Jets roaring overhead par for course at Tyee Valley Golf Club

Originally published Saturday, November 29, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

There's been a long-standing joke at the Tyee Valley Golf Club that if you can hit an airborne Boeing 747 with your ball, you get to keep it.

The plane, that is.

But it will cost you a stroke on that hole. And you've probably lost your brand new Top Flite ball.

For longer than most duffers, even old duffers, have been chasing the little dimpled white ball along the fairways, and long before SeaTac became a city, Tyee Valley Golf Club has been co-existing with aircraft from nearby Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

"Adjacent" doesn't begin to describe it. "On top of" comes close, and "smack down the middle of" also describes the symbiotic relationship that has worked since the golf course opened with more than a few "It'll never work!" prophecies in 1965.

And after more than 2 million golfers have tried to make par 72 -- temporarily reduced to a 70 because of airport safety-zone expansion -- the 120-acre course still is drawing customers year-round.

"Less than 10 percent of our customers have said the aircraft noise affects their game," said Roy Moore, the last of the three golfers who founded and built the course. "And more than 50 percent say they don't even really hear the planes when they're playing."

Well, you know how golfers stretch things sometimes. It's hard to imagine those big jets not rattling you on an important green shot. Those orange metal landing light towers bisect the golf course like a coat zipper, and the turnaround area for jets awaiting takeoff at the main north-south runway is close enough to the golf course's clubhouse to see the pilots.

But more than 30 years ago, when he and the others were looking for land to build a public, daily-fee golf course, Moore saw more than pilots and planes. "I saw a story in the paper about how the airport had to buy more than 100 acres of open space for a safety zone at the edge of the airport," he said.

He also saw a small, very isolated building in the boggy area. "It was a pumping station for Water District 75, and it was taken over by the airport. That well was the single largest and most important factor in our locating here. On hot summer days, we might pump a half-million gallons of water.

"In fact, during the summer water shortage several years ago, I had to put up signs explaining that we were not using public water for the course."

And Tyee Valley is one of the few daily-fee courses that doesn't use public tax money. Its $750,000 annual maintenance and operations budget comes solely through fees and miscellaneous income.

When it opened in August 1965, it cost $2.50 to play 18 holes and $1.25 for nine. Today, it's $18 for 18 holes, weekdays; $19 on weekends, and $12.50 for nine holes. With a staff that varies from 12 in the winter to as many as 40 in the summer, there's not a whole lot in the budget left over.

Hopes for expanding the leased-land program and building a new driving range and clubhouse were temporarily squashed when an airport safety-zone expansion the last two years forced the reconfiguration of three holes.

"Originally, the Port (of Seattle) engineers wanted to just shut us down for the duration. That would've killed us for sure," said Moore. "As it was, we lost about $200,000 over the last two years because of the project."

Last year's damaging storms and freeze also took out more than 250 trees as well as underground wiring and valves for more than 500 water sprinklers, and a substantial amount of drainage, Moore added.

A course that took roughly $250,000 to build 30 years ago couldn't be duplicated today for less than $2 million, Moore said. "And they wouldn't let it be built here, either," he added, noting that much of the land is designated as wetlands.

Moore and airline pilot George Geyer and golf pro George Puetz built the course with their own money, relying on a 30-year lease from the Port of Seattle and their own sweat equity. "Because of my trucking background, I found myself driving dump truck and other heavy machinery as we built the course," Moore said.

A successful businessman in trucking and real estate development, he has stuck with Tyee Valley "because this is my baby; I helped it grow out of the raw ground. You don't go into this business -- daily-fee public golf -- to make money." As a boy, he grew up in what everyone then called the "Poverty Hill" area of Burien. "And I can remember riding my bicycle on what is now that runway over there," he said, pointing from the clubhouse.

This was scrub land then, he recalled, and deer were commonplace even after the course was built. "There was a blueberry farm where the No. 3, 4 and 5 holes are now. There was a chicken ranch on holes 6, 7 and 11. And there was a family excavating peat from what's now the No. 13 hole. When we started grading for the course, we even found an old .50-caliber machine gun on the No. 16 fairway."

Families of fox also were common, and Moore tells the tale of how a visiting British engineer, playing golf as a guest of some Boeing hosts, had his golf ball snatched off the green by a curious fox.

A drainage ditch, since upgraded to official "creek" status, bisected the course east to west. It has created something of a standoff between environmentalists, wildlife (read that, fish and waterfowl) proponents and the Federal Aviation Administration and airport officials concerned with birds as an aircraft hazard. "We're on a daily program to discourage bird concentrations because of the danger they pose to aircraft," Moore said. Golf course workers use "cracker gun" cartridges to disperse ducks and geese.

Although there's been only one documented aircraft/bird collision, resulting in minor damage to the airplane, there has been one unscheduled landing on the course, Moore recalled. "A private plane with six people had landed at Sea-Tac on their return from a Canadian fishing trip about 10, 15 years ago. They were heading to Renton (Airport) but it was too late to do a Customs check there, so they did it here and took off again.

"They crashed on the No. 15 green. They were banged up, but no one was killed. Turned out, they had run out of gas."

Which is something Roy Moore never seems to do. At 62, with more than 30 years of babying and nursing Tyee Valley into and through its various stages, he hopes to help negotiate a land-swap and land lease between the port, City of SeaTac and the golf course. "It will mean another reconfiguration of the course, back to a par 70, and a new clubhouse and a driving range," he said.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.