The L.A. wildfires took his home. Golf gave him back much more

From the first tee at Maggie Hathaway Golf Course, a landmark municipal layout in South Los Angeles, the view sweeps north across the city, past the green folds of Griffith Park to the bold white letters of the Hollywood sign. 

On a warm, windy morning one year ago this week, Tommy Naccarato stood there, taking it in.

The course was closed, but Naccarato hadn’t come to play. This was his first day back to work since suffering a stroke that had hospitalized him for a month and forced him to relearn how to walk and talk. Still limited in his mobility, he drove his truck onto the property, stopping to tag trees slated for removal as part of a planned renovation. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner had been hired for the project, and Naccarato — a jack-of-all-trades for their design firm — was serving as their lead man on site.

He had just wrapped yellow tape around a small pine when he looked up and saw dark smoke billowing on the horizon. His first thought was that a plane had crashed at nearby LAX. Moments later, his phone buzzed with a government alert. A fire was raging in Pacific Palisades, where Naccarato lived in a studio rental. Evacuation orders were in effect.

He climbed back into his truck and headed west, crossing Los Angeles through a growing haze of sirens and uncertainty. Traffic slowed, then stopped. At the edge of the Palisades, all access routes were sealed. A bumper-to-bumper exodus was underway.

By mid-afternoon, Naccarato pulled into a parking lot across from Corpus Christi Church, his weekly place of worship, where he also played guitar in the folk-music choir. He clung to the faint hope that he might be allowed home long enough to grab a few belongings, though he knew he would need somewhere else to sleep. He searched for hotels. Everything was booked. The roads were gridlocked.

His phone rang. It was his 87-year-old mother, calling from La Mirada, a city south of L.A., urging him to come back to his childhood home.

“You read stories all the time about what people go through in natural disasters,” Naccarato says. “It can be hard to wrap your head around, especially when it’s you.”

For days, he waited, watching the news, refreshing alerts, driving toward barricades only to be turned away again. It was a week before he was allowed back into his neighborhood, much of which had been reduced to ash and rubble. His apartment — on the ground floor of a friend’s home — was gone. So was his church.

In the end, the Palisades and Eaton fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures and killed 31 people, the deadliest wildfires in Los Angeles County since official record-keeping began.

In that context, golf barely registered as a casualty. But for Naccarato, nearly everything he owned was gone. On the day the fire broke out, he happened to have an extra pair of pants and a shirt he’d planned to take to the cleaners. Beyond that, there was little left.

“I kept reminding myself they were just things,” he says. “But some of those things were irreplaceable.”

Among the losses were twelve guitars he’d collected over decades, along with amps, backstage passes, and memorabilia. An Ozzy Osbourne autograph was no more. Ditto a photo he’d taken with Cheap Trick. His library of golf books — some 500 titles, many of them first editions — had been incinerated. Most cherished was a copy of “The World Atlas of Golf,” a seminal compendium he’d bought for $10 at Price Club in 1979, around the time he fell hard for the game.

Though he didn’t take up golf until he was 20, after leaving home to work as an electrician, Naccarato made it his life’s passion. Union work paid the bills, but golf — and golf design in particular — fed his curiosity and artistic interests. He became an early voice in online architecture chat rooms, forging relationships that eventually led to opportunities. Since the early 2000s, he has been something of a Swiss army knife for Hanse and Wagner, contributing everything from research to graphics to on-the-ground problem solving.

“Tommy is one of those guys who brings so much passion to what he does,” Wagner says. “He’s exactly the type of person you want on a job.”

Golf is a global game but a small world. Word of Naccarato’s losses spread quickly. Adam Lawrence, a golf architecture writer, started a GoFundMe campaign that has raised nearly $80,000. Ron Wright, a former superintendent and accomplished guitar maker, built him a replacement Telecaster. Other offers of support poured in.

“That’s been the most beautiful thing to come out of this,” Naccarato says. “It really brought home how many incredible people there are in golf and how many great friends I have.”

Chief among them were Hanse and Wagner, who entrusted Naccarato to help shepherd the Maggie Hathaway project to completion.

First opened in 1962 as the Jack Thompson Golf Course, Maggie Hathaway is a nine-hole par-3 layout with a small footprint and an outsized legacy. In 1997, it was renamed for the actress and civil-rights activist who helped integrate public golf in Los Angeles. Long a hub for junior golfers and an affordable entry point to the game, the course drew support for its renovation from Los Angeles Country Club and the USGA — heavyweights lending their names to a humble facility.

At 66, Naccarato lives comfortably between those worlds. His work connects him to elite clubs and powerful institutions, but his instincts are rooted in access and community. Maggie Hathaway, he says, speaks to the “soul” of the game. “It’s a course for everyone.”

He returned to work about a month after the fires and stayed at it throughout the year, logging as many hours as his body would allow alongside project manager Pat Gradoville. The effects of the stroke linger. Naccarato’s gait can be unsteady. He sometimes stops mid-sentence, searching for words.

Still, he kept showing up. At an otherwise chaotic time, he says, the work gave him purpose and honed his focus. The Maggie Hathaway job is now complete. A grand opening is scheduled for March 27. The renovated course will be modest but renewed: holes reordered and re-turfed, greens rebuilt with fresh contours and subtle surrounds, bunkers sharpened, views improved. Green fees will remain $9.

Other parts of Naccarato’s life remain unsettled. He is still sleeping in his childhood home, still working to regain his speech and balance. But his church has found a new sanctuary in Brentwood, where he attends Mass each week, guitar in hand.

His faith remains intact, as does his gratitude — for the people who rallied around him, and for the work that sustained and inspired him.

“The funny thing is, this project was supposed to be about saving Maggie Hathaway,” Naccarato says. “Really, though, the course wound up saving me.”