Finally!
That’s all I could say to myself as I stepped onto the first tee last week on the new Sheep Ranch course at Bandon Dunes. I was supposed to have made that move more than a year ago, at the official opening of the latest offering at this slice-of-heaven resort on the southern coast of Oregon. But it was one of several milestone events I was forced to miss in 2020 due to the dreaded COVID-19 virus.
Dawn was just breaking as I put my peg in the ground and rested a golf ball upon it. I took a moment to admire the setting moon in one part of the sky and the rising sun in another. A light breeze blew off the Pacific, the direction in which the hole was playing, and I could see a sliver of ocean in the distance. I also discerned the faint rumble of waves breaking on the beach below the first green, some 500 yards away, and heard the yelps of coyote pups from a den in the nearby woods. I smiled at those sounds and then smacked a drive down the right side of the fairway.
Finally, I was off.
One of the things that made me so excited about this round was the backstory of the Sheep Ranch. Two decades ago, Bandon Dunes creator Mike Keiser bought 150 acres of rather flattish, oceanfront land north of the other Bandon courses with his one-time college roommate and longtime partner in the greeting card business, Phil Friedmann. The cost was $4 million. They each put up half.
Problem was, Keiser did not have the money to develop that property, having just built and opened Bandon Dunes (in 1999) and then Pacific Dunes (two years later). So, he and Friedmann asked Doak and his design associate Jim Urbina to produce something less formal. That turned out to be a layout featuring 13 greens, but with no particular routing. And it existed as something of an underground track for the next 15 years, with Friedmann operating it as his private domain for his friends and also guests who asked the right people the right questions at the right time to gain access.
Then, he and Keiser decided to build a more traditional course on the property and engaged Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw to design it. The result was a par-71 beaut that boasted nine green sites constructed on cliffs overlooking the Pacific and no sand bunkers.
After hitting my second shot down the right side, I ran an 8-iron onto the green. Walking up to my ball, I took note of a tall fir on the right side of the putting surface, bleached white-gray by the sun, wind and salt air. I watched seagulls glide along the cliff on which the green was built, occasionally dipping below the ground I traversed.
After only one hole, all I could think was: This was well worth the wait.
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John Steinbreder