The Tucumcari city commission voted August 27 to rename Tucumcari Municipal Golf Course as Charlie Maciel Municipal Golf Course.
Tucumcari, New Mexico
The Course Has His Name On It Now
Charlie Maciel has run the municipal course for more than 40 years and coached the high school team that played it for 20. On August 27 the city put his name on the property.
The vote came after area golfers and city officials spoke on his behalf. Commissioner CJ Oglesby had brought the idea to the previous meeting. When it passed, the city handed Maciel a plaque recognizing his stewardship of the course and his service to the town.
Maciel has been the course’s supervisor and its golf pro for more than 40 years, holding both jobs at the same time. He has also served Tucumcari as a city commissioner and as its mayor.
He came to it young. His family moved to Tucumcari from Waco, his father coached in town, and Maciel graduated from Tucumcari High School. Richard Primrose, who later served as city manager and as Quay County manager, played beside him on the high school golf team in 1969 and 1970.
Twenty Years of Coaching
Maciel coached the golf team for two decades. Asked what he took from it, he did not reach for a record or a trophy.
“We learned more from the kids than we ever taught the kids.”
Charlie Maciel
What the years gave him, he said, was patience, and the habit of finding out where a kid came from before deciding how to reach him. Some of them needed more attention than others to get pointed the right direction. None of them were the same, so the work was reading which way each one had to go.
His former players went on to become doctors and teachers, and some of them went into science.
The Other Name He Wants On The Sign
A new sign is coming to the entrance, and Maciel has asked that it carry a second name alongside his own. T.B. Hoover was a Tucumcari physician who routed the nine holes through the valleys on the city’s west side in 1948. Maciel credits him with starting the whole thing, and rates the design against courses in New Mexico that cost a great deal more to play. The course runs to a par 36 at 3,314 yards.
Of the place he has looked after for four decades, Maciel told the Quay County Sun: “It’s like a church to me.”