Sewailo: "Begay ordered construction of 17 waterfalls, dug out space for 14 acres of lakes, and created a meandering path for a mile-long creek."

Thanks to reader Douglas for taking me back to the 90s with this Greg Hansen story on Notah Begay's newly opened $25 million design near Tucson.

Only, the course was not built in the roaring, in-hindsight-hideous 90s, but actually opened in 2013 in a game legitimately worried about water usage and accessibility.

Sewailo--loosely translated as Say What?--sounds like a poster child for the 90s will not be remembered fondly. Only, this course opened in December, 2013.

Begay ordered construction of 17 waterfalls, dug out space for 14 acres of lakes, and created a meandering path for a mile-long creek.

The stonework to support those waterways cost an estimated $4 million.

This is the type of course you’d build at Hilton Head Island, S.C., the type of eye candy you see while watching PGA Tour regulars at Kapalua in Maui.

Location, location, location does not apply here.

Begay built Tucson’s latest “world-class golf course” a few hundred yards from the Casino del Sol resort — address: Middle of Nowhere — at a time Tucson needed another golf course the way it needs another Modern Street Car.

He built it during a period in which the golf industry in Southern Arizona borders on funereal, in which two established golf courses, Canoa Hills and Santa Rita, have been shuttered, and three others, Forty Niner, San Ignacio and Arizona National, were temporarily closed, foundering with cash-flow trouble.

He built it when two muni courses, El Rio and Fred Enke, had their necks in a financial guillotine.

You can drive for miles on West Valencia Road and see neither a flower nor a green piece of turf, yet Notah Begay and the Pascua Yaquis named this $25 million venture “Sewailo.”

Flower world.

And Hansen said this about the difficulty:

Undeterred, Begay, a Stanford grad, stood at Sewailo’s 10th tee last week — it’s a ridiculously brutal 638-yard par 5 — and winked when someone asked him if “six golf balls” would successfully get him around the course.

“You might hit six water balls on the first few holes,” he said, laughing.