Wet Dog Fur Open, 1985-2025: S-R sports department bids farewell to its annual ‘golf’ tournament

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote: “I became insane with intervals of horrible sanity.”

John Lennon was fond of the expression: “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.”

And Franz Kafka held to the belief, “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably happy.”

Poe, Lennon and Kafka – none of them made it past 40. Others who died at 40 include England’s King Edward IV, NBA great “Pistol” Pete Maravich, and actors Chris Penn and Paul Walker, who proclaimed in “Fast and the Furious 6,” “Hey, we do what we do best, we improvise.”

On Thursday, The Wet Dog Fur Open, The Spokesman-Review sports department’s annual “golf” tournament – and I use that term loosely – will join them by breathing its 40th and final breath.

Born out of scorn but filled with that same unbearably happy spirit that Kafka spoke of, the Dog Fur will come to an end with a final round at the Kalispel Golf and Country Club.

Historians disagree on the origins of the tournament’s name. Did it originate from a letter to the editor? An angry call? Possibly a voicemail message? All we know for certain is that sometime in late 1984 or early 1985, a reader of The Spokesman-Review’s sports pages contacted the paper with a critique.

Some recall the message being: “Your sports section smells like wet dog fur.”

Others said it was: “Your sports section sucks wet dog fur.”

Honestly, it’s a distinction without much difference.

The sports editor at the time, Jeff Jordan, was able to recently clear up one mystery. “It was a postcard,” he said. “I kept the damn thing for years. I don’t know where it is now.”

A few months later, in the summer of 1985, a small group of sportswriters played hooky from work to enjoy a round of golf – they unofficially dubbed it the Wet Dog Fur Open.

“It just started out with four of us guys playing a round of golf and the more we talked about it the more people wanted to play,” said Steve Bergum, who preceded Jordan as sports editor before becoming a longtime beat reporter. He was also the newspaper’s golf writer.

“I remember getting really drunk that first year,” Jordan said. “And you probably shouldn’t write this, but we stopped by my house after playing and Steve was puking in the front yard and my kid came out and said, ‘Dad, Uncle Steve is puking in the front yard.’ ”

Within a couple of years, dozens of reporters, copy editors, photographers and friends of the paper would sign up to play in what became an annual affair, complete with trophies, T-shirts, hats and prizes of random items lifted from the newspaper. There were some good golfers – like Jim Meehan and Mike Dixon – and some not-so good golfers – pretty much everyone else. The tournament spanned careers – we miss you on the course, Rich Landers and Annie Letourneau – as well as generations – Vince Grippi begetting Tyler, Don McGuire bequeathing his slice to Greg. But each year the captain of the winning team would be awarded a well-worn blazer from Goodwill and get doused with ketchup and mustard.

Did anyone in the sports department take offense with their work being likened to a soggy mutt?

“I thought it was funny that someone would go to the trouble of letting us know,” Bergum agreed, “but, yeah, I’m sure we did have a few bad days.”

There is a general sense of amazement that the Dog Fur has lasted as long as it did. After Jordan’s epic run of 18 tournaments, Joe Palmquist expertly piloted The S-R sports department and the Dog Fur for 14 more. Current sports editor Ralph Walter has courageously kept it on life support for the last eight, through cutbacks, a pandemic, and the usual antics and mishaps.

“We were doing stupid stuff that I figured would eventually get us banned from certain courses,” Bergum said, recalling an incident at one course when a ball washer near one of the tee boxes was set ablaze.

For obvious reasons, the site of the Dog Fur bounced around to a variety of local golf courses – including Liberty Lake, MeadowWood and Deer Park.

“I’m just shocked to think that over 40 years we didn’t have anybody arrested and that nobody died,” Bergum noted. “But there were some injuries.”

Oh, there were certainly injuries. In full disclosure, I did “accidentally” strike acclaimed author and favorite son of the Spokane Valley Jess Walter with a golf cart that sent him flying into the air during one Dog Fur.

And I have been repeatedly reminded that my cart driving was so erratic that one year Dick Wright, a beloved radio voice of Spokane sports, leapt from my cart because he feared for his life.

“I’ll never forget an aging Dick Wright jumping from your cart and rolling down a hill to save himself,” Jordan said. “He never played again in the Dog Fur.”

In another incident, Jess Walter yanked an approach shot so horribly that he decided to mimic the pratfall that Chevy Chase did in “Caddyshack,” resulting in Jess breaking his collarbone. Despite the injury, the other members of his foursome demanded he complete the round so they wouldn’t be disqualified.

There were teams that dressed as their favorite “Caddyshack” players. And venerable sports columnist John Blanchette was always quick with a line from the movie at just the right moment.

“My uncle says you’ve got a screw loose.”

“Oh yeah? Your uncle molests collies.”

Caddyshack was such a seminal force on the Dog Fur that for its final outing, actor Michael O’Keefe, who played Danny Noonan, was gracious enough to send a video celebrating the Dog Fur. (And when we say gracious enough, we mean that he agreed to take our money to record a video celebrating the Dog Fur.)

An obvious question that arises is why is the Dog Fur coming to an end?

Well, for starters, Walter, the current sports editor, really doesn’t want to organize it anymore and no one else is dumb enough to take it on. And 40 sounded like a good round number to go out on. Plus, let’s face it, if we keep going, the chances that someone will die during the tournament will only grow exponentially, and nobody wants to see that.

And so, it’s been a good run.

I realize there are those who will read this remembrance and liken it to the sad and tragic musings of a high school athlete who lives only in the past, as if his best days ended with graduation.

But trust me, no one will mistake us for athletes. And while there certainly is a wistfulness that comes with memories of things gone past and the acceptance that none of us are as young as we used to be, the Dog Fur still acts as a touchpoint in our lives.

“What’s the Kierkegaard line that life can only be understood looking backwards?” asked Dave Boling, a longtime sportswriter and columnist at the paper. “I think that’s a perfect point for the Wet Dog Fur. At the time you know it’s a bunch of drunk golfers, trying to re-enact the characters of “Caddyshack” year after year after year, to an embarrassingly juvenile degree. But as I look back on it now, I was never at a place that had that internal staff camaraderie. You can be your most juvenile. You can be a jackass. You can play terribly.

“And these are people with whom you work, and hold you in some degree of respect, still love you.”

Of course, there is the second part to the quote by Kierkegaard (who died at 42) that makes clear that while life can only be understood looking backwards, “it must be lived forwards.”

And over the past 40 years we have all done that as well, achieving our own successes in our own ways. But that doesn’t lessen the appreciation for the friendships a silly golf tournament created.

“You know, it just turned into a great fellowship of guys on our staff,” Jordan said wistfully. “We would go to work together, we had kids together, our families grew up together.

“And we didn’t get quite as crazy as we got older, but we still had a blast.”

And thankfully, nobody died.

Additional research provided by Seth Gorvan and Lance Manion.

Jim DeFede was a reporter at The Spokesman Review from 1986 to 1991. He is currently an investigative reporter for CBS News Miami where he has won 10 Emmy’s, two Murrows, and a DuPont but considers his 1990 Wet Dog Fur victory to be his greatest accomplishment.