Bandon Dunes at 25: The groundbreaking Oregon resort retains getting larger (and higher)

Let’s make a journey within the wayback machine to a way back grey morning on the Oregon coast: Could 2, 1999. A lightweight rain is falling. A brisk breeze is blowing off the water. And a 2-iron of a person named Mike Keiser is greeting golfers on the primary tee of a rugged-looking format, gifting everybody he meets with a commemorative coin. Every marker bears the picture of a tufted puffin, a brand that may develop into an icon.

It’s opening day at Bandon Dunes.

Given the best way issues are in leisure golf at present, it’s simple to overlook how various things had been then, and the way sharply Bandon broke from what had come earlier than it.

For many years, public entry programs on this nation had largely been developed as actual property performs or lush facilities to frill-filled resorts near main inhabitants facilities. Golfers buzzed round in carts and misplaced balls by the field load. Errant pictures that didn’t land in synthetic lakes risked smashing the home windows of neighboring properties.

In Keiser’s eyes, this was not golf because it was meant to be or something like what he aimed to create. With a fortune earned in recycled greeting playing cards and a imaginative and prescient formed by golf journeys to Eire and Scotland, he’d got down to revive the sport’s rustic, windswept spirit in a market that had stifled it with waterfalls and buggies. To understand his dream, he’d additional shirked conference by buying seaside land in an outlier location, a number of miles north of the sleepy city of Bandon, Ore., and hiring as his designer a younger, untested Scotsman named David McLay Kidd.

“I used to be filled with piss and vinegar on the time,” McLay Kidd says. “However except for confidence, I didn’t have so much to point out for myself.”

Keiser wasn’t shy on self perception, both. However in quieter moments, he couldn’t assist however marvel if the skeptics — and there have been many — is perhaps proper about walking-only golf uncovered to coastal components on a course located on the fringe of nowhere. He was going to construct it, however would anyone come?

The reply arrived earlier than anticipated. Of the 144 golfers invited to the ribbon reducing, 25 years in the past this month, there was just one no-show within the dreary climate. The evaluations had been glowing, in individual and in print. Afforded a sneak peek, GOLF journal described the land as “the best made accessible for a golf course in America since Alister MacKenzie was proven the location for the Cypress Level.” In one other publication, a giddy scribe confessed that the course gave him the urge to dash down the fairways bare. He meant that in a great way.

The purpose was that Bandon had woke up one thing primal. It had taken the outdated and made it new once more, assembly a requirement for a throwback type of golf that had been ignored for therefore lengthy that folks had forgotten it even existed.

In that first 12 months, Keiser hoped the course would draw 10,000 rounds, a quantity he figured he wanted to interrupt even; it wound up registering 25,000.

“After that full tee sheet on opening day, I used to be optimistic,” Keiser says now. “However after that first 12 months, I used to be completely astonished.”

And clear in his conviction {that a} single course was not sufficient. “One plus one equals three” was Keiser’s formulation (even his strategy to basic math was totally different), the concept being {that a} second format would carry exponential advantages to the resort. As most avid golfers know, Bandon at present is residence to not two however 5 18-hole programs (Bandon Dunes, Pacific Dunes, Bandon Trails, Old Macdonald and Sheep Ranch) and a par-3 course (Bandon Protect) with one other brief course (Shorty’s) set to open this month. Among the many placing options of that development is how trustworthy the resort has stayed to its founding ethos: that nice golf doesn’t require fancy extras. Even when wagyu beef has joined “Grandma’s meat loaf” among the many menu gadgets, every little thing at Bandon revolves across the sport and the fellowship, recent air and problem that include it. You’ll be able to guide a therapeutic massage, however you possibly can’t hit the spa as a result of there isn’t one. Most visitors rise at dawn, play till exhaustion, then stand up the following morning and do it once more.

In the meantime, past its property strains, Bandon has impressed profound change. In a once-flagging area whose two essential industries — fishing and logging — had sputtered, the resort has grow to be a significant financial engine, the second-largest employer within the county, after the hospital system. After which there may be its influence on the sport itself.

Even because it broke a mildew, Bandon supplied a recent template for “vacation spot” golf. That world-class programs now lengthen from the sand barrens of Wisconsin and the shores of Nova Scotia to Saint Lucia, Tasmania, Norway and past owes largely to a pioneering challenge on the Oregon coast.

“It flipped every little thing,” says the architect Invoice Coore, who, along with his design associate, Ben Crenshaw, had a hand in lots of these programs, together with three at Bandon. “We take it with no consideration today that for those who discover an awesome web site and construct nice golf on it, golfers will come see it, regardless of how far they need to go. However for those who mentioned that earlier than Bandon, lots of people would have mentioned you’d misplaced your thoughts.”

As Bandon now prepares to mark a significant anniversary, it’s also preparing for one more ribbon reducing at its new 19-hole par-3 course Shorty’s. What the climate has in retailer is anybody’s guess. However this a lot is for certain: A big crowd of Bandon loyalists shall be readily available. So will Mike Keiser, greeting visitors and handing out commemorative cash.

“Has it actually been 25 years?” Keiser says. “To me, it really looks like we’ve been round for much longer.”

No marvel, actually. Bandon suits so naturally into the panorama, it nearly appears to have been there from the beginning.

Josh Sens

Golf.com Editor

A golf, meals and journey author, Josh Sens has been a GOLF Journal contributor since 2004 and now contributes throughout all of GOLF’s platforms. His work has been anthologized in The Finest American Sportswriting. He’s additionally the co-author, with Sammy Hagar, of Are We Having Any Enjoyable But: the Cooking and Partying Handbook.