57In its 20 years, the one-of-a-kind resort has proven to be much
more than a pioneering one-off. As most avid golfers know, there
are now five courses—Bandon Dunes, Pacific Dunes, Bandon Trails,
Old Macdonald and Bandon Preserve—with a sixth, the Sheep
Ranch, set to open next year. In the meanwhile, the ripple-effects
of Bandon have reached far beyond its grounds. Even as it helped
revive the economic fortunes of a flagging region, Bandon helped
awaken a larger, slumbering market. It might be a stretch to say
that Bandon rescued golf. But for those—and there were many—
who felt that golf had lost its way, Bandon got the game on track
again. Its popularity shattered tired assumptions about golfers and
freshened worn ideas about what a course should look like and
where a course could be.
Going back over the last two decades, it would be hard to find a
golf project of any note that doesn’t share some of Bandon’s DNA,
be it the restoration of a Golden Age design or the construction of a
new course or resort. Bandon made careers and shaped reputations.
It turned golf course architecture into a subject of such public fasci-
nation that the nerdiest among us might even call it sexy. Above all,
it gave golfers cause to travel. To visit Bandon Dunes is to set foot on
a property of permanence and change, one that’s different in its pro-
file than it was on opening day and yet the same in spirit—and meant
to stay that way. It’s a place where the game’s past rushes up to meet
its present, even as it points to the promise of its future. Maybe what
that means it that Bandon Dunes is timeless. Twenty years from now,
Mike Keiser says, “If you were to come here, my hope and my inten-
Pr tion is that you would find it very much as it is today.”
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