Part II
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The only thing Bandon Dunes lacked was accessibility. Bandon is nearly as tough to get to as Sand Hills. And it offers few other wrinkles for the normally pampered golf traveler. As at Sand Hills, there is little to do at Bandon besides eat, drink, and golf. And Bandon has a "walking only" policy. Unless you have a government-recognized disability, you will walk Bandon's courses or you won't play them.
And yet Bandon has thrived. Since opening in 1999, Bandon has used "Golf as it was meant to be" as its slogan and manifesto. The golf world has rallied around both the resort and its philosophy. In less than a decade of existence, Bandon Dunes has become the preferred resort of America's golfing cognoscenti, eclipsing such mainstays as California's renowned Pebble Beach.
If you visit Bandon Dunes, early in the evening you'll see a pub full of golfers with wind-burned faces happily downing beers and huge slabs of Bandon's famous meatloaf. Many of them have spent the past 10 hours walking 36 holes. Few of them are expert golfers. And yet they have all had fun, because the courses at Bandon allowed them to. Many of Bandon's visitors are experiencing "golf as it was meant to be" for the first time, and they look like they'll need the smiles surgically pried from their faces before they return to their workaday lives.
While the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort has three magnificent courses, the acknowledged gem is Pacific Dunes, designed by Tom Doak and opened in 2001. On Golf Magazine's list of the 100 best courses in America, Sand Hills ranks eighth and Pacific Dunes ranks ninth. They are the only courses in the top 20 that are younger than 70 years old.
Tom Doak graduated from Cornell in 1982, already intent on becoming a golf course architect. He began his career as an iconoclast, more known for his writing than his course design. While still young and impolitic, Doak wrote books and articles that gleefully savaged the efforts of many of the era's leading architects. He resented and rightly condemned the way those architects used their modern construction tools to create artificial environments where the typical golf round became an ordeal rather than a pleasure.
Although Doak had been producing stirring courses for over a decade before Pacific Dunes stunned the golf world, it was Pacific Dunes that made his reputation. It transformed the one-time outsider into one of golf's most sought-after architects. But Doak wasn't about to rest on his laurels. Shortly after Pacific Dunes debuted, Tom Doak journeyed to remote Holyoke, Colorado, where he would create what is perhaps the fullest expression yet of golf as it was meant to be.
The town of Holyoke sits in the northeast corner of Colorado, roughly 15 miles from the Nebraska border. The topography is flat, perfect for farming. In the center of Holyoke swings the town's sole traffic light, ensuring that the roughly 2,300 locals and visitors passing through town govern their automobiles appropriately.
The Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club of Holyoke opened for business in July 2006 and has already won the highest accolades. While several publications release rankings of the top courses in America and the world, Golf Magazine's rankings are the industry's gold standard. In its first year of operation, Ballyneal debuted as the 46th best course in America and the 83rd best in the world. Ballyneal is the youngest course on either list.
Impressive as those numbers are, they're deceptively low. Ballyneal had been open for only a few months of play when the 2007 rankings were due. Therefore, relatively few of Golf Magazine's panelists had had the chance to play and rate the course. In other words, the legend of Ballyneal has only just begun.
The story of how one of the world's greatest golf courses wound up in rural Colorado begins with a fit, youthful, and almost preternaturally energetic 47-year-old lifetime resident of Holyoke named Rupert O'Neal. As a boy, O'Neal and his younger brother Jim used to hit golf balls in an area of dunes known locally as the Chop Hills-- a few thousand acres of dramatically rolling terrain that interrupts the hundreds of miles of surrounding flatness. Even though there was no golf course there, the O'Neal brothers "played golf" in the Chop Hills using the contours of the land and their own vivid imaginations.
Both O'Neals eventually went to college, but from there they followed different paths. While Rupert returned to Holyoke to tend the family's 3,000 acre farm, the Chop Hills had given Jim an affection for golf that he couldn't ignore. Jim became a golf professional, and today is the head pro of one of the San Francisco area's top country clubs.
Over the years, the O'Neal brothers used to talk about the Chop Hills as the perfect setting for a golf course. Both remembered the fun of playing their homemade version of the game. Long after Rupert had put away his clubs, the discussions continued, always purely theoretical. The thought of actually putting a golf course in a locale that golf snobs would undoubtedly dismiss out of hand seemed unrealistic. But that changed with the success of Sand Hills and Bandon Dunes.
The O'Neals were smart. They brought Tom Doak into the project right after he finished Pacific Dunes. Had they waited, Doak's services would have been beyond their budget. But in 2002, the stars aligned.
When he visited Holyoke, Doak saw that the O'Neal brothers were right: The Chop Hills were indeed a perfect place for a golf course. That fact shouldn't diminish Doak's accomplishment in creating one of the world's finest golf courses there. It's not as easy as Doak and Coore & Crenshaw make it look. After the success of the Sand Hills Golf Club, Jack Nicklaus attempted a "minimalist" golf course not far away on terrain almost identical to Coore & Crenshaw's. Golf Magazine's 2007 rankings ignored the Nicklaus-designed course. The magnificent courses that Doak and Coore & Crenshaw have turned out in recent years are the product of long study, but also of aesthetic sensibilities that future golf architects will surely analyze for centuries.
Whenever Rupert O'Neal speaks about Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club, he does so with evident and justified enthusiasm. In addition to helping create one of the golf world's most special places, O'Neal helped give his home town what is already Holyoke's largest non-agricultural employer.
In many ways, O'Neal has stood on the shoulders of the men who produced Sand Hills and Bandon Dunes, refining their visions to suit his own sensibilities. Like Bandon Dunes, Ballyneal is walking only; that policy should ensure a membership that's serious about its golf, rather than a group of dilettantes eager to crow about belonging to one of the world's best golf courses. Yet Ballyneal supplements its magnificent golf course with supremely comfortable accommodations where you get not only a strong cell phone signal but also wireless high speed Internet and high definition television.
O'Neal clearly doesn't welcome any kind of snobbery at Ballyneal. He is often to be seen dashing about his property in flip-flops, sipping a glass of homemade chocolate milk. O'Neal is looking for members who want to have fun, and who have fun playing golf. To make sure Ballyneal develops the right kind of membership, O'Neal personally plays at least nine holes with every potential member. Open now a little over a year, Ballyneal is still filling out its membership rolls, a fact that avid golfers will want to note.
There remains the pressing question of what long-term impact places like Sand Hills, Bandon Dunes, and Ballyneal will have on golf architecture and the game itself. The early attempts at golf-course design by Jack Nicklaus's successor as king of golf, Tiger Woods, may offer a clue.
For his first project, announced in 2006, Woods took a commission to build a course on a piece of flat desert in Dubai. It was a move right out of the Nicklaus school: Put a golf course where nature didn't intend there to be one, substituting one man's limited imagination for nature's infinite variety. The "Tiger Woods, Dubai," its website says, "will feature 20 palaces, 75 mansions and 190 luxury villas that offer the perfect blend of exclusivity and luxurious community living"--about as far as conceivable from the austere fun to be had at a place like Sand Hills.
For his second commission, Woods undertook to build a golf course on a piece of rolling terrain outside of Asheville called the Carolina Preserve. When the project was announced a few months back, Woods insisted that the land is perfect for golf, and that no man-made lakes or waterfalls will blight his first American design. The course will be walking only.
So has Tiger undergone a conversion? Only the finished product will tell. But this much we know: When someone asked him to describe his design philosophy, Tiger Woods used the magic word: "I'm more of a minimalist," he said.
Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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