Golf in Willa Cather Country
Red Cloud, Nebraska, population 1,313, is a town that stays alive (barely) by clinging to its past. You see its precariousness in the redbrick town center, a third of whose storefronts are empty. There is something charming about the turn-of-the-century look of the downtown, all four square blocks of it. But here, 140 miles southwest of Lincoln, along the Kansas border, there is also something sad, as if the world has passed it by and it is clinging desperately to its status as a stage for a movie on Willa Cather—Red Cloud’s famous literary daughter—that has yet to be filmed here.
It doesn’t help that it is swelteringly hot on this mid-August day. An underpowered air conditioner has chased me out of my $48 room at the Green Acres Motel and RV Park. Its twenty-nine units are the only accommodations between here and Hastings, forty miles to the north. A sign by the check-in assures me that Little Caesars Pizza services the town on Tuesdays from 6:35 to 7:20 p.m.; otherwise, there’s Subway for lunch and, for dinner, the Palace Steak House and Lounge.
That’s the fate of so many small towns here in a state that is relatively prosperous. There’s a steady flight away from hamlets like this and, with it, a loss of a certain intimacy and community. Four miles to the west, the village of Inavale is so emptied that abandoned storefronts along the main street have trees growing through the middle of them.
A century ago the view for Willa Cather was undoubtedly far more interesting. Granted, from the vantage point of her cramped attic bedroom, she couldn’t see out very far. Certainly not out to the Nebraska prairie of which she wrote so beautifully. But her ability to convey the forlorn, desolate, and forbidding landscape of the state derived from far more than the immediate view from the garret where, as a teenager in this town, she immersed herself in classical literature and spent her formative years. Her success as a writer is the reason why today Red Cloud is home to a museum and foundation devoted to Willa Cather’s lifework—to her fiction, her poetry, and her Pulitzer Prize–winning depiction of the hardships of life in rural Nebraska.
Cather, who was born in 1873, moved from Virginia to Webster County, Nebraska, in 1882. The family first established itself on an isolated settlement fourteen miles north of Red Cloud on a vast open stretch of land at the base of a long, three hundred–foot slope called the Divide. Here at the core of what geologists call eastern Nebraska’s Dissected Till Plain, settlers from central and northern Europe came to stake out a future. The Cather family struggled at farming, ranching, and simply surviving the brutal winters, finally abandoning the settlement and moving into a modest two-story house in town on the southwest corner of West Third Avenue and North Cedar Street. There Willa’s father became a farm loan and insurance agent, and she became an incurable reader and writer. Her tiny loft bedroom with the cramped view was her retreat, her library, and her window onto the world.
Cather left Red Cloud in 1893 to attend the University of Nebraska. There, while still an undergraduate, she became one of the Midwest’s leading theater critics, and she was soon off to a glorious career editing magazines and writing books and returning only intermittently the rest of her life—she died in 1947—to the community that spawned her unique vision.
Cather published seventeen novels in her lifetime. Some of them involved historical fiction (about sixteenth-century Quebec, seventeenth-century southern slave life, nineteenth-century Mexico); some of them involved music and theater. But the books that gave her voice real life and that lit the imagination of midwestern America are those, such as O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), set in and around fictionalized versions of Red Cloud.
Cather wasn’t a golfer, never wrote about the game, and for all her books and magazine articles and editing in Pittsburgh and New York, she appears to have had nothing to say about sports at all. Yet her work speaks powerfully to the land, to the prairies, to an ominous sense of nature, and to the unrelentingly harsh conditions that émigré homesteaders and plain people of the earth confronted across her state’s wide open spaces. For all the attention she devoted to building strong personalities and making them memorable to readers, the strongest character is the land itself. Against the backdrop of a uniquely optimistic American populace that aspired to mobility, industry, and wealth, Cather focused on the everyday travails of teasing life out of the ground. Her experience in rural Nebraska told her that for all the triumphs of human spirit and homilies about hard work having its just rewards, often the land won.
Cather set the tone early in her epic novel O Pioneers! In the opening chapter, called “The Wild Land,” the main character, Alexandra Bergson, is still a teenager when she heads off from the town of Hanover (i.e., Red Cloud) in a farm cart. It’s late afternoon on an early winter day. They are venturing off to the kind of bleak prairie land miles outside of town where Cather’s family had tried their hand at farming for their first two years in the area. “The homesteads were few and far apart; here and there a windmill gaunt against the sky, a sod house crouching in a hollow. But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its somber wastes.”
Alexandra’s father is a former shipyard worker from Sweden who has been trying for eleven years to make life viable on his 640-acre section. The labor is elusive because the land and its weather are unrelenting. “John Bergson had the Old World belief that land, in itself, is desirable. But this land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.”
Not that her image of the land was entirely depressing. Jim Burden, the narrator in Cather’s most famous work, My Ántonia, finds beauty in the summer light that resonates with a distinctly sacral glow. The biblical sensibility is unmistakable in Burden’s description of how “the whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.” Looking up on a clear day, you could not just see forever; you could see what he called “the complete dome of heaven.”
For Cather the land itself was literally alive, with crumpled, wavy ground, endlessly fascinating as it stretched out and rolled forever in every direction. As one character notes, “I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.”
Cather’s was a vision filled with awe at the power of land to yield and also to withhold. For all the fecundity of the Corn Belt, it also had the capacity to withdraw from life and to render life harsh and unbearable. Nowhere is this stronger than in her accounts of the bleak, pale gray of winter. “I was convinced that man’s strongest antagonist is the cold,” says Burden. “One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.”
It was the fate of men and women on the Nebraska prairie to continue struggling with the land. With more grace and respect than perhaps any other American writer, Cather documented that effort. She didn’t engage in the kind of documentary-style realism that Bess Streeter Aldrich (1881–1954) and Mari Sandoz (1896–1966) relied upon in their fictional accounts of the Nebraska frontier. And if Cather had a fault in her emphasis upon women’s spirit and strength of character, it was her tendency to overlook the brutal everyday economics and power exercised by railways, banks, middlemen, and speculators in making life unprofitable for farmers. Yet Cather had a keen sense of the toll that Nebraska farm life exacted on many families and how hard everyday existence was in the simplest of sod houses. In her own pioneering way she found that women had more strength than they were commonly assumed to possess in dealing with the prairie day after day. And those lessons weren’t specific to one gender; there was something universal in that struggle and something both beautiful and untamable in the raw Nebraska landscape.
It’s one thing to read about this world, quite another to see it. And so I go on a little tour of Red Cloud that’s run by the Willa Cather Foundation. The thermometer in my rental car tells me that it’s 102 degrees, and I don’t have enough time while getting in and out of my car for each of the seven stops on the itinerary to get the air conditioner going. The guide dutifully instructs me we have only ninety minutes, which turns out to be not enough time to read the historical posters and displays. Still, I’m drawn in. At the town’s Burlington Train Depot exhibits explain the county’s geology and the complicated history of how the railroads dominated land transfers in the late nineteenth century. At Grace Episcopal Church I view the stained glass windows that Cather donated in memory of her parents. At St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church I get a sense of how strong a role religious reverence must have been in an era when life was harsh and unforgiving. But it’s a visit to that attic room of hers, with the wallpaper she put up that’s now faded but still clinging to the walls in this searing heat, that moves me and that fills me with wonder. Here in this cramped bedroom Cather fashioned her own literary garret and in the process changed our view of the American landscape.
Before I leave town, I can’t help but pay a visit to the Red Cloud Golf Club, two miles east of town on Route 136. It’s a nine-hole layout, obviously a labor of love done in 1988 (so says the scorecard) by a local fellow named Harry Obitz, who seems to have had all you need to build a course, namely a bulldozer and a passion for golf. The result is a rudimentary layout, 3,168 yards long and par-36, all of it laid out along a simple north-south axis. Technically, it’s more like a mowed-down cornfield than a prairie links. There are no bunkers, though there are a few basic mounds here and there. On several holes the key strategic element is a tree right in the middle of the ideal landing area.
Course superintendent Jim Zimmerman has one full-time assistant and one part-time employee in season. Maintenance costs for the season running March through October are well under $200,000, which helps keep green fees down. An eighteen-hole round (twice around the tract) costs only $20. Annual memberships can be had for $280. And from the look of the ramshackle clubhouse interior, the bar takes up more space than the golf shop, which is just as it should be for a community golf course. When you get to a course like this, you don’t worry about amenities and just revel in the fact that a town of 1,313 people can support a golf course at all.
A half day of driving lies ahead of me as I venture off into the center of the state. First west along Route 16, then north to
Kearney, and then west again on the country’s great east-west highway, Interstate 80. I am keenly aware that I am not the first one to have made this trip. Frontier pioneers two centuries ago headed off along a similar path on what was known as the old Oregon Trail. The pony express made a commercial attempt to ply a nearly identical routing. It was a short-lived venture enshrined in historic lore and brand iconography that belie the complete failure of the business. Soon came the steam engines of the Union Pacific Railroad and in the interwar period a transcontinental paved road network called the Lincoln Highway that is now Route 30 in Nebraska.
From the comfort of my car I join the stream of western pioneers, a tourist, not a settler, but starry-eyed as they were at seeing the placid beauty of the Platte River. I’m too late for the annual migration of the sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis); each February–March the sandbars along the North Platte River between Grand Island and Kearney become temporary home to a half million of these strange, spindly-legged gawking birds. On both sides of the highway I can see the riparian marshes and sandbars. The speed limit is seventy-five; I’m keeping it close to eighty-four—my time-tested theory being that at only nine miles per hour above the speed level, I’ll never get a ticket or, for that matter, stand out in highway traffic. I’m oscillating between a right lane where the trucks are going slower and a left lane where cars are all intent on passing me by.
And then I’m reminded that if life is a migratory journey, then not everyone manages to make it—or at least not make it in very good shape. At exit 177 I get off for North Platte and gas up at a Kwik Stop. As I get out of my car and unhook the gas cap, I notice a bunch of clean-scrubbed kids playing on the other side of the pump. It’s noon on Sunday, and they look like they just got out of church. There are four in all, standing around a large can. The three young boys are wearing white shirts and blue slacks; a small girl in a dress is with them and beside her a woman, presumably her mother, with an infant in her arms and large enough around the front that I figure she’s expecting soon. I go inside to prepay, and there stands a young man, no older than thirty, white shirt, sleeves rolled up, thick black glasses, very nervous, and shuffling his feet in awkwardness as the teller tells him, “Your check’s no good.”
He needs to come up with the $15.93 he spent filling up the gas can. Turns out their car ran out of gas near the exit ramp, so he, his wife, and their five and a half kids hoofed it to the station. As per Kwik Stop policy, he had let the cashier literally hold his checkbook and driver’s license while he filled up the can, then went in to write out the check, and by the time I got there, the check had been denied. He’s penniless. It’s 1:30 p.m., the clerk explains to him that she’s cashing out at 3 p.m., and he has to come back with the money by then. She then asks him for some sort of security in exchange. Amazingly, he hands over his driver’s license again, then borrows a pen and writes out on his hand, “$15.93, back 3 p.m.” All of this I take in carefully. Only later, as I pull out of the station, do I suddenly feel stupid and guilty for not having paid the bill for him myself. But I was dumfounded by the image of this devout, churchgoing man, penniless, with a family to feed and no sense at all.
The entrance road to the golf course is fifty-five miles long. One member called the journey the longest hour in golf—except that the land is stunningly beautiful, so you don’t mind gazing at it. Adding to the enchantment of the trip is the temporal magic of arriving at the same time you leave. During the drive north on Route 97 from North Platte to Mullen, you cross over from the Central to the Mountain Time Zone, so you get there when you left.
“There” is Sand Hills Golf Club, denoted by nothing more than a rough-hewn painted sign at mile marker 55. Anyone looking for a guardhouse with a gate is simply in the wrong place.
Out here in the middle of central Nebraska’s Sandhills, the grass-covered dunes seem to unfold forever. At nineteen thousand square miles in scope, they occupy a quarter of the entire state and constitute the largest grassed duneland in the Western hemisphere.
Driving across them is like going on a dreamy enchanted carpet ride. With each rise of the road, you feel as if you’re climbing a bluff and about to get a view of the ocean. Instead, what you see for miles in every direction are more dunes, interspersed with sandy blowouts. The only shade is provided by the cumulus clouds. And you soon find yourself so mesmerized by the rolling land that you feel as if you are out at sea riding a massive wave.
There are hand-painted wooden signs announcing ranches, most of them with dirt paths that turn off from the two-lane paved road and disappear into the hills. It’s as if some impish giant had gotten hold of spools of thread and kicked them across the countryside to form lines that disappear over the horizon. Cattle, most of them Black Angus, vastly outnumber people. In fact, the only human beings you see are behind the steering wheels of trucks. And the only contact you have with them is fleeting: either you risk passing them, or you get stuck behind them, and when they fly by in the opposite direction, you realize with that terrific “whoosh” how dangerous and fleeting life can be out here, especially in the winter or at night or during a storm.
It’s not hard to imagine what a feasibility study would have said about building a world-class golf retreat on this desolate site: No. When the best you can claim is being midway between Omaha (295 miles to the east) and Denver (320 miles to the southwest), you don’t meet anybody’s standards of “location, location, location.” Perhaps in an era of postmodern guerrilla marketing and “narrow casting,” there’s a perverse appeal to being hard to find and in the middle of nowhere. Turns out, as you discover during that fantastical ride across the prairie, that the difficulty of getting to Sand Hills isn’t so much an obstacle to enjoying golf; it’s actually part of what makes golf here so special. Particularly for students of classic linksland golf, there is a powerful irony in realizing that a game that got its spiritual start on coastal land has now been reborn on interior land as far away from ocean as it is possible to find.
The porous soil drains perfectly, ideal for firm turf conditions and ground-game golf. The only drawback for the game is the tendency for the land to migrate of its own accord, thanks to erosion from wind or water. Bunkers migrate. Crevices open up. Erosion has never seemed more natural.
To be sure, there are not many golf courses out here. There aren’t many people either. Hooker County, home to Sand Hills Golf Course, has all of 800 people inhabiting its 722 square miles. It’s not uncommon here for school kids to be bused 50 miles each way to class on a daily basis. Mullen, the county seat, sports a population of 554 and looks like a scene from The Last Picture Show. A Sinclair gas station downtown still has one of those old green dinosaurs on the signboard. Next door, at Red’s Cafe, local custom decrees that whoever walks in picks up the coffee pot and offers refills to all who are gathered—most of whom are busy watching Jeopardy on TV. Across the street are the one dozen little white-and-red bungalows of the Sand Hills Motel, the only overnight rooms available in the county. The nearest airport is an hour south, in North Platte (pop. 25,000), with regularly scheduled service consisting of four flights a day on a prop plane from Denver. North Platte, a major freight train handling town, is also home to the only hospital and the only Starbucks within 100 miles. If you don’t like spending time in your car, it’s not the place for you.
Cattle ranchers have been squeezing a living out of this windswept turf for only a century. Before that it was simply natural ground, rich with bison and buffalo and without organized agriculture. It’s among the last land in the country to have been touched by human hands, and only lightly at that, with scant evidence of any settlement or industry.
Understandably, folks in Hooker County were suspicious two decades ago when a fellow from Lincoln came into town with dreams of building a golf club. Dick Youngscap, an architect by training who had established himself designing medical offices and hospitals, was also an avid golfer. In the mid-1980s he had made a reputation throughout the state when he oversaw the design and development of Firethorn Golf Club on the southeast side of Lincoln. Youngscap had hired Pete Dye to transform the rolling prairie land there into fine, low-lying golf ground. At the time Dye was famous for fanciful creations, some of which created inventive golf ground out of flat, featureless land. But in working interesting golf features into dead flat land at the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida (1981); Long Cove Golf Club, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina (1982); and the PGA West TPC Stadium Course in La Quinta, California (1985), Dye at least had the benefit of considerable earth-moving budgets to work with. Not so at Firethorn, where the total construction budget was under $1 million—even in those days a very modest sum. Dye, a strong personality in his own right, bristled under Youngscap’s close watch but nonetheless delivered an unusually ground-hugging layout that proved to be an economic success. The good fortune of the golf course was aided by an underserved golf real estate market that rapidly embraced the facility and populated it with one of the most avid, lowest-handicap memberships in the country.
Now out in Mullen, a five-hour drive to the west, it was time for something very different: remote, devoid of home sites or country club amenities, and focused exclusively on the game of golf. Several inquiries led Youngscap to the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who at that time (1990) were still very much newcomers to the architecture business. Crenshaw had long been a student of traditional design and managed to distinguish himself among his PGA Tour peers by pursuing a genuine love of design history while playing with impressive success. In a quarter century of professional golf he won nineteen PGA Tour events, including the 1984 and 1995 Masters, and was inducted in 2002 into the World Golf Hall of Fame. While many of his peers gestured toward architecture in clichés about “seeing everything in front of you” or liking links golf (even as they played a strictly aerial game), Crenshaw could speak in exquisite detail about shotmaking, the ground game bounces, and the way green contours influenced approach angle and tee shot placement. In short he understood strategy and used it in his play.
Crenshaw’s partner, Bill Coore, learned the trade in the field working on construction crews for Dye and went on to become a respected superintendent and course builder in Texas. He teamed up with Crenshaw in 1986, and they had designed only a handful of layouts before Sand Hills, both of them high-end resort courses: Barton Creek in Austin, Texas; and the Plantation Course at Kapalua Resort on Maui, Hawaii.
The idea of an utterly simple, links-inspired course at Sand Hills routed over native sand dunes appealed to both men’s classical temperaments. The logistics were daunting, however. Just getting out there and back was a major undertaking. And there were further questions about taking on such a remote site. What if they built it and nobody came?
Upon first visiting the region in September 1990, Coore and Crenshaw knew they were onto something. Crenshaw says that at the time he only had two recollections of the Sandhills. One was from a color photograph that golf course architecture historian Ron Whitten had included in a volume he cowrote with Geoffrey Cornish in 1981 called The Golf Course; the image looks like one of the towering sand dunes holes at Royal St. George’s in England, except this one didn’t show a golf course at all and wasn’t anywhere near Mullen. The photo was actually taken 125 miles away, near O’Neill, the “Irish Capital” of Nebraska, and simply showed the rugged look of the native Sandhills terrain. The other image Crenshaw had in mind was a black-and-white photo of the Sandhills region in an article about local ranching that appeared in the magazine Southwest Art. That’s not a lot to go on, but obviously it was enough to register with Crenshaw and intrigue him enough to make the visit.
Coore and Crenshaw flew into North Platte. On the way in, they could see that just to the north of the airport, the land started getting very interesting. From there they transferred over to a helicopter for an aerial tour of the region. Crenshaw had an eerie premonition of good things to come the minute after he exchanged pleasantries with the helicopter pilot, Jim Simon. Crenshaw quickly found out that Simon, who operated a building construction firm out of North Platte, was married to professional golfer Judy Kimball, a three-time winner on the LPGA. Crenshaw knew her well because they both were longtime students of the same instructor in Austin, Texas, the legendary Harvey Penick.
For the next three hours Crenshaw and Coore toured the skies over central Nebraska in search of ideal golf ground. “Oh my Lord,” Crenshaw recalls saying to Coore at the time. “Will you look at that?” There was rippling, sandy ground everywhere. “I had no idea it took up a quarter of the state,” he later said. “It was too much to take in all at once.” But they tried, gawking at what they saw and leaning over from one side of the helicopter to the other for a better view.
Meanwhile, back on earth, Youngscap and some potential partners frantically chased after them in a black Chevy Suburban pickup truck. The problem they faced was that for all the land they surveyed that day, it was hard to find available ground they could buy. People held onto vast tracts for generations, and acreage didn’t often come up on the open market.
It also took Youngscap a few months to convince Coore and Crenshaw that he was serious about building a course so far from civilization. What they finally settled on was part of the old Hager ranch, eight thousand acres of treeless scrub on the banks of the Dismal River, eleven miles southwest of Mullen.
Youngscap remembers the first time he looked out on the property. He stood upon a knoll at what is now “Ben’s Porch,” the little halfway house overlooking the ninth green at Sand Hills Golf Club. In those days there was nothing but sand blowouts, cattle tracks, and wisps of prairie grass to look at.
“Isn’t that the biggest mess you’ve seen in your life?” asked one rancher as he looked out upon the land with the group.
“I think it’s the most beautiful piece of ground I’ve ever seen,” said Youngscap.
He calls his decision to build a golf outpost there “an emotional impulse, not a rational decision.” But he also figured he could make it work if he could keep the front-end costs down. His mantra then was that “more courses have been ruined by too much money than by too little.”
With Sand Hills he certainly didn’t have too much. He put together a modest investor’s group of fifteen intrepid golf enthusiasts and bought the land for $150 per acre—$1.2 million in all. He trusted Coore and Crenshaw with stewarding the project by maximizing the native rolls and sand hills and without having to bulldoze anything. The water source was right there underneath the land in the form of the massive Ogallala Aquifer. It is perhaps the country’s most extensive freshwater source—174,000 square miles across the High Plains, underlying almost all of Nebraska and stretching from Wyoming to South Dakota in the north down to New Mexico and Texas. At Sand Hills Golf Club, a well reached water at only 150 feet below the surface, and the water-bearing sand below ran down another 800 feet. Freshwater was abundant.
“The key to the whole project,” says Youngscap, “is that we had the three basic elements right there in the ground: contours, sand, and water.”
Youngscap knew he’d have to work closely with the town and its people. He needed their labor, their equipment, and, most of all, their comfort with the project. So, instead of imposing something on the land, he built a golf course that fit in with the Sandhills culture and topography.
Finding holes was the easy part. Over a two-square mile area Coore and Crenshaw routed some 130 potential holes. There was no limit to the possibilities on this barren, crumpled land. With their native washes and blowouts of sand, the grassed dunes offered all manner of perfectly natural settings for tees, fairways, bunkers, and greens. The hard part was narrowing down the choices and then puzzling through the connections in the chain.
For years afterward Coore remained somewhat defensive when told by some admiring observer of the course that with all of those possible holes, laying out the course was easy. “Sure, there were holes everywhere,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they made sense as a walkable composition. For all the holes out there, they were often separated by lots of steep land or terrain that would never work for golf. So we had to find not just the best holes, but the best combination that had a rhythm and a feel that worked from start to finish.”
The process took numerous visits over a two-year period. Sometimes the two designers would walk out there with local ranchers who knew the nature of land and wind in the Sandhills and who could tell them what might happen to a blowout or flat spot from years of wind and erosion. This wasn’t the sort of place you could simply install a bunker or fairway or green and assume it would stay there. The land out here evolves over weeks and months, with erosion patterns that need to be respected. The routing of holes had to pay homage to these natural processes lest fairways disappear, collapse, or get covered by encroaching sand dunes.
One thing Coore and Crenshaw didn’t have to worry about was a lengthy local permitting process. Out in Santa Barbara, California, Coore and Crenshaw were in the middle of what would turn out to be a fruitless sixteen-year process seeking permission to build a golf course on land abutting the habitat of an endangered gnatcatcher. Luckily, there were no endangered species on the old Hager ranch. Nor were there any wetlands. One day Coore, fresh off the plane from another unproductive permit meeting in Southern California, accompanied Youngscap into what passed for county governance in Hooker County. They asked the county manager what the procedure was for gaining approval for a golf course. The official asked them if they owned the land free and clear. When told that Youngscap’s investor group did indeed own the land, the official simply said, “Well, then, this is America, and if it’s your land, you can do what you see fit with it.” And with that the impromptu meeting was over and necessary permits secured.
The golf course was planned and built in a very old-fashioned way. The holes were basically found, with little more than some hand labor needed to get them into shape, plus a few nudges from a light bulldozer here, a few days of digging with a shovel there. All told, precisely two thousand cubic yards of earth were moved during construction. This in an era when it was not uncommon for a Pete Dye, Tom Fazio, or Jack Nicklaus to move a million cubic yards of dirt. Construction costs for Sand Hills were one-tenth of standard budgets for the mid-1990s. A state-of-the-art, multilayered green with internal drainage meeting technical specifications set out by the United States Golf Association and its Green Section agronomists generally costs about $50,000 to build, for one green, or $950,000 for a full set (including the practice green). At Sand Hills, Youngscap spent $300 apiece, $5,700 in total. The resulting course cost all of $970,000, three-quarters of it spent on the irrigation system. One of the interested partners, Bill Kubly, owned a major golf course construction firm based in Lincoln and provided technical help, especially on the irrigation.
Much of the fine shaping work was undertaken by handwork, with Coore and Crenshaw’s own team using rakes and shovels. They were helped by two lifelong golf guys, Dave Axland and Dan Proctor, who through their bunker and greens shaping at Sand Hills have gone on to become quiet legends in the business. Axland got his start on the turf and maintenance side; Proctor came through the golf shop. Together, via a ragtag firm called Bunker Hill Golf, Inc., they have built and also designed some intriguing, modest-budget courses throughout the American West and Southwest. Their own design approach, reflected in Sand Hills, involves respect for native features and enhancing rather than creating anew what’s already in the ground. It’s an approach they used while doing work for Coore and Crenshaw, and it’s now evident in their own independent work at Delaware Springs Golf Course in the Texas Hill Country and Wild Horse Golf Club in Gothenburg, Nebraska—the latter a kind of Sand Hills for the everyday golfer.
The ground at Sand Hills was easy to work with—sand always is, but Coore and Crenshaw had especially fine-grained particles to work with. On most inland sites in the United States, heavier clay and loam soils are not ideal for golf course turf and don’t percolate—drain—very well. Bringing in high-quality sand that meets rigorous laboratory certified construction specifications can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. When the design team sent the native sand out there off to a soils lab for testing, the agronomist called back and asked, “Where did you get this greens mix?” Construction of fairways and greens basically consisted of rototilling the existing surface contours. Greens were seeded with bent grass and the fairways with a firmer-bladed fescue. The problem wasn’t shaping the course. It was in getting the seed to germinate.
Actually, it was in getting the seed to stay put. The winds were brutal at times—as they were, it turned out, right after the first seed was laid in May 1994. Youngscap recalls the frustration he felt as howling winds blew the seed off the fairway twice. At one point he sat down along one of the fairways and found himself in near despair confronting the possibility that the place “just wasn’t meant to be a golf course” and that he might have to give up his project. Finally, the weather cooperated. And it helped that he could devise an irrigation system with enough staying power to keep the course moist while the seed took. To pressurize the system, he hauled in three railroad tank cars from Lincoln, buried them in the ground, hooked them up to his irrigation network, and filled them with enough air to form a giant compressor to power up the entire system.
Weather took its toll on the turfgrass year-round. Average rainfall was only fifteen inches annually. But that sort of average didn’t account for the “all or nothing” quality of storm bursts interspersed with drought periods, or the seeming seven-year cycles of damp weather and then dry weather. There were also severe temperature extremes to deal with. Cool season turfgrasses don’t usually have to endure ranges that go from thirty below in winter to one hundred degrees in summer. Sometimes those extremes could hit in one day. It was not unusual on a lovely, clear September day for the conditions to plummet from vibrancy at seventy-five degrees to shutdown mode at thirty-five degrees within two hours. Winds of forty or fifty miles per hour are common, sometimes in searing heat, other times in winter. Perhaps the greatest danger to turfgrass came from exposure to cold, desiccating weather, when the winds from a Chinook could bear down on exposed turfgrass without the protective cover of snow and kill it off in a matter of hours. Dense snowpack would provide protective cover. But snows did not sit long on the windswept prairie. Perhaps the hardest part of the job that Youngscap and his first golf course superintendent, Cory Crandall, faced was keeping the turfgrass moist enough to live through the winter.
A typical underground system, once installed, had to be turned off and emptied of water to avoid freezing through in winter. Keeping dormant turfgrass alive required surface pipe and hand watering. Turf loss was a big problem during the first few years; each spring Sand Hills had to regrass acres of fairway. When your season for active golf only runs from June 1 through early October, it’s tough to have to deal with turfgrass recovery on areas that are getting heavy play. The winters were brutal, and it was exhausting for the small crew to haul a forty-foot section of pipe around and couple it up to hoses for hand spraying. At one point Youngscap, ever the inventive and experimental type, got hold of a snowmaking machine from a ski resort and tried it out over a winter. Unfortunately, the snow it created did not stay put. Eventually, Youngscap and the maintenance staff devised a system for moving enough pipe around on low and exposed areas of turfgrass that they could get through winters without devastating damage.
The results of all that labor are stunning. Sand Hills Golf Club is a par-71 course that snuggles in tightly to the ground. As you first look out upon it from the rise at the end of the mile-long path from the clubhouse, you see wide ribbony fairways, a few scattered flags fluttering in the wind, and some flashes of sand that approximate the look of bunkers. None of it quite comes through as a standard golf course because your eye cannot trace some continuous thread linking a conventional sequence of tee-fairway-green on this rolling land. The forms seem distended, exaggerated, and yet stunning in their shape—as if the raw elements of a golf course are lying around waiting to be assembled.
The first hole suddenly unfolds, or at least seems to, at a cross-angle that allows your eye to follow a fairway landing area but doesn’t seem to lead to a green. Only halfway down the hole do you look up and see that immense target atop a slope and realize it’s meant to be the putting surface. And yet everything seems to shift when you are out here. You walk a few yards and change your angle of vision, and the course metamorphoses into an alien landscape. Or walk off the back of the second green, as I do each time I’m there, for effect, and suddenly you are facing north and looking out onto a vast, unmarked plain without the scantest evidence of golf or civilization or even a ranch settlement.
There are no standard reference points out here: no trees; lakes; signature holes; red, white, and blue yardage disks in the fairways; bunker rakes; ornamental flowerbeds; memorial topiary; benches; or signage. This is golf as basic as it gets.
Sand Hills feels more like a frontier outpost than a country club. The parking lot is unpaved and unlit, and the porte cochere consists of a simple overhang supported by spindly wooden posts. Daily life starts and ends at a modest clubhouse that offers a fine restaurant, a comfortable bar, and a tiny changing room where you park your street shoes under the bench and hang up your outer jacket on hooks. The original Coore-Crenshaw hand-drawn map showing a layout of 130 possible holes hangs on a wall alongside old maps of the Nebraska territory and a mounted collection of three dozen different kinds of barbed wire from the 1880s.
Outside, terraced into the hillside just below, looking out onto the Dismal River, twenty-four double- and quadruple-occupancy guest cottages provide spartan accommodations. No one worries about tee times because there’s not a clock to be found on the grounds. With the sun rising early on the easternmost edge of the Rocky Mountain Time Zone, life gets off to a quick start each morning. In midsummer folks start wandering in for breakfast at 6 a.m., then hop in carts with caddies hanging on the back with the golf bags and ride the mile north to the golf course. Few golfers seem even to stop off at the practice range that’s at the midway point along the cart path. When you’ve traveled so far to get there, it’s hard to contain your excitement and revert to the routines of warming up. The prevailing view seems to be, why waste time hitting practice balls when you could be playing golf—often thirty-six or even fifty-four holes in a day? Twosomes or fivesomes, just about anything seems acceptable.
The membership, which is by invitation only, needs no reminders not to use cellular phones or PDAs or dress codes dictating proper shirts and slacks. They know what it’s like trying to land a 7-iron on the postage-stamp hole at Royal Troon in Scotland, and when they end up with a strange lie in the rough at Sand Hills, they play on rather than complain about it being “unfair.”
Sand Hills is intimately embedded in its locality and is not one of those places that are helicoptered into. The staff are all local. Many of them had never been on a golf course before, yet they soon learn this course, the habits of its players, and the small geometries and choreography of accompanying players during a round. In an effort to resist the feeling of members just dropping in, Youngscap has steadily resisted requests to build a local airfield that might accommodate charter and privately owned planes. He wants that fifty-five-mile drive in from North Platte to be part of the golf experience here.
For most Americans, Nebraska is a flyover state, commonly experienced—if at all—from the fleeting vantage point of thirty-seven thousand feet. And from there, way overhead in the jet stream on a cross-country airplane, the vast open space designated as “Nebraska” by the map in the seat pocket doesn’t look very compelling. Certainly not for golf. But when viewed from the ground, the land here has an alluring quality, with massive rolls and natural blowouts. And from the vantage point behind a car window moving along a highway, the keen eye of a golfer spots resplendent holes everywhere. The irony is that if you want to experience a modern variant of classic, seaside linksland, the place to go isn’t on either of the North American continent’s coasts but as far away from them as you can get, dead center in the United States.
Youngscap pioneered the idea of quality golf here in the middle of the United States. The accolades accorded Sand Hills and the success of the modest business model he developed have drawn others to the region hoping to capitalize on the allure of the place.
Maybe it’s one of those strange, postmodern inversions of classic market law, with its emphasis on centrality: by contrast, in Nebraska the more remote and inaccessible, the more intense the emotional appeal. When it comes to golf, the place is magnetic. Among those properties newly emergent here under the spell of “build it and they will come” is a place called Dismal River.
“The sand has a mind of its own,” says Chris Johnston, chief executive officer of Dismal River Club. His course is also in Mullen, sort of. In fact, his 1,200-acre property sits only eight miles west of Sand Hills Golf Club. But to get there from Youngscap’s place, you have to drive eight miles north on Route 97, then make the left at the “Dismal River” sign and proceed along the entrance road west, then south, for seventeen miles—seventeen hypnotic miles. Along the way your emotions run the gamut: excitement, boredom, impatience, and as I can attest, anger at the owners for having placed the property in such a doubly remote place. It’s tough enough getting to Mullen. But then you have to get to Dismal River along a narrow, one and a quarter–lane road, where the lay-bys are too small and the falloff from pavement to off-road dirt too severe.
The initial development of Dismal River in 2005 was intended as a high-end alternative to its rustic neighbor, Sand Hills. Ambitious plans initially called for real estate lots, country club amenities, and fawning personal service. Jack Nicklaus, then in the middle of working with Tom Doak on Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton, New York, abandoned his usual high-modernist design style at Dismal River and adopted with a vengeance a ground-hugging routing that used the existing contours, faults and all.
Give the man credit for embracing a new style. Dismal River features pronounced saddled-out putting surfaces, a bunker in the middle of a par-3 green, option-laden drivable par-4s, a remnant windmill in front of a par-5 green, and lots of short-game recovery chipping areas around and behind putting surfaces. The acknowledgment of classic shot making was a welcome addition to the Nicklaus design repertoire, even if at times Dismal River has become overbaked and the contours too severe. But that’s what happens when you do a routing quickly and don’t watch the “mind of its own” quality of the land. Coore and Crenshaw took eighteen months to do their routing. Nicklaus took two days.
Which is why you go and tweak after opening a course. Some severe greens at Dismal River were eventually softened in their contouring. Washouts and poorly draining areas were regraded. Some fairways had to be reshaped to keep the ball in play. Gradually, the editing took hold. The course has now become far more playable.
Dismal River operates as a private club, though in an effort to showcase the remote place to prospective members, the management accommodates guests who have been introduced by their home club PGA professional. They’ve also made a point of welcoming the members of the course evaluation team at the major U.S. golf publications. And well accommodated the guests will be, thanks to two dozen rough-hewn cabins and a large, low-slung clubhouse looking out west over the riverbed to a steep wooded hillside. A purist might argue that with all the macho furnishings—the high-vaulted ceiling in the dining room, LCD sports TV screens, a meat and potatoes menu, an outdoor fire pit where the guys gather each night for cigars and storytelling—Dismal River feels like the little frat house on the prairie.
But all that gets left behind during the mile-long ride to the first tee. Along the way, if the windshield on your golf cart is down, you’re likely to get battered with grasshoppers. Their hard shells make them feel like small artillery. And what looked like undifferentiated fields during that seventeen-mile entrance drive now reveal themselves as painterly wildflowers and grasses, flecked by silver artemisia, blue salvia, white thistle, and wild sunflowers.
If, as an industry saying goes, “the third owner makes the money,” the new management team at Dismal River under Johnston finally has a chance. Johnston is not only de facto general manager but also head cheerleader and a whirling dervish of a publicist who knows how to network. He’s also not been afraid to make more changes in the Nicklaus course. And now he’s gone out on a limb and hired Doak to build a second course, this one with a routing through broad, open prairie, then under a dramatic bluff, and finishing with two holes on the Dismal River. When it opened in 2013, it immediately became another reason to make the trek.
But a long, slow trek it is, especially for those golfers who see travel to the country’s interior as an ordeal rather than as a hajj.
Seventy-five miles north of Mullen, through the heart of the Sandhills and close to the South Dakota border, sits The Prairie Club in Valentine. It’s the newest incarnation of the regional golf genre and the first one structured as a resort, meaning that anyone can stay and play. Actually, it’s a hybrid, including daily-fee play, a private membership component, and guest play for those staying at the resort’s thirty-one-room lodge or its trio of eight-bedroom cabins.
Golfers here face terrain that juxtaposes rolling grassed duneland with pine groves and the steep banks of the Snake River Canyon. There are two eighteen-hole courses that, while sitting side by side, are markedly different in styling and presentation.
The Graham Marsh–designed Pines Course ambles along the high ground overlooking the well-treed Snake River Canyon. It would be nice if you could actually see the canyon, even better if you could play along or across it. The whole place feels like you are not quite in the Nebraska Sandhills. There’s a lot of motion to the putting surfaces, all of it built in rather than sitting on the natural contours. You can tell because many of the greens have the telltale sign of having been built, with rounded mounds behind them, reliable evidence that a contractor working on a bulldozer hived up the dirt and created the putting surfaces and surrounds. And with many of the tees sitting right at grade level, you end up playing many tee shots uphill or at least threading drives through tree corridors that are narrow at the outset and then widen up farther down the fairway.
The Tom Lehman–designed Dunes Course, by contrast, sits on a vast, unadorned prairie-sized site and is routed in a huge counterclockwise loop. Just walking the course is something of an adventure, not least because of the substantial hikes from green to tee and because at every point where Lehman could have chosen soft ground for his holes he opted for the more demanding terrain. With its enormous greens—averaging 12,500 square feet—it’s clearly built on a massive scale and feels like it fills up the whole prairie. There are some impressive shots into greens, most of which seem uphill. Overall, it’s an example of an opportunity to use the land that went awry in the name of trying to be dramatic and memorable.
Good golf course design and cultivating a distinct sense of a unique place often take restraint and understatement. Maybe it’s my own tendency to overread landscape architecture. But the same ambition to impress is evident in the clubhouse-hotel building as in the golf courses. The main lodge, thirty-eight thousand square feet, is big and gaudy and awkward to negotiate—as if the floors don’t align and the adjoining room functions are mismatched. There I felt just as lost inside as I did outside.
That’s not at all the case at Wild Horse Golf Club, in Gothenburg, back on Route 80. Here is the simplest and most unadorned of all golf courses in the country, yet it’s also one of those rare public facilities where the game’s diverse demography is on full display. Gucci-clad A-listers just off their G-5 jets into Lincoln or North Platte line up at the first tee next to ranch hands in cargo pants with six packs on their golf carts. The course, opened in 1999, was designed and built by Dave Axland and Dan Proctor, two of the fellows who helped build Sand Hills Golf Club. At Wild Horse the ground contours and feature work of bunkers and greens they honed look like they were hand cut with a pocketknife. Knee-high, wavy field grasses atop bunkers and in roughs have a strange way of hiding intended target areas as soon as you veer from the ideal line. The clubhouse is your basic prairie outpost: one big room for the pro shop, bar, and restaurant, a walk-around veranda outside with a 360-degree view of the golf course. With its simple fare and cluttered pro shop, it makes you feel like you’re in a small-town general store. With a weekend green fee of $45, Wild Horse must surely be the best value in U.S. golf. It’s also a place where you know exactly where you are—flat out in the American heartland.
Strange things happen out here. Bunkers move. Fairways erode. The very ground shifts, sometimes invisibly. Awarii Dunes Golf Course in Axtell, six miles south of Kearney, had its opening in the spring of 2011 thrown off completely by floods on the back nine that literally came up from nowhere. For all the concern about drawing down the Ogallala Aquifer, in fact the water table is uneven through the subsurface sands. In—or should I say, under?—Kearney County, along with neighboring Phelps and Gosper Counties, the water table has actually been rising. With heavy rains throughout the Midwest, the Platte River and its tributaries ran unusually high, and farmers didn’t use their center pivot irrigation systems as much. Thus, they didn’t draw down the aquifer, and the rising water table infiltrated the lower-lying fairways at Awarii Dunes, leading to water pockets, turf damage, and interrupted play.
There are more dramatic examples of nature having a mind of its own, such as the storm that broke over Sand Hills Golf Club on the last night of my visit in August 2011. It was a beautiful, clear Sunday afternoon, but as the round proceeded into late afternoon, heavy storm clouds loomed in the west. Three nights earlier a hailstorm had descended upon the site, leaving ice balls everywhere and pockmarked turf instead of smooth ground. Youngscap told us of the danger posed to cattle by such hail—that their eyes get so pummeled by the ice that they can literally go blind. Or that lightning strikes will occasionally hit cattle huddled together and take out a dozen or more all at once.
As these clouds formed near us, one fellow started talking about “anvil clouds,” misshaped formations in the sky that were indented in the middle because of differential wind and air pressure impinging at two distinct altitudes. And then as the storm descended, we were treated to a four-hour light show of stunning power and brilliance, a slow-moving strobe light display that would momentarily flash-freeze the landscape into a two-dimensional image, then release it back into its normal flow and depth. And as I watched this, I thought back to Willa Cather’s description of a summer storm that her heroine Ántonia Shimerda had witnessed: “The thunder was loud and metallic, like the rattle of sheet iron, and the lightning broke out in great zigzags across the heavens, making everything stand out and come close to us for a moment.”
All of which adds to the haunting power of this land and to the mystery of such lovely ground. And I felt lucky to have found a reason to come here, to the heartland of the American prairie, if only to play golf. For here, on land that is only matched in its haunting beauty by the links of Ireland and Scotland, one takes refuge and solace.
It’s not a place that most golfers know about or can even imagine. But if they cannot play it, then at least they can read a fictional account of it from My Ántonia that lives on from nearly a century ago: “I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”