Player’s Corner PROFILE
Breaking Trail at Saddleback ‘Not normal’ and proud of it: Northern Front Range course is No. 1 for fun, innovation. By Andy Bigford
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF SADDLEBACK GOLF CLUB
CHEERIO: The opening hole at Saddleback Golf Club is the start of an experience at one of Golf Digest’s Top-10 “Most Cheerful” places to play.
WHEN SADDLEBACK Golf Club in Firestone launched its “Old Turd Tuesdays” back in 2012, the $29 offer included range balls, 18 holes and cart—plus an “all-you-can-eat” prune bar with a pint of Metamucil to wash it down. After a supposed Health Department intervention nixed the prune bar—along with an alleged Metamucil shortage—the course quickly substituted a hot dog and a “sodee pop” instead. There were a few grumbles from those who didn’t follow along with the joke, but rounds among the 60-and-older set immediately increased threefold, and this on a day of the week, at least pre-COVID-19, that is universally slow at golf courses (the cost is now $42, and OTT regularly draws 200 players). This is all par for the course at a club which bills itself as “not normal,” whose scorecard declares “USGA rules apply only some of the time,” and which was named by Golf Digest as one of the country’s Top 10 “Most Cheerful” places to play. “We are not pretentious people,” says Lanna O’Malley, who along with her husband Tom (everyone calls him Whitey) are anomalies in Colorado as hands-on owner-operators. The two met in college at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and with partners built and operated a popular course there called Kilkarney Hills (they still own a share). Looking for opportunities to the west, they eventually partnered in the late 1990s with Vern Hamilton, a cash-crop farmer who had weathered one too many hailstorms and was ready for a change (he passed away in 2016). All the marketing studies said golf would continue to boom (wrong) and that the Northern Front Range would see dramatic population growth (right). coloradoavidgolfer.com
X MARKS THE SPOT: A sign on the fourth hole commemorates a disagreement between a married couple that ended up with a cart being driven into the bottom of a lake at the island green par-3. It’s one example of how the course refuses to take itself too seriously, preferring lighthearted conversation to corporate-speak.
“There was nothing here back then,” she recalls of the Firestone-Frederick area, noting there wasn’t even a grocery store and they had to drive 12 miles east to Longmont to “buy a bolt.” “We had to trust it,” she says, and indeed the growth has come, with the Frederick-Firestone corridor now dotted with businesses, including a Safeway and Ace Hardware, and the region continuing to experience one of the highest growth rates in the country. The O’Malleys hired veteran Colorado-born architect Andy Johnson to design Saddleback, which looks west to the mountains and features wide, rolling fairways; large, undulating greens; and plenty of wetlands and water. Saddleback stretches to 7,041 yards from the tips, with four more tee box options at 6,492, 6,054, 5,484, and 4,855 yards. Two man-made lakes bookend the south portion of the property, with a creek connecting them as it meanders through the back nine. It is fair and friendly, but with some bite, including three tough par fours: the split fairway
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7th, the hazardous, well-bunkered 12th, and the long, narrow uphill 15th. For signatures, you could include two: The island par-3 4th and the drivable (over water), 322-yard dogleg par-4 16th, which highlights a strenuous four-hole closing stretch. An expansive range beckons with fresh balls pyramided at each station, not fetched from a finicky code- or token-operated ball dispenser. Most daily fee courses see the range as a revenue stream, but not Saddleback, which includes it in the price of the round. The club actually experimented five years ago with using Titleist Pro V1s on the range, getting three local businesses to sponsor (and pay for) the 13,000 new balls. Saddleback knew there would be substantial theft, so besides featuring the sponsor’s logo the balls were boldly marked “Stolen from Saddleback Golf Club.” Still, 8,000 disappeared in the first summer, and the club returned to using normal range balls. Another innovation, at least in non-COVID times: the bunkers feature buried vertical tubes as rake holders, taking the four-foot Fall 2020 | COLORADO AVIDGOLFER
