Steve Lapper died in his sleep last week – a quiet death for a beloved husband, father, unreformed golf junkie and friend to many in the game, none of whom would have described it as quiet.
I first met Steve about 15 years ago in the grill room of a hidden club in the Boston area. He was sitting at the next table, keeping a favorable whisper over his work The Golden Age architect William Flynn. Someone made an introduction and we started talking, first about the courses but soon about work and kids and where to get the best dim sum nearby. Before long, he was giving me the kind of good grief I only expect from people I’ve known and liked for years.
This was Steve. He made your acquaintance quickly. He was drawn to golf as an art form and a pastime, but more so as a catalyst for the social connections he seemed to make wherever he went. Breaking chops was just one of his ways of expressing love. He enjoyed his relationships in the game, realizing that the places golf took him and the people he met through it were the richest rewards.
Steve was born and raised in New Rochelle, NY, and grew up in caddy Wykagyl AND Foot with wings. One of his fondest memories was walking Winged Foot as a standard bearer at the 1974 US Open, an experience he would happily recount to anyone who would listen.
Both his parents played, his mother well enough to win her club championship. Steve could also send the ball into the air. Sometimes, he even hit her with power and precision. But he never deluded himself into thinking he could do this for a living. Instead, the Golf became a near-constant companion during a career that spanned trading floors in Chicago, San Francisco and New York.
It was in Manhattan that he met his wife, Melissa. They later moved to New Jersey, where they raised two daughters, Sydney and Whitney.
Like New York, Steve had an extraordinary personality and history to match. Friends sometimes accused him of taking poetic license with his anecdotes, including about playing golf and poker with Michael Jordan when Jordan was a rookie. Steve’s friend Mike Policano was among the beloved suspects until a few years ago, when he ended up having dinner with Steve and two friends, one of whom said he had just bumped into Jordan in a hotel lobby. “He then described the two of them playing poker and golf with Jordan,” Policano told me. “I stammered, ‘You mean, that story was true?’
Along with good yarns, Steve was full of interests and opinions. He read passionately. He collected art. He could talk about high-brow topics without sounding pretentious and low-brow issues without being cloying. Besides his wife and daughters, few subjects pleased him more than golf design.
He was an early and powerful voice in online architecture forums. Debates on those platforms can be like academic squabbles in which people care so much because the stakes are so small. At times, Steve ruffled his feathers and scratched his back. But he never lost touch with the purpose of those exchanges, which was to exchange ideas and knowledge with obsessive colleagues, or their ultimate importance, which was minimal. He could vehemently disagree and laugh about it an hour later. And he was never too proud to admit when he was wrong.
“Steve can be a lot,” one of his friends told me, gently. I always thought it was better than being small. To engage with Steve would be to understand that he expected you to enter fully. You can count on him to show you the same respect in return.
Steve served as GOLF Magazine’s course reviewer for more than a decade. But his deepest involvement in the game was as a course operator and developer. He was president of Paramount Golf Club in New York and co-owner of Fox Hollow Golf Course in New Jersey and was working on a real estate project at nearby Spring Brook GC when he died.
Brandel Chamblee, the Golf Channel and NBC Sports analyst, first met Steve over lunch at Paramount under circumstances not unlike my own. Steve was sitting nearby and “he was inconspicuous,” Chamblee said. “He also knew more about architecture than anyone I’d ever met. It was like talking to George Thomas, Alister MacKenzie, Bill Coore and Gil Hanse all rolled into one.”
Steve and Chamblee became friends, but not because they agreed on everything. “Politically, we couldn’t have been more opposite,” Chamblee said. “But with Steve, you could have an argument without hostility. He would listen. He was open to changing his mind. Even on difficult topics, conversations with Steve were always civil. They reminded me of the way the world used to be. The way the world should be.”
Golf was a Lapper family affair.
Courtesy of Sydney Lapper
They eventually teamed up on a golf development project that fell into oblivion. Friendship does not.
Steve will be remembered for his camaraderie, but also for his generosity. He gave with his time as well as with his contacts. Whether I was writing about design, agronomy, the business of golf development or the legal issues surrounding the Tour-LIV war, he topped my call list. If I needed a source, he had a reference. The Kevin Bacon of the golf world, he was rarely more than a few degrees removed from a prominent figure. Often this figure was someone he knew well enough to destroy.
Golf course photographer Jon Cavalier experienced this firsthand. Steve was a big driver in the launch of LinksGems from Cavalier, the now prominent Instagram account he runs. “When I was starting out, I didn’t know much about grand architecture or private clubs,” Cavalier told me. “I didn’t know who to contact or how to behave.” Steve liked Cavalier’s work, approached him to say so, and became a friend and mentor, educating him about design, showing him how to navigate the industry. “If I have 1,000 great relationships in golf,” Cavalier said, “I probably owe 950 of them to Steve.”
Steve shared his love of golf at home. He inspired Melissa to take up the game and taught both girls to play. Before his death, Whitney had planned to organize a tour of her college in Wisconsin to raise money for one of the campus clubs. This event is in April. Steve and Sydney had planned to attend. Now, Sydney and her mother will go. “But my dad will be there in spirit,” Sydney said. “His idea of heaven was a golf course.”
Steve would have turned 69 this year. The last time we spoke, he had scratched it. His game had seen better days and he was the first to say so, but no complaints. He knew it was the bargain for every golfer’s lifelong attack. He had planned trips and a clear sense of how he hoped to spend his time. He had played 99 games The 100 best GOLF courses in the worldAugusta National is the exception. He’d be thrilled to play it, but he wasn’t going to break his back trying to do it. Going out with friends and family was the main thing. The course package was less about him than the company he kept.
In 2022, one of Steve’s close friends, a fellow course evaluator named David Baum, was killed in a car accident in New Jersey. In one tribute to GOLF.comSteve wrote, “Like many of us, David took lessons and worked on his swing, yet his goal was not to score lower than to enjoy the ride… He also saw the game as a portal to adventure and discovery.”
I count myself among the many who feel the same way about golf and whose world was expanded because of Steve.
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