The Good Rx

Stan Steuter, the local "Golf Club Doctor," fixes golfers' equipment and repairs their psyche.

Minnesota

In the marketing of golf equipment, new is always deemed better. But when golfers think of their clubs, old was often very good, so why can’t it be again? That’s the prescription Stan Steuter, “The Golf Club Doctor,” has been doling out for more than 40 years. Steuter owns The Golf Club Hospital in South Minneapolis, where he refinishes and refurbishes old, used and broken golf clubs, and helps some golfers heal their mental game in the process. “I get to talk to a lot of people, and I am kind of a counselor for them about their golf games,” Steuter says. “They have to tell me their story.”

“Playing the Course”
Working as a part-time “golf counselor” is not foreign territory to the Nebraska native, who left the farm for the University of St. Thomas to become a priest. That career path veered to teaching when Steuter graduated with a degree in history before attending graduate school at the University of Minnesota to work on his teaching certificate. But supporting his young family changed his career course once more, and Steuter took a job at Bullseye Golf Center.

Any Regrets?
"I have enjoyed what I do a lot," Steuter says. “My son ended up doing exactly what I was planning—he’s a high school teacher. But I kept getting told in1974-75 that there were almost no high school jobs available. Bullseye paid me well to start there, and this has ended up working very well for me.”

• Steuter was managing a Bullseye in Des Moines, and all the major repair work from the other stores was being sent to him. In 1982, he got the opportunity to buy The Golf Club Hospital (with a partner, whom he eventually bought out) and has been working there on his “golf club medical practice” ever since. 
• “When I bought this place, my wife wasn’t on board to start,” Steuter says. “She preferred the secure income we were getting from the Golf Center. But I was 29 and ready to strike out on my own.”
• He eventually became the sole proprietor and employee (Steuter prefers club repair to the paperwork and problems of managing employees), and has built a national reputation for golf club refurbishing that occasionally attracts some worldwide customers. His work in restoring hickory-shafted or wood woods for either use or display put his craftsmanship in demand. 

A Golf Doctor in Demand
While speaking to Minnesota Golfer from his crowded and time-worn Bryant Avenue shop, Steuter took a call from Palm Springs, Calif.—a customer with a Scotty Cameron putter in need of repair. Like most of Steuter’s clients, he’d learned of “The Golf Club Doctor” by word-of-mouth.

“The industry has changed so much,” Steuter says. “When I started it was all wooden woods until the late ‘80s or early ‘90s before the metal woods became popular. It was very much a local business back then, and I did work for country clubs and golf shops around the upper Midwest. Nowadays, a third of my business is shipped in everywhere from Florida to Connecticut to California. Today, I got three boxes in from all areas of the country, because I do stuff that almost no one else does.”

While the lion’s share of his business is re-shafting clubs (the hickory-shafted club work has slowed some, although wood woods work is still required), Steuter continues to stay abreast of all the changes to contemporary clubs so he can repair and refurbish the newer models. He enjoys working with wood most of all, but his website displays plenty of modern drivers he has made look like new. And with more than four decades in the trade, he has seen it all.

Steuter tells the story of a group of friends who exchange a putter every Christmas as a gag gift and do different things with it—including making the putter head out of an old fruit cake.
“It was hard as a rock,” Steuter says of the fruit cake. “I took the shaft out of the old putter, put it in that, baked a finish on it and made it shiny. There are other strange things I’m asked to do, but sometimes not really even related to golf.”

Art More than Science
Steuter’s longevity as one of the preeminent golf club doctors in the country has also afforded him a unique perspective on the game. In addition to his club repair work, Steuter has spent many years building clubs from scratch for golfers and club-fitting them in his shop—work that he says is more art than science. “I give recommendations on what probably would work best for the customer,” he says. “I don’t use the high-tech launch monitors. I made a conscious decision years ago that that’s mostly smoke and mirrors. And I know people like that, but I can make as good or better a recommendation by seeing them swing a few times or talking to them about how their current equipment is working.” 

“If I see them swing a few times, I will know what their tempo is and clubhead speed is (I can tell them the speed almost to the mile-per-hour). I know shafts real well and will make a recommendation based just on the way they swing. I will guarantee that it will be just as good as spending $300 on a fitting session and a computer printout. People who do that will get a different recommendation from everybody they go to.”

Nearing the age of 70, Steuter looks forward to retirement (and the time to play more golf than he gets to in-season). But his clients are more rueful about that impending day.“My customers are worried every day that I am retiring,” he says. “My customers who live six months of the year in Texas or Florida can’t find anything like me there. They’re worried about what’s going to happen.”

But when looking backward, he does so wistfully, knowing that he brought smiles to the faces of many golfers. He got to work with his hands and make people’s lives better, and while it wasn’t his original career plan, it’s become a labor of love.

”It’s something I really enjoy doing, Steuter says. “It’s been extremely rewarding, because not many people, I think, feel as appreciated in what they do as I do. My customers are so happy with me all the time. And that’s just because I’ve done it for so long. Most folks don’t stick with something long enough to get this good at it, I think. It’s nothing beyond that.”