As a rule, the southern Oregon coast is not considered earthquake country. But 25 years ago this week, there was something of a seismic event in that part of the Beaver State. At least as far as golfers were concerned. For that is when Bandon Dunes officially opened for play. Imagined by Mike Keiser, who had made millions in the greeting card business before diving into golf development, and designed by David McLay Kidd, a twentysomething Scot with a temperament that could be as fiery as his red hair, the links-style layout was an immediate hit. And that not only led Keiser to steadily expand his golf offerings at the resort he was creating on the Pacific Ocean but also ushered in a renaissance in golf course architecture, with minimalist, Old World compositions becoming all the rage in the private and public realms.
The reverberations of that debut continue to be felt all these years later. And the game as well as the people who play it are so much the better for it.
Keiser’s concept was simple: Bring British Isles golf to America by building walking-only courses on spectacular sand-based sites, no matter how isolated the location. With Kidd, the son of a course superintendent who grew up playing links golf, Keiser found the perfect person to help him realize his dream.
“I had no idea how many people in America liked links golf enough to travel to places in this country as remote as Bandon Dunes to play it,” said Keiser, an Upstate New York transplant who has long lived in Chicago. “But I knew from playing places like Royal Dornoch in northern Scotland that Americans were not unwilling to travel great distances to play it.”
Looking at the Bandon Dunes resort today, boasting five 18-hole courses and two par-3 tracks as well as 210 guest rooms and nine restaurants, it is hard to imagine what it was like a quarter century ago.
Equally as inconceivable is all that led up to its premiere, going back to January 1991, when Keiser purchased a 1,215-acre spread of coastland for $2.4 million almost immediately after seeing it for the first time. Through the 5½ years that it took to secure permitting for the project and after that the build-in, Kidd’s course opened on May 2, 1999.
To celebrate that milestone and provide a closer look at that day and all that led up to it, Global Golf Post asked a handful of people who were part of that effort – Keiser and Kidd among them – to recall how one of the great destinations in golf came to be. Here are their comments:
David McLay Kidd: Go back to July 1994. I was 26 years old and in Bandon with my father, Jimmy, who was still working as the superintendent at Gleneagles in Scotland. Mike and my dad were the same age, just born a day apart (in 1945). And we spent a week looking at the property, with the caretaker, Shorty Dow, showing us around. Then Mike arrived at some point during that visit with Howard McKee (who served as the land planner for the project and oversaw the permitting process), Bruce Johnson (a landscape architect who helped plan and oversee the eventual construction of the golf course) and Steve Lesnik (the co-founder of Kemper Sports, which was going to manage the resort). I was staying in town at the Sea Star Guesthouse in an upstairs room, with Mike in one below me. I had to give a presentation one day about the course I envisioned building there. There were no cellphones back then, and I did not have a laptop. So, I went to Tiffany’s Drug store, bought some marker pens and poster boards and put together a very dumbed-down, PowerPoint presentation that I gave in a little kitchen in the guest house.
I did not think I was going to be hired, so I spoke quite openly about what I thought Bandon should be, which was a links-style course with interesting greens, pot bunkers, no flat lies, no real estate and no cart paths. In other words, the complete opposite of courses being built in America at the time. I figured I had nothing to lose.
Everything I said my father and I knew to be true. Mike said thanks, and we left. I had no idea whether he liked what we said or not.
Mike was in his mid-50s back then, and he could be hard to read. He was still smoking (Marlboro Reds) and often wore Levi’s. He was trim and rugged, a Clint Eastwood-type figure, and a man of few words whose only reaction in many cases was just raising an eyebrow.
A few weeks passed before Mike called. He said he was intrigued by what had been said and also appreciated our commitment and that we were not trying to say just what we thought he wanted to hear. So, he asked us to come back for another visit. Which we did. Then, Mike asked me to lay out 36 holes. I did that as well and also drew up plans for a clubhouse and a parking lot. Cottages, too, with the idea of playing golf from the clubhouse to the ocean and back. I laid out one course on the land where Bandon Dunes sits today and another on the property where Bandon Trails is now routed. I gave all that to Mike in the fall of 1994.
Mike Keiser: Since the late 1980s, after I had built and opened the Dunes Club (in New Buffalo, Michigan), I started looking for a site on the East Coast for another course. But I could not find one. So, I asked Howard (McKee) to help me find some land on the West Coast. Though he was living in Chicago, he had lived in Oregon and knew it well.
Kennon McKee (widow of Howard, who died in 2007 at age 68 from colon cancer): Howard was an architect and urban planner and worked for many years for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill before going out on his own. We were living in Chicago when we met Mike. One day, Mike told Howard he was thinking about building another course. Howard suggested he look in Oregon. Mike then engaged Howard as a scout and gave him a single sheet of paper with a list of what he was looking for, such as access to water, sandy soil and dunes, a certain amount of acreage. Howard then met Bob Johnson (no relation to Bruce and a real estate agent who with McKee helped Keiser find the Bandon land).
Keiser: I will never forget the day that I saw it for the first time. Shorty Dow showed us around. He and his wife, Charlotte, were the longtime caretakers, and after we had stopped to eat lunch, he led us to the highest point of the property. And the view from that spot – of the ocean, the gorse and the dunes – convinced me right then and there to buy it.
Kidd: Shorty was a force of nature. He was about 70 years old when we first met, and he and Charlotte were living in a pretty rundown house in the backwoods. He knew everyone and everything. He showed everyone around when they came to see the property, and he was in charge of getting the timber cut on the land that Mike had bought and then sending Mike the checks for whatever he was able to get for it. Shorty used to joke that he was the only one who ever sent Mike money, and that all the rest of us ever did was spend it.
As for Charlotte, she made the best cinnamon rolls with caramels and pecans I have ever tasted. And occasionally, she’d bring some out to me. I’ve tried ever since to replicate those rolls but have never been able to do so.
As Keiser and Kidd concerned themselves with the design of the first course, McKee took on the rather tricky – and exhaustive – permitting process.
Keiser: Howard knew the permitting and approval process from his work at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. And from his time in Oregon, he also knew and understood the green side of things, the environmentalists. That proved to be quite helpful.
Colin McKee (Howard’s son): Once Mike bought the land, it was up to my father to make it possible for the course to be built there. He put together a land-use plan that he hoped would convince a lot of skeptical people that building a golf resort there really was a good idea. My dad was very good at finding ways to work with people and address their concerns as he also did his best to move the project along.
Keiser: One thing that Howard brought up was how devastating gorse fires had been in the Bandon area over the years, because gorse is so flammable, and how we would manage it on the resort property in ways that would greatly reduce that risk.
Kennon McKee: The permitting process took a long time, but eventually it got done. And I will never forget Mike telling me one time, “I did the golf, but Howard did everything else,” and that Bandon Dunes would not have happened without him.
Kidd: Howard and Bruce were the unsung heroes of Bandon Dunes. They took Mike’s ideas and make them into a legal reality.
As that process was unfolding, Keiser and Kidd kept talking about the course design.
Kidd: Mike was paying me $160 a day, plus expenses. Then in April 1997, Mike said, “OK, I get the design. I get the whole philosophy. Now, can you realize those concepts on the ground?”
In other words, he wanted me to shape some greens on the site. So, that is what I did, with the help of Jim Haley, who had worked for Rees Jones and Mike knew from Chicago. It was a bit of a forced marriage, but Jim and I became friends right away.
We shaped the first and 17th greens, the same greens that are there today.
Now, during this three-year process, Mike would fly in with a crew of his friends to check on our progress and review the work I was doing. Then in August, he brought out Dick Youngscap (the founder of the private Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, Nebraska, which opened in 1994 and also helped to kick off the minimalist, site-based golf movement). Dick liked what he saw. “God dammit, this is great,” he said. That gave Mike (who was an early member of Sand Hills) that final seal of approval and the confirmation that what we had laid out and built at Bandon was worth the shot.
It was great to get the go-ahead, and we got right to work. Everything was grassed in by late spring of 1998. And as sort of a reward for finishing things up, Mike flew me down to San Francisco with him that June to watch some of the U.S. Open at the Olympic Club.
I had a great crew. We worked hard, and we played hard. There was a dive bar in Bandon called Lloyd’s. The owner was named Bobby Dahl, and we went in there after work pretty much every night of the week. I’d give my credit card to the bartender and tell him to cut everyone off when the tab hit $200. And then I’d send the bill to Mike. He paid every one.
Around the time of Youngscap’s visit, 29-year-old Josh Lesnik, the son of Kemper Sports head Steve Lesnik, started work at Bandon as its first general manager. And the following spring, a truck-driving Teamster from Southern California named Bob Gaspar began caddying at the resort. Just 5 feet 5 inches tall and also a member of the Coast Guard Reserve, he bore a striking resemblance to Willie Shoemaker, the renowned horse-racing jockey, and was soon known by one and all as Shoe. Gaspar served as a sort of go-fer through the summer of 1998 and in the fall became caddie master and only the second official employee at Bandon, after Lesnik, who was not a member of the course construction or maintenance crew. Now 82, Shoe still works at the resort, with his official title being “director of outside happiness.”
Lesnik: I had gone to work for my father at Kemper after college. My role was to find new management contracts for the company, and my first deal was to develop, build and manage a course called Falcon Ridge in Lenexa, Kansas. It opened in the fall of 1997, and Mike was a silent investor. He was already building Bandon and had hired Kemper to serve as the management company to run the resort.
Not long after that, Mike called to ask me to accompany him on a trip to Bandon, which I had never seen before. We flew out together, just the two of us, and as we were driving in our rental car to the resort site, he asked me to become the general manager.
The next thing I knew, I was in a construction meeting that included David Kidd. Then, I was walking the property with Mike and looking across the dunes and down at the Pacific Ocean. And when I got to the spot on the course that today is where the 16th green and 17th tee meet, I said to myself: How can I not be a part of this? By the time we got back to the plane, I knew this is what I wanted to do.
I moved out to Bandon in May 1998 with my wife, Judy, and our 2-year-old son, Jake. We bought a house, and I started working out of an office that Howard McKee had set up for me in a mobile trailer. One of my jobs was telling golfers and journalists what Bandon was going to be.
It was an exciting time, and I remember faxing back and forth with Mike every day. And we talked on the phone daily.
I also interacted a lot with Jim Seeley, a Naval Academy graduate and one-time tour professional who was our senior operations person at Kemper. He had also worked for the PGA Tour. Jim was a part of any decision I made and someone I could call whenever I had a problem. And like Mike, he tried to see everything through the customer’s eyes.
Rae Seeley (widow of Jim Seeley, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2020 at the age of 77): Steve Lesnik had hired Jim to work at Kemper in 1995, and he stayed there for 17 years. One of Jim’s main roles, especially as the resort was being built, was to serve as something of a naysayer to Mike. Mike would often say, “What if we…”, and then Jim would respond. That was how they communicated, and they communicated very well.
I remember one thing that Jim pushed back on was having Bandon be walking-only. The idea of that back then was so radical, so unique. Jim told Mike that he needed carts for the revenue they generated and also for the comfort of the golfers.
Jim may have lost that battle, but Mike always appreciated having him as a sounding board.
Jim retired from Kemper in 2011, and we ended up relocating from Chicago to Bandon. My first thought when we moved was that it rained a lot here. But then I came to really love the quietness of the town, the openness of the area and the beauty.
About a year after we arrived, Mike asked Jim to help him create what today is the Bandon Dunes Charitable Foundation. And Jim ran that until he died.
Lesnik: Things did not always go smoothly. My first month in Bandon, I set up a slide show for a small group of business people from the local Chamber of Commerce. We met in a yurt in a state park that is right next to Bandon. Problem was, I had put the slides in upside down.
But a lot of things did go right, and I will never forget the first time I saw Mike address the construction crew. It was at a pizza kick-off party, with construction about to begin. And Mike said to them, “This is not about me. It is about you and your work and the fact that you are building something that will be here 100 years from now.”
Shoe: I was living in Bandon and driving for a local freight operator when I delivered a trailer load of mulch to the course one day in September 1997, when construction was just starting up. The next spring, I took a tour of the course with Shorty Dow. It was absolutely beautiful, and I remember stepping off the 10th tee and thinking as I looked down toward the ocean that this might be a very good place for me to work. Eventually, I started caddying there and helping out when and where I could.
Lesnik: After the PGA Championship at Sahalee in Washington State in August 1998, we hosted a handful of writers from Golfweek who had been covering that event. One of them, the editor, Dave Seanor, was the one who started calling Bob, “Shoe.”
Shoe: I had rounded up caddies for the group. Their intention was to play 18 holes. But they liked the course so much they stayed two days and played 54. And even then, we could hardly get them off the grounds. As he was leaving, Dave told me: “Even if you took away the ocean, these are still 18 of the finest golf holes I have ever played.”
Several months later, Lesnik and Shoe received another indication of how well the new course might be received.
Lesnik: The plan was to start taking tee times on New Year’s Day 1999. But a few weeks before, Bob Robinson, a reporter from the Portland Oregonian, came to visit. We played a round and had a sandwich afterwards. He then went on to write a very glowing article. The phones started ringing the next day, and Shoe and I started taking reservations for tee times much earlier than we had expected.
Shoe: I had caddied for Bob that day, and it was wild the morning his story came out. We only had two lines and one computer in the office. Josh manned the computer, and I wrote down the tee times I took on 3-by-5 index cards. I remember the first green fees being $100. I cannot recall exactly how many reservations we took. Maybe 30. Or 35. But it was a busy day. Much busier than we had expected.
Rave reviews kept pouring in through the spring.
Kidd: Golfweek ranked Bandon Dunes No. 10 on its list of modern courses in America before we had even opened.
Lesnik: Bandon Dunes also ended up being on the cover of Golf Magazine that spring. And in another publication, it beat out Whistling Straits for best new course in 1999.
Kidd: Things got a little weird for me with all that praise. Sure, I loved it. But I also started suffering a bit from impostor’s syndrome. The lights would go out at night, and as I tried to go to sleep, I often wondered why people thought this course was so special. It really wasn’t any different from the courses I had played as a kid in Scotland. In Great Britain, it would just be another golf course. But in America, it was so unique.
Finally, it was time to open Bandon Dunes to the golfing public.
Keiser: Howard, Josh and I went to dinner the night before. We thought things were looking pretty good. We just hoped it wouldn’t rain. Well, of course, it rained. But it stopped by 10 o’clock or so and turned out to be a nice day. We had a full tee sheet. A lot of locals. A lot of Oregonians. I did not play. I just stood on the first tee and greeted people. That’s what I wanted to do. And most everyone told me after their rounds that they love the course and could not wait to come back.
Shoe: The clubhouse wasn’t open then, so one of our local cranberry growers hauled over a big barbeque grill and cooked hot dogs and hamburgers for everyone. And he drank from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s as he did so. I think he drank the whole bottle, and by the end of the day, hot dogs and hamburgers were flying everywhere.
A local barber, Mick Peters, had the first tee time and was the first person to tee off. And since then, he has hit the first tee shot on every other Bandon course.
Things only got better from opening day.
Keiser: That first season, I was praying for 10,000 rounds. Josh thought it would fall somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. We needed 10,000 to break even, and we ended up doing something like 24,000 rounds. We were busy the entire year.
Lesnik: Actually, I think we did more than 30,000 rounds. We had budgeted for 12,466 rounds. I remember that exact number because we used a budget template to do our spreadsheets. But Bandon blew it away. And once it did, Mike started focusing very quickly on Pacific Dunes.