Meet the Mad Russian

Golf Digest, Sept, 2003 by Dave Kindred

The mad Russian golf course WAS built by a mad Russian, a short, bull-shouldered man with wild eyebrows. He is a throwback to a time in America when pioneers did whatever they were brave enough to do. His name is Ted Blehm. He's 83 years old, legendary in Colorado for beating the hell out of people, and the last thing he says to me is, "Make it a good story, or you'll hear from me."

There is, I think, a twinkle in his eye.

Or it may have been an eyebrow twitching in happy anticipation of a brawl to come. Blehm's are serious eyebrows. Long and gray, a tangle of hairs, they swoop up at the tips even as they hang over his eyes. To civilize these eyebrows, a team of beauticians might need axes.

Anyway, we're at his kitchen table. His thick fingers are touching a series of snapshots that show him hip-deep in a trench laying pipe.

"Hell, it'll be there forever," he says. The pipe is part of his golf course's irrigation system. He cut and fit it himself. "No leaks, never."

Done perfectly.

"It had to be No. 1," he says, moving to another snapshot of himself in a trench.

"See?" And to another. "See?"

One more. "See who is in the trench?"

Himself, the mad Russian. "Oh, I was something."

It was 1979. Looking to make big money, he imagined a golf course/real estate development near Milliken, just north of Denver and east of the Rocky Mountains.

Blehm knew nothing about golf, so he hired Greeley Country Club superintendent Dave Tooley to design the layout. Blehm and a crew of Mexican immigrants built Jack Rabbit Trail Golf Course. "A novelty," Tooley calls it. It's 5,461 yards with two lakes and small greens.

Next, Blehm built his own house on a hilltop by the 18th tee. It is a revolving, 12-sided, up-on-pillars flying saucer of a house that he says cost $1.3 million. He did the blueprints personally and personally designed the motors that turn the house and drove nails personally.

So, legend has it, when an architect billed him $119,000, the mad Russian personally beat the hell out of him. Not so, Blehm insists. Not that he'd have minded. At his kitchen table, 23 years after the house-raising, he says, "By God, I got in fights all the time."

There is, I'd swear, a twinkle in his eye.

By then Blehm owned and farmed thousands of acres, controlled water rights to more land and says he fed 50,000 head of cattle. The course and house were new evidence of Blehm's ambition. "Everybody said I wasn't worth a damn," Blehm says. "But I could've been a billionaire--if that stuff hadn't happened."

Alas, that stuff. In those two words is a Russian story rich enough for Tolstoy.

It's about immigrants and arctic winters in two-room shacks. It's about bankers, a bad partner and a president. It's about a beef market so bad you lost money every time your cattle ate breakfast. Besides, there were people. "People'd say anything," Blehm says, "to knock me on my ass. And my accountant. I hope he's dead."

This is the mad Russian's story, and he's sticking to it: He got screwed. His brother, Reinhold, says he warned Ted, "You need a golf course like you need a hole in the head." The brother saw a perfect storm gathering.

Bankers were eager to get their money back when Jimmy Carter's presidency sent the prime interest rate to nearly 20 percent. As the Colorado agricultural economy went in the dumper, Blehm's business partner misled him in ways he won't discuss. Nor does Blehm absolve himself. He says, "I got way too gung-ho."

Still, if people had left him alone, he's sure he'd have climbed out of that foreclosure ditch. But losing $200 a head on 50,000 cattle, as he says he did, will put even a fearless guy in a seriously deep $10 million ditch. Blehm realized he was wrong about one thing. "I thought I had so much money I could never go broke."

His parents, Henry and Molly Blehm, had moved from Germany to Russia when World War I seemed imminent, then across the Atlantic and by train to northern Colorado and a German settlement at Windsor.

Early on, Henry Blehm got on his knees to teach little Theador how to fight. Use the side of the hand, it's faster than balling up a fist. Strike behind an ear, on the nose, the point of a chin. Teddy first got in trouble at a wedding when big brother Reinhold told him to go grab the bride's breasts. He did. He was 8.

The boy wanted to be something. He thinned sugar beets, crawling to scratch out weeds. Then came corn, cattle and land. Reinhold says, "Ted said, 'I don't want everything, just what joins mine.' " Dave Tooley says, "Ted was fearless, and he always wanted to prove he was better than you, braver, richer, smarter."

Blehm ran an environmental bureaucrat off his golf course because the man said he couldn't build his lake dam that high. Another time, rather than slog through red tape for permits, Blehm laid water and sewer pipes six miles--under a railroad, through a river and across a neighbor's yard.

Go broke he did, squeezed dry by his gung-ho-ness and the national economic malaise. So anyone who goes to Colorado looking for the mad Russian winds up in the Missouri outback, 105 miles east of Kansas City.