At This Golf Tournament, The Players Are Always In Rough

Custom T-shirts, custom score cards, flags fluttering above every hole …

The eighth annual Nesbitt Open has everything the discriminating duffer would demand at a golf tournament.

Everything, that is, except a golf course.

This is a golf coarse. When you land on the greens at the Nesbitt Open, you’re still in the rough.

Played northeast of Spokane on a scrubby horse pasture in the middle of a 100-acre wood, the Nesbitt is better suited to hunting than golf. In fact, moose and deer have been known to wander onto the links.

Those are just some of the hazards in a landscape cluttered with thistles, barbed wire, logs, boulders, grasshoppers and fresh piles of horse dung that will swallow your Titleist like quicksand.

“Play through no matter where you land. That’s the major rule here,” growls tournament director Rick Nesbitt, who uses his 9-iron like a machete to hack away an insidious clump of ragweed blocking his ball. “This ain’t some sissy country club stuff.”

I should say not. I not only lost two balls playing the Nesbitt’s three holes with 50 or 60 other challengers on Saturday, I also lost my 8-iron.

“Aw, it’ll turn up somewhere,” says Nesbitt, sipping on a can of beer and peering into the foliage like some bush guide leading a safari.

Contradictions abound at the Nesbitt.

Although called an open, golfers must be invited to play. And the man who founded the tournament freely admits to hating the game. “That’s the whole point,” says Nesbitt, 33, now lighting a cigarette. “Golf is a stupid thing to do unless you make it interesting.”

How this unlikely tournament came to be is a story recounted often.

Nesbitt was wandering his father’s estate one day with some of his pals. Bob Nesbitt, a railroad engineer, owns 200 acres on Pleasant Prairie.

While on their trek, Nesbitt’s friend, Rob Tipps, had something akin to a religious awakening. “This would make a fine golf course,” he muttered dreamily.

“Well, we were drinking a lot of beer at the time,” Nesbitt concedes a bit defensively.

And so they went to work, mowing weeds and clearing brush. The end result resembles, say, Hangman Hills the way Frankenstein’s monster resembles Cindy Crawford.

It takes a spine-jarring, half-mile ride in the back of a pickup to get to the course. Hole No. 1 is 69 yards that tees off over a steep gully. Hole No. 2 is 128 yards through the swampy muck of a horse urinal. Hole No. 3 is 85 yards with the green set at a 45-degree angle.

Only a fool would use his best clubs. Balls leaving the fairway are rarely located without a chain saw.

The cups in the Nesbitt greens, which technically should be called “browns,” are coffee cans sunk into the ground. Which seems generous until you realize that golf balls don’t roll in the rocky stubble. You have to chip, not putt, the balls into holes.

Following the “Field of Dreams” philosophy, Nesbitt built it and people came.

In years past, as many as 250 reveling golfers have competed. One year sheriff’s deputies arrived when neighbors complained about the noise. It looked like so much fun that the cops came back and joined the party when they went off-duty.

The crowds swelled to the point where Nesbitt decided to scale it back this year before something uglier than normal happened.

Carl Newton, a systems manager, flew up from Arizona to play the tournament. “Thank God there’s only three holes,” he says. “If there were 18 I’d probably shoot a 196.”

Mike Johns likes to show off the nasty scar on his wrist that came from an encounter with a barbed wire fence several years back. “I played through,” he proclaims with pride.

As difficult as it is, the Nesbitt course seems to be owned by a burly fisheries biologist named Ron Peters. On Saturday, the man won his fifth tournament with an inexplicable 12.

Nesbitt often loudly accuses his friend of cheating, but so far nobody can prove anything. So Peters took home the grand prize: a used copy of the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination.

“Great bathroom reading,” says Nesbitt, who concedes he patterned some of his golf course after the Dallas grassy knoll.

Peters was ecstatic about his fifth win, if not a bit bleary-eyed from the refreshments.”Helluva party,” he says. “If there were more Nesbitt Opens I’d definitely turn pro.”

, DataTimes