Mike McCarthy

Mike McCarthy flies MV-22 Ospreys for the Marine Corps Reserves and is building an indoor golf club in Cherokee County, Georgia.

He came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast the week after the Masters, introduced through a mutual friend, and the two of them spent the episode in each other's hats. Brad had the Lady Ace cap with the patch on it and McCarthy had a Georgia Green classic GOAT. What caught Brad first was the branding, before he knew anything about the club, and the branding turned out to have a longer story attached than the business did.

The Lady Ace Golf Club will run twenty four hours a day for members, built around TrackMan, the system the top PGA players use, which nobody else in the county currently offers. The nearest one is down in Kennesaw. The space is at the Mill at Etowah, an old paper mill refurbished into restaurants and shops, with a cigar bar in view of the unit and Reformation Brewery nearby, and most of it delivers. Members will be able to rent a whiskey locker and keep their own bottle there. The name comes from VMM-165, his Osprey squadron in California, one of the last Marine squadrons allowed to keep a pinup girl, because the radio call sign was Lady Ace. McCarthy ran the squadron's merchandise to raise money for the Marine Corps ball and they outsold everyone. He hired a local artist, Sebastian Martin, to redraw her for a family audience.

He got out of active duty three years ago thinking he had it worked out. He had the plan, he had the career job coming at Delta, he kept the reserve slot. What he had not counted on was the community. He says it took a while before he could even name what was missing, and that it was the hardest part of getting out, because the thing he had left was not a job but an identity and a brotherhood, and he had the same conversation over again with the men who got out around the same time as him. The timing for starting a business was poor. Three kids, a wife in nursing school, airline hours all over the calendar. He also admits the original promise he made himself never came true: he became a pilot expecting to fly and then go play golf, and he never once got the afternoon.

So the next question he keeps asking about the club is how it helps. He wants to tie in with the Veterans Golf Association and bring in local vets who need somewhere to be, and first responders too, since his wife's father and brother are police officers and both their mothers are nurses. He builds it out of small businesses on purpose: the merchandise through Deadline Apparel, a veteran company, the logo through the local sketch artist, the food through the restaurants around the mill. The Marine Corps, he says, is a people business. Nothing gets done unless people work together and figure out how to solve problems, and everything else is just tools.