As good as the golf has been for most of the first 100 years at Bass Lake Golf Club in Deerbrook, near Antigo, the unforgettable stories that have originated there might be even better.
For Pete VandeHei, they go back to the earliest of his many days spent at the course.
“I remember when we were kids the only time we could golf was on Mondays,” the 88-year-old retired doctor and life-long Bass Lake member recalled last week. “We used to play 72 holes a day – 36 in the morning and 36 in the afternoon. If you didn’t par the first hole, you went back and started over. We knew every nick and cranny on the course back then.”
Even if they had to go back to the first tee, it didn’t keep VanderHei and his pals from coming back to Bass Lake again and again. They found a passion for the game, a friendship with one another and, most importantly, a deep love for a club that has now provided a century of golden memories not only to those who grew up in the area, but to those who found the hidden gem.
Bass Lake CC, opened in 1926 as a nine-hole course carved out of 110 acres of land owned by the Langlade Lumber Company, will celebrate its 100-year anniversary Saturday evening with a program to include live music, cold drinks and many, many more memories. A Facebook post for the event said the celebration would recognize a special place, located 15 miles due north of the Culvers in Antigo, where “memories are made, friendships are built and traditions live on.”
One of those traditions is the unique blend of golfers who find their way to Bass Lake. Many are lifelong members – or their children and grandchildren, who have turned this into a legacy club – while others are golfers who happened upon the course and are drawn back year after year.
“It’s interesting what this place does and how it gets you,” Nick Bretl, 51, a Wausau-area dentist who grew up playing Bass Lake and now serves on Bass Lake’s board of directors, said during the Talking.Golf podcast recorded for this story. “I remember I was about 10 years old, playing up here with my dad and I saw two cars in the parking lot that had Florida plates. And I’m from Antigo. My dad was a member. He joined in 1962. I looked at him and said ‘What’s this all about? How can there be Florida cars here?’ He kind of explained how you have to go to Florida for the good weather in the winter and you come up here for the good weather in the summer.”
Forty years later, Bretl – now a Tampa, Fla., snowbird – counts himself among many Bass Lake members who scatter as far away as Arizona, California and Florida during the winter. But they return home to Bass Lake during the summer when the days are long and the course is perfect.
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Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Antigo Bass Lake GC-Deerbrook
Once upon a time, Bass Lake was a little Starr-struck
It’s always been like that at Bass Lake, which had some “Glory Years” of its own.
A group of longtime members recalled them with a mix of pride and fondness last week as they gathered around the telephone during an interview for this story. Specifically, they remembered Bass Lake’s place during the same era for high-profile members of the Green Bay Packers dynasty.
Legendary quarterback Bart Starr had a cottage on Bass Lake. Fuzzy Thurston,who played left guard in front of Starr, had a place on Upper Clear Lake. Wide receiver Max McGee vacationed in the area. Of course, their presence attacted other Packers greats to tee it up at Bass Lake.
“I had to work for (golf professional) Bill Martine,” said Tom Conrad, a many-time club champion at Bass Lake who enjoyed a 33-year career as the boys golf coach at D.C. Everest (Schofield). “One of my jobs was to clean the bottle chute … and take them to the dump down the road. That’s when I got to know Bill. Before long, I was playing in all of his tournaments.
“Fuzzy Thurston, I got to know him quite well. Max McGee. It was a great memory for me.”
Even today, celebrity sightings during that era are the stuff of Bass Lake legend.
“(Future Antigo eye doctor) Rick Gjome caddied for (Packers coach) Vince Lombardi,” said longtime member Sarah Lange, who lived across from Starr.
VanderHei added: “Bing Crosby was up here quite a bit. Guys would caddy for him.”
For golf history buffs, however, nothing could top the story of an early visitor to the course – a seven-time major champion who happened to be a good friend of Louis Jedlika, the first golf professional at Bass Lake who is also credited with designing the front nine in the 1920s.
“He came from Chicago in 1926 to, essentially, build the course,” longtime Bass Lake member Don Winter said in a video interview with Lange for the celebration. “He was good friends with a guy by the name of Gene Sarazen, who was one of the best golfers at that time in the country. In the 1920s and 1930s. Gene Sarazen actually played up here a few times with Louie.”
One hundred years later, the golf course remains the star of the show
Celebrities have come and gone. Many members, too. But the golf course endures.
The nine holes Jedicka designed enjoyed what would now be called a “soft opening” on July 4, 1925 ahead of its inaugural season in 1926. Before that, according to club history published during its 50th anniversary, the golf pro opened an indoor practice facility in the Masonic Temple downtown and local hardware stores in Antigo advertised having golf equipment for sale.
“We had the Chicago & Northwestern railroad track that came all the way up to Elcho/Summit Lake,” Conrad said. “The course was right next to the railroad track back then. There were a lot of people from Milwaukee and southern Wisconsin who came up to eventually buy property up here. They all got off at the depot in Summit Lake. They came and bought property on Bass Lake and the golf course. If you see the history of the membership, that’s how it got started.”
Offering golf, swimming at nearby Langlade Beach, boating, and fishing, what became known as Antigo Bass Lake Country Club drew golfers from all over and the interest in the club grew exponentially through the 1950s. In 1963, Bass Lake expanded to 18 holes thanks to the design work of Larry Packard, who did many courses in Wisconsin and the region during that era.
The course underwent a $750,000 renovation in 2001 in conjunction with the club’s 75th anniversary. Led by Michigan native Jerry Matthews, who had received regional acclaim for his work at TimberStone Golf Club in Iron Mountain, Mich., the changes were largely cosmetic – expanding greens, adding and relocating bunkers and creating the last of four sets of tees.
“To me, that made it more enjoyable for a lot more people,” said Dick Olk, 88, a retired attorney, a former club president and one of Bass Lake’s oldest living members. “It’s probably never going to have a state golf championship there, but it’s a fun course.”
To Bretl, that the original nine remains largely as it looked when it opened speaks volumes.
“None of them had any experience in golf course architecture,” Bretl said of Jedlicka and early club members who consulted on his plans for what today is Bass Lake’s back nine. “It’s an absolute gem, what they laid out. We’ve done nothing but restore. There has really been minimal renovation to that side, maybe a bunker or two added here or there.
“What those guys had for a vision blows our mind.”
To many, the key to Bass Lake’s future rests in its past
As Bass Lake gets set to salute its past Saturday, the club is already looking to its future.
Many clubs in areas the size of Antigo have struggled to retain members and offer course conditions that keep golfers coming back. By all accounts, Bass Lake has mastered both.
Its members have always been invested in the course. In the early 2000s, they stepped up financially to retire the debt that came with the renovation and today, according to Lange, they continue to step up with sweat equity – performing tasks such as painting the interior and exterior of the clubhouse and tarping greens in the fall and taking them off in the spring.
2026 ANTIGO BASS LAKE GC FEES
Days
Spring/Fall
Summer
Late Summer
& Oct. 1 to close
Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday
$20 for 9
$27 for 9
$24 for 9
Thursday, Friday,
Sunday
$26 for 9
$38 for 9
$35 for 9
Saturday,
Holidays
$26 for 9
$42 for 9
$35 for 9
Twilight Rates
After 4 p.m.
$20 for 9
$22 for 9
($2 more on Saturday)
$20 for 9
Cart fees
Google reviews of the course conditions reflect the priority the club places on them. Bretl credits course superintendent Eric Schmitt, who came to Bass Lake in 2019 after stints as assistant superintendent at Oconomowoc GC and the Legend at Brandybrook in Wales, for continuing Bass Lake’s proud tradition of providing fast greens and tight fairways, course qualities that always seem to turn heads for first-time golfers who come from far and wide.
“When they get (done), they are ranting and raving about it,” said Bass Lake director of golf John Hunter, a third-generation member whose family’s roots in the club date to the 1940s. “Like we always say, we’ve got private-club greens at a public golf course. They really are spectacular.”
According to Miller, the club intends to keep it that way. He said it is about “five years ahead” on a 10-year plan to restore details in the design to help it play the way it did 100 years ago and Bretl said attention paid to a century of tree growth has perhaps made the biggest difference.
“One thing we’re really doing with the restoration is ensuring the new age of architecture and the new age of agronomy, which is less trees (and) what the game originally was,” Bretl said. “It wasn’t originally designed around big trees being around. We’re starting to get back sightlines, some wind movement, some airflow, some sun. We’re really growing grass in places that we haven’t before. We’ve always been good at growing grass in the center of the fairways and on the greens. But now we’re starting to work on the periphery of the golf course.”
Longtime members like VanderHei are proud of the club and what is being done to preserve the history, tradition and, of course, the stories that have been authored during the first 100 years.
Like the time VanderHei was playing a game called “Wolf” with Martine and two other golfers. Each golfer gets to be the wolf every four holes and has the option of playing the hole alone or choosing another golfer to be his partner for that hole. Martine, the wolf on a par-3, went first, missed the green, looked at the other three golfers and chose someone other than VanderHei.
“I’m like ‘What’s the deal here? I’m a better golfer than (him),’” VanderHei said. “(Martine) is like ‘You dummy! (The other guy) gets a stroke on this hole and you don’t.”
That’s when VanderHei took matters in his own hands. He hit his tee shot into the bottom of the cup for a hole-in-one.
“I turned around and looked at Bill,” VanderHei recalled, “And he just said, ‘You … @#%$*!’”
Let’s just say the choice word rhymed with Bass … and had nothing to do with a lake.