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GREENSBORO — A solution could be at hand to the Sedgefield Country Club’s need for a real par 5 hole.

The two existing holes are too short, some at this week’s Wyndham Championship say, and offer no challenge for players with  juiced-up golf clubs and golf balls.

But the land that could be used to lengthen the golf course has a history, and what a history it is. 

From at least the 1930s to the 1970s, the tinkling of cocktail glasses and dance music filled the elegant but rustic Embassy Club.

The Embassy was a 6,500-square foot log cabin, with rock fireplaces and decorations such as  totem poles and  Confederate rifles, and the grounds bordered  almost the length of the golf course’s sixth hole, a par 4.

From the 1930s until 1975, the Embassy was a night club where Frank Sinatra and other celebrities performed and where pros playing in the city’s golf championship unwound.

On an icy night in December 1975, fire destroyed the Embassy, leaving only a chimney. The cause was never determined, and the club was never rebuilt.

Nearly two years after the fire, the Greater Greensboro Open, as it was called then, left Sedgefield for Forest Oaks Country Club.      

Now the tournament is back, renamed the Wyndham, and kudzu and wild foliage fill the old Embassy site. The place looks ghostly.

“It’s critter land,” says Ed Purgason, a real estate agent for Re/Max.

Whether it’s the uninviting look or an encounter with a copperhead, galleries bypass the Embassy site.

At the sixth hole tee box, gallery ropes lead spectators along a cart path to the opposite side of the fairway.

At seven acres, the Embassy land is perhaps Sedgefield’s largest undeveloped tract.

After the fire, Ross Strange, a Greensboro attorney who lives in Burlington and who bought the Embassy from longtime owner Charles Anderson in the early 1970s, vowed to rebuild.

He didn’t. Sedgefield residents wait after all these years for something to happen.

Now, it might. A big sign put up at the start of the tournament by Re/Max and listing Purgason as agent, announces that the property is for sale. The price, according to the agent’s Web site listing, is $1.735 million. He says there’s interest.

 Current zoning would limit development to seven or eight houses on spacious lots.

But there have been rumblings of a cul de sac plan that would put more houses on smaller lots. A zoning change would be needed.

Such a change would take place over Steve Crihfield’s dead body. A retired lawyer and Sedgefield resident since 1945, Crihfield promises a zoning and court fight if a developer tries for more houses than current zoning authorizes.

“Our belief is that Sedgefield founder A.W. McAlister wanted lots to take up at least an acre or even more than that,” Crihfield says.

“We have taken the position that Sedgefield should be developed in that pattern.”

He says other developers have sought to offer higher-density projects in Sedgefield. Residents have defeated the proposals each time.

Why Strange has allowed the property to stay empty for so long isn’t clear.

He has done almost the same with the historic former Cascade Saloon building on South Elm Street downtown. He stores personal property there.

Repeated calls to Strange were not returned.

One thing is for sure. The Embassy Club won’t be rebuilt.  It went up before 1925, when the rural county lacked zoning. When zoning was adopted, the Embassy was “grandfathered” in and allowed to stay even though it didn’t fit the character of the neighborhood.

Although some Sedgefield residents fondly remember the Embassy, they likely wouldn’t want its return and would oppose the radical zoning change needed for a nightclub.

But what a club!

Crihfield says that after Charles and Anita Anderson bought the cabin, they turned into “basically a speakeasy.”

Liquor sales were illegal in Guilford then. But, Crihfield says, the Andersons had a bar better stocked than today’s restaurants, which can sell whiskey legally.

Authorities raided the Embassy at least twice and arrested Charles Anderson for liquor violations.

Crihfield says the Embassy’s front door had a peephole. If George the bouncer or Anita Anderson, who ran the place and who wore her trademark sunglasses at night, didn’t know you, the door stayed shut.

Big-name organizations held parties there. People dined in 200-seat room with a fireplace and a view of the golf course.

“It was a great place,” says Crihfield.

And it would be a great place for a new green on the par-5 hole. The green ends at Brunswick Road. The west end of the Embassy property is on the other side of Brunswick.

The short street has no houses fronting it. The asphalt could be grassed over and a new 5th green built behind  it. That would turn it into a lengthy par-5 .

The club buying a lot for a green is nowhere close to a done deal. But there has been talk, Sedgefield people say.

Meanwhile big galleries filed by the sixth fairway Saturday between rain delays. It can be said with some certainty that at least a few of those people had   a story about a night at the Embassy.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net