Family ties inspire Gulbis’ good will

It had been a good half-hour since the dedication of the Boys & Girls Club of Henderson’s new Natalie Gulbis unit at the Apache Pines affordable housing community in far west Las Vegas late Tuesday afternoon.

By then, John Gulbis’ winsome daughter, the LPGA pinup girl, was off hitting golf balls with some of the kids who had been hanging all over her during the ceremony. A lot of the male media types wanted to go, too.

Natalie Gulbis, who recently turned 30, was wearing a white Natalie Gulbis Boys & Girls Club T-shirt, black slacks that hugged her in all kinds of right places, heels, sparkly silver hoop earrings, bright pink nail polish. She wore big sunglasses on top of her head, like Jackie Kennedy or a supermodel. Her long blond hair was bunched in a bun.

John Gulbis’ hair was not pulled back in a bun. Nor his beard.

Neither are as long and flowing as they used to be, when Natalie first joined the tour after a year of college golf at Arizona, and her father would caddie for her, and he often would be mistaken for ZZ Top’s road manager. Or one of the Angels. Not Los Angeles. Hells.

Natalie’s old man was wearing a black-and-red San Francisco 49ers cap, black Harley-Davidson shirt, black pants, black loafers. He was not wearing socks. Why bother? It was in the 60s.

John Gulbis does not appear the country-club type. I had him pegged as a guy who might sneak onto the local muni course on the third fairway, to avoid paying, and try to get in a quick five or six before it got dark.

My kind of guy.

John Gulbis told me he was born in Germany, in 1947, in a displaced persons camp. He said his Latvian parents fled the Germans and the Russians and came through Ellis Island on Jan. 3, 1951, when he was 4.

He grew up in Sacramento, Calif., in a blighted neighborhood called Oak Park. Sometimes he would stay out all night and sleep on rooftops when it was cold outside. The rooftops always seemed a little warmer than the alleys, he said.

“If we would have had a place like this,” he said, nodding to the pool tables and the computer room and an alcove off the entrance to the Natalie Gulbis Boys & Girls Club called the teen room, with its overstuffed beanbag chairs and widescreen TV, “it would have been like Beverly Hills.”

But John Gulbis survived this most modest of upbringings. It made him strong. He even went to college, got a master’s degree from Sacramento State, became a probation officer for Sacramento County.

Sometimes when he got home from work, Natalie would be waiting, and she wanted to go do something, play golf or other sports. And invariably father and daughter would wind up at the local Boys & Girls club or someplace similar, because you could play sports there and it didn’t cost a lot.

“He worked on the Boys Ranch, and at the YMCA, and he also worked in juvenile probation,” Natalie had said in the teen room. “So we were always at these different facilities, and I got to meet these kids, and I got to see how ... I mean, you saw these kids today, how they are so grateful for someone to spend some time with them, and just to play with them, and to teach them something.

“My dad loved to do that. That was my original passion for the Boys & Girls Club.”

A few years ago, Natalie Gulbis got together with the Boys & Girls Club of Henderson, which rebranded its fundraising golf tournament in her name and raised Al Czervik at Bushwood Country Club money in three years, more than $200,000 after expenses.

So the Boys & Girls Club people on Tuesday put up a big chrome banner on the front wall of the clubhouse at Apache Pines proclaiming this the Natalie Gulbis Boys & Girls Club.

The officials wearing sports jackets — and nice shoes with socks — told Natalie only a handful of clubs are named for pro athletes — Andre Agassi, LeBron, Shane Victorino, the one back East for Jackie Robinson.

And now the one in far west Las Vegas, for her.

So this is why the kids at the clubhouse were hanging all over pretty Natalie Gulbis’ shirt on Tuesday afternoon, and why she took some of them to hit golf balls.

The ones who stayed behind played bumper pool in a safe environment. And when this one little guy with chubby cheeks dropped one in the hole, John Gulbis, one of the grown-ups in the room, went right over there, patted him on the head and said, “Nice shot, young man.”

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.