Building a dream

Robert Thompson | Image: Dina Goldstein | Published: May 01, 2008

Sitting in the clubhouse locker-room at Warwick Hills Golf and Country Club in 1992, Richard Zokol listened intently as former Masters champ Ben Crenshaw talked about a course he was creating on a rural tract of sandy land in remote Nebraska: the newly opened Sand Hills Golf Club.

Zokol, only weeks away from his biggest triumph on the PGA Tour – a victory at the Greater Milwaukee Open – took in the master’s every word, as if recording directions to some buried treasure. “He spoke about it with such passion that I was drawn to the idea,” says the 49-year-old golfer once known as Disco Dick. “I knew right then that I wanted to build my own course.”

That dream, 16 years in the making, is now close to becoming a reality. The Sagebrush Golf and Sporting Club’s $8-million 18-hole golf course – which sits on a dramatic hillside near Merritt, once part of the fabled Quilchena Ranch – is set to open late this summer. Zokol has worked for almost a decade fashioning the course, and at every step in the process nay­sayers told him he wouldn’t make it: he didn’t have the money, the connections or the experience.

Even Zokol admits he had his doubts. “I asked myself how I would pull this one off,” he says. “I’m the consummate PGA Tour journeyman. I wasn’t the most skilled. I figured it all out through perseverance. I never made a fortune playing the game and got my nose bloodied more often than not.” With real estate sales at Sagebrush kicking off this spring – and with the course’s grass filling in the bare patches in the fairways – the next few months will determine whether Zokol’s unusual business venture will prove a scrappy success or a knockdown failure.

It isn’t an unusual position for Zokol, who’s fought most of his life to prove others wrong. The son of a Slovenian immigrant who became a dentist after the Second World War, Zokol grew up next to Marine Drive Golf Club, where he’d spend hours pounding balls, playing and practising. Few felt Zokol would ever succeed at the game. As a golfer he was never the longest, the biggest or the best. But with determination and imagination, Zokol excelled beyond his natural abilities. He led his team at Brigham Young University in Utah to an NCAA championship and later turned pro. In

412 events between 1983 and 2003, he gained a reputation as a free thinker, someone who often went against the status quo. He had 20 top-10 finishes, one win and total earnings of $1.8 million.

His time on tour was limited, and by 1995 he was playing less and less frequently, often spending extended periods of time at his home in Vancouver with his growing family. As his golf career waned, Zokol became more involved in business ventures, including helping launch Eaglequest Golf Centers Inc. But his success in the corporate world never reached the levels he’d witnessed in his golf career. By 2000 he was back on tour, a stint that would last until back problems derailed him in 2003.

A year after Zokol’s final attempt at the PGA Tour, he was back dreaming about his golf course. Following Crenshaw’s lead, Zokol wanted to build something different from almost any other course in the country. He wanted to make it an exclusive enclave not unlike the elite links where the rich and famous play on Long Island, New York. He wanted to create a club with an experience that rivalled the best in North America. But to outshine places such as Capilano Golf & Country Club in Vancouver, the notoriously exclusive Redtail Golf Course near St. Thomas, Ont., or Mount Bruno, haunt of Montreal’s most powerful businesspeople, it had to have atmosphere, access to world-class fishing and a great golf course.