As tournament director for the Travelers Championship golf tournament, Nathan Grube spends his working life surrounded by all things golf. To some, that seems a fantasy come true. For Grube, who’s gearing up for this year’s tournament June 16-22, it’s the result of more than a decade dabbling in several areas of the golf industry. But when he earned his very first buck, it was far from the sprawling green links. It was hard labor, hauling Christmas trees in San Diego, Calif.
“I came home sappy, and I smelled like a forest,” he said. “I liked it because I couldn’t believe I was getting paid.”
That meager salary came to about $2 an hour or so, “very unfair wages, I’m sure,” Grube said. But fair or not, it was money in his pocket, and that’s all that mattered to the 14-year-old Grube.
Fourteen was also the age when Grube started playing golf. The introduction came courtesy of his father, and the sport became the perfect pastime for him, his father and his older brother to share.
A baseball player for years prior, Grube said he fell in love with golf immediately. That love split his athletic passion between two sports. Overlapping seasons required a difficult decision: to swing a bat or a club?
Grube went with the club.
Seasonal Gigs
The Christmas tree gig was seasonal work. To fill his summers, Grube volunteered at a summer camp. He started mowing lawns and eventually became a camp counselor, taking his campers whitewater rafting and to the top of Mount Shasta in the Cascade Mountains in northern California.
It was a leadership development camp, and he and the 100 other volunteers gave their time for free to keep costs down for the campers.
That summer stint kept him through eight straight summers, even taking him through college at Auburn University in Alabama. He stayed with golf and tried to walk on the team at Auburn. Although he didn’t make it, he wasn’t deterred. And when he graduated, he decided to go pro.
To get the money to enter tournaments, Grube needed side jobs — two of them, to be exact. He waited tables at night, leaving the daytime to practice. On the weekends, he worked outside services at the golf course.
His first year as a pro player earned Grube a grand total of about $200. That prompted him to look at golf from a different angle.
Process of Elimination
Grube started taking classes at the The Golf Professional Training Program to get his Class A PGA credentials, which exposed him to the facility management side of the industry. Grube quickly realized that wasn’t really what he wanted to do.
He worked as a golf instructor throughout the program at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama and then continued teaching for four years after that. But that wasn’t really a fit either.
“[It was] like a process of elimination,” he recalled. “I knew I wanted to stay in the business, but what part of the business.”
So he ventured into the sports marketing and event promotion side of the industry with the Bruno Event Team in Alabama.
“That’s when I really kind of found the aspect of the business that I really enjoyed,” Grube said.
In 2005, Grube was offered the position as tournament director of the Travelers Championship played at the TPC River Highlands in Cromwell.
“I feel like I had some great opportunities at a young age,” Grube said. “Being at the right place at the right time with the right company opened doors and allowed me to do a lot of things.”
