Why Not Minot?
I have seen the future of golf, and it looks like a ten-some in cargo pants.
For too long, spoiled PGA Tour millionaires have seemingly dominated the game’s values. Private club members try to impress their guests with flawlessly groomed fairways and lightning-quick greens whose speeds are posted as if at a racetrack. Meanwhile, slow-playing zombies clad in khaki slacks and white (collared) golf shirts have brought the game to a temporal and cultural halt. Which is why, by contrast, a visit to the country’s “flyover zone” will quickly cure one of such misperceptions—or at least instill in folks, as it did in me, faith that an alternative spirit of down-to-earth public golf is very much alive and kicking.
The epiphany came on a cold July day in the summer of 2009, as I stood on the first tee of the Minot Country Club in North Dakota, watching a charity outing gather for a shotgun start—with all the teams dispersed across the golf course and starting simultaneously from separate holes and playing all eighteen holes from there in. It was a chilly fifty degrees, the wind felt around fifteen miles per hour, and the threat of rain was palpable. Yet here were 180 people, each having paid $75 to support the Minot State University’s Athletic Department (Go Beavers!). Sweatshirts predominated, though there were a few hearty souls clad in T-shirts. As for pants, well, even among the men, shorts outnumbered full-length slacks by about four to one. And of course those stylish cargo pants—ideal for warming up the hands and with all of that pocketed storage space equally ideal for carrying around an extra can of beer or two.
Meanwhile, I needed a helmet because the players were all grouped into five-person teams (three carts per team), and they were heading off to play on the basis of two teams per hole, thus as ten-somes—a first that I had ever witnessed, and with six golf carts per group, so it looked decidedly like an invasion force. Why two teams playing at once? I guess someone had to keep watch on each five-some lest they have a rules question or accidentally write down the wrong score. The result in terms of course management was simply a mad scramble, with more golf balls flying than at a Tokyo driving range. Pace of play turned out better than anyone could have predicted. In five and half hours they were done, and then they could head inside to refuel. Oddly enough, they played golf wearing grievously too little clothing for my sartorial taste and then, when finished, donned sweaters to relax indoors by the fireplace, drinking more beer.
The liquid refreshment that North Dakota Golf Association executive director Steve Bain refers to as “aiming fluid” is a staple of the North Dakota golf scene, even at officially sponsored state association tournaments. I clearly remember that when I played in the 1996 North Dakota State Men’s Stroke Play Championship at the newly opened Links of North Dakota in Williston, the drink stand at the halfway house consisted of a beer keg. Actually, it was the only nourishment available mid-round. Nor, in retrospect, should I have been surprised when reviewing that 1996 state event to have seen contestants sporting sandals or boots with golf spikes or, for that matter, tank tops. When asked if a dress code was in place for the eight statewide championships he runs, including the state’s three-man best ball (in which they go off in six-somes), Bain seemed taken aback. “Of course we do,” he said. “Shirts.”
Welcome to North Dakota, where golf in the middle of a vast, windswept prairie is fun, inexpensive, and unpretentious. States with one member in the House of Representatives are not generally known as golf destinations. But North Dakota’s Department of Commerce Tourism Division makes a big deal out of its Lewis & Clark Golf Trail. The grouping of twenty public layouts sprawls across the state’s western expanse and includes badlands, grasslands, and farmlands.
Actually, the state’s 105 golf courses are all publicly available, even the predominantly private membership clubs such as Minot Country Club. With frigid winters and short winter daylight, it’s no surprise that folks here like to play outdoors when the weather allows—a season that runs at least from mid-May through late September. After that golf is a dicey—or icy—enterprise. And when the weather allows, watch out. The state sports a golf participation rate approaching 20 percent—nearly twice the national average and exceeded only by Minnesota.
Sara Otte Coleman, the state’s director of the Division of Tourism, points out that with most of the state on the western edge of the Central Time Zone, residents effectively enjoy an extra hour of late sunlight for golf after work.
“Along with hunting, fishing, and mountain biking, golf is a big draw,” Coleman says. One virtue of the state, by the way, is that it’s easy to get things done here, such as seeing government officials. For starters Coleman’s office in Bismarck is easy to find. “Just take the highway down from Minot and turn left at the Space Alien Café. We’re right behind it,” she told me.
North Dakota, as it turns out, is a fascinating if unusual place for serious golfers to find refuge and value. In fact, there’s a lesson to be gleaned from the spirit of North Dakota golf. In an era when the industry struggles to retain players and attract new ones, the future of the game requires making sure that golf is inexpensive, accessible, and socially welcoming. Of course, those extra daylight hours after work help too.
Selling the virtues of North Dakota is made easier because the economy is actually expanding, with unemployment under 5 percent and a $1 billion state budget surplus. For a state with only 675,000 people, that’s a surplus of $1,481 per resident. In an era when most other states are running huge budget shortfalls and suffering chronic unemployment, North Dakota is advertising for workers in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio to meet the state’s labor needs. Oil and gas development is booming, and it’s not uncommon to see kids recruited right out of high school to earn $65,000 a year hauling pipe out in the energy exploration fields. Trucks ply the roads west from Bismarck and Minot so heavily that unpaved areas are getting beat into submission, and the state has a backlog of road repair and paving on its hands. There’s such a shortfall of housing that hotel rooms are all but impossible to find. Long before they opened, the seven more hotels in construction or on the drawing board in Minot were all booked up through 2013.
The healthy economy and state budget surplus are enough to make politicians look good—no mean feat these days. Among those riding the wave of good times has been moderate Republican John Hoeven, a two-term governor who hitched onto the coattails of the state’s good fortune from Bismarck into Washington DC, where he established himself as North Dakota’s junior senator in 2011. He’s also a longtime mid-handicap golfer and member of the Minot Country Club. His dad, Jack, a career banker and also a Minot CC member, spearheaded the local fund-raising effort for the city’s First Tee facility for junior golfers, the Jack Hoeven Wee Links Golf Course (with a $1 green fee for kids, $5 for those fourteen years and older).
A couple of years after I watched the ten-somes attack Minot CC, I came back to the town, this time looking at golf under very different circumstances. I’m standing on top of a grassed coulee just west of Minot looking out for miles in every direction. It’s seventy degrees, the sky crystalline blue, and there’s scarcely a wisp of wind on this perfectly clear day. I’m feeling the wide open spaces and thinking about the wide open fairways.
For a state that can shiver in the face of an Alberta clipper half the winter and char half the summer from searing hot wind, a day like this seems to have been made by the chamber of commerce. I’m told there are about ten days a year like this in North Dakota and that I should not get too carried away.
But I cannot help myself. I’m out here on this virgin grassland to evaluate the site for a potential golf course, and I’m trying really hard not to get excited about the holes I’m constructing in my mind. I’m also torn—between thinking this could be the next great place in golf and wondering whether it’s best left untouched for at least another twenty thousand years. This is a place shaped by glaciers and the ensuing erosion. The grass feels three feet thick. Butterflies are dancing along the tops of purple sage, sunflowers, and a tall thick stemmy plant the locals call—with good reason—“stinkweed.” To me it’s got the freshest smell in the world. And I feel guilty just contemplating the ground for golf.
As I look down the slope at the toe of the coulee two hundred feet below me, I see the results of relentless beavers that have cut down ash trees and dammed up a small stream. Down in the wet meadow that runs west to east into town, a half dozen good-sized deer run freely near the woodland edge. It’s their land, and we’re the interlopers.
Across the coulee on the flat beyond the upslope of the meadow, I spot a speck in the sky. It turns out to be a single-engine crop duster. The image triggers memories of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. But I’m not sure how to express the film reference to the folks I’m with without sounding didactic or snobbish, so I hold off. As a city boy, I’m out of my element here and just trying to fit in to a world that seems so rooted in nature and the outdoors. Better just to buckle myself in behind a seat belt of the four-wheel-drive Mule we’re in and marvel at the ride up, down, and across this stunning prairie landform.
Five miles to the east, beyond the train track trestle that sits at the low end of the valley, the town of Minot lies in ruins. A quarter of it, anyway, ravaged by floods that have seen the Mouse River overspill its banks and reach levels that far surpassed what’s defined as a “one hundred–year flood.”
A layman might be excused for thinking that such a statistic referred to a “once-in-a-century” event. In fact, it simply means that there’s a 1 percent chance of it occurring in any given year. Minot last reached the hundred-year flood stage in 1969, with water topping out at an elevation of 1,555 feet above sea level. Then in June 2011 the water level soared 9 feet higher, tantamount to what hydrogeologists would classify as a five hundred–year event. Record snowpack in the Intermountain West (along the eastern outslope of the Rockies) saw springtime streamflows trending dangerously close to alarm levels. Next came torrential late-spring downpours throughout eastern Montana, North Dakota, and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The entire Missouri River drainage basin backed up. So did the system just to the north, which ultimately empties into Canada’s Hudson Bay.
The Mouse River, which flows right through downtown Minot, is anomalous in that it starts and ends in Canada but loops down into North Dakota. A joint commission of American and Canadian engineers oversaw controlled releases from nearby Lake Darling, providing capacity for drainage in the whole region but also ensuring that the Mouse River would flow well beyond its normal spring rates. By mid-April 2011 the Army Corps of Engineers knew it would have a flood on its hands and began preparing for it in Minot with temporary dykes through residential and commercial neighborhoods.
By mid-June the town of forty-three thousand people looked like a war zone, with nearly every available dump truck, bulldozer, and skip loader in the state mobilized for action. In what must have seemed like a massive construction project gone awry, these various trucks crawled around the town searching for large piles of dirt they could grab and amass into makeshift levees. But the waters proved ceaseless. On June 22 and 23 the river overspilled even these stopgap earthworks. The town had to be evacuated. Throughout the northwest side of town streets filled with water, and roads turned into impassable streams. The Amtrak station and railway line downtown were rendered useless. Rushing water eroded bridge abutments, turning once-busy streets and highways into ghost paths. All told, three thousand homes, a quarter of the town’s residences, took in enough water to be made uninhabitable. A month after the floods started receding, the carnage was, at least to my eye, biblical in scope, with mud lines reaching into the second floors of houses, debris piles along the street awaiting pickup, and the abandoned houses now all but hollowed out as residents sought desperately to remove mold, dry out walls, replace electrical wiring and plumbing, and somehow salvage their lives.
Back at the Minot Country Club, I’m touring a course that has been devastated. The inside of the clubhouse looks like the stateroom of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean. Chairs, tables, bottles, and mirrors are shattered, walls ripped open, cabinets askew, wires exposed, and the place smells from mildew. There’s a watermark at the eight-foot level that runs the width of the main dining room windows showing exactly how high the floodwaters got. The building is a total loss. And outside, the golf course isn’t much better. Trees have been uprooted; the lower two-thirds of the property was covered by as much as twenty-five feet of water. That’s now receded, but it left behind chalky gravel that has laid waste to the underlying turfgrass. The greens surfaces have desiccated and cracked, leaving behind a kind of archaeological trace in the form of old cup hole outlines that have now puckered up—perverse evidence of a previous life.
Longtime superintendent Bruce Ruppert rescued his maintenance equipment by lining it up on the highest point of the property, along the sixth fairway and the range. He also stored tools and gear near the house he occupies on dry ground on the north side of the course. Now his place looks like a hillbilly’s front yard, but at least his equipment was saved. That’s more than can be said for his maintenance building, which sat at a low spot near the river and is a total loss. Just getting onto the golf course is a problem because a temporary dike occupies the entrance road and the parking lot is buckled and broken up beyond use or recovery.
That’s all a far cry from what I saw in 2009. Back then, when John Hoeven was still governor, he took time out from his official state duties to meet and greet a group of us who were on a grand tour of the state’s courses. “We” were forty-five golf course evaluators representing Golfweek magazine. We’re actually part of a much larger national group I run and often accompany on tours of various golf courses throughout the United States and abroad. In this case we were just concluding a four-day bus tour of North Dakota’s westernmost golf destinations.
We had invited the governor, an avid golfer, to join us for a round at his hometown course in Minot. He would play later that day, but not before meeting us and staying on for lunch, by which time he was on a first-name basis with nearly everyone.
Among those he already knew very well was a local dentist, Mark Hildahl—a longtime member of our rating team who has been golfing at Minot CC as a member for two decades. He and a fellow dentist from Bismarck had been to so many of our Golfweek rater outings elsewhere in warm-weather states that I used to kid them about causing a dental health care crisis at home when they left the state. “Well,” said Hildahl, “why not bring the raters here?”
After reading a New York Times Sunday Magazine article in 2008 about rural depopulation in the Peace Garden State, I figured the least we could do as a golf publication was spread the good word about a state that actually had two of the highest-rated public courses in the country, the Hawktree Golf Club in Bismarck and the Links of North Dakota in Williston. We contacted the state tourism board, and it wasn’t long thereafter that we announced the Prairie Dog Tour, with golf in Bismarck, Medora, Minot, and Williston. Folks accustomed to places like Pebble Beach and Pinehurst didn’t hesitate to sign up, and the trip sold out in two weeks. Two course architects joined us for the tour: Jim Engh, who did Hawktree, and Stephen Kay, who designed the Links of North Dakota.
First stop was Bismarck, the state capital along the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark came through here and camped out at nearby Fort Mandan, as did an ill-fated Colonel Custer in the 1870s. A 1901 Spanish-style train station downtown conveys some of the city’s culture, and a modest in-town revival of historic structures gives bars such as Peacock Alley a smart, retro sensibility that animates this city of fifty-six thousand. You have to love the pace of a city where the six Starbucks in town get the Sunday New York Times and sell it all week long—no daily edition needed, thank you.
Those of us who got in a half day early warmed up with golf on the east side of town, at Apple Creek Country Club. Its original nine holes date to 1948 and snuggle in simply, though they are heavily overplanted with conifers. I suppose if I had to endure the expansive plains feel of the Dakotas year round, I’d look for some vertical relief in trees too. The second nine, opened in 1978, is more open in character but prone to flooding from the stream that gives this semiprivate club its name.
Nobody in the city had seen anything as dramatic or as mind-boggling as Hawktree when the daily-fee layout opened in 2000. Engh, who grew up in Dickinson, a hundred miles to the west, has made a big impression across the American West with courses that look and play like roller coaster rides. He’s spartan with bunkers—there are only thirty-six at Hawktree, and five holes have none. But the “sand” here is native black coal slag and gets your attention, not least because the traps are so deep they look like massive gashes in the earth. Engh calls them “muscle bunkers,” a term he uses to evoke the dense rippling of a well-honed physique.
Engh also loves massive punch bowl greens, steeply tiered putting surfaces, steroidal mounding, and the occasional tree right in the middle of the playing area. “I like messing with your mind,” he told us at an evening session devoted to his work. Funny, but for all the psychology and heavy-handed effort at certain aesthetic effects, most of us just prefer playing golf and having fun. The self-consciousness of his design has a certain scholastic or formal merit. But it seemed odd—a kind of unnecessary amplification—that he was intent on trying so hard to impress his ideas upon native grasslands that, in their own simpler native shapes, already had a quiet, unassuming appeal of their own.
The next morning we took a two-hour bus ride west along I-94 through the vast prairie grasslands to Medora. On the way we sampled that peculiar American flair for “Colossus of Roads” highway iconography. First there was thirty-eight-foot-high “Salem Sue,” a fiberglass construction touted as the world’s largest Holstein cow. An hour later, at exit 72, was a massive scrap metal sculpture, Geese in Flight; it’s the first of six oversized metal art displays along the thirty-two-mile “Enchanted Highway” running south to Regent. None has anything to do with golf.
The town of Medora, population one hundred, sits smack in the middle of the Little Missouri National Grassland. It’s basically a reenacted Old West cowboy and ranch tourist town run by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation in honor of the nation’s twenty-sixth president, who had long been associated with the area. Accommodations at the Badlands Motel and the Rough Riders Hotel were rustic and spartan to an extreme—ideal for the kind of jeans-and-T-shirt golf we were pursuing. Our dawn breakfast at the Cowboy Café was a high cholesterol treat, made all the more enjoyable because we had warned them we’d turn up early in droves, and they’d added extra help to accommodate us.
For City Slickers like us there was no way to avoid the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame or a rousing Broadway-style show, Medora Musical, at the Burning Hills Amphitheatre. Dinner there consisted of a pitchfork steak fondue. Forget any genteel delicacies—this is simply a sliced-up steer, the steaks skewered onto pitchforks and then dropped into hot oil over a charcoal fire. The meat is then served slathered with various dishes such as coleslaw, beans, and garlic bread drenched in butter. Like everything else in North Dakota, it tastes great but will probably kill you in the long run.
Medora somehow manages to tread the line between frontier town and theater for a Wild West revue. But it’s simple and folksy enough not to be mistaken for a theme park, and the natural setting out there in the Badlands compensates for any sense of artifice. A few in our group had no trouble spending an hour browsing through the impressive collection of cowboy lore, Native American culture, and frontier military history on offer at Western Edge Books. But the real attraction in town for most of us was a low-budget, daily-fee golf tract that cost only $1.7 million to build (for everything, including golf course and clubhouse), which architect Michael Hurdzan did for the foundation.
Bully Pulpit Golf Course, par-72, plays from 4,750 yards up to 7,166. The front nine sits on low ground along the Little Missouri River and is pleasant enough. But it’s the back nine that gets the goose bumps popping, starting with a very demanding tee shot on the long par-4 tenth and culminating in three absolutely wild holes, the fourteenth through sixteenth, in the middle of steep badlands.
From there we had another two-hour bus ride, this one north to Williston and then twenty-eight miles due east along the upper shore of five hundred–square–mile Lake Sakakawea. There sits the Links of North Dakota. When the course opened in 1995, it was hailed as a low-budget, daily-fee counterpart to another American heartland design, Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska. Despite high national regard, the Links of North Dakota suffered financially because of its remoteness and was sold at a bankruptcy auction in 2001. It’s now coping tolerably well, even while registering only ten thousand rounds a year.
Architect Stephen Kay, who was also with us on the Prairie Dog Tour, explained before our round that he had tried hard, despite not moving much earth, to minimize blind shots or at least enable groups to see the foursome ahead before they hit over slopes and mounds. The consensus was that on many holes it’s still tough to see the landing areas, and with the winds typically strong out here, it’s something of a guessing game where to drive off the tee. But with that massive lake as backdrop and with so many intriguing second shots and a pair of great short par-3s (the third and eleventh holes), the Links of North Dakota is really a joy. Affordable, too, with a green fee of $78 and an annual pass for unlimited golf costing $978.
The irony is that with intriguing, affordable places such as the Links of North Dakota, it’ll cost most people $1,000 to get there; meanwhile, there don’t seem to be enough North Dakotans willing to make the trek. Perhaps there’s also something to the notion that people who seem to spend so much of their work lives outdoors on wide open fields would prefer to do their relaxing in a less-exposed landscape, one dotted by trees and along a cool stream bank, for example.
Which is, I suppose, the appeal of what was the last stop on our grand tour of North Dakota golf, the Minot Country Club. Here inhabitants of this railroad junction town in the late 1920s created a country club and brought in a golf course designer from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to lay it out. Tom Vardon, then the pro at the highly respected White Bear Yacht Club, was an Englishman whose older brother, five-time British Open winner Harry Vardon, was among the most famous golfers in the world. Tom Vardon did a handful of designs in the upper Midwest and, while laying out a nine-hole routing for Minot, left behind plans for an additional nine that didn’t get built until 1952, long after his death.
The original nine was an un-treed plain. By the early 1940s club members had planted the site with poplars, pines, and cottonwoods. Each member was assigned a tree or two to keep watered. In the absence of a mechanized irrigation system, that meant hand-carrying buckets of water to each sapling. In that manner Minot took on the feel of a mature woodland. The only drawback was that the planting program was a bit soldier-like in that the trees tended to dot the entire site, without differentiation for dense copses in some areas and open spaces in others. Nor was there much regard for giving turfed areas adequate sunlight or air. But the effect on the membership was pleasant enough; they had their refuge in the form of a pleasant parkland golf course.
The adjoining Mouse River flooded in 1969 and again in 1976, and the club managed to dig itself out each time, twice adding a layer of protective dykes. The assumption was that the golf course would hence remain safe from the river’s occasional rage. But as folks like to say in the area, “The river has a mind of its own and is going to do what it wants to do.”
Following the monumental flood of 2011, Minot residents faced the prospects of rebuilding their golf course again. This time, however, the engineering issues were greater, and they faced the burden of a more extensive recovery than in the past. It’s also not clear that rebuilding on-site makes much sense because the Army Corps of Engineers has not yet decided on a plan for the area.
For all the sentiment of the members to have their course back, post-flood recovery won’t allow for it. The levees have to be built up, which also means widening them out at the base. Given the configuration of the main access road, that would make it impossible to access the existing clubhouse site or maintenance building. Those structures have to be relocated, ideally to higher ground and closer to the main road out of town.
As with any golf course routing or jigsaw puzzle, once you move a few pieces around, everything else has to get moved as well. Besides, a new routing of holes, with new turfgrass cover, rebuilt greens, and bunkers and a new irrigation system wouldn’t cost much more than rebuilding the entire golf course in place. But a rerouting would enable the club to expand its notoriously cramped practice range, develop better views of the site, and resolve some perennial problems with bad holes. Either that or move up to the coulee on the west side of town.
Despite the attractiveness of the possible site atop the coulee, however, the logistics of such a development are considerable for a membership that’s emotionally attached to the only site it’s known for eighty years. And a move up there or to somewhere else near town would probably have to take place in conjunction with a real estate development, which requires a big financial partner, along with negotiations over water, road access, sewage treatment, and orientation of the golf course vis-à-vis real estate lots. That could also take years, whereas reclaiming at least part of their current ground would take a few months. It might not make much economic sense in the long run, however. And it does nothing to address the risk of another flood.
As an outsider surveying the aftermath of the flood, I think that Minot’s residents have more important things on their hands than golf, such as rebuilding the town and its housing. But as a golfer and as a writer, I also know that folks in Minot are, in their own way, a lot like folks everywhere. They have a right to play as much as they have a right to work and to live in decent housing. And so they will apply their labors to their native North Dakota. In golf, as in life, you rebuild. I just envy the space they do it on.