From the Oregonian
City's courses hook golfers with a slice of world-class play
03/14/04
BETH QUINN
BANDON -- Last year, Chicago tycoon Mike Keiser told the construction crew ready to begin building his Bandon Trails golf course the same thing he'd told the crews who built his first two world-class links on the Southern Oregon coast.
"If you do a good job of building a golf course, and an earthquake doesn't take it away," Keiser said, "we will be playing on this course in 500 years."
Those uninitiated in golf may accuse Keiser of hyperbole, but aficionados recognize the allusion to the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, where the sport was born in 1400 and still is played today.
Keiser's Bandon Dunes Golf Resort is an homage to the game's roots in the windswept coastal dunes of Scotland and Ireland, where the pioneers of golf laid out seaside links through gorse and heather that often required golfers to contend with wind, rain and fog as well as ground naturally sculpted by time and tide.
Keiser made his mark as a canny businessman with Recycled Paper Greetings, an eco-friendly greeting card company he co-founded in 1971, which now has $80 million in annual sales. He branched into golf with a well-regarded private nine-hole course on the shore of Lake Michigan in 1988. Still, Keiser's plan to spend $80 million during 15 years to develop Bandon Dunes was greeted with much skepticism.
"All my friends said, 'You are nuts. You're going to build it in Bandon, and you have to walk it?' That was rubbing salt in the wound," Keiser recalls. "My hope was to break even."
Formula from British Isles
In an age when most of the U.S. coastline is sprouting buildings, and most new golf courses are private preserves with fairways lined with luxury homes, Keiser tossed out the contemporary business model for resort development in favor of the ancient formula from the British Isles.
At public Bandon Dunes, the land atop the 100-foot bluffs is reserved for the golf courses, and the lodge and other buildings are clustered far inland near a trio of natural lakes. Guests who stay at the resort, which has an occupancy rate of 70 percent, had better love golf because there are no tennis courts or swimming pools.
Golfers must walk both courses -- there are no carts -- and are encouraged to hire professionally trained caddies who can offer advice about battling tricky winds, towering sand dunes and deep bunkers, and a rough dominated by thickets of gorse and Scotch broom. Keiser has approval for as many as 300 private homes, but if he eventually decides to build, those houses will be located far from the fairways.
"It's a site from heaven, if you know golf. Bandon has the ocean. That's what emboldened me," Keiser says. "I didn't know anyone who'd come, but I knew I represented some people who would go anywhere to play links."
Among the world's best
Last year, Keiser's two Oregon golf courses hosted 75,000 rounds of golf. Bandon Dunes, opened in 1999, is rated by Golf Magazine as 74th of the world's 100 best golf courses. Pacific Dunes, opened in 2001, ranks 19th on the same 2003 list. And in the world of golf, the two are considered the best tandem links courses on the planet.
"It's truly one of the extraordinary golf experiences in the world," says course architect Bill Coore. With his partner, professional golfer Ben Crenshaw, he is designing Bandon Trails.
"No matter how ingenious a golf design person may be, you can't compete with Mother Nature," Coore says. "It's so natural. It's golf laid upon a natural landscape."
Keiser's track record at Bandon Dunes challenges Coore and Crenshaw to score their second golf course in the global top 100 -- and Keiser's third -- on a links landscape that includes great dunes beside the Pacific, meadows covered with kinnikinnick and huckleberry, and lush coastal woodlands.
Coore terms that challenge "an extraordinary compliment."
"There are a few places you want to work, where it's the best it's ever been," he says. "Probably the best thing is that the three courses are going to be so amazingly different. I can't think of any place in the world with contiguous golf courses that are so different."
Global vision of links
These days, Keiser is in Bandon about once a month but seldom has time to visit his other Oregon property, the late Glenn Jackson's 5,000-acre Cascade Ranch near Eagle Point. He's too busy taking his vision of roots golf global, with one new links course, Barnbougle Dunes, opening in Tasmania in November and site scouting under way for another in Chile.
On a visit in late February, Keiser brought two friends who'd never been to Bandon and sent them off to play golf on a typical winter day on the Southern Oregon coast -- torrential rain interspersed with gentle showers, swirling fog interspersed with brilliant sunshine, shrieking winds interspersed with gentle breezes. A few hours later, Keiser met them as they staggered off the 18th hole.
"They both came up enraptured," he recalls with a grin. "They said, 'There's different weather on every hole!' "