Former business partners chip-shot each other in a battle over Hillcrest Country Club

From the back of the Missouri Court of Appeals’ dimly lighted courtroom in Kansas City, David Francis fixes his gaze on his former business partner, Terry Clark.

Francis shakes his head often as Clark, a military veteran, pleads with the court’s three-judge panel to reverse a 2012 decision by the Circuit Court of Jackson County that sliced away Clark’s stake in Hillcrest, a struggling south Kansas City country club that narrowly avoided being sold in 2011 on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse.

Since 2003, Clark and Francis had done golf-course business together. Now their paths cross only in courtrooms; the two have been locked in a protracted legal battle over the fallout from their failed partnership at Hillcrest.

Hillcrest has long been a troubled enterprise and it fared worse after Francis bought it in 2006 for about $3 million. Members left in droves due to the way Francis and Clark managed the course. Hillcrest sued former members for leaving, and the former members filed countersuits.

In 2010, Francis testified under oath that Clark owned 50 percent of the business, even though Clark had no direct financial stake.

The Clark-Francis partnership was an odd pairing. Francis, a Mission Hills resident, comes from old Kansas City money; his father made a fortune running the Puritan-Bennett Co.

Clark, a Kansas City, Kansas, native, has a blue-collar background.

On this early October morning, Clark represents himself; he says he can no longer afford a lawyer. Judges Karen Mitchell, Lisa Hardwick and Gary Witt listen patiently to Clark, who won’t win this appeal. The law, the appellate judges rule on October 29, isn’t on his side. But the long-simmering feud between former friends may not be over.

David Francis met Terry Clark in 2001. Clark was a course marshal at Prairie Highlands, an Olathe golf course owned by Francis.

Clark was a former air-traffic controller (one of the 11,000 fired by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 when union controllers went on strike). Francis flew planes as a hobby. They struck up a conversation about aviation in the Prairie Highlands’ pro shop.

In 2003, they became reacquainted when the city of Olathe wanted to open a municipal golf course near Prairie Highlands. Clark argued that the city was wasting taxpayer money by getting into the golf business, and Francis wasn’t keen on having competition. Francis eventually sued Olathe over the proposed golf course, which never came to fruition.

That same year, Clark took on more responsibilities at Prairie Highlands, but he wasn’t getting paid. Francis comped him rounds of golf, meals and various golf accessories. In turn, Clark would do improvement projects. He built a couple of bridges on the course, installed garage doors on the pavilion and held tournaments at Prairie Highlands.

“I really turned it around businesswise,” Clark tells The Pitch. “He didn’t care. He’s just greedy.”

Francis and his attorneys did not respond to messages for this story. But in court testimony, Francis minimizes the role that Clark played in his golf business. Francis refers to Clark as a consultant who was using Prairie Highlands to test his ideas for other golf courses that he wanted to run.

“And I said, ‘Why are you doing this?'” Francis testified during a January 3, 2012, Jackson County Circuit Court hearing. “He said, ‘Because I’m looking at the future.'”

In testimony, Francis passed Clark off as a mere acquaintance, but the two were frequently seen together in Johnson County in the mid-2000s, vexing city officials and institutions. At Olathe City Council meetings in 2006, Clark and Francis often spoke in favor of a small-business owner who wanted to build a small convenience store but was running into opposition from city officials.

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But what really brought the two together — and would eventually pull them apart — was a sloppy business arrangement struck to manage Hillcrest.

Hillcrest Country Club was founded in 1916. Famous Scottish course architect Donald Ross designed the course, located south of Swope Park and north of where U.S. Highway 71 and Interstate 435 meet. Ross fashioned hundreds of courses in the United States in the early part of the 20th century, including Pinehurst No. 2, the site of next year’s U.S. Open.

Hillcrest was known as an “easy in, easy out” club; it was neither expensive nor exclusive, relative to Kansas City’s other country clubs.

At some point before 2006, Clark told Francis that the club was having financial issues. Clark suggested that Francis buy the course. Francis opened his wallet, but not before striking a deal with Clark outlining how the two would work together at Hillcrest. One part of the arrangement seemed clear: Francis was the money; Clark would be the brains, overseeing operations. But exactly how the whole thing was divvied up depends on whom you ask.

Clark insists that Francis made him a 50-percent owner of Hillcrest. He didn’t put up any money but said sweat equity held up his end of the bargain.

Francis testified in 2012 that it was simply a profit-sharing arrangement, and Clark would get half of the future profits — once Francis recouped the money he had invested.

But that’s not what Francis testified in 2010 during a lawsuit filed against Hillcrest by pissed-off former members:

Attorney: Mr. Clark is here today. I take it he’s attending this deposition as a representative of Heartland Golf [the ownership entity of Hillcrest]?

Francis: That’s correct.

Attorney: OK. Does he have any ownership interest in Heartland Golf Development II?

Francis: Yes, he does.

Attorney: And what is that interest?

Francis: He owns 50 percent of it.

Francis would later testify that he misspoke when he said Clark was a half-owner of Hillcrest.

Clark says that’s proof that Francis is lying.

However, neither Clark nor Francis ever put their agreement in writing. 

“I guess I should have,” Clark tells The Pitch. “I was stupid. I trusted him. My word means something. His doesn’t.”

In 2012, Francis said Clark didn’t want a written agreement.

“And I said, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you want your name on this thing?'” Francis testified. “He goes … ‘I don’t want my name on it. I like to be below the radar screen. If you want my name to be on anything, I’m going to walk away. I won’t work with you.'”

Clark ended up walking away from Hillcrest in 2011, just not on his terms.

Golf wasn’t an easy business, even before the 2008 recession. Hillcrest was owned by a group of members, but they were having trouble keeping membership up and the finances afloat.

A former member, who asked to remain anonymous due to the history of litigation involving Hillcrest, tells The Pitch that running Hillcrest was difficult but not impossible.

“It’s in a part of town that’s viewed by some as dicey, and that was always the reason we got pushback from membership, especially from Johnson County types,” the former member says.

Francis made them an unsolicited offer to buy the property, which the members took.

Though financial pressures affected many golf courses and country clubs in the years leading to the recession, Francis and Clark’s management of their business made matters worse for Hillcrest.

“David let Terry be in charge, and Terry is a very difficult person and he seemed to be intentionally chasing members away, just making decisions that made you feel like you were a fool for paying them money voluntarily every month,” the former member says.

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Hillcrest, at the time, required up to $550 a month. As membership declined, so too did the quality of the course.

“The way the club was going, to pay the fees it cost, it wasn’t worth it,” says Jim Glynn, an advertising executive and former Hillcrest member. “The food was gone. Events were gone. They weren’t taking as good a care of the course.”

The property was headed toward a foreclosure sale when Francis put it in bankruptcy — seven months after he had run off Clark.

Clark says his problems with Francis started in 2010. Francis’ wife, Janis, was in charge of Hillcrest’s financial ledgers. Clark says she couldn’t keep the accounting straight, which caused Clark to attempt to get his 50-percent ownership in writing.

“David had made the statement before that if he wasn’t married to our accountant, he would have fired her years ago,” Clark testified in 2012.

Those tensions led to a May 10, 2011, confrontation at Hillcrest, where Clark was living in a small apartment. Francis fired Clark, turned off Clark’s cell phone, stopped his health-insurance benefits, and shut off his access to the company’s accounts.

Clark filed a lawsuit about a month later. The court ordered Francis to allow Clark back onto the grounds until the lawsuit was sorted out.

The trial record reads as though well-paid lawyers and a judge had to oversee a turf battle between fifth-graders. Francis complained that Clark left Hillcrest but not before taking such things as a 32-inch television and a $300 gun safe. Clark responded that Francis couldn’t prove he had them.

At one point, attorneys spent considerable time trying to track down a gun that Francis had bought at Cabela’s five years earlier. Francis said he bought the 40-caliber pistol, registered it in his name and left it with Clark at Hillcrest.

When Clark was rousted from the apartment, the gun was nowhere to be found. Francis’ attorneys complained several times to the Jackson County judge overseeing the case that Clark wasn’t giving it back. 

After the judge ordered Clark to return the gun, Clark said he couldn’t find it.

The lawsuit did return a more substantive finding: Clark couldn’t prove that he was a half-owner of anything because nothing was in writing.

Clark says he has lost in court because of the Francis family’s stature in Kansas City.

“His family is old-money Kansas City. The judges all know him,” Clark says. “I don’t have a prayer. I’m not going to beat him.”

Meanwhile, Francis brought Hillcrest out of bankruptcy and has now placed it on the market. He told the Kansas City Business Journal that he would consider selling it for $9 million. The October 3 article, which includes a photo of Francis on one of the greens holding the pin’s flag taut to highlight the Hillcrest logo, says the club’s membership is at 150, down from 600 in its heyday.

Membership now costs about $150 a month, which comes with preferred tee times, among other fringe benefits. But anyone can call the clubhouse nowadays and schedule a round.