a team. He shot 69 the first day to tie for the lead with Capital’s Jeff Jackson. A 79 on the second day slid him down five spots, while Jackson went on to win the individual title with a six-under 138 at Clarkston County Club.
Matheny then said he went into his dark years, taking four years to complete two years of community college education in Phoenix to get his associates degree in architect drafting, and then spent two years working.
Golf took a back seat in those years, but the golf god was beckoning. Matheny had maintained a friendly relationship with Greg Peterson, grounds keeper superintendent at Rolling Hills, and Peterson told him of a job opportunity at the course.
“He gave me a call one day and wanted to get into the golf business,” says Hudanich. “He came up from Phoenix and I hired him as an assistant professional working behind the counter. He was a great asset to my operation. He was attentive to other circumstances, good for business and good to people. Clearly, he was going to be successful as a golf professional. Otherwise, I would not have hired him.”
Matheny didn’t stay long with Hudanich. In 1988, just a few months after returning to Kitsap, an opportunity came along that he could not turn down. Scott Alexander, director of golf at Gold Mountain, had an opening. It didn’t take much for Matheny to apply.
The job was as assistant professional and required Matheny to work 10-12 hours a day, six days a week. But it was home and it was golf, and that was enough. Golf was in his blood and he was finally situated in a spot that fulfilled a passion. Most people don’t get to work at what they love, but Matheny found a way.
“It was all responsibility and no pay, but it was a helluva lot of fun,” says Matheny.
Matheny took the spot filled by Mark Sivara, who moved over to Kitsap Golf & Country club to run the pro shop there. He filled it well.
“He was from town, had a great personality and did an unbelievable job,” says Alexander. “He did about every job we had. Everything I did he did. He did all the coordination of tournaments, involved in hiring and firing of staff. Oh boy, you name it, he did about every job we had. We were a team. You tell him you wanted something done you didn’t even have to think about it. He got it done. He’s genuinely a very good guy. Cool and calm.”
In 2012 two things changed for Matheny. Alexander, who managed Gold Mountain for 28 years as golf director, retired to run his golf cart business, which is now being handled by Joe Perdue, who is running Village Greens Golf Course in Port Orchard.
Then the city of Bremerton, which owns Gold Mountain’s two 18-hole courses, turned over operations of the complex to Columbia Hospitality, which runs the Bremerton Convention Center as well as McCormick Woods Golf Club in Port Orchard.
Matheny, who stepped in as golf director when Alexander retired, was retained and named general manager. The boy who caddied for his step-dad and biked to Rolling Hills summer days to play was now king of golf at Gold Mountain. It was quite a change, for sure.
Matheny and his family are all in with athletics. Wife Tammee was a good athlete in high school and their three children, all who played sports at and graduated from Olympic High as well, are married: son Shane is playing triple-A baseball with the Sacramento River Cats in the San Francisco Giants organization; son Chase is a senior playing baseball at the University of South Carolina Upstate; and daughter Zoie played club basketball and tennis while going to Central Washington. She is now close to finishing her fire academy schooling to become a firefighter and paramedic with the Central Kitsap Fire Department.
It’s a lot to manage for Matheny, but it’s working out well. Like everybody else, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the golf business hard, forcing Gold Mountain to shut down for six weeks and lay off some staff. But in one sense it was a godsend because it gave Matheny and his staff time for proper aeration of the greens. The staff he retained were able to take the pause as positive and do all the things needed to keep the course in good shape and be ready when they were given the okay to reopen.
And golfers flocked back when the course reopened, and business took off.
“We are going great now,” says Matheny. “We are as busy as ever making more money even. We have funneled more money into the property. We are healthy and it’s exciting, it’s fun.”
Some tournaments are scheduled, including the Bremerton City Am for June 3-4 and the Husky Invitational set for Sept. 17-19. The West Coast Conference women’s tournament and men’s tournament have already been held over the complex.
One of the biggest joys for Matheny is that he can get out of his office on occasion and either practice putting or hit the range, and take out any frustration he might have by launching a long drive off the range.
And when he does get out and hit the ball around a bit, friends and strangers alike are there to have some friendly conversations. It makes his day that he can do this while at work and not miss a beat of work.
But like most pros who manage a golf course, there isn’t much time to actually play golf. Matheny hopes that changes in the near future and he can showcase his 1.8 handicap in some pro-ams.
“Oh absolutely, yeah, I love it and at some point I will play a lot more,” says Matheny.
Terry Mosher is a longtime Kitsap sportswriter, who writes a regular feature for the Kitsap Sun on local sports personalities. Contact him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Gold Mountain Golf Club GM Daryl Matheny doing what he loves