Dexter Bruce Keeps Greens

It began on the first green at Golden Gate Park, the moment I asked Dexter Bruce if he wanted me to remove the pin for his par putt. 

“No, leave it in,” Dexter said. “I like to see it standing straight up.” Upon making his putt he pantomimed a master class in pin setting: back to the fairway, hole cutter held vertically, the twisting of the cutter performed without oscillation, vertical orientation the  true north of setting a golf pin, the result of the diligence a flagstick standing straight up and down. No need to ever remove it.

“Setting a pin is more than picking a location on the green,” Dexter explained, his Caribbean accent at age 56 drumming out in a steady cadence. “You want to set a pin that challenges the daily golfer, you want to work them to need to work the ball left to right or the other way.”

Thus, setting a pin may suggest moving tee markers in tandem. Or as Dexter said, “Why tuck the pin left but also keep the tee on the left side, with the tree now in the line of sight.” He was explaining away why my ostensibly straight shot hit a tree limb instead of the green on #2. Glad for the excuse, I asked him about the maxim of setting 3 easy, 3 medium, 3 hard pin locations each 9 holes. His eyes rolled. Not a fan. 

“An easy location for one player is harder for another player so I could never follow that,” he said. “I just try to see it in my eye the way a player would.”

“People think I’m anal,” Dexter offered up, because “I like doing the same thing over and over the same exact way.” I, trying my best, replaced a micro divot on the green. “Don’t even try,” he said. “It’ll die.” Slowly I was coming on line.

Dexter’s precision and eye toward keeping pins in tune with tees stems from a career in golf beginning more than 20 years ago at Crystal Springs. In 2015 Dexter got a job at Harding Park and continued there until 2022, when he began work at Golden Gate Park Golf Course and also Lincoln Park when needed.

“I think what sets him apart from other gardeners is his love for the game of golf,” said Joe Koran, general manager of Golden Gate Park GC. “He takes a great sense of pride in his work and it shows throughout the course. He’s intentional with his course setup and wants every guest that comes to golf to have an enjoyable experience. We are very fortunate to have a gardener that is so passionate about golf and the work that he does for our course on a daily basis.”

Dexter was a player of cricket before a player of golf, his first set baby blue women’s clubs, bought at a garage sale, which a stranger at Montclair driving range gently informed him were not for him. “I quickly went to the pro shop and purchased Ram blades,” he laughed. Dexter may have never even come to golf had not a fellow cricketer warned him that golf, not cricket, was the “most” difficult sport. He took after it with a 10-finger grip and got good. He eventually visited Crystal Springs at the invitation of the assistant superintendent, a fellow Trinidadian. Dexter played commandingly well and afterwards was offered a job. 

Dexter subsequently learned greenskeeping under Tim Powers at Crystal Springs. Powers, now the superintendent at Poplar Creek, remembered Dexter  “really seemed to enjoy the work since he was really into the game and was a pretty fair player.” 

“I cross-train my workers and found Dexter liked changing cups. He most enjoyed talking to players who frequent the course. He had a smile on his face every day,” Powers said.

His golf helped, but Dexter’s background as a performing steel drum musician may have made him uniquely suited for a job requiring respect for equipment, repetitive precision and spatial tempo. 

In Trinidad and Tobago, Dexter as a teenager would play a steel drum and eventually was invited to join a traveling orchestra. When they invited him to a U.S. tour he joined up. The orchestra had contacts in California and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake closely preceded their arrival to the Bay Area, Dexter then 19 years old. As a group the orchestra decided to apply for H1-B visas, an initial step that years later resulted in Dexter becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Dexter’s interest in the mechanics behind tuning his steel drums he later applied to the workforce at body shops in Oakland, learning the fine hammering and techniques to move metal in calibrated ways in ways not dissimilar to a musician tuning a steel drum.

Dexter Bruce shot even par at Golden Gate Park that day while I lurked a couple over. He stayed in rhythm and had a few closeup looks that we hoped in flight would be his first ace. We celebrated each other’s birdies and good swings (Dexter to me: “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”) and had the now-obligatory burger dogs afterwards. A day with a new friend, who has come a long way, with energy leftover for you.