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Henning: A golf round in Michigan’s north spurs memories, and new thrills

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Henning: A golf round in Michigan’s north spurs memories, and new thrills

Harbor Springs, Mich. — Sorting out the sensual bliss from 18 holes of golf was going to be tough after this reunion with The Donald Ross Memorial Course at Boyne Highlands:

▶ Solitude: I was playing Thursday with two friends from Indianapolis: Art Rettig, a retired team orthopedist for the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, as well as Mark Ford, a retired attorney from Indy and mutual pal from my new life on St. Simons Island, Georgia.

We were in awe, all of us, at Thursday’s mid-day quiet. No noise from maintenance vehicles. No sounds from other groups elsewhere on the course. Nothing but sweet songs from birds spread among those tall, lush-leaved trees framing 18 fascinating golf holes replicated from the original worldwide work of a master golf-design artist.

▶ Wildlife: A year-old whitetail deer bounded across the fairway, just forward of our tee on the Ross Memorial’s third hole. A pair of sandhill cranes trod through a bunker at the eighth. A wild turkey, sporting a healthy “beard” of at least 15 inches, and hunting for goodies in a swale only 50 yards away from out tee shot at, was unbothered as it traipsed across the rough, slipping into a tree-line where it gobbled, regally. A raven later barged onto my golf cart and stole a burger-box that had been lunch at the turn. On the 18th, which is meant to duplicate the 18th hole at Oakland Hills, a momma duck eased across a pond, five ducklings cruising behind her, single file.

▶ The golf: A glorious game is better Up North — it just is. The early-summer temperature (70 degrees after overnight showers had given the grass a nice drink) is what June ideally should feel like anywhere in the world. In that freshly mown grass, there was the sweet hint of alfalfa’s fragrance.

There also were enough good shots among the three of us to make those famous Ross holes and greens gratifying, especially so four days after the U.S. Open had wrapped up on a Ross treasure, the No. 2 Course at Pinehurst.

I said to Art and Mark as we left the 18th, after Mark nearly chipped-in for a birdie, and after someone nearly also birdied after hitting one of the best of his day’s drives and 7-irons:

“This was the most fun round of golf I’ve ever played.”

And it was, which 58 years after a personal golf baptism, was some tribute, given the privileges this game has offered, at so many places, around the world.

Thursday was everything golf should be: an intimate dance with nature; the unmatched gift of friendship shared during four hours of golf’s grandeur; the genius of golf architecture; the afterglow of sharing drinks on a patio overlooking nearby Crooked Lake; an ongoing evening celebration, among radiant friends, during dinner within the wine cellar at Chandler’s in Petoskey, all of it capped by perhaps a few more libations and a card game at the Rettigs’ spectacular shoreline home.

It was a reminder that Up North golf is, personally, exclusive in its gifts that keep giving.

It spurred, also, reflections. Much had changed — and, blessedly, much hadn’t — these past 42 years since a first golf trip to Michigan’s Great Lakes-area art gallery had offered a front-row seat to Michigan’s Up North golf odyssey. It is a story with chapters great and good. Also, it is a tale that’s imperfect, but only in how idealism sometimes clashed with reality.

It has gone like this:

Memories: First taste of Northern Michigan’s golf feast

It was July 9, 1982, a Friday. Golf was becoming a feature at some of those Up North resorts, and we were curious, four of us who worked for The Detroit News (Mark Lett, Rich Willing, Norm Sinclair, and myself), as we trekked to Crystal Mountain Resort, in Thompsonville, and to a then-18-hole layout that had been added as a summer adjunct to Crystal’s ski slopes.

This was in step with what Up North’s famous resort-golf pioneer, Everett Kircher, had begun in 1967 when he opened the Alpine Course at Boyne Mountain as a means for keeping his ski-staff employed year-round.

What sealed our infatuation with Crystal Mountain was not only the late-afternoon, nine-hole appetizer after we had checked in.

It was that night’s dinner.

We were on a package deal, with a dinner option: For an extra $10 per person, we could have a chef offer tableside dining within a quaint, candle-lit cedar loft. We opted to, uh, splurge.

By the time we had dug into our sauteed shrimp and sides, we clinked Lowenbrau bottles and toasted to our discovery.

It was to be, at least for a couple of us, something of a life change, as we booked a repeat trip in 1983. 

A year later, in August of 1984, Sinclair, Willing and I were bound for a now-annual Up North golf retreat, this time accompanied by late, great News cartoonist Larry Wright. We found our way to Boyne Mountain. We lavished in the Alpine Course’s sights, treats, and elevations. We made our way to Boyne City where we helped a couple of bars and restaurants stay solvent.

We were hooked, deeply and permanently.

Cut to 1985: Sinclair and I were on an undetermined golf itinerary, this time joined by our buddy and golf-design connoisseur, Nick Ficorelli. I had a friend and golf-resort contact, Tim Hygh, who then was working in media relations for Shanty Creek Resort, in Bellaire.

I hadn’t informed Hygh of our trip, but Sinclair pushed me to give him a shout as we stopped in Mancelona and I hit a pay phone (remember, this was 1985).

Hygh was delighted. “Come on over,” he all but commanded. “We’re opening a new course, Arnold Palmer-designed — The Legend — and you need to play it.”

It required, at most, three-quarters of a second to say “yes” and head for Shanty Creek — and to another, utterly unforgettable, afternoon.

We were playing the first few holes of the newly wrought Palmer course when from a hillside high above the seventh fairway, a golf car came bounding toward us, driven by then-Shanty Creek club professional Tom Weideman.

We were to bathe in two of the warmest, most cordial, most hospitable days of golf — and evenings of northern Michigan splendor — an imaginative mind could have conceived.

More springs, summers, and autumns of golf bliss would follow. It was part of the bounty a God-graced Great Lakes region offered, all fueled by the zeal and stewardship Kircher and others steadily were bringing to Michigan’s resort havens.

The Up North golf boom flourishes, shore to shore

It wasn’t as if golf in the northlands began with resorts. Belvedere Golf Club, in Charlevoix, opened in 1927 and was a favorite of no less than a Golf Hall of Fame visitor named Tom Watson. Crystal Downs, high atop Lake Michigan’s bluffs at Frankfort, was part of an Alister Mackenzie-sculpted trifecta that included Cypress Point and Augusta National.

By the early and mid-1980s, 60 years after Belvedere and Crystal Downs embodied golf’s decade of grand designs, it seemed everyone was getting in on northern Michigan’s golf fad.

Jack Nicklaus had been invited to create a Nicklaus-grade testament to long, power-punching tracks when he carved 18 heroic holes: The Bear at Grand Traverse Resort.

Soon, the celebrity-design trend was shrouding Gaylord. Harry Melling, of Melling Tool Co., in Jackson, hired Robert Trent Jones, Sr., to weave 18 holes into his Sylvan Ski Resort.

Jones persisted in calling his course “Treetops” — an obvious name when one gazed across the plunging slopes and miles of trees surrounding the Sturgeon River Valley and within the thousands of acres Melling owned.

The name stuck. So did its billboard status, helped not only by Jones’ grandiose design, but by the import from Ohio of a young, charismatic golf professional named Rick Smith. 

Smith doubled as one of America’s Top 50 golf instructors (Golf Magazine, and other publications agreed) and steadily began working with celebrity Tour stars, including two guys named Nicklaus and Phil Mickelson.

Melling was just beginning. In came another design star, Tom Fazio, to plot a second course. Smith, your basic Renaissance man of a golf professional, designed another tract for Melling, with a gala opening that, typical of Treetops’ and Melling’s ways, was a day-evening pageant that included then-Gov. John Engler.  Smith’s imprint, as well, was shifting to Lake Michigan’s shores. His designer’s mind will always be part of the deep tale behind Arcadia Bluffs, another of Michigan’s west-side treasures.

Golf was the rage 35 years ago. Courses were sprouting everywhere in America at a time when the national golf mantra (unwisely) had become: “Build a Golf Course Every Day.” It was a chorus geared to accommodate demand that, well, proved not to be as robust as the dreamers pictured.

It didn’t matter. Not in northern Michigan as the ‘80s turned toward the ‘90s.

Garland Resort, owned by Ron Otto, who fancied himself as a course-builder, was flourishing with multiple 18-hole layouts at Lewiston, east of Gaylord.

It was time for a timeline architect to emerge: Tom Doak, from Traverse City, was just beginning a path as one of golf’s brilliant global course designers, a status that has only risen during the past 40 years. Doak built his first course down the road from Grand Traverse Resort. He added another outside of Gaylord, Black Forest, at Wilderness Valley Resort. He has since built courses everywhere from Pacific Dunes on Oregon’s coast, to New Zealand.

He also etched a marvelously novel mosaic, The Loop, a course that can be played two ways, from opposite directions — paired with a spectacular design cut from the sand and scrub near Roscommon, aptly named Forest Dunes.

Tom Weiskopf, during a phone conversation in 1997 when Forest Dunes was mentioned, confided: “I think that’s the best work I’ve ever done.”

Rich testimony, there, when Weiskopf and his partner, Jay Morrish, had carved golf jewels in the U.S. and beyond. It was Weiskopf who from 1993-95 had woven Cedar River into what became part of Shanty Creek’s quiver of courses.

Well into the ‘90s, golf was still bubbling amid the Up North pines-and-lakes landscape: Hidden Valley (now: Otsego Resort), another old-time ski resort in Gaylord, had gotten in on the party, adding 18 holes to its golden-oldie Classic course. Gaylord was el fuego in making golf a tourism target, with Michaywe — something of a charter member — joined by newer venues, such as The Loon.

An ambitious, creative resort-owner had also hatched an idea: Jack Mathias, who owned Thunder Bay Golf Resort, outside of Alpena, got other oases along Lake Huron to become part of a “Sunrise Side” golf alliance.

There was no let-up, with media flooding the north’s niches, many of them because of the singular artistry of the late Michigan resort-golf promoter, Dave Richards.

There was talk, not necessarily fanciful, of making Tokyo-to-Gaylord flights possible as the Japanese yen for golf found its occasional ecstasies in Michigan’s north.

Alas, the so-called Golf Boom cooled, and not only nationally. Real-estate was always part of the business balance to a sport that, in Michigan, had about a four-month season.

 Some course-owners were too high-calorie in their appetites and in their expectations. There was a fair amount of over-construction. And an equally fair amount of business blow-ups.

But last week’s trip to Boyne was a reminder how much golf remains at the heart of Michigan’s allure and its blessings. It had taken a few years being away from places and paths that had once been regular stops to see again how unmatched is this state, especially in the pristine north, in bringing to people the Eden-like experience golf can be, and is, throughout these woods-and-water wonderlands.

It was a chance, also, to think of people that golf in this sublime state have brought to a man’s life: Stephen Kircher, Tim Hygh, Tom Doak, Tom Weideman, Brad Dean, Barry Owens, Mike D’Agostino, Ray Hearn, Bernie Friedrich, Kevin Frisch, Jack Mathias, Paul Beechnau, Roy Gaddey, Terry Schieber, Chris MacInnes, Rick Smith, Mike Husby, and those whom we since have lost: Dave Richards, Dick Weber, Ron Otto, Ken Devine, Jerry Matthews, Rodger Jabara, Tom Weiskopf.

It was impossible to separate from Thursday’s round, this history, these memories. Everything instead was rekindled. All of it warm, personal, indelible — and beautiful.

Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and retired Detroit News sports reporter.

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