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Bandon’s Sheep Ranch To Beckon Next Summer
This article originally ran in Global Golf Post on Sept. 2, 2019
BANDON, OREGON | Next summer, the fifth and likely final 18-hole golf course will come on line here. Its formal name is the Bally Bandon Sheep Ranch, though most everyone already refers to it simply as the Sheep Ranch. And the par-71 track that will measure some 7,000 yards from the tips might well turn out to be the best of an already very heady bunch.
“It’s a stunningly beautiful piece of property with great views and terrific land movement,” says architect Bill Coore, who has been charged with his longtime partner Ben Crenshaw to transform a makeshift track that Tom Doak and Jim Urbina had roughed out on approximately 150 acres of oceanfront land north of the other Bandon courses into a more formal, championship-caliber layout. “The Sheep Ranch is also different from anything else at the resort. There are no dunes, which means you can see clear across the entire landscape. And as opposed to the other courses, which have very linear coastlines, this one is irregular, which means we were able to build holes that compel golfers to hit shots across parts of the beach or the Pacific.”
What also separates the Sheep Ranch from other courses at Bandon is the time it has taken the track to be built. The process began nearly two decades ago, in 2001, when the resort’s second course, Pacific Dunes, opened – and when Keiser bought the property on which the Sheep Ranch is now routed with his one-time roommate at Amherst College and longtime partner in the greeting card business, Phil Friedmann. The cost for the land was $4 million, and the two friends each put down half.
“I was still in the early stages of developing the resort, and while there was a lot of cash going out, there was not a lot coming in,” says Keiser, who had already purchased hundreds of acres on the Oregon coast on his own and invested millions of dollars into course and clubhouse construction at Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes. “So, I approached Phil (who had declined initially to invest in Bandon because he felt the endeavor to be folly). We did not sign a formal agreement. I don’t think we even shook hands. We just did it and without really knowing what we would do with the property.”
Adding a third course to the burgeoning Bandon collection was not an option, given how tight finances were at the time. So, they engaged Doak to produce something less formal. The result was a layout that included 13 greens and no particular routing. And for the next 15 years, it existed as something of a shadow track, with Friedmann operating it as his private domain, for his friends and also for guests who managed to ask the right people at the resort (usually caddies and bartenders) the right questions at the right time to gain access.
Eventually, Friedmann decided he wanted to build a more traditional course on the Sheep Ranch property and open it to the public. Keiser concurred, and they hired Coore and Crenshaw, who had created the highly acclaimed Bandon Trails course in 2005, for the job.
What the designers have created is quite special, with nine of the green sites constructed on cliffs overlooking the Pacific. The most spectacular of those is a double green for the third and 16th holes, both of which are par-3s on a piece of land called Five Mile Point that juts into the ocean.
“The biggest challenge was sorting out how to use a smallish piece of property in the best possible ways,” says Coore of the course that does not have even one bunker and will rely instead on the ever-present wind to protect par.
All indications are that he and Crenshaw have been more than up to the task.
J.S.