56 GOLF.COM / S e p t ember 2019the opening shots were struck on a seaside layout that marked a
stark departure from what golfers in this country had come to know.
Ever since the Caddyshack ’80s (nitpickers can quibble as to the
exact date), the industry had fed its daily-fee consumers a steady
diet of lushly tended courses within ready striking distance of major
urban centers. Carts were the standard mode of transport. Real
estate sales were a common path to profit. If you smacked a way-
ward drive, your ball was apt to land in a neighbor’s well-kept yard.
That was the blueprint. Golf stuck to it for decades.
Then along came Bandon Dunes.
As dreamed up by an understated golf nut from Chicago, and
drawn up by an unknown architect from Scotland, Bandon was pat-
terned on a familiar template—its inspirations were such storied
links as Ballybunion and Royal Dornoch—but as a Stateside des-
tination, it broke the mold. Its location was remote, its landscape
rugged. Walking was not encouraged. It was required. There were
no paths for buggies, and no man-made encroachments. Native
grasses, not custom homes, fringed the fairways.
That Bandon was destined for runaway success only became obvi-
ous in retrospect. In its early stages, skeptics abounded. Even its devel-
oper, Mike Keiser, had doubts. Though his gut told him he was onto
something—that the kind of golf he loved was loved by many others
who would travel great lengths for it—in his head he figured he was
fated to lose money. The young architect he’d hired, David McLay Kidd,
brimmed with confidence but had little on his résumé to back it up.“My strongest qualification in those days was probably my Scot-
tish accent,” Kidd concedes.
From its inception, one of Bandon’s striking features was the
way it felt both very old and very new. “American links,” was how
its founders billed it, and it did seem like a vividly American crea-
tion: assimilating influences from elsewhere into something that
could only exist here. Bandon offered golf as it was played across
the pond, supplemented with American-style service at a resort
that would swell to American scale. There was gorse, much like in
Scotland, and woolly humps and hollows, but also post-round plat-
ters of “grandma’s” meatloaf. If you hired a looper, as you would in
the UK, odds were good you’d get a local, possibly a former fisher-
man or lumberjack. At every turn, Bandon reminded you of where
you were—friendly, small-town Oregon— without letting you for-
get the purpose of your visit. It was all golf, all the time. You played
from dawn to dusk, then woke up the next day and did it all again.
“There were lots of moving parts, but every decision that we
made came down to golf and what golfers wanted,” says Josh Lesnik,
the president of KemperSports, which has managed Bandon since
its birth. “It was so authentic, it’s almost crazy to think that some-
thing like it didn’t already exist.”Twenty years ago, on
a drizzly, slate-gray
morning in southern
Oregon,
PACIFIC DUNES “One course is a curiosity,” Bandon
developer Mike Keiser likes to say. “Two is a destination.”
With the 2001 opening of Pacific Dunes, a Tom Doak design
that critics immediately rated even higher than Bandon
Dunes, Keiser began transforming his remote resort into a
36-hole mecca, with both layouts catapulting onto GOLF’s
list of the Top 100 Courses in the World.