Businessman, and now developer, Bob Screen endured the long and winding road to get his golf course built. But not that it’s here, the effort seems entirely justified.

In the late 1980s, Bob Screen was flying nearly a quarter of a million miles a year to meet with clients. On landing in Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, Chicago or whichever hub he needed to pass through in order to get home to Seattle, the marketing company owner would look out the window and wonder at all that land. “Most of those airports were built well outside the city on huge, flat areas that were ideal for future development,” he says. “The more I flew, the more built up I saw these areas become.” The same couldn’t be said for his hometown, however. Development opportunities in Seattle, squeezed into something of a bottleneck between Puget Sound and the Olympics to the west, and the Cascades to the east, are somewhat fewer and further between. So when, in 1988, Screen discovered a large property for sale on the Kitsap Peninsula, he pounced, agreeing to buy all 456 acres with a handshake (and for an undisclosed sum.) With land prices swelling, he figured it was a sensible purchase despite not really knowing what he was going to do with his new acquisition. “I thought perhaps I’d just sit on it for a while and wait for the right time to sell it,” he says. Born into a golfing family — in 1901 his grandfather leased a cow pasture in Utah and, for a total of $25.61, built a golf course which is still operating today — Screen, now 66, was interested to read in The Seattle Times an interview with Karsten Solheim in which the club design genius and founder of Ping was quoted as saying that North Kitsap County was in dire need of a golf course.

White Horse Golf Club

• Address: 9260 NE White Horse Drive, Kingston, WA 98346
• Directions: Three miles south of Kingston ferry dock on S. Kingston Rd
• Tel: (360) 297-4468
• Yardage: 5,022 to 7,093 yards, par 72
• Rates: Weekday: $45 (twilight – $25, replay – $25)
• Weekend: $60 (twilight – $35, replay – $35)
• Web Site: www.whitehorsegolf.com

Solheim, who grew up in Ballard and owned a shoe repair shop in the Seattle neighborhood during the mid-1930s, spent his summers on the peninsula where his sisters live and where he owned a small family restaurant called Karsten’s. Screen went looking for him there and found him eating his lunch with his wife and son. “I went over and told him that I’d read what he’d said about golf in the county and asked if he’d like to come and have a look at my land some time. He thought about it for a second, then looked at his son Lou and said ‘Come on, let’s go now.’” Solheim took one look at the quiet undulations, sandy soil and dark evergreen forests and told Screen he had a perfect site for a golf course and that to build it, he shouldn’t spend a million dollars getting a big name architect to come and stamp his signature all over the place, but rather invite a group of seniors from the University of Washington’s Landscape Design program to build it. Screen decided against that idea, however, believing his site was simply too good on which to let a group of talented but, as yet, unqualified students loose with a fleet of bulldozers. “I had eight designers look the place over instead,” he says. “One even offered to buy it. I turned him down and was largely unimpressed with the others’ ideas, and prices.” Not finding his man was the least of Screen’s concerns, however, as he was about to embark on an 11-year battle with local environmental groups who opposed any sort of development. “We took five years to convince the county our plan was environmentally sensitive and gain their approval, and then another six defending the decision in court,” says Screen.