College path, continued

And as an owner, perhaps those nasty divots wouldn't bother him as much as they did when he was superintendent back at Highland Springs in Rock Island, Ill.

Bellinger called golf course designers from around the world, finally selecting Hale Irwin to turn 175 acres of woods into a top-level golf course just north of West Lafayette.

Coyote Crossing opened in 2000. In 2001, Golf Digest magazine selected it the best new affordable golf course in Indiana.

“I had two goals when I built the golf course,” Bellinger says. “I wanted a course that could host a major event, either an LPGA, Champions or Nike Tour event, and I wanted something Lafayette could be proud of.”

“When we built the course, we went to a lot of expense to make sure we did things that were agronomically correct,” Bellinger says.

That included moving 800 large trees out of their nursery to accommodate Irwin's design. Workers stripped off the top six inches of soil from the fairways, contoured them, then put the topsoil back in place.

He trucked in peat moss from Nova Scotia for the greens and sand from West Virginia for the bunkers.

“I had a great time building this course. I never really wanted to be a golf course owner, but I had a lot of fun being a golf course builder,” Bellinger says.

“Now I can say ?I did it.' I won't be sitting in a nursing home saying ?Why didn't I do that?' although I may be sitting in the poor house one day saying ?Why did I do that?'”

Either way, putting Coyote Crossing on the map is Bellinger's legacy to the Lafayette area. A nice gift, considering that 30 years ago, Bellinger couldn't even find Lafayette on the map.