More Happy Trails - Washington

By: Jeff Shelley


• Playing a round almost 30 years ago with William Kittredge, a well-known Montana-based novelist whose non-playing girlfriend/partner, author Annick Smith, is the producer of the movie "Heartland," co-producer of the Robert Redford-directed "A River Runs Through It," and a founding board member of Redford's Sundance Institute. As Bill, I and Richard Chapman (a professor at the U of Montana who wrote for me at Back Nine magazine) played North Shore in Tacoma, Annick drifted in and out of the trees like a willowy wraith, smiling when emerging, clearly enjoying the magic of a golf course.

• Trekking to the far northeast corner of the state and playing Colville Elks (now called Dominion Meadows) and the gloriously named Pend Oreille Golf & Country Club. The 50-mile trip from Colville to Pend Oreille G&CC in Metaline Falls took nearly two hours while encountering what seemed like 200 deer darting into the road. Once arriving at the latter course, I found a six-hole layout with sand greens. The Quonset hut/clubhouse had a small sign that said the all-day honor-system green fee was $1.

• I've gone to well over 100 grand openings over the years. Those included the ridiculous (Battle Creek in Marysville which was only about 60 percent grown-in) to the sublime (several, including Chambers Bay, though we were required to tote little patches of Astroturf to hit off fairways). Then there was Echo Falls in Woodinville, 18 holes and 79 big homes squeezed onto a small 200-acre parcel involving a tall hill and buzzing overhead power lines. Before 100 dignitaries and media, the last speaker, designer and co-developer Jack Frei clenching a rolled-up newspaper, went to the podium and dispensed with any "Welcome to Echo Falls" niceties, angrily blurting, "Is Tom (last name deleted) here?!" I was sitting behind Jack's wife and fellow developer, and watched them squirm uncomfortably as Jack railed about Tom's otherwise glowing review of his new course, which has one problematic hole that required a Sherpa to get to, and sucking the air out of an otherwise uplifting occasion.

• Arriving at one of three Riverside courses in the Northwest, this one in Chehalis, flooded yet again by an overflowing Chehalis River. Though the clubhouse had been recently elevated on stilts, the water level breached the structure. The head pro, in hip boots and full clean-up mode, pointed out a water line on the outside wall a good seven feet off the ground.

• Playing the Olympic Course at Golf Mountain before it opened with three friends while accompanied by architect, John Harbottle III. My friend Walter and I had a game against John and Brad, and the Tacoma-based designer provided great insight as we played. The late Harbottle, a fine golfer and the son of a U.S. Women's Amateur champion, was fully aware of the situation and would confide in my ear, "You can hit over the left side of that hill," "Aim at that tree in the distance," or "The ball breaks right." Walter and I swept the front, back and overall and won many presses, leading our opponents to buy us a surf-and-turf dinner at a Port Orchard waterfront restaurant before we took the Puget Sound ferry home.

• Driving into the new Arnold Palmer-designed Semiahmoo Resort course near the Canadian border and observing over a dozen workers crawling across a fairway on their hands and knees, picking out invading poa annua on this new, ballyhooed "all-bentgrass" layout.

• As a youngster growing up in Yakima sneaking onto the second hole at Westwood West. Its head pro and designer, the irascible Curley Hueston, would spot me and my friend Nick, futilely taking chase after us in a smoke-billowing, three-wheeled Harley-Davidson golf cart. He never caught us as we dashed into nearby Congdon Orchards. It would be many years before I finally played the first hole at Westwood West.

• Tackling Duke's Lakeview Challenge in Vancouver, self-dubbed "The World's Toughest Par-3." Its proprietor, the white-haired Duke Wager, set up his 11-acre course with 10 greens and 18 tees on a scale of 1 to 10. At 10, the conditions were inhumane, with tees set to require shots over tall trees to pins tucked at the edges of greens mowed 7/64th of an inch and tilting toward little ponds and bunkers as deep as 12 feet. Not surprisingly, Wager hosted weekly betting games. Many LPGA Tour players at the Safeway Classic in nearby Portland ventured to Duke's. He told me some of them posted scores as high as 20 on a single 60-yard hole and hundreds of dollars exchanged hands.

• Being a regular at the inimitable Whispering Rattlesnakes Golf & Flubbers Club and staying in its fabled "Pro's Cottage" (actually a truck camper) near Mazama in north-central Washington. Designed, developed, maintained and owned by my great friend Bob Spiwak, Whispering Rattlesnakes has a head pro - former amateur champion, tour pro winner and notable golf teacher Wiffi Smith - and just two members, Bob Elliott of the Bob & Ray comedy team and CBS newsman Charles Kuralt. Elliott readily accepted a membership, but Spiwak sent multiple letters inviting Kuralt to join, with Kuralt writing back to leave him the hell alone. Among other wonderful touches, Spiwak built Rube Goldberg-like "ball washers" consisting of twisting PVC pipe that funneled balls into a bucket of water. After a bear stopped late at night before a tournament, Bob put up a sign by the evidence that read, "Bear Shit - Free Drop."

• While in the ultra-private-course mode, I played 54 holes one day at Caledon, a 380-acre estate near Arlington with a 6,300-yard golf course that gets maybe a hundred rounds a year. In addition, this fun-filled reserve boasts a Le Mans-style go-cart track, the world's longest quarter-scale railroad system, a helicopter pad, and a 14,000-square-foot party house with a 200-seat banquet room and full-sized disco.

• Eastern Washington nines in Tekoa, Harrington and Touchet Valley in Dayton. Tekoa for the amazingly colorful wheat and alfalfa checkerboard fields around it; Harrington for a truly sublime golf course - perhaps the best nine in the entire state; and the 1925-built Touchet (pronounced "Tooshy") for the horseracing track that contains two holes in its infield (signs warn golfers to look both ways for galloping horses).

• An eight-hour round at Seattle's Jackson Park during golf's late-1980s heydays, when the muni hosted a staggering 130,000 annual rounds on its regulation 18 and par-3 nine. Rescuing this fiasco was my being paired with two University of Washington trustees, among them Dr. Hans Lehmann, who brought out a bottle of Scotch when the rains came and our round got even slower. Dr. Lehmann fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ended up in Seattle, where he was instrumental in building the University of Washington's now-vaunted Medical School as well as boosting the fortunes of the Seattle Opera Association and Pacific Northwest Ballet. This very funny man had some wondrous tales to tell during that eight-hour round.

• As a youngster going to beach with my family in the early 1960s and playing the then-new Ocean Shores Golf Course. One-time site of the LPGA's Pat Boone Classic (I have a tournament program with the players' bouffant hairdos to prove it), the course had a straight-as-a-stick, 750-yard par-7 with a fairway wide enough to land a Boeing 707.

• Taking my soon-to-be wife Anni on a golf outing for her first time. At the now-closed Tall Chief in Fall City, Anni, whose family considered golf "stupid" and "elitist," found an old knitted head cover that a golfer had lost, causing her to blurt, "Look, someone lost their hat!" Later on that spring day we encountered the fox pups and deer fawns that inhabited Tall Chief's back nine. At that point in time, Anni's view of golf - and its sublime benefits - changed. She now plays more than me.

• And my favorite golf memory in my home state: Golf with Anni and my buddies for the past 20-plus years at Sand Point in Seattle, whose views of Lake Washington and the Cascades - from Mt. Baker near Canada to Mt. Rainier over 100 miles to the south - rank among the most spectacular on the West Coast.

Editorial director Jeff Shelley's last day at Cybergolf is July 31.