Incoming GCBAA president emphasizing safety in 2025
Jon O’Donnell takes office fresh off Heritage Links’ 25th anniversary.
By Hal Phillips
Read the full story here.
Heritage Links president Jon O’Donnell, who takes the gavel next month as president of the Golf Course Builders Association of America, is a networker. Sitting in his Houston office, or driving beside him on the way to a project site, the incoming calls never stop. Some are personal. When I visited with him in December, he’d just returned from a hunting trip with several friends who, like O’Donnell, weren’t ready to stop telling stories. But most come from project managers who have questions that need answering regarding one of the two dozen jobs Heritage Links has in process right now. When the calls don’t come at him, he’s placing them — to clients who need reassurance, to colleagues who haven’t sent along the bid estimates he needs, to the guys he’s supposed to play golf with over the weekend.
“I met Jon here at Houston Oaks Country Club back in 2017,” recalls Chuck Orrico, a friend and golf buddy. “He is constantly on the phone — sun up to sun down — engaged with his employees or clients, providing mentorship, construction ideas or resolving issues. I frequently tell him: If he would stop looking at his phone or accepting calls on the course, his handicap would be cut in half.”
When Heritage Links celebrated its 25th anniversary last November, all that networking came home to roost. The party itself, in Houston, where the company has been based from the get-go, was standing-room only. Clients old and new made the trip, along with golf industry colleagues from his earliest days as a superintendent, from his time in Southeast Asia during the 1990s, from the more than 657 jobs Heritage has completed this century.
“That whole week was great fun, but it’s a bit of a blur,” says O’Donnell, whose USGA index, for the record, is 5.7. “One thing that did strike me, though: This company we’ve built is really a big family, with an emphasis on BIG. We all depend on each other to make it work, which is a great feeling. It hits home on that sort of occasion. But a family looks after its own and the bigger we get, the more far-flung our work, the more important it is that we do things the right way.”
Heritage Links was formed in 1999 as a subsidiary of Lexicon, Inc. Today, Heritage operates as a full-scale division of the Little Rock, Arkansas-based heavy industrial construction firm. It was this long-term alliance in particular, along with the growing number of employees he looks after, that convinced O’Donnell to devote his term as GCBAA president to improving safety protocols across the golf course-construction business.
“Twenty-five years working with Lexicon has educated me in a lot of important ways. But maybe most important: It has shown me where the safety standards are in the golf sector. They’re just not good enough,” O’Donnell says. “We can do better, because I’ve seen other construction sectors in action and their performance is just better than ours. We can match that performance if we make it an industry-wide priority.
“I don’t want to be a nag about it, but we just don’t take this stuff seriously enough. And when I say that Lexicon’s best practices have shown me a better way, that’s me admitting that we at Heritage haven’t always taken it seriously enough. However, we have upped our game in this regard, hugely — and it was a simple matter of making the commitment to set our standards higher, then going ahead and meeting them.
“It’s like I tell the guys: We want you leaving the site the way you showed up — in one piece. As president of the Builders Association, I’m going to do everything I can to help my colleagues do a better job in this area. Because we can do better. We have to do better.”
That dull roar you may hear outside your window is perhaps a collective howl of indignation from other course builders, especially those leading more modest operations, who might well be mumbling, Easy for him to say, with a massive parent company footing the bill. Safety costs money…
“I hear that,” O’Donnell says. “I do. But I have to disagree. Today, you can’t afford not to make that investment. Because shit happens; we all know that. We just had a major injury last year that involved one of our Ditch Witch trenching machines. Even with the best safety program, an incredible safety director, and the best insurance coverage, this injury cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our employee did not go home the way he showed up.”
On this point, there is no space between the outgoing GCBAA president and his successor.
“Look, Jon is a top-notch manager of a large course builder,” said John McDonald II, president of McDonald & Sons, Inc., and the man who will pass the gavel to O’Donnell at the GCBAA banquet, Feb. 4, in San Diego. “If you do construction and irrigation in this business, the amount of things you’ve got to know through and through is pretty staggering. And one of those things is safety. Some are not as up to speed as Heritage Links, which has been very adamant about safety protocols. So I welcome Jon’s making this a priority during his term.
“These guys who work for us are our most important assets. To lose one over a safety matter that should have been avoided? That’s just about the worst thing that could happen. It’s something we’ve all got to keep front of mind, all the time.”
A LOT HAS BEEN WRITTEN about how well a career in course construction can prepare folks for careers in golf course architecture. There’s certainly truth in that, but O’Donnell is a good example of how course-maintenance training can prepare folks for careers in construction — to say nothing of team-building and corporate leadership.
Bring up Penn State to O’Donnell and you’re likely to get a lot of talk about the new college football playoff. (And hey, the guy lives in Houston; if he doesn’t talk up the Nittany Lions down there, who will?) But Penn State and his turfgrass management education were clearly the making of Jon O’Donnell. Having grown up in Sheffield, a small community in northwestern Pennsylvania, O’Donnell arrived in State College in the fall of 1985. The following year, he was working as an intern on the crew at Augusta National Golf Club.
“I wasn’t thinking about getting into course construction at that stage, but I do remember loving the construction work we did there,” O’Donnell remembers. “There’s a ton of problem-solving in growing healthy turf, in maintaining a golf course top to bottom. But a construction project, back then, did strike me as something a little different: a solution. And I realize now that the satisfaction in that was more immediate. I liked that.”
Upon graduation, O’Donnell went off to the desert — as a first assistant superintendent at The Vintage Club in Indian Wells, California. Quite suddenly, the lead guy moved on and O’Donnell was running the show. Soon after, he was contacted by the Landmark Land company to join them as a project manager. He accepted the position and built several golf courses. His construction career was off and running. Two years later, O’Donnell hired Southern California-based Fairway Construction to handle one of the projects.
“I guess it went well, because next thing you know the guy who owned Fairway Construction, Glen Gosch, offered me a job. In Singapore, to manage the Southeast Asian Golf Division.”
O’Donnell’s timing has proved pretty immaculate through the years. He and his turf degree entered the golf business in the late 1980s, just when the industry was poised to build 300 new courses a year. He landed in Singapore in 1991, just when another course-building boom was taking hold — across Southeast Asia, then China. In due course, the man knew just about everyone in Asia-Pacific.
“It’s hard to ignore Jon’s infectious personality and genuine desire to get to know people,” says Orrico, his friend from Houston Oaks. “Every single time we travel to a new golf venue, Jon makes sure to spend time with the director of golf, superintendent, or anyone willing to hear how grateful he is for the experience.”
L&M Fairway — a division of Fairway Construction — operated its Asia-Pacific business out of Singapore. Most of its projects, however, took place in the tropical wilds of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and India, where the sourcing of materials, equipment and labor was a challenge. “It was the wild west,” O’Donnell says. “But I learned so much — most of it from the seat of my pants.”
“Jon and I are almost exactly the same age, more or less,” says Oscar Rodriguez, today senior vice president with Heritage Links, “and we arrived in Asia at exactly the same time. I went to Guam and he went to Singapore. So, I knew who he was, but we never crossed paths back then. That didn’t happen until late in the ’90s, and all through the early 2000s — as competitors.”
Adds O’Donnell: “Life is funny, because we were competitors. And today we are the best of friends and Oscar is the best wingman anyone could ask for.”
Prior to the economic recession of 1998, the Asia-Pacific region was a great place to be building golf courses. O’Donnell thrived there, in most every respect. By 1995, he had bought out L&M Fairway, found a new backer, renamed the company Heritage Golf, and took on a partner. He also met Jo, a former Singapore Airlines flight attendant, and married her.
Near the turn of the century, with golf development booming on both sides of the Pacific, the larger, more ambitious North American course builders were beginning to follow their architect colleagues to Asia.
Where much of the business zigged, however, O’Donnell zagged.
LIKE MOST BUILDERS, O’DONNELL CAN point to a handful of influential projects through the years that, in retrospect, proved pivotal to the company’s fortunes, its reputation and its brand. In Southeast Asia, it was Laguna National in Singapore. This job persuaded both O’Donnell and future clients that Heritage Golf could compete for jobs in the market and execute the work to the highest standard. In 1999, when he was exploring the potential of opening an office in North America, Fish Creek Golf Club — now known as Woodforest Golf Club — in Montgomery, Texas served the same purpose.
“I had met a Lexicon employee in Asia who asked if I might be interested in managing a golf division for them out of Houston. Fish Creek convinced me it would work,” O’Donnell recalls. “It also convinced Lexicon to support Heritage, on a model similar to the way L&M had backed us in Asia. I mean, Lexicon is a big company. A significant component of their construction business is shaped around the steel, heavy industrial and energy sectors. They basically build everything in a refinery, steel plants, solar sector, hospitals and many other heavy industrial settings. It is very specialized work, but they’ve got a big presence in Houston. And that’s why the new company, renamed Heritage Links, has always been based in Houston.
“More to the point: Once we were up and running with Lexicon, we felt we could credibly bid on just about any golf job, anywhere in the country.”
The early 20th century proved another fortuitous time be building golf courses in North America. Prior to the start of the Great Recession in 2008, Heritage Links competed and won jobs, built widely admired finished projects, forged more relationships, and assembled an ever-larger team of trusted lieutenants and crews. Yet O’Donnell doesn’t feel like Heritage Links really started to mature, as a company and an organization, until the early 2010s, when he went after a job in Hawaii, backed by tech entrepreneur Larry Ellison.
This proved another pivotal project, mainly because it all went so very wrong.
O’Donnell and Rodriguez had met before, not in Asia but down in Cabo San Lucas during the late 1990s. Thereafter, they ran into each other over and over again, when O’Donnell was building Heritage Links and Rodriguez was working for Weitz Construction and another smaller construction company on the West Coast.
“We competed for a lot of the same jobs,” Rodriguez remembers. “Eventually, Jon says to me one day, ‘You know what, Oscar? We’ve got this Nicklaus project identified on the island of Lanai. I’ll do the heavy lifting if you do the work on the ground. Let’s do this together.’ I was really more of a consultant on that job, but it opened the door to our cooperation. When Ellison pulled the plug, the whole thing fell apart! But that episode started our communication, our relationship.
“When we came back to the mainland, we started looking at other projects. One day I’m driving to Phoenix and Jon calls. He says, ‘Where you stayin’ tonight?’ ‘Well, Jon, if Southern Dunes calls, I’ll head south. If Desert Mountain calls, I’ll head north. So, it depends …’ He tells me, ‘Why don’t you go north and I’ll meet you there.’
“So, we sat down there and made the relationship formal. That was 2013 or thereabouts. My employer had paid me well, but without a great benefit package. That was my big concern, to be honest — to take care of my family. Jon said, ‘Done.’ I finished off the projects I had in progress and away we went.”
