Wild Horse GC
Gothenburg, NE (BFE in south-central Nebraska, 5.5 hours from Omaha, 2.5 hours from Lincoln)
Golf Magazine's Travelin' Joe named Wild Horse his #1 Course Under $50 Anywhere: "Sure, sometimes times are tighter than Chubby Chandler's waistband, but that doesn't mean you can't afford a fabulous public course. Wild Horse GC ($37-$50) is a 1998 design by Dan Proctor and Dave Axland, who helped Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw bring nearby Sand Hills to fruition. Wild Horse rides through wind-blown treeless firm terrain, framed with wheat-colored native grasses and tattered edge bunkers. The course has earned a #67 ranking in our Top 100 Courses You Can Play list. Nebraska is a bit of a hike, but at around $50 with a cart midweek, it's a worthy trek."
From Mar/Apr 08 T&L Golf:
Wild Horse Golf Club (public)
41150 Road 786, Gothenburg, Nebraska.
Architects: Dave Axland and Dan Proctor, 1999. Yardage: 6,955. Par: 72. Slope: 134. Green Fee: $33. Contact: 308-537-7700, www.playwildhorse.com. Public welcome.
To Reach Wild Horse Golf Club, you take the Highway 47 exit off of Interstate 80, which puts you in downtown Gothenburg. Drive past a John Deere dealership, a doughnut shop, a bank and four churches, until you hit Road 768. Make a left. A mile and a half later you arrive at one of America’s very best public courses. A round at Wild Horse can be had for the princely sum of thirty-three dollars plus tax. Of course, even that is considered steep by the locals, who pay five hundred dollars a year for a membership that provides unlimited golf for the whole family. (Throw in another hundred dollars and you get a year’s worth of range balls, too.)
Wild Horse was a vision that first appeared in mud puddles. The nine-hole Gothenburg Golf Club used to be the only course in town; built in a low area next to a canal, it would become unplayable after even a moderate rain. During these frequent rainouts, the damp and underserved locals would gather beneath a clubhouse awning to bemoan their bad luck. Eventually all the whining led to action. Around Gothenburg, inquiries were made, search parties were sent out, and in due time a 310-acre cattle ranch was selected as the ideal site for a new course. Gothenburg Links Inc. was then formed, loans were secured, and after a long search an architect was selected. The papers were a day or two from being signed when fate intervened. Actually, it was Dick Youngscap.
Youngscap was a family friend of one of the new course’s organizers. He also happens to be the prairie visionary who built Sand Hills. When he heard about the Wild Horse project, he was inspired to recommend Dave Axland and Dan Proctor as course architects. Coore and Crenshaw get all the glory for Sand Hills, but Axland and Proctor, two of the primary shapers, did much of the important work. They had already collaborated to design Delaware Springs, a well-received muni in Burnet, Texas. Most important, they would work cheap.
Axland and Proctor buzzed into town to see the property. “To say we were excited would be an understatement,” says Axland. “The land was less dramatic than Sand Hills, but you could stand there and see great golf hole after great golf hole.”
The team began construction in 1997. It was golf’s equivalent of an Amish barn-raising. At the beginning they had only one full-time employee, a kid named Cody Gracey. Much of the labor and equipment was supplied by volunteers from the community. “Farmers would be driving by on their tractors,” recalls Wade Geiken, board president of Gothenburg Links Inc., “and they’d stop and ask what they could do to help. Dave and Dan would tell ’em to tear up some sod, and then the farmers would be on the way to their fields. This happened every day.”
The finished product is a layout that flows gracefully from hole to hole. The fairways are framed not by towering sand hills but by long prairie grasses swaying in the ever-present wind. To make the course playable for a variety of golfers, the fairways are generous and many greens are open to run-up shots. But at 6,955 yards, with a rating/slope of 73.6/134, Wild Horse is all the golf course you could want, especially given that some of the blowout bunkering is fiendish in its size, depth and placement.
Because of Axland and Proctor, Sand Hills and Wild Horse will always share the same DNA, making comparisons all the more inevitable. “It’s an honor to be compared with Sand Hills, because it’s internationally renowned,” says Don Graham, Wild Horse’s head pro. “At the same time, we get a little tired of being the little brother. We think we can stand on our own.”
Immediately after it opened in 1999, Wild Horse began garnering accolades. How did the refugees from the old Gothenburg Golf Club feel about all the fuss? “Awestruck,” says Chris Healey, the onetime head of Gothenburg Links Inc.
Wild Horse now ranks as high as twenty-second on lists of the top hundred modern courses, and it would surely be higher if points were given for hospitality. Says Graham, “You don’t have to be a five handicap to enjoy our course; you don’t have to be rich. Everybody is welcome, and being as personable and accommodating as possible is important to us.”
Of Wild Horse’s 25,000 rounds a year, some 40 percent are played by nonmembers. In 2007 golfers from forty-one states visited; the year before, pilgrims from eleven countries made the trip. This steady revenue stream will make it possible for all of Wild Horse’s construction loans to be paid off by 2010.