As it celebrates this spring the 25th anniversary of its opening, Bandon Dunes needs to be recognized as being more than a great golf course.
The David McLay Kidd design that one-time greeting card magnate Mike Keiser commissioned also instigated a massive paradigm shift in golf development and course architecture, as golfers fell hard for that sandy-soil, links-style track that ran across bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Their very favorable response to this Old World track and the austere lodge that provided Bandon’s early customers a place to eat, drink and sleep induced Keiser to build several other courses on the dunesy, gorse-filled property he had purchased on the southwest Oregon coast. And in time, the resort grew to include five highly rated 18-hole tracks (Pacific Dunes, Bandon Trails, Old Macdonald and Sheep Ranch along with the original) and a pair of par-3 layouts of comparable acclaim (The Bandon Preserve and Shorty’s), with Keiser adding rooms and restaurants along the way.
Those successes led other individuals to create minimalist courses of their own in equally isolated locales. Among them, Ben Cowan-Dewar, whose Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs layouts on the Cape Breton coast in Nova Scotia, Canada, are regarded as among the finest on the planet.
The group of new entrants even came to include Keiser’s two sons, Michael and Chris, who are overseeing expansive and ambitious ventures at Sand Valley in Wisconsin and Rodeo Dunes in Colorado.
A second Golden Age of golf course design ensued as a result, and the layouts that have been coming online in this era are taking the overall quality of golf around the globe to new heights.
In birthing Bandon Dunes, Keiser the elder more or less duplicated what Charles Blair Macdonald had done nearly a century before when he formed the National Golf Links of America on the east end of Long Island, which was to educate golfers as to the attributes of the Old World game by providing them the opportunity to play golf in its most traditional form.
“Mike tapped into the fact that Americans had a big appetite for links golf,” Kidd said. “And with Bandon Dunes, he gave the average golfer access to that type of course in this country for the first time.”
“[Mike Keiser] re-established golf architecture as the lead character in a resort’s production. ... we dream of soul-stirring golf courses and wake up in the middle of the nights thinking of how to delight our guests on the golf course.”
MICHAEL KEISER
It is safe to say, then, that Bandon Dunes has turned out to be as important and impactful of a development in golf as, say, the introduction of titanium in the making of clubheads and urethane in ball manufacturing. And all these years later, it continues to influence the ways that golf courses are built and designed as well as how golf resorts are assembled and run.
“As much as anything else, Mike reinvented golf course development by letting golf and golf course architecture drive all the decisions,” said Josh Lesnik, who was 29 years old when he began serving as the first general manager at Bandon Dunes and is now the executive vice president of Kemper Sports in Chicago. “Not real estate sales. Not money. But golf, and golf as it has been played for hundreds of years in the British Isles.”
Keiser’s oldest son, Michael, agrees with that assessment. “My dad proved that if you make decisions for the right reasons, everything else falls into place,” he said. “He re-established golf architecture as the lead character in a resort’s production. For decades, developers dreamt of huge windfalls derived from robust real estate sales. Now, we dream of soul-stirring golf courses and wake up in the middle of the nights thinking of how to delight our guests on the golf course.”
Dream is an important word when one considers Bandon Dunes, and not only because the course and the resort that grew up around it gave regular golfers the chance to visit a place where they had only heretofore been able to dream of playing.
“Dad created a model for other developers to follow and a reason to believe that they, too, could build something similar and be successful,” Chris Keiser said. “Success was anything but a foregone conclusion at Bandon Dunes when it first opened, and people thought our dad was crazy for trying. But he made it work, and in doing so allowed us to imagine that we could, as well.”
Cowan-Dewar, the Canadian golf impresario who has collaborated on several occasions with Keiser and is now developing courses from British Columbia to Florida and the Caribbean, agrees.
“There would be no Cabot Links or Cabot Cliffs without Bandon Dunes,” Cowan-Dewar said. “And none of it would have happened without Mike. He gave me a model to follow. He was there to offer help and advice whenever I needed it. And he backed me financially, which is what allowed me to get those first two courses done.”
Any breakdown of the reasons for Mike Keiser’s successes in golf has to start with his belief in the importance of spectacular, sand-based sites. Water was also a welcome component, when available, and it did not matter how out-of-the-way a location might be so long as it possessed those other properties.
Just as critical in his eyes was the course architecture. For one thing, he employed different designers to give his players a variety of looks and feels. And he took a very hands-on approach when he worked with those individuals, beginning with Kidd at Bandon Dunes and continuing with Tom Doak, who created Pacific Dunes and shares design credit with Jim Urbina on Old Macdonald, and Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who fashioned Bandon Trails and Sheep Ranch.
“Mike enjoyed the creative process and saw his role as representing the golfers who would eventually be playing his courses,” Cowan-Dewar said. “He had this innate sense of knowing what the customer wanted and then making sure that he or she got it.”
That meant interesting and well-fashioned golf holes that were visually appealing and tested a player’s skills without beating him or her up.
Lesnik says he knows exactly what Cowan-Dewar is talking about.
“I walked so many holes with Mike through the construction process at Bandon and had to rate each one, on a scale of 1 to 10,” Lesnik said. “Then, we talked about them. And if there was something that Mike did not like or understand about a hole, he would get David (Kidd) to talk him through what he was trying to do. Mike was very exacting in that process. But what came out of it was invariably very, very good.”
“The game took some hits post-World War II. Due to courses being built as part of real estate developments, the advent of player designers, the expanded use of irrigation systems – all those things had a negative effect on golf course architecture. But then along came Mike.”
DAVID McLAY KIDD
Another way in which Keiser set himself apart was creating a critical mass in terms of both the number of courses at Bandon as well as the quality of their designs, so the golfer always had a wide range of choices to play and reasons to keep coming back, year after year.
Kidd is among those who believe that the opening of Bandon Dunes in 1999 (along with the establishment four years earlier of the private Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, Nebraska, by another visionary in Dick Youngscap) was a critical advance for golf course design.
“The game took some hits post-World War II,” Kidd said. “Due to courses being built as part of real estate developments, the advent of player designers, the expanded use of irrigation systems – all those things had a negative effect on golf course architecture. But then along came Mike.”
The sense among many in the golf industry is that his arrival saved that aspect of the game. And thanks to Keiser, who recently received the William D. Richardson Award from the Golf Writers Association of America for outstanding contributions to the sport, it never has been in better shape.
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: An aerial view of Sheep Ranch
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