Development is the 'high heavenly ground' of golf

By ANGELO BRUSCAS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Rich MacIntosh has a dilemma that he can't seem to solve. Even his role as marketing vice chairman for Sahalee's committee to host the Professional Golfers' Association's 80th annual championship next week doesn't help.

When the retired Microsoft executive wants to tool around the golf course, he normally just backs his golf cart out of its special mini garage by hitting the automatic door opener and drives through his back yard to the cart path behind the first green. He's on the course in seconds.

But as Sahalee Country Club prepares for its biggest event in the nearly 30 years of its existence, MacIntosh's pathway is blocked by a chain-link fence that now walls off the golf course grounds from the houses that surround it. To play or make a trek up to the PGA trailer, he has to walk or drive around the front nine.

Gated and private from the outside world of bustling development on the Sammamish Plateau above Redmond, Sahalee is now closed off from the inside, too. Until Aug. 8, members could still play 18 of the 27 holes, but they had to play through jungle-like rough and a beehive of construction workers and groundskeepers as the club braces for the world's best golfers.

There hasn't been this much activity -- other than golf -- since Sahalee's ground was first broken on the old logging and hunting grounds in the Summer of Love, 1967.

MacIntosh, however, doesn't mind the slight disruption this summer, a season in which his back yard has been turned into the staging ground for one of golf's four major annual events, a $60 million enterprise that will bring 30,000 people to Sahalee each day next week.

If it weren't for golf, he'd be living elsewhere.

"We bought the house because we wanted to be on a great golf course," says MacIntosh, who retired from Microsoft at age 50 after serving as the company's general manager and vice president of sales in the United States and operations in Canada. "Sahalee was a great golf course already, and with this event it's gotten better. It's phenomenal, even though it gets a fair amount of play."

You don't have to play golf if you live on one of Sahalee's 500 lots -- only two are vacant but they aren't for sale -- but golf is the hub of life and the lifeblood of history in this northern section of the rapidly developing plateau.

Sahalee was born as a golf course, with housing only a secondary concern. Original members were disgruntled with efforts to buy Inglewood Country Club and decided to form their own club one night in 1965 over drinks and an informal discussion.

Architect Jack Wright is credited in Sahalee annals as making the suggestion, and he vividly recalls how the group eventually found its way into the woods above Lake Sammamish.

"When we first came out here, there wasn't anything here," Wright says.

What they saw were 200 acres of land that would be high and fairly dry for a golf course. For sale at the modest price of $2,000 an acre, the land was owned by the family of a Seattle orthopedic surgeon who had built a lone cabin in the middle of the forest and used it to hunt for deer and bear. The property had been logged in the mid-1930s, so the only way in or out was an old logging road that started to the south off Inglewood Hill Road and ended at the cabin.

Eight founders each put in $5,000 for earnest money, and a community built around golf officially was announced Sept. 12, 1967.

Sahalee started out with modest designs as a development but the highest demands as a golf course. Members wanted a full 27 holes, not just 18, and they were determined that it be championship caliber. Housing was an afterthought, and it grew slowly until sewer and water services expanded in the 1970s.

"When we got our planned-unit development approved by the county, they stipulated that we could only build 100 houses in the area without sewers," Wright says. "At the same time, the closest road to the site was a one-lane dirt road. ... The houses were just there because we had to buy more property than we needed for the golf course in order to lay out a championship golf course. And we needed to build the houses to get a road."

Although Sahalee carries an Indian name, it does not originate from anything of historic Native American significance. When the club was forming in 1967, the board of trustees decided an Indian motif would be appropriate. Vida Ervin and her daughter, Arlene, went to the Seattle Public Library and came back with a list of tribal names, phrases and other interesting words.

"From this list, they selected several possibilities and asked each board member to take the names home for their wives' reactions," the official Sahalee history book says. "The most popular name was Sahalee, a Chinook word meaning 'high heavenly ground.' "