85. Hinterlands Tour, June 21-27, 2017 (Part II)

Hinterlands Tour, June 21-27, 2017 (Part II)

Before I continue, I need to add some additional information regarding Firethorn.  It was originally founded by Dick Youngscap, a Nebraskan who about 10 years later opened Sand Hills GC near Mullen, NE.  Sand Hills is located about 295 miles WNW of Firethorn in the middle of the Nebraska’s Sand Hills region, a vast (20,000 square miles) area covered my huge and beautiful sand dunes (it is reputed to be the largest contiguous area of sand dunes in the western hemisphere).  It is almost universally regarded as the finest golf course opened in the world after 1960…and the daring and brilliant decision to build such a course in an isolated area under the “build it and they will come theory” initiated the modern golden age of golf course architecture.  Bandon Dunes made this movement famous, but Sand Hills GC started it all.  How he has not been inducted into the Golf Hall of Fame (along with Mike Keiser) is simply astounding to me!

Now back to the more mundane. 

Wichita Country Club, June 24, 2017:  On Saturday morning, I drove south from Lincoln, NE to Wichita, KS, a trip of about 4:30 or 265 miles…and continued to be quite surprised by the rolling terrain in both states.  And during the drive south, I discovered why Flint Hills National Golf Club (a superb Tom Fazio designed course also located in Wichita that I played in April 2013) has its name---the region around Wichita is known as “Flint Hills”.

The club was founded in 1900 and started with a nine-hole course…moving to a new facility with 18 holes in 1913, and then moved to its present facility in 1950, building a 6498 yard par 71 course designed by William Diddle.   Since that time it has hosted three important USGA woman’s championships:  the 1955 Woman’s Open, the 1969 Woman’s Senior Amateur, and the 2010 Woman’s Mid-Amateur.  Also, it was cited several times in The Founders film cited at the start of my prior post.  Over the past year, Tripp Davis completed a renovation of WCC.  Davis’ work has been principally in the Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas area as well as the New York area.

WCC has not appeared on any Top 100 list.

Today is stretches to 6862 yards (par 71).  The land here is fairly flat, but the greens have good slopes and are well protected by properly place bunkers.  Course was in excellent condition.  Best holes to my mind are 358 yard sharp dogleg left par 4 #5, dogleg left uphill 570 yard par 5 #9, dogleg right 387 yard par 4 #12 which flows slightly down off tee and then up to green, and #16 and #17, par 5 and 3 respectively with superbly shaped greens that put a premium on approach placement.

The club is beautifully maintained and seems to be very active.  The hallways and walls of the rooms in the club are filled with a superb collection of golf memorabilia commemorating the greats of the game who have played this course.

After the round, I drove about an hour from Wichita to Hutchinson, Kansas.  My sense is that you know about Hutchinson only if  (1) you live or lived near there; (2) your business has been deeply involved with farm related commodities, and/or (3) you love the game of golf and are interested in golf architecture or great golf courses. 

After checking in at my hotel, I went downtown for dinner at Jillian’s, a fun and very nice Italian restaurant.  Was good to get to bed early…have along day coming on Sunday.

Prairie Dunes Country Club, June 25, 2017:  I tried to recall my previous trip here in summer (August I think) 1979.  I had visited close friends Susan and Bill F. in Steamboat Springs, CO and then drove east playing along the way at Cherry Hills (Denver), Prairie Dunes, Oak Tree (Oklahoma City), and Southern Hills (Tulsa).  All were “first time” for me, and PD was my 180^th course played.  Strange the coincidences in life…during my drive from Omaha to Wichita the previous day I spoke with Susan and Bill, and learned that Bill’s mom (a truly truly remarkable 94 year old) was fading quickly…and she passed away on Sunday June 25 and will be missed.

Upon arriving at the club, I immediately went to take a quick peak at the par 3 #10 sitting behind and to the left of the clubhouse, as I recalled starting my round in 1979 on that hole.  My host was John J (“JJ”), a retired commodities broker from Hutchinson who was introduced to me by Fergal.  We also played with Brian and Frank (the head of high net worth business at the largest local back, and the soon to be retired…and by now retired Director of Finance for the City of Hutchinson).  This was a fun group of good players who loved the game and their beloved “PD”. 

PD’s history is rich with hosted events and extensive in terms of Top 100 listings.  It has hosted:           

o   The US Senior Open (2006 won by Allen Doyle);

o   The US Woman’s Open (2001 won by Juli Inkster);

o   The US Mid-Amateur (1988 won by David Eger);

o   The US Woman’s Amateur (1964 won by Barbara McIntire, 1980 by Juli Inkster, and 1991 by Amy Fruhwirth);

o   The Curtis Cup (24^th in 1986 won by GB&I); and

o   The US Men’s Senior Amateur (1995 won by James Stahl, Jr.).

Additionally, it has hosted five Trans Mississippi Men’s Amateurs (including in 1958 won by Jack Nicklaus) and in 2014 hosted the NCAA Men’s Division I Championships.

Prairie Dunes has been included on 39 of the 41 World Top 50 or 100 listings that I have uncovered, missing only Golf Magazine’s first two World Top 50 published in 1979 and 1981.  It’s highest rating was #14 in GM in 1991, and its lowest rating was #59 in Golf Digest last year (excluding its “tie” for #100 on the MacWood “spoof” list when it had just 9 holes in 1939...more below).  It has appeared on every USA Top 100 list that I have uncovered…66 of 66 to date.  Highest rating #8 in GM in 1979 and currently #29, 14, and 18 in GD, GW and GM respectively, and GD has this one wrong. 

The course opened in 1937 with 9 holes built by Perry Maxwell and signs of Maxwell’s genius abound, especially on the greens.  After Perry Maxwell’s passing in 1952, his son Press Maxwell designed an additional nine holes to complete the 18.  The original nine are holes 1-2, 6-10, and 17-18 on the current layout.  A number of years ago PD expanded its National membership program, and that had kept the club healthy financially and highly active.  It was wonderful to see such a special gem thriving.

As I did in 1979, I looked for the Atlantic Ocean behind many of the dunes, again with no success.  As I understand it, according to Al Gore if I return on about 5 weeks, the Atlantic (and perhaps the Pacific as well) will be easily visible from the highest dunes at PD.  My round started poorly with a 45 on the front, but a very healthy two over 37 on the back brought a smile back to my face.

There simply are too many great holes to describe them all.  # 2 and #8 stand out as the best in my mind.  #2 is 164 from the back to a green half way up a dune (Atlantic not behind dune but 6^th tee is) to a multi-tiered green sloped sharply from back to front.  The fact that I hit my tee shot to about 6’ has nothing to do with my describing this hole (besides I missed the putt).  #8 was included as the best #8 hole in the USA by Dan Jenkins and Ben Hogan in their 1965 book.  I can do no better than to quote from this book’s special description of this club, course and hole (note…today the 8^th is 468 yards and the course stretches to 6947 yards (par 70):

8 PRAIRIE DUNES
PAR 4 424 YARDS

Straight away in the distance, crawling across the horizon, are the sweeping sandhills. To the right and left, twitching in the normal 25 mph wind, are broad, swollen patches of knee-high native grass, festering clumps of yucca plants, plum thickets and sunflowers. This is the outlook from every tee at one of America's most unusual golf courses, Prairie Dunes Country Club, a course whose scenery and shot-making requirements are those of a Scottish links, but whose location—Hutchinson, Kans.—could hardly be farther from the Irish Sea.

As country clubs go, Prairie Dunes is certainly not opulent. The small clubhouse is white frame, the landscaping is, for the most part, Kansas natural and the lawn is spotted and unshaded. As for cuisine, it does exist, but a Hutchinson gourmet would prefer the Town Club for an evening out. Thus the country club is strictly a golf course, but a distinctive one.

This incongruous touch of Scotland on the Kansas plains was founded in 1937 as another golfing lark of the Emerson Carey family, a ruling dynasty in Hutchinson. It was built by Emerson Carey Jr. and his brother, Bill, who succeeded their father as benefactors of the town. Emerson Carey Sr., before his death in the '30s, had provided Hutchinson with four golf courses and a public park. The young Carey brothers hired Golf Architect Perry Maxwell to lay out a different kind of course on the unusual duneland in the area. Maxwell set forth each day with a bag of apples and a thermos to walk the ground, and he kept coming home confused. "There are 118 golf holes out there," he once said. "All I have to do is eliminate 100." Finally, he ran out of time—or apples—and he laid out Prairie Dunes.

By modern championship standards, Maxwell's 6,522-yard course is not long, but its rough more than makes up for any lack of distance. Even the best player has been known to take 15 swings or so trying to disgorge the ball from a yucca plant. The course first came to public attention in 1958, only a year after the second nine holes was completed, when a burly 18-year-old named Jack Nicklaus won the Trans-Mississippi Amateur there. Although he won, Nicklaus did not manage a round below 72, and to this day he still talks about the severity of the course. In 1962, Arnold Palmer and Nicklaus played an exhibition round at Prairie Dunes. They shot 72 and 77, and in the process Nicklaus demonstrated how to take an eight out of the matted rough.

There is also the wind. It can be so severe a factor that a hole which plays with a driver and a wedge on one day may require a driver, a spoon and a wedge the next.

The Prairie Dunes golfer constantly finds himself brooding on a windy hilltop—called a tee box by club members—from which he peers down into a swale of thorny growth. He can see little fairway on which his shot can safely land. Thus every hole becomes a challenge, but none is more challenging than the 8th. It is a long, forced dogleg to the right with no reward whatever for trying to cut across. The fairway rises gradually, bumping its way over four ancient dunes—formations that were apparently caused by the wind that whips into Hutchinson from the Arkansas River Valley. The first dune is 165 yards out from the tee and about six feet high. They get successively higher, the last one rising about 50 feet. A perfect tee shot will carry the first dune and have enough length and fade to clear the second, too. After that, the green, protected by four bunkers on the right and one more on the left, each of which is dotted with yucca plants, can be reached with a solid three-iron. The green itself, well uphill from the fairway, is large and severely contoured, inviting three excellent pin positions and making a long, curling putt a decided possibility.

My drive cleared the first grass-covered dune—called Hockaday's Hill in honor of a club member named Ray Hockaday whose drives always landed there—and the second dune as well. As promised, I had a three-iron to the green, but did not quite make it, glancing off into a right-hand bunker. Fortunately, I was in sand instead of a yucca plant. My trap shot was uneventful and my 20-foot putt woefully offline. I made the next putt from five feet for a hard bogey and leaned, more than satisfied, into the wind blowing over the Kansas sunflowers from an invisible sea.

Pictures follow.  I rest my case.

PD #2 164 yard par 3

PD #8 468 yds...approach shot

PD #12, 395 yds...approach with trees protecting green

PD #18, 390 yds...nailed 3 wood to just over back and got up and down for par

Shadow Glen Golf Club, June 25, 2017:  JJ, Brian, and Frank were well aware of my ridiculous schedule for the day and sent me packing with my customary chicken salad sandwich (whole-wheat toast with lettuce and tomato and no mayo on the bread) to go for my 3:05 drive to Shadow Glen outside of Kansas City, KS.  I had not heard of Shadow Glen until I saw it amongst my unplayed USA Top 100…having been #82 on GD in 1995 and never appearing on any other list.  How this one made a Top 100 is one of the great mysteries.  Designed by Tom Weiskopf, Jay Morrish and Tom Watson (who grew up in Kansas City) and opened in 1989.  The golf course is clearly subservient to the houses development through which it winds, and the site is much too hilly for a golf course.  It plays to 7051 yards (par 72).  In particular I did not like the par 5 10^th or the sharply downhill par 3 12^th…and must say, there were no holes that stick in my mind as being holes I am rushing to get back to.

Shadow Glen #4146 yds over deep gorge.

I had to bounce around holes as it was very busy this afternoon…and I of course had a third 18 to play.  Thanks in large part to the generosity of Midwesterners (who usually waved me through as a single as soon as they spotted me), I was able to complete the round in about 2:20.  Had a 42-41 = 83…and was off to Dubs Dread!!

Dubs Dread Golf Club, June 25, 2017:  Now I bet a lot of you folks are saying to yourselves “he is in KC…how is he going to get to Dubs Dread near Chicago?”  You folks are thinking of the new Dubs Dread…the original was built in Kansas City, KS in 1963, designed by Bob Dunning.  It was written up all over the place in the 1960’s and early 1970’s because in those days (kids…it was persimmon and balata and tour pros averaged about 245 on their drives) it played to 8101 yards (par 72) from the tips.  In 1967 it was included on GD’s 200 Toughest, and in 1969 on GD’s 100 Most Testing in the #91-100 bracket. 

No pictures here…but I am attaching a copy of GD’s 1966 and 1967 200 Toughest lists and the articles that accompanied them to the email notifying you of this posting.  Starting on page 3 of 8 is the 1967 article that discusses Dubs Dread in depth.  GD claims the par 3, 4, and 5’s averaged 240 yards, 473 yards, and 596 yards respectively.  While the club did not have an old scorecard, I do have a calculator, and using DD’s hole distribution of 4 3’s, 10 4’s and 4 5’s, that comes to 8194 yards…proving that the main stream media was lying 50 years ago as well :-).  My guess is the averages were 250, 474 and 600 yards respectively…pretty substantial with 1960’s hitting distances.

Today DD plays to 7230 yards regularly (I played from 6277) and one day a year they put the markers way back and it reaches almost 7900 (trees have overgrown some of the tees).  It is not in great condition…but was fun to finally see it.  Had a 42-43 = 85.  You never know what you’ll find with the very old lists!!

Went to my hotel and dropped car off at airport…not in bad shape after 54.  Had one more day to go, and flights early tomorrow…heading to North Dakota for last 36 holes of this trip!!

Hawktree Golf Club, June 26, 2017:

Flight left KC on time at 6:45am and after making my connection in Minneapolis-St. Paul, arrived in Bismarck, ND about 10 minutes early (10:15am).  This brought me to 49 states visited (missing only Alaska)…update on “States Golfed In” later in this post. Drive from airport to Hawktree took about 25 minutes., and was able to go right off.

Hawktree opened about in 1999 and was designed by Jim Engh.  Other courses by Engh that I have played are Black Rock (ID), Sanctuary (CO), and Carne (on the north coast of Ireland…was not the main designer at Carne).  In addition, Tullymore (MI) is on one of my bucket lists.  While Hawktree was never on a Top 100 USA list, for eight straight years (2001-08) it was on Golf Week’s Modern Top 100 list peaking at #49 in 2005.

It is located just north of Bismarck and its bunkers are filled with black sand, common to the region.  This sand also has the helpful characteristic of resisting the tendency of the area’s strong winds to blow sand out of the bunkers.  The darkness of the bunkers has an unusual impact on the “look” of the course…as the landscape tend to look dark without the beige or white sand one is accustomed to seeing.  More importantly, the black sand has a superb texture for bunker play.

While the land is very dramatic, many of the greens are located in “hollows” which makes the course too forgiving (off line drives and approach shots tend to bounce back toward the fairways or greens).  This characteristic may well explain my 38 – 38 =76 round.  Overall, a good course but certainly not a Top 100.  Plays to 7085 yards.

Hawktree #3 164 yards way way downhill!

One other aspect about playing here was the incredible quiet…out on the course, all I could hear was the sound of my blood rushing though my ears!!

After the round it was to the car for the, thankfully, last long drive of this trip, heading to northwestern North Dakota.

Links of North Dakota, June 26, 2017:  The drive to Links of North Dakota was only 185 miles but took about 3:15 due to lots of construction activity especially during the last 30-40 miles of the trip.   This area is right in the middle of the Bakken Oil Reserve and the economic activity is just booming (although the locals claim it is nothing compared to just prior to the drop in oil prices).  Most of the homes and buildings up here have been built during the last 10-15 years, and the local roads are just beginning to catch up.  Over most of the final 30 miles of the drive, I was on gravel roads (being widened from 2 lanes to 4), and the construction workers were working without barriers or other protections one is used to seeing in other parts of the country…and the construction workers are working hard!  Have not seen economic activity like this since China some 15 years ago.

Arrived at Links of ND around 6:15 pm (sunset was at 10pm). Incredible setting just north of the Missouri River which is almost 2 miles wide at this point.  Course opened in 1995 and was designed by Stephen Kay.  It is a bold interesting design with some architecturally superb holes…but from a business standpoint it has been a disaster…and as a result, its condition today is pretty damn awful.  This place is actual proof of the brilliance of Mike Keiser…it takes two courses to make a destination.  Even with the conditioning (or lack thereof) it was fun to play.  Had the entire course pretty much to myself and the sights are amazing (but the greens are like putting on the streets of Manhattan).

Plays to 7092 yards (par 72).  Land has superb elevation changes and pitches and rolls in every direction.  Cannot comment on the greens…with all the pock marks and winterkill damage, the ball bounces around at random and it is hard to discern the “natural” breaks.

Regarding Top 100 listings, Links of ND has only appeared in Golf Week.  It was #82 on the GW merged list in 1997 (GW’s first year publishing a Top100) and then slip down off the merged list but remained on GW’s Top 100 Modern courses for a 14 year run thru 2010.  Please see some of my pics below…and then the following article from the March 18, 2002 edition of Sports Illustrated.  What a story…read it and you won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Links of ND par 3 3rd--145 yds

Links of ND--par 3 8th 185 yards

Links of ND 8th green from behind...do not be over as green slopes back to front!

 

The Legend Of Red Mike In the Badlands of North Dakota, what started out as a small town's field of dreams wound up as a nightmarish battleground

Stan's folly, they called it, and no wonder. Ten years ago Stan
Weeks was the superintendent of a rinky-dink nine-hole golf
course set amid a prairie of cattle ranches and truck stops in
Williston, N.Dak. Golf was as much a part of the local lifestyle
as three-piece suits, but Weeks was visited by a vision just as
surely as Ray Kinsella heard whispers among the corn. Despite a
legion of naysayers, he built a course, the Links of North
Dakota at Red Mike Resort, which turned out better than he or
anyone else imagined. Weeks's field of dreams, though, slowly
disintegrated into a small-town soap opera of lawsuits,
splintered friendships, a sex scandal and financial failure, and
last month Red Mike was sold at auction for a fraction of its
value. "We did something nobody said we could do," says Weeks,
but the building, as well as the sale, of Red Mike is only part
of the story.

A tireless self-improver, Weeks, then 29, spent the winter of
1992 at Rutgers taking a class in turf-grass and course
management. On the last day of the semester he ambushed his
instructor, Stephen Kay, a New Yorker looking to make a name for
himself as a course designer, and sold him on the possibilities
of the Badlands. Intrigued, Kay contacted his favorite shaper,
Marvin Schlauch, who grew up in Jamestown, N.Dak. Acting as Kay's
eyes, Schlauch visited three potential sites with Weeks over the
Fourth of July weekend. The first two were mundane. The third was
miraculous.

"You'd swear it was Ireland," Kay says, recalling the first
photos sent by Schlauch. "Rolling terrain. Views of [Lake
Sakakawea] from every hole. The dirt was essentially USGA soil to
six feet deep--you could build greens right on it. I knew I could
work until I was 95 and never get a better site."

The location was known as Red Mike Hill because it's believed to
be the final resting place of a notorious 19th-century horse
thief who was either hanged or set ablaze--depending on who's
telling the story--by a vigilante mob. Red Mike Hill was situated
in the town of Ray (pop. 534), 30 miles east of Williston via
Highway 1804--the Lewis and Clark Trail, a road so lightly
trafficked that passing motorists often wave to one another. 

Weeks, whose superintendent's salary was $24,000, needed a
partner to help acquire the land, and he immediately thought of
his friend Mike Ames, an irrigation contractor from Williston
who owns four businesses. (Weeks worked winters for one of them,
setting irrigation pivots.) Ames wasn't a golfer, but two years
of listening to Weeks go on about his dream had turned him into
a romantic. He signed on as Weeks's partner and provided the
money to buy the land. "All I know how to do is water a course,"
says Ames, "but I wanted to build something nice out here,
something North Dakota could be proud of."

The banks were more circumspect when it came time to find
financing for the construction. The Williston area lacked
certain tangibles--money, golfers and tourists, for starters.
The average household income was only $33,000. There were just
20,000 people in Williams County (that's 9.5 per square mile;
the national average is 80), and the number of single-digit
handicappers in the area hovered around single digits. Visitors?
North Dakota ranked 49th in the U.S. in tourism revenue. Another
unhappy number was 200--that's how many miles Ray is from the
nearest city of any size, Bismarck (pop. 55,000). If you build
it...? Not much of a business plan.

After the banks took a pass, the dogged Kay visited North Dakota
several times over an 18-month period to help Weeks and Ames
raise cash. They hoped to pull in $1 million for a resort that
would include the course, a pitch-and-putt, a swimming area, a
boat ramp, plus hiking and biking trails. In the end they
scrounged up $300,000 from 20 area investors who formed the Red
Mike Development Corporation. (Weeks and Ames held 31.8% of the
shares in the corporation.)

"I didn't want the project to end," says Kay, "so I said to
everyone, 'Why don't we leave our fees on the table?' That's
what we did, and we built the course for only $300,000." The
budget restraints, coupled with the virtues of the site, led to
an amazingly natural design. Kay barely touched the land, moving
only 7,000 cubic yards of earth. (It is not uncommon for the Tom
Fazios of the world to move upward of a half-million cubic
yards.) The accoutrements were also down-home. Off Highway 1804
golfers turned in at a sign that simply read GOLF COURSE, bumped
along for three miles to the modest cedar-sided clubhouse, which
was there all by its lonesome.

The Links of North Dakota at Red Mike Resort officially opened
on July 11, 1995, with a greens fee of $26. (Because of the cost
cutting there was no resort, only an RV park adjacent to the
clubhouse.) The reviews were rapturous. Golf Magazine called Red
Mike "one of the purest expressions of links-style golf ever
conceived outside Scotland." Golf Digest ranked Red Mike the
best course in North Dakota and No. 2 in the country in the Best
New Affordable category. In 1997 Red Mike debuted at No. 41 on
Golfweek's Top 100 Modern Courses list. This should have been
the culmination of Weeks's triumph, but he wasn't around to
enjoy it. By then he had already been cast out of his Eden,
felled by a kind of original sin.

"I thought she was 22 or 23," says a Red Mike shareholder of one
of the course's early pro-shop assistants, who was really much
younger. "I told Stan, 'Maybe you should get rid of her.'
Instead, he ended up fooling around with her. I mean, get a
Playboy--you don't fool around with an employee." 

On Oct. 10, 1996, Weeks, single but the father of a
four-month-old son, was charged with corruption of a minor. The
following February he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30
days in jail, with 30 days suspended, plus two years' probation
and a $25 fine. "It was my own wrongdoing," Weeks says in the
flat tone characteristic of North Dakotans. "I don't make
excuses for what I did--it was the worst thing I've ever done."

Like the story of Red Mike himself, what happened next depends
on who's doing the telling. According to Weeks, he went to the
board meeting following his arrest and offered his resignation,
which was rejected. Weeks says his fellow shareholders wanted
him to seek treatment. "I went into the psychiatric ward at the
hospital, did everything they wanted me to do, got all the
approvals from the people there," he says. "Two weeks after I
got back, Mike [Ames] asked me to resign. I'd wanted to get out
all along, thinking it was best for the company. Then after
everything was said and done, they told me, 'We're sorry, you're
done.' That's what hurt." 

Says Ames, "We tried to help him out, but Stan's unpredictable.
He became more of a liability than an asset. We decided we needed
to go on without him, and that offended him. He tried to make
life miserable for us."

Shedding Weeks wasn't easy. He and Ames still owned the land. On
March 11, 1998, the Red Mike Development Corporation sued the
Ames and Weeks partnership, but the shareholders were really only
after Weeks, claiming he had refused to follow through on a
land-purchase agreement; the same day, Weeks sued the
shareholders, trying to evict the corporation for nonpayment on
the lease.

It took 19 months for the courts to sort things out, and even
then Weeks's break wasn't clean. Under a buyout agreement Weeks
retained a five-acre parcel at Red Mike, which he still owns. Why
hold on to an otherwise meaningless plot of land? "I put five
years of my life into it," says Weeks, "and I wanted some proof
that I worked on the venture."

While Weeks's affair and the ensuing nastiness were all the talk
at Williston's one-chair Sunset Barbershop, there was a
concurrent power struggle playing out behind the scenes at Red
Mike that would also shape the course's future. The day of the
grand opening, Kevin Spooner, the treasurer of the Red Mike
Development Corporation, told the Bismarck Tribune, "[Red Mike]
is going to be one of the top tourist attractions in northwest
North Dakota." Spooner, too, had a vision--he wanted to take out
a mortgage against the course to build on-site lodging. After
all, Williston is not exactly set up to welcome the traveling
golfer. The best digs in town are the El Rancho Motor Hotel, at
which a room costs $46.95 a night, including HBO. The busiest
restaurant is Gramma Sharon's, at the Conoco station, where the
truckers eat.

Spooner might have been on to something. The biggest recent
successes in course development--Bandon Dunes in Bandon, Ore.,
and Sand Hills in Mullen, Neb.--were as isolated as Red Mike,
but both built lodging as well as courses and became
destinations. Red Mike shareholders, however, felt they were
already overextended and voted down Spooner's proposal. In
February 1996 Spooner also failed to win reelection to the board
of directors. Unable to unload his shares, he sued the
corporation in June '97 for securities violations and fraud. The
case was finally settled last January, and although terms
weren't disclosed, Spooner is said to have received about
$80,000 of his $100,000 investment.

By then things were sliding at Red Mike, and it wasn't hard to
see why. The course was amateurishly marketed (a brochure
featured a player in blue jeans), poorly run (the
longest-tenured general manager had no golf experience) and
underused (only 10,000 rounds a year). Red Mike lost money for
the last three years, and in October 2001 the board decided to
sell the course pending shareholder approval, which soon followed.

Feb. 25, auction day, is bitterly cold, seven below counting the
wind chill. The parking lot at Red Mike is chockablock with
trucks, outfits as they're called here. Inside, with a crowd
heavy on curious townspeople, the ambience feels more like a
mixer than a funeral. There's lots of joking about being only a
few dollars short of the required $50,000 cashier's check needed
to enter the bidding. Lunch is served: sloppy joes and homemade
macaroni and cheese. The keyboardist hired for the occasion
begins her set with the Beatles' Yesterday but then switches to
something more upbeat.

Kay, very much the breezy New Yorker, gives a slide show
detailing Red Mike's bona fides and his vision of its future. An
old picture of Kay side by side with Weeks at the course flashes
by on the screen, unremarked upon. "I said in the beginning that
this had the potential to be a Top 100 course, and everyone
laughed," Kay concludes, his tone gently scolding. "North Dakota
doesn't realize what it has here--it really doesn't. With
bungalows, this could be a home run, a grand-slam home run."

Forty-one preauction information packets had been requested by
potential buyers nationwide--including, rumor has it, some
Augusta National members keen on making Red Mike their personal
summer playground. At the sale the closest things to Augusta are
the matching green jackets of the auctioneer and his associates.
No deep-pocketed developers materialize, just six registered
bidders from North Dakota and Montana, nor does anyone take
advantage of the online bidding option.

As the auction progresses only one serious bidder emerges, a
group of area businessmen who call themselves Save Red Mike LLC.
The group is fronted by Kevin Spooner's former lawyer Marvin
Kaiser. Ames puts in a couple of bids--"I'm no quitter," he said
before the auction--but Save Red Mike soon prevails for a paltry
$467,500. (Bandon Dunes developer Mike Keiser calls the price
"unbelievably low.") It's not enough to pay off Red Mike
Development Corporation's outstanding debts, so shareholders
will have to reach into their pockets one last time before being
rid of Red Mike.

Kaiser, turned out in a purple shirt and snakeskin boots, says
he will bring in experienced management, improve marketing and
customer service, draw players from a wider region, develop a
junior program, create a North Dakota golf trail and, yes, raise
prices. (For now, housing can wait.) Asked if he expects any
more local support than the previous owners received, Kaiser
says, "With the threat of the course being lost, I think the
community now senses what we have here."

Weeks shows up at the auction, too, to say his goodbyes, but he
walks away nursing more grievances. "I'm mad at the architect,"
he says. "He didn't even say hi at the sale. Red Mike is the
best thing that ever happened to him, and I'm the one who
brought him on." Despite his obvious bitterness, Weeks claims he
has moved on. He's now the superintendent at Hawktree Golf Club
in Bismarck. Hawktree opened in 1999, and it edged out Red Mike
for best-in-state in the latest Golf Digest ranking, while
placing No. 2 in the country in the Best New Affordable
category. Weeks has no financial stake in the course, but having
helped shape the land, he has plenty invested emotionally. "It
kind of gets in your blood," he says, "taking the dirt and
making something grow."

After the round, I drove about 30 minutes to Williston,  ND.  My flight left at 6am the next morning connecting in Minneapolis for Boston and home to Pat.  What a journey…six days and played 14 rounds of golf (3 days with 54 holes)…drove a total of some 1385 miles through six states.  So now where do I stand on the bucket lists:

            States played—48 with just Utah and Alaska to go (knocked off IA, SD and ND).

            Majors Ever—11 to go (all former PGA sites) (none played this trip)

            Top 100 EVER—13 left (including 5 in midwest) (knocked off 4)

            Cups EVER—4 left (knocked off 1)

            US Senior Open EVER—6 left (knocked off 2)

            US Amateur Ever—2 left (knocked off 2)

            Total of 34 to go to complete all of above.

Lifetime course count:  949!!  2017 course count…71…55 new and 16 repeats!!

Next stops…New York area and Chicago!!