Golf & Business: Pride of Ownership | Golf News and Tour Information [Video]

You’ll find Tim Boyle’s name on the membership rolls at some of the country’s top golf clubs. Among them: Nanea in Hawaii, Sand Hills in Nebraska and Waverley Country Club in his hometown of Portland, Ore. Yet Boyle, the CEO of Columbia Sportswear, plays much of his golf at Gearhart Golf Links, a little public course on the coast about 90 minutes outside of Portland.

Boyle is the course’s owner. It happened sort of accidentally. He joined a group of other wealthy Oregonians to take control of the financially struggling course in 2000—and then, as he recalls, “Everybody decided, ‘This is horrible,'” so he bought them all out in 2010.

He has been working to turn it around ever since. Boyle paid to lengthen the course to 6,500 yards, chop down 400 pine trees planted unaccountably some years earlier, remove its paved cartpaths, and plant fescue along the fairways to …