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Starting four decades ago, American Indian-owned courses changed the rez, and the sport. By Bruce Selcraig Nearly 40 years ago on a cool mountain island bordering the Chihuahuan Desert in the south-central section of New Mexico, three Apache elders drove along together until they came upon a fallow field of oats within their impoverished reservation. The Mescaleros’ fiery autocratic president, Wendell Chino, stopped the car beneath their sacred Sierra Blanca Mountain and got out to walk. Chino, who died in 1998, was an entrepreneurial dynamo who brought jobs to the rez with sawmills, ski areas and, famously, tribal bingo. He often joked, “The Zuni make jewelry. Navajos make blankets. Apaches make money.” The visionary Apache was right, but at the time, recalls Freddie Peso, a Mescalero sculptor who joined Chino that afternoon, “No one knew anything about golf. Chino didn’t play. No one did. That was completely out of our minds here.” The Mescaleros opened Inn of the Mountain Gods in 1975, and beside it, a sublime alpine golf course (altitude 7,200 feet) filled with ponderosa pines, frisky elk, and bent-grass greens, designed by international golf architect Ted Robinson. Sweltering Texans did indeed flock there from May to October, as they still do today, igniting the man-bites-dog news that one of the finest new golf courses in America was on a remote and downtrodden Indian reservation. While the Mescaleros perhaps knew that they had built America’s first tribal-owned, 18-hole championship golf course—Oregon’s Warm Springs tribe earlier built a nine-holer—they never imagined they would also pioneer one of America’s most unlikely tourism success stories: a collection of about 60 tribal-owned courses in some 17 states that today draws more than 3 million golfers to Indian Country. 
Waterless Hazard
Go into the rough on Black Mesa’s tenth hole at your peril. From Connecticut to Arizona, on tiny suburban reservations with fewer than 300 members and on sprawling Southwestern pueblos, worldclass courses with evocative names like Circling Raven, Apache Stronghold, and Dancing Rabbit have changed the face of American golf. With daily-green fees of about $45 to $150, they’ve been designed by some of the nation’s finest golf architects—Tom Fazio; Tom Doak; Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore; Rees Jones; Robert Trent Jones Jr.; Steve Smyers—and many have rocketed onto the golf media’s various awards lists. 
Golf Digest’s 2007 list of America’s best 100
public courses includes Black Mesa Golf Club
(No. 44), near Espanola, New Mexico; and Dancing
Rabbit Golf Club (No. 98) on the Choctaw
Reservation in Mississippi. Numerous others—
such as Barona Creek Golf Club, outside
San Diego; Circling Raven, on the Coeur d’Alene
Reservation in Idaho; and Twin Warriors Golf
Club, north of Albuquerque, New Mexico—have
received similar national honors from major
magazines. “I think the tribal courses are probably
the single most impressive force in golf architecture
over the last 10 years,” says Ron Whitten,
Golf Digest’s noted architecture critic.
But American Indian tribes didn’t just revolutionize golf. This revolution worked both ways. ON A FEBRUARY AFTERNOON turning battleship- gray and more bracing by the moment, I walk onto the driving range at the Santa Ana Golf Course on the Cochiti Pueblo near Albuquerque, New Mexico. I meet Roger Abeyta, a veteran schoolteacher who coaches the co-ed golf team at nearby Bernalillo High School. A calming, likeable guy, Abeyta tells me he had once been an intense boys basketball coach until he found the cure. “Coach girls,” he says, smiling. “Girls listen.” Abeyta’s golf team scatters over the range and practice green, working on putting drills, playing air guitar, being teenagers. A stout Navajo boy with a waist-length ponytail hits wedges beside a skinny pueblo kid who all but vanishes turtlestyle within his floppy gray sweatshirt. Then slightly off to himself, there is a quietly focused young man in a navy-blue-and-orange Denver Broncos jersey, tiny diamond studs in each earlobe, methodically pounding balls with a fluid swing that oozes potential. 
Kings of Clubs
Travis Pecos and Roger Abeyta (previous photo); Phil Quintana and Jude Suina (this photo) “That’s Travis Pecos,” Abeyta tells me. “He’s a Cochiti Pueblo kid. Senior. Very respectful. Somewhat shy. Not boastful. Very coachable. I wish I had five or six like him. He has a chance for a scholarship somewhere.” Travis’ broad auburn face brightens at the thought of playing college golf, then he whacks another yellow range ball 160 yards with his seven-iron, piercing the growing north wind that whipped off Tuyuna Mesa. One of six children and the youngest of five brothers in a well-known Cochiti family—an uncle, Princeton- educated Regis Pecos, was formerly the Cochiti governor—Travis picked up the game after turning 8 from his father, Richard. But his game really flourished at the Cochiti junior golf program some years later. “I still like basketball and baseball,” he says, “but with golf you can be by yourself if you want. It’s a very tough game. It’s different every day.” He clearly has the self-discipline gene. “Travis won’t leave the driving range,” Abeyta says, “until he’s satisfied.” I wonder if Notah Begay III—a half-Navajo, half-Pueblo golfer from New Mexico who won four PGA Tour events in 1999 and 2000 and became the most successful American Indian golfer in the history of the sport—had much influence on Travis. “A little,” Travis allows, after a telling pause. He sends another ball to the horizon. “But Tiger mostly. I like Tiger. All the guys like Tiger.” Travis searches his red Bernalillo Spartans golf bag for something to wipe a runny nose. He hits balls in the high-desert chill almost until dark, preparing for the upcoming New Mexico state high school golf tournament. Though Travis doesn’t yet break par consistently or effortlessly blast Tiger-drives over 300 yards, Abeyta thinks he could play college golf. But Travis also excels at math and science, so he’s thinking about a career in the business end of golf, perhaps through New Mexico State’s professional golf management program. That would allow him to possibly return to one of New Mexico’s pueblo courses and one day run the whole operation. That has always been a goal of the tribes, not to merely make money off the courses but to bring new jobs to the reservation and control their future. Yet feel-good business stories and promising junior golfers would not have created a tribal-golf buzz in America if the tribes had not committed themselves to building great courses. Rather than viewing the courses as mere casino amenities—low-budget layouts meant for hurried gamblers and without much challenge—most tribes gave talented designers free rein to build scenic wonders that enhanced the casinos, not the other way around. No tribe did it better than the Santa Ana Pueblo, which traces its ancestry near Albuquerque to the late 1500s. At the Santa Ana course, beside the placid Rio Grande’s ribbon of fallflaming cottonwoods, Roger Martinez presides over a pastoral delight woven through blonde native grasses, eight man-made lakes, and a menagerie of plump roadrunners, rabbits, and barking coyotes. Just a mile away, where the Spanish explorer Coronado once walked, Santa Ana’s newer sister course, Twin Warriors, rises higher into the rugged red mesas that define the pueblo. With 10,600-foot Sandia Peak looming over virtually every hole, these two courses afford some of the finest golf vistas in the Southwest. Between them is the 350-room Hyatt Tamaya Resort, a siennacolored adobe structure that blends unobtrusively into a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape of scrub pińon and cactus. World-class designers like Fazio, Doak, Crenshaw, and Jones, who charge about $500,000 to $1 million for their services, say they are intrigued by the tribal course opportunities. They mention several reasons: The tribes generally aren’t in a rush, they pay on time and, most of all, their courses aren’t normally surrounded by and dependent upon suburban real estate, the bane of modern golf design. The tribal courses have allowed designers to care more about aesthetics, creativity, and challenge than the commercial needs of property developers and nearby homeowners. “It’s been a breath of fresh air to build courses without all the housing,” says Jones, who has designed or renovated more than 240 courses on six continents. “The Pueblo de Cochiti Golf Course took a lot of time to build. But that’s all right because the land reveals itself slowly. What I most enjoyed was walking the land with the Cochiti people. They talk about the spirits of the land, and they know everything about it, like where the rattlesnakes are. It was just more of a spiritual and poetic experience than I normally have in golf.” Few who have played at Cochiti would disagree—especially the locals.
AMERICAN INDIAN golf got off to a slow start. After the Mescaleros’ venture in 1975, the second tribal-owned, 18-hole course took six years to open. That’s when the Cochiti Pueblo bought a preexisting Robert Trent Jones Jr., course from a failing suburban development next to their reservation. It opened to rave reviews, and soon Golf Digestnamed it one of the 75 best public courses in America. A full decade passed before the nearby Santa Ana Pueblo opened a 27-hole links-style complex in 1991 along the tranquil forested banks of the Rio Grande. Within a short time the course was so well regarded that the PGA’s minor league—then named the Nike Tour—held an annual tournament at Santa Ana Pueblo. Other tribes saw the success of the New Mexico courses, yet by the early ’90s there were still only a handful of native tracks across the country. Golf was still viewed by many on the rez as an expensive, country club pastime that could never compete with Indian Country’s first loves, basketball and baseball. In pure marketing terms, many tribal leaders also doubted that they could attract the largely urban, Anglo, and upscale clientele that fuels the destination golf market. But a confluence of outside events few could have imagined launched tribal golf. In 1988, Congress broadly legalized gambling on Indian lands, creating a casino-construction boom that fully took hold in the mid-’90s. Sudden fortunes in casino cash eventually began paying for senior citizens centers, sewage treatment plants, nutrition programs, and college educations. Resort hotels with golf courses simply became the logical next step because tribes wanted to diversify their casino-dependent economies. Plus they usually had a free supply of golf’s two most essential and costly ingredients: land and water. “You really have to credit those tribes who were brave enough to go down this road 20 years ago,” says Ernie Stevens Jr., chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, a lobbying group that represents 184 tribes. “At first we didn’t see how golf would fit in [with casinos], but now we understand golf is a part of tourism, and it fits with Indian Country’s strong commitment to maintaining natural beauty.” The trend shows little sign of leveling off, with new courses being built by New York’s Seneca Tribe and North Carolina’s Eastern Band Cherokee, among many others. Meanwhile heretofore-uncool golf became more acceptable on the rez, especially among kids, because of the emergence in the ’90s of two young golfers from Stanford University: Tiger Woods and the aforementioned Begay. Woods you know. On the way to becoming the best golfer alive, he exponentially increased golf tournament attendance, prize money, and golf TV viewing, while also fueling a bonanza in minority junior golf programs. Less known is Begay. An economics major at Stanford, he has given countless golf clinics to American Indian junior golfers and also worked to increase awareness of diabetes in Indian Country. “Notah is very real to our kids,” says Roger Martinez, director of golf at the Santa Ana Golf Club, where Begay has played often. “They could see him, hear him, watch him at tribal dances. His success was huge to growing tribal golf.” The development of junior golf on the rez has been a pleasant surprise to many tribes that perhaps initially considered golf only in terms of its job opportunities, environmental impact, and ability to generate cash. In little more than a decade, golf has grown from a cultural curiosity in Indian Country to an emerging sport that now engages well over a thousand American Indian children. “Twenty years ago on reservations the question was, ‘Golf? Who plays golf?’” says Jayson Ray, director of First Nations Golf Association, a group that runs clinics and tournaments for all ages of American Indians. “No one even cared about the game. Our children had very little access to golf. The cost was prohibitive, and transportation was usually an issue. But now the game grows easily and naturally whenever a tribe builds a course.”
TO FIGURE OUT what to make of the rise of tribal golf, head north of Albuquerque to the Cochiti Pueblo off Interstate 25. Everything there quickly goes rural. There are no chain stores, no neon. The county blacktop rises gently past tiny plots of chiles, squash, and beans, past the trout-filled Cochiti Reservoir— bless the Rio Grande—and into the heart of the historic village (pop. 1,500), where dirt roads and weathered adobes are clustered around the ceremonial circular kiva. As I arrived one morning, women from the pueblo’s pumpkin and turquoise clans, some chatting in their native Keresan language, were walking into town to prepare for a weekend festival. Signs warned visitors: no photographs or drawings. I’ve been making occasional pilgrimages to Pueblo de Cochiti Golf Course since the early ’90s and look forward to the drive every bit as much as some worship the azalea-scented trail to Augusta National. This exceptional mountain muni is only about 30 miles north of Travis Pecos’ high school and the encroaching Albuquerque sprawl of Home Depots and Lotaburgers, but they are still pleasingly worlds apart. Across the county road, the Cochiti golf course had received an overnight dusting of snow, which meant golf director Jude Suina and his tournament director, Phil Quintana, could linger over our steaming green-chile burritos from the clubhouse café. First they show off some autographed golf caps from a few of the celebs who adore Cochiti: actors Gene Hackman and Samuel L. Jackson, footballer Troy Aikman, and rocker Steve Miller, without the Band. Little pushpins on a world map in the pro shop further show that scores of visitors have come from as far as Norway and Madagascar. But because it’s not connected to a resort or casino, and the pro shop isn’t run by an out-of-town firm that turns “local” into Scottsdale, Arizona–posh, Cochiti still feels like a humble hometown course. In the café, conversations are more likely to be about basketball or big elk than mergers and acquisitions. Suina and Quintana—and before them a devoted head pro named Steve Schoch—have not only nurtured many junior golfers like Travis Pecos, they’ve also helped set a tone, a sense of priorities here. Suina, who worked his way up from golf cart attendant, is one of 11 children and got his first set of clubs when his mother, a Cochiti potter, traded some ceramic figurines called storytellers with one of the head pros. “The elders talk to the kids about more than golf,” Suina says. “Respect for family. Respect for yourself. But also keeping the traditions. Our language is slowly fading away. The kids speak a little, but they’re not fluent. The elders preach and preach about that.” Those traditions also include conservation. When Robert Trent Jones Jr. was building Cochiti he says he felt particularly compelled to handle water features and water usage responsibly. “The tribes don’t have as many bureaucratic regulations, true,” he says, “but they demand that you be ethical about water.” On a typical summer day a New Mexico course with 90 to 100 acres of irrigated Kentucky bluegrass fairways and bent-grass greens can use well over a million gallons of water. That thirst, especially in recent times of drought, has placed some tribes at odds with environmentalists who suggest that American Indians marketing luscious green golf in the desert is not just ironic, but counter to their ethic of conservation. To which the tribes respond, more or less: We were here hundreds of years before any Anglo development. We have ancestral water rights. Our casinos and golf courses use a fraction of what in years past has gone to shopping malls, subdivisions, and corporate agriculture. For Suina and Quintana, who must straddle two often-divergent worlds, the discussion of tradition, keeping the language, and protecting the environment, must inevitably turn to Indian Country’s all-consuming force: casinos. While a majority of New Mexico’s 22 pueblos and reservations have embraced gambling, with some grossing as much as $30 million a year, the Cochiti have resisted. “We see what gaming has done for many tribes—the monthly checks, the laptop computers for kids,” says Quintana, running through the arguments. “But a casino would also cause divisions among us, among families. People would argue over who is 100 percent Cochiti. I think a lot of people admire us for not having a casino. We have a very tranquil environment here.” That they do. And to the bemusement of many Cochiti elders, that environment now includes a simple, ancient game from Scotland whose tenets of honesty, self-discipline, and walking with nature seem to have found across America a fertile field in which to bloom.
Bruce Selcraig is a former Sports Illustrated writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s and Smithsonian. He stows his clubs in Austin, Texas.
Ten Tribal Courses Get into golf on the rez at one of these standout
destinations, from Connecticut to California. 1) Lake of Isles Golf
Course, North Course 2) Black Mesa Golf
Course 3) Twin Warriors Golf
Course 4) We-Ko-Pa Golf
Course, Cholla and
Saguaro Courses 5) Pueblo de Cochiti
Golf Course 6) The Inn of the
Mountain Gods Championship
Golf Course 7) Turning Stone
Resort, Atunyote
Course 8) Barona Creek Golf
Course 9) Circling Raven Golf
Course 10) Dancing Rabbit
Golf Course, Azaleas
Course — Bruce Selcraig
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But none of Chino’s economic brainstorms
quite prepared his once-nomadic and self-sufficient
tribe for what he uncorked that day. “This
land,” he said, with arms spread wide among the
stubbled crops, “will one day be a destination
golf resort. Texans will love it.”
