| Posted on: Thursday, November 29, 2001
Around the Greens
Distinguished service
By Bill Kwon
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| Dave Mills will be leaving behind a long list of achievements after serving as the city's director of municipal golf for the past 18 years.
Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser
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Dave Mills still remembers the two questions he was asked when he interviewed for the position of director of golf for the city's municipal courses 18 years ago.
"Do you golf?"
"No," Mills replied.
"Do you know anybody who golfs at the city courses, especially the Ala Wai?"
Again, Mills said no.
He got the job.
Mills, 65, will retire at the end of the year, leaving a remarkable record of accomplishments:
• Turning the golf division, which had a $500,000 deficit when he took over, into a productive enterprise with a $3 million surplus.
• Supervising the renovation of the Ala Wai Golf Course and the addition of a full-service driving range.
• Supervising the $85 million construction of the West Loch and 'Ewa Villages golf courses and the $6 million Ala Wai clubhouse.
• Incorporating an automated reservation system that now has 120,000 registered golfers, making it the largest in the nation.
And his most significant contribution — coming up with the idea of having the city take over the operation of golf carts from vendors and leasing the carts instead of buying them to avoid maintenance costs.
This initiative by Mills in itself netted the city more than $36 million in the past 12 years.
Not bad for a non-golfer.
"When you're a coal miner from Pennsylvania, you don't have much time for golf," Mills said.
Not being a golfer actually helped in terms of looking at things from a different perspective, according to Mills.
As for leadership qualities in running an operation, Mills credits his 25 years of service as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Mills graduated in 1960 from Holy Cross where he played football as a linebacker and fullback. You had to go both ways in those days.
"The first guy I ever tackled in a football game was Jim Brown, who was with Syracuse. They beat us, 27-7," Mills said.
Back then, Holy Cross played with the big boys, scheduling the likes of Penn State and Pittsburgh as well.
Joining the Marines, Mills pulled duty at the White House and Camp David. It was then and there that he thought Hawai'i wouldn't be such a bad assignment.
His superior officer was a friend of the late Col. Bob Shuford, then the Kane'ohe MCAS base commander.
"I need a provost marshal," Shuford told Mills, who was reassigned to K-Bay from 1971-75.
It was at Kane'ohe Klipper where Mills played his first round of golf. And he was under orders to do so.
Shuford, it seems, used to allow a former local underworld figure, who had a passion for golf, to play at Klipper. Whenever that happened, Mills had to be in the foursome just ahead of the colonel's notorious guest, seeing to it that he left the base without incident.
Mills got a second tour of duty in Hawai'i at Pearl Harbor in 1980, as the executive officer of a detachment of 600 Marines who worked guard duty at various military installations.
In 1983, Mills retired as a lieutenant colonel after 25 years, preferring to remain in Hawai'i instead of accepting reassignment to Cherry Point, N.C.
He began looking for a job. There was an advertisement that the city's head administrative golf position was available.
The rest, as they say, is history.
"I've always made it a point of being up front and have never played favorites," said Mills, who has served under three mayors with distinction in a position that draws a lot of scrutiny.
"The best thing we ever did was move our offices from City Hall to the Ala Wai clubhouse when it was finished in 1990," he added. "They (golfers) see us out here. That gives us a lot of credibility."
Mills will be honored at a luncheon Dec. 13 at the Hawai'i Prince Hotel. He and his wife Peggy, a retired nurse with Kaiser Hospital, will continue to live in Kailua after his retirement. Being from Pennsylvania, Mills still lives and dies with the Philadelphia Eagles, Phillies and 76ers. And the Holy Cross Crusaders.
Invalid Skins Game
I don't know about you, but I didn't like the new "validation" rule for the Skins Game in which Greg Norman won $1 million while the other three — Tiger Woods, Jesper Parnevik and Colin Montgomerie — drew blanks. Maybe because it was a cash-less Saturday of TV watching.
Woods likes the new format in which a player has to tie for the lowest score on the next hole to validate a skin he claimed the previous hole. But to me, it was boring with all those sign holders flashing zeroes until Norman finally cashed a par worth $800,000 on the 18th hole after birdieing the 17th to take $730,000 out of Parnevik's back pocket.
Nobody even won a skin to validate from the sixth hole Saturday to the 15th Sunday. Under the old format, Montgomerie would have won $75,000, and Norman and Woods $25,000 each until Parnevik's skin at 16.
For a real exciting Skins Game, I'd like to see the four players each put up $250,000 of their own money and try to get it back and then some.
As for the Senior Skins Game at Maui's Wailea Gold Course Jan. 26 featuring Hale Irwin, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Fuzzy Zoeller, fortunately it will be played under the old format with no need of any validation.
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