Bandon Charette
Most “charettes” last a few hours. Ours ran three days. That’s what happens when you bring together far-flung architecture junkies and turn them loose on a proposed golf course site.
In this case it was linksland along Oregon’s wild coast. The land is part of the Bandon Dunes Resort, 5 miles north of the town of Bandon, 240 miles south-southwest of Portland. Despite the resort’s remote location, it was already home to three successful public layouts. Then, in 2006, resort owner-developer Mike Keiser hatched a plan for a fourth course. He tabbed designer Tom Doak and his longtime associate, Jim Urbina, to come up with a retro-design that paid homage to Keiser’s favorite architect, Charles Blair Macdonald (1856–1939).
To help them—not that they needed any—Doak and Urbina, at Keiser’s instigation, formed a design advisory group with me as one of the members. (As a condition of accepting the assignment, my magazine editor asked that I donate away my consulting fee and thereby dispense with issues of perceived conflict of interest should I or Golfweek comment on the resort in the future.)
The advisory group included George Bahto, a New Jersey–based golf architecture fan and longtime public golf regular. Born in 1935, Bahto is an affable, barrel-chested fellow and U.S. Navy veteran who had been running a dry cleaning store for at least forty years. He found himself smitten with golf and had the run of several central New Jersey courses he came to love, all of them, as he found out, designed by Macdonald’s longtime protégé Seth Raynor (1874–1926). Despite no formal training as a writer or researcher, Bahto pursued his interest in dogged fashion, burrowing through the musty pages and faded photographs of private collections and hanging out with superintendents as they made their daylong rounds on Macdonald-Raynor courses. Eventually, with the help of a friend who could write more elegantly, Bahto produced an immensely detailed design biography of Macdonald called The Evangelist of Golf and was at work on a companion volume about Raynor when Keiser asked him to join the Bandon project.
6. Author test-driving the par-4 third hole at Old Macdonald, Bandon, Oregon, during construction. Courtesy of the author.
No one would mistake Bahto for a buttoned-down country club patrician. He’s rough-hewn, unafraid to jump in and offer his views, and yet tactful enough to deal in a straightforward but informed manner with the board members of very high-toned clubs of Macdonald-Raynor design heritage. He had become a consultant on architectural history for several pretty exclusive places and had even done design and construction work, including some shaping from the seat of a bulldozer. If ever there were evidence that a self-taught love of architecture was all you really needed to secure a niche in the business, Bahto fit the bill.
There was nothing self-tutored about the third member of the consulting team. Karl Olson was a distinguished golf course superintendent. From 1986 to 2003 Olson held that position at Macdonald’s greatest design, National Golf Links of America (NGLA) in Southampton, New York. This was the 1911 design in which Macdonald brought to bear for the New World his interpretation of the great holes and the great design features he found on golf sojourns in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century. National Golf Links immediately became a kind of museum piece of classic design. For generations afterward, architects and students of golf design headed out to Long Island’s South Fork to study this homage to traditional links course design.
The first time I went there to look at National Golf Links, I felt as if I were on some sacred trip to the Holy Land. It was the day following the 1986 U.S. Open next door at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, and I had caddied that week for Joe Inman. He missed the cut, which freed me up to spend the weekend spectating—and also to finish reading Macdonald’s rambling, egomaniacal memoir, Scotland’s Gift: Golf.
National Golf Links runs literally side by side with Shinnecock Hills. Earlier in the week, after Tuesday’s practice round, I had ventured over to the shack that functioned as the National’s pro shop behind the first tee and asked—“politely begged” might be the better term—the golf pro if I could come back the next Monday to play.
“Sure,” he said. “Just don’t tell anyone. See you at eleven.”
And so I came back the day after the Open, parked up by the clubhouse, threw my golf shoes on, and off I went with my golf bag in tow as if handed the keys to the palace. By the third hole I thought the wild array of bunkering and green contours made for the funniest golf course I had ever seen. Not that it was a joke but that it was all so absurd and in your face and so unlike anything I had seen in the United States. With its blind shots and unpredictable hazard placement, it reminded me of Prestwick in Scotland, only louder and more outrageous.
At what is arguably the National’s most famous hole, the par-3 fourth hole, I paused long enough over my 5-iron tee shot for a whole chapter of golf course architecture to scroll through my head. Here was the famous Redan, a mid-length par-3 adapted from the original par-3 fifteenth hole at North Berwick Golf Club–West Links in Scotland. The idea of the Redan was a fortification that resists attack. The name is actually the French term for “projection” or “salient” and describes a reinforced position that deflects or repels an advance. The term came to golf after the Crimean War (1853–56), when a returning veteran sought to describe how hard it was to hold the green at Berwick—a putting surface that was blind from the tee, ran from front to back, and was heavily defended on the left side by a notoriously steep bunker. Having witnessed a bloody siege at a fortress near Sevastopol, he named the hole “Redan.”
Luckily, the National’s Redan was an improvement on the original. The green was visible from the tee and enabled you to target an ideal landing area up front. You could also stare into that ominous bunker on the left, and you could tell the way the slope on the far right rolled away that it left you with no chance of recovery. Hit it a little too deep into the green, and the ball would run away into yet more trouble. All of this I saw: the hole in front of me; the original in Scotland; images of versions elsewhere on other courses; maps and drawings from books depicting the hazards that loomed and the hazards I could not see. All of it flashed before me in a matter of seconds.
There is precious little difference between functioning as an idiot savant and being crippled by obsessive thoughts and images. In that small nebulous space between those two worlds, I somehow found just enough room and time to make my swing. The ball came off the clubface almost as planned and wound up just short of the green, which I knew was fine. From there I chipped to within ten feet of the flagstick and then stood over the remaining putt trying to pretend it did not mean the world to me if I sank it. But I knew it did. And when the ball plopped in, I stopped and looked around and started to sink just a bit as my knees gave way.
As if to save myself, I grabbed my hat but only managed to slide it halfway off my head. And then the tears came, the relief, the excitement, and the powerful joy of something I had not really allowed myself to experience before as I felt I was becoming part of the same conversational tradition that had just looped through my mind. And then an idea jumped into my head, as it often does, in the form of a title, this one ideal for its meter, weight, and phrasing. “A Par at Macdonald’s Redan. A Par at Macdonald’s Redan.” I liked the sound of it and knew it would be the perfect title for a short story that I wanted to write someday. Too bad I never quite got around to it. Until now.
So, here we were out in Oregon, a bunch of people who spend our lives looking at golf holes and filing them away, sorting through them, with the ability to flip through them like a collector handling a deck of baseball cards who is able on a whim to pull out the Ken Hubbs 1962 rookie card or Carl Yastrzemski’s from his Triple Crown year of 1967 without flinching or searching. To varying degrees we all had the routine down. And while no one came close to Doak in speed and detail when it came to classifying and analyzing a golf hole that you called out, we were all conversant enough and well traveled to the point where we didn’t need translation or explanation for the reference. We were all fluent in the language.
From the get-go the project acquired the name “Old Macdonald.” Officially, it was a provisional designation because it was still not yet clear that the name wouldn’t evoke a response of “E-I-E-I-O” rather than reverence for one of golf’s legendary architects. Keiser envisioned an ode to Macdonald’s bold understanding of golf strategy. The idea was to draw upon holes that Macdonald had himself used as sources of inspiration and emulation.
Keiser is an avid golfer from Chicago, well traveled, about a 12-handicap, not a dramatic or excitable player. He’s the kind of golfer who keeps managing to score without blowing up and who is not afraid to hammer away with fairway woods from 175 yards out when other players with bigger egos are trying to bust 5- and 6-irons. He knows his strengths and his limits, and this holds true on the golf course and off. In an industry filled with men who publicly need to assert themselves and who think spending money is the path to quality and greatness, Keiser consistently takes a more modest route.
He’s cautious in how he proceeds, does his homework quietly and persistently. And he does something that I have observed all really successful people are able to do. He has enough of a sense of self that he can surround himself with people worth listening to. Keiser takes in what they say, considers it, and tries to formulate a response that will meet their concerns. Perhaps in his case, he does it to a fault, because his “rabbit ears” are attuned to everything that people mention, even if they are not technically qualified to offer an informed judgment. But when you are in the hospitality industry as he is, as a developer of resort golf, it makes good sense to take the everyday consumer seriously.
He had made his fortune in the greeting card business and was smart enough to try not to lose it in the golf industry. Keiser knew there weren’t enough par-shooters out there to pay the bills. Instead, he attuned himself to what he calls the “retail golfer,” which I’ve heard him define as “the seven-and-up handicapper, who is good enough to enjoy the game but not good enough to play it well.”
There’s a lot dancing around in that little description. For one thing it contains the element of hopefulness, the sense that golfers have that while their skill level enables them occasionally to play decently, their imagination is always able to anticipate new challenges and different places for them to try. The key here is not just the matter of handicap but also that these golfers are curious travelers, willing to go to far-flung places and to endure the occasional hardship of long journeys and spare accommodations. They don’t need to be spoiled with luxury comforts. They just need to be presented with an interesting golf course that provides solvable puzzles in inspired settings.
Too many people building golf courses since the early 1990s have been intent on challenging the scratch golfer. That has meant stretching layouts to well over seven thousand yards and evaluating how courses play for elite golfers from the very back tees. It has also entailed heavily defended putting surfaces requiring forced approach shots flown in over front bunkers and water hazards. And it has meant tendentious talk in the clubhouse about length and difficulty and an accompanying array of cheesy yardage book descriptions about how par-5s afford a chance to reach the green in two and how short par-4s are easy birdie opportunities—as if the majority of golfers could relate to the way the game is talked about. It’s as if the entire industry were engaged in a delusional conspiracy, with owners, architects, and commentators sharing a language about golf that has nothing to do with the experience that the vast majority of real players actually have on a golf course.
There have been humble owners and architects who act modestly about the game and run their courses that way. But Keiser was the first owner-developer to make a major mark on the industry by doing so. His achievement with the first course at Bandon Dunes, opened in 1999, was to show the golf and resort industries that there was a market niche interested in traditional golf—without “country club for a day” amenities, without carts, without flowerbeds, and without fancy accommodations. He did it by building a links-inspired course that offered firm, fast, and sandy ground conditions and was set on a dramatic bluff perched along the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
Getting there is part of the adventure. Bandon is really hard to find. The real estate mantra about proximity to markets normally holds true for a golf course; access is an advantage. Bandon is anything but accessible. I always like to say that there are four ways to get to Bandon, and none of them are any good. You can fly to the region’s major airport in Portland and drive five hours. Or you can fly there and take a glorified puddle jumper into the local airport at Coos Bay–North Bend, twenty miles away, and get a van ride from there. You can also fly through San Francisco into North Bend–Coos Bay. Except that the prop planes are small, the local airport is often fogged in, and the flights in (especially from San Francisco) are at operational limits of their weight and duration and will often dump luggage to meet load limits or cancel if there’s a threat of delay. By default the least worst option is to fly into Eugene, which has the advantage of being serviced regularly by major carriers and leaves you with a lovely two-and-a-half-hour drive, first heading west through the heavily wooded Siuslaw River Valley and then south along Oregon’s famous Route 101 coast road.
Such is the beauty of Bandon Dunes that its remoteness and inaccessibility, rather than serving as liabilities, actually work in its favor. Moreover, for the half of the country living west of the Mississippi River, getting to Bandon is cheaper and easier than flying to Ireland or Scotland—and easier to manage once there. With the resort a self-contained golf facility, there’s no need for driving around (on the wrong side of the road) and little else to do but play golf, practice, drink, and recover.
To the extent there was a business plan at the outset, Keiser calculated he could break even with ten thousand rounds a year. The first course, designed by unknown Scotsman David Kidd, garnered rave reviews and cover stories from the print media that drew attention to the unique resort. Even before the place opened in 1999, the word was out among golf cognoscenti that something fascinating was going on out there in Oregon. Bandon logged thirty thousand rounds in its first full year of operation and basically booked out the twenty-room lodge. Keiser was off and running.
Two years later the resort was back making headlines with the debut of its second course, Pacific Dunes, designed by Tom Doak. This one, just north of the first course, included dramatic cliff-top holes and lots of crumply ground in landing areas and around greens. Instead of meeting demand for golf guests who seemingly wanted to play from dawn to dusk, Pacific Dunes simply created more demand. The resort expanded its housing accordingly. Four years later Keiser unveiled yet a third course, Bandon Trails, this one designed by the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. Unlike its two predecessors, Bandon Trails is entirely landlocked. There are fleeting glimpses of the ocean on the first tee and the last green; it starts on duneland, works its way up a scrubby heathlands environment, and enters classic Northwest parkland before reversing course back down toward the dunes. It’s the sternest walk of the courses at Bandon, in large part because of the elevation changes involved.
The site for the fourth course at Bandon returns the game closer to the shoreline. The site is east and slightly north of the first two courses and affords ocean views but is set back somewhat. Much of it circulates in a big open bowl, some 220 acres in expanse. All of it is covered with dense gorse—a lovely plant that flowers yellow six months of the year. But it’s an exotic that was brought to Bandon in the mid-nineteenth century in order to stabilize the dunes and prevent erosion and did so well that it spread like crazy in the absence of natural controls. The oily plant is readily flammable; twice in this century the town of Bandon was burned to the ground from wild gorse fires. Keiser got permission to build on the Bandon site in the name of gorse eradication, and when the plant was finally cleared from the site of what would become Old Macdonald, the ground revealed itself as ideally suited, with hillocks and rolls. Not that anyone looking out at the gorse-covered site for the first time could have anticipated how lovely and rolling it would be. When I tried to walk the interior bowl of land that would be the main site, it was so densely overgrown with gorse that it looked like a vast carpet had covered the terrain and reduced it to uniform height.
Keiser had long been enamored with Macdonald and with his three most famous courses: National Golf Links; Chicago Golf Club in Wheaton, Illinois; and the legendary Lido Golf Links on Long Island, which Macdonald (and Raynor) had undertaken in 1914–17. Lido was the first American golf course where the landforms were manufactured rather than utilized naturally. Macdonald himself said that the project “was like a dream.” “The more I thought it over,” he said, “the more it fascinated me. It really made me feel like a creator.”
Lido entailed engineering on a monumental scale. The setting was a rectangular tract of sand and salt marsh on Long Beach in Nassau County, with Reynolds Channel to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south. So waterlogged was the site that a British construction manager deemed the ground fit only for “aquatic sports.” Taming the unruly ground required filling 115 acres of tidal wetlands with two million cubic yards of sand. To keep the dunes from blowing away and to serve as Lido’s version of rough, Macdonald and Raynor oversaw a meticulous installation of over a million plantings of bents, rushes, and eelgrass. Total construction came to $800,000, a scandalous sum for the era and about fifteen times the average spent then for a first-rate private course in the United States. And that did not include the cost of the four hundred–room Spanish mission clubhouse and hotel that opened a decade after the course debuted.
For two decades Lido enjoyed celebrity status as a brutally difficult links. Eventually, economic hardship took its toll, whittling away at what had once been the epitome of Roaring Twenties excess. By the mid-1930s Lido was a shadow of its former self, and in 1942 it closed. After the U.S. Navy appropriated the site for the duration of World War II, the golf ground was parceled out for real estate. In 1956 Robert Trent Jones Sr. created an entirely new eighteen-hole routing on an adjoining parcel to the east.
When I was a teenager in Rosedale, Lido was considered just another municipal layout. Having only just begun reading about golf course history, I was not aware of its significance. And when I finally got my driver’s license and made the trip there in the summer of 1971, the journey seemed like a long way to go—through the swamps of Jamaica Bay, across the border into Nassau County, over the bridge to Long Beach. It turns out it was all of eleven miles away, though in my mind it was another world. Given the condition of the course back then, it hardly seemed worthwhile. I remember one very cool par-5 involving a lot of water, though I had no idea at the time how famous it was.
The original Lido sported the reliable Macdonald-Raynor mix of classic holes, including an Alps par-4 (from the seventeenth hole at Prestwick in Scotland) and a Redan par-3. Yet it also unveiled some innovative holes. The par-4 eighteenth was adapted from Alister MacKenzie’s award-winning submission to Britain’s Country Life magazine in 1914 for the ideal two-shot hole, including three distinct ways to get from tee to green.
But it was Lido’s par-5 fourth hole, “Channel,” that became an instant classic with its strategic options. It was based on the sixteenth hole at Littlestone Golf Club, set in dunes along England’s Kent Coast. Macdonald had seen it during one of his pilgrimages to Britain and was inspired to adapt the hole. At Lido he did so by weaving a large, man-made lagoon that created three distinctly segmented playing areas and forced players to hopscotch over them to get to the green. Players trying to get home in two could brave a long forced carry to the right to reach an acre-sized fairway oasis, from which they could brave another long carry to the green. The safer choice, played to the left, involved a large, banana-shaped fairway, from which players still had the option of laying up safely or flying a long, bold second shot to the green. Lido’s distinctive Channel hole disappeared when the course closed—though interestingly, Jones created a version of it when he rebuilt the course in 1956. And it was this version that I remembered being impressed with the one time I played the course.
It’s sometimes strange and confusing to think about what version of a famous hole you’re playing. Macdonald’s Channel hole bore scant resemblance to the original that inspired it. Or perhaps one could say that he freely interpreted and exaggerated what he saw at Littlestone’s sixteenth. The original hole had no water, and the alternative option for the shorter second shot was but a sliver of fairway amid dunes. No matter. The point was one of inspiration. And it provided an instructive lesson for what would become Old Macdonald. Instead of copying the original or, for that matter, emulating the secondary version, Doak and Urbina’s Old Macdonald would allow itself to be inspired by both the originals and the simulations and adapt them to the unique landforms of the Bandon Dunes site.
At one point Keiser had actually thought of recreating the entire lost Lido course in place at Bandon with the identical routing sequence and contours. But neither Bahto nor Doak could make the holes fit when they tried on paper, and so here we were, gathered together not to reproduce a Macdonald course but to figure out how to tease one out of the landforms that would do justice to the legendary architect’s temperament and vision.
Some raw sites for golf are inspiring at first glance. Others only reveal themselves slowly, and not always for the better, as you learn the lay of the land. When I first walked the land for Old Macdonald in 2006, its features were scarcely discernible. A dune ridge ran along the west side of the property, effectively sealing off the open tract from the coast. All along the east side, a forty-foot-high secondary dune ran the length of the parcel and made that open bowl feel as if it were sitting down in a massive valley. There were no direct views of the ocean and no room for holes that would look down upon the sea—unlike the first two courses at the resort, which enjoyed extended coastal exposure. And given the logistics of the site and available access road, the course would have to start and end on the inland side of the big ridgeline that ran along the east side of the main tract. Other than that, we had little to work with when we first met to discuss the golf course.
The gathering took place in late October 2006 at National Golf Links. Doak, Urbina, and the entire design team from their firm, Renaissance Golf, were in attendance, as well as Keiser, Josh Lesnik from Kemper Sports (the management firm that operates Bandon Dunes Resort), and our three-man consulting group. The point of this two-day meeting was to get to know each other and to have a frank, open-ended conversation about design and the proposed golf course. We did something of a go-around to introduce ourselves and express our concerns, and after about two hours we seemed to have opened up more issues than we resolved. The one near-consensus we arrived at was that despite misgivings we had about potential mockery of the proposed name—Old Macdonald—most folks either liked it a lot or thought that it was better than any alternatives we could come up with at the time. The name perfectly evoked the sensibility of the project, which was to honor the legacy of a long-gone architect whose vision had animated the game and brought new life to the craft of golf course design by linking the British past to the American future.
After two hours of conversation we walked National Golf Links en masse, starting on the first tee and stopping wherever along the way someone had something to say. We had allocated five hours for getting all the way around and found ourselves out of daylight on the fifteenth fairway. Every hollow, every angle where the golfer was faced with a choice, it seemed that somebody had something interesting to say, whether about the turfgrass, the evolution of the feature, or on what hole it was based.
Any thoughts I had that Doak and Urbina were going to copy the classic holes simply went out the window during a memorable moment during that trip to National Golf Links as we ascended the hill fronting the green on the long par-4 third hole, Alps. We all knew the original at Prestwick Golf in Scotland. There it’s a straightaway par-4, 391 yards, the rolling fairway set amid flanking dunes, with the second shot blind over a steep hill to a green protected in front by a bathtub bunker that covers up the entire entrance—in effect, a double forced carry blind approach.
Macdonald’s version had more strategy; he angled the fairway to give you an option off the tee with the possibility of a shorter, more favorable approach in, where you could actually see some of the target. In any case you had to get over or around a steep hill protecting the green, and there was a necklace of bunkers in front you had to avoid. The National’s version had more options and wasn’t quite as severe as Prestwick’s. No sooner did we get into a discussion of the relative merits of the two holes than Keiser piped up with a comment that really threw me off. Pointing to those blind bunkers in front of the green, he said, “Well we can’t have those on our Alps. Retail golfers will never tolerate them.”
I seem to remember a collective silent groan, as if everyone at the same time realized that in that case it wouldn’t be an Alps. And someone (I can’t remember who) did point out that blind bunkers in front of the green were essential to such a hole. Some discussion ensued, and I think it was finally Doak who said, “Well, we can figure it out later.” Time to move on to the Redan.
I’m not always the best reporter. I find that in the middle of a conversation, note taking can hinder the natural flow. It’s journalism’s version of the Heisenberg principle in physics—namely, that efforts to monitor the dynamic characteristics of an object (i.e., temperature, speed, position) alter the phenomenon you are measuring. At such times I abandon all efforts at being a stenographer and simply try to remember what I hear and to absorb the sounds and feel and flow of the conversation.
In the case of our time together at National Golf Links, I went home the next day and tried to distill the experience into a series of precepts that I e-mailed out as a memo of thirteen points, the same number of “general principles” that Alister MacKenzie relied upon back in 1920 in his treatise Golf Architecture, in which he explains the elements of sound golf course design.
1. Old Macdonald Course should be an attempt to showcase the vision, grandeur, and boldness of Charles Blair Macdonald’s design sense. Instead of copying his “best” holes, it should be an attempt to transport into the Pacific Northwest a version of classic golf course design that is imaginative and on a lateral scale befitting an expansive site. The commitment should be to playing up to the edginess and depth of CBM’s vision rather than soft-balling design for the sake of the supposed lower tolerance of resort or public play golfers. The Bandon project has already shown that inventive, challenging courses are perfectly acceptable to a discriminating, self-selected resort clientele such as Bandon regularly attracts.
2. This is not simply an exercise in three-dimensional design but also an effort to evoke the (volatile) personality of CBM in this golf course. That means a firm commitment to the spirit of golf as a vigorous outdoor adventure and to the importance of chance, (mis)fortune, and the outrageous as part of a normal round. To a large extent what is most impressive about CBM’s work is that there really is nothing subtle about it.
3. Length, par, and routing are ultimately to be determined by site-specific characteristics, though consideration should be given to making Old Macdonald different than the other Bandon courses. That suggests the course could be stretched out to the 7,100 to 7,200 yards length, so long as all holes are playable in the variable winds and the holes are also playable and strategically accessible to players from middle and forward tees as well.
4. In selecting the CBM palette of holes, consideration should be given to those design elements, features, and strategies that appear in the (early) courses that Macdonald himself was most involved in: Chicago Golf (1894 version), Mid Ocean, NGLA, Piping Rock, and, to a lesser extent, Lido and Yale. An attempt will be made to focus more on CBM’s work, rather than on Seth Raynor’s.
5. Among the likely hole types that come immediately to mind as candidates for incorporation in some form or another are Biarritz, Eden, Redan, and Short; Alps, Bottle, Cape, Leven, Road, and Sahara; Channel and Long.
6. In looking for inspiration from various CBM holes, we need to be mindful of how the holes he designed evolved over time. This became apparent during our walk of NGLA, when we saw, for example, how the original width of CBM’s Alps hole had been lost, thereby making the approach shot virtually mandatory as a blind one, rather than as restored now, where it allows golfers the opportunity to play down the right and catch a glimpse of the putting surface or at least the ideal second-shot landing area.
7. What’s particularly striking about NGLA is the massive width of the tee shot landing areas and the fact that with all the undulation of the fairways, CBM often shaped out a dead flat landing area of as little as four hundred square feet in the middle of it or on one side.
8. To prevent scooped-out bunkers from being blown out by prevailing winds, it might be advisable to rely upon the turf islands that dot the NGLA bunkers.
9. The complexity of angles and shapes at NGLA ensure its endless fascination. One concession that needs to be made for modern golf is ensuring adequate separation from neighboring/parallel holes in the opposite direction.
10. Zero-horizon lines of greens make for interesting visual masking of perspective. Unusual shapes of bunkers, even if a deep trench like the one at NGLA’s fifth, are also ideal.
11. Interesting greens are paramount. The scale of the Bandon site suggests that the putting surfaces there can be enormous, certainly far larger than anything else on-site. This will not only suit the site but will ensure differentiation from the other three courses there.
12. Major unresolved point, to be decided: square tees or more naturalistic shapes that follow the existing ground contour?
13. Instead of issuing a constant stream of blogs, discussion threads on websites such as GolfClubAtlas.com, press releases, and preopening discussion of preliminary planning, the group will limit its public disclosures and confine comments to general statements and agreed-upon plans rather than divulge internal disagreements or individual contributions and ideas. There is also a sense that it might be better to reduce the preconstruction buzz so as not to overcook expectations about the course or to exhaust the audience in the two- to three-year run-up phase. The occasional commentary or column about progress might well be appropriate, subject to specific agreement by Mike Keiser.
For all of the land planning, drafting, and technical specifications that go into modern course design, the best part—the stuff that gets people excited—is simply walking and talking out on the land. And that’s what we did, armed with a routing that Doak and Urbina had worked out over the few months following our meeting on Long Island and that they were now having us walk, critique, discuss, and consider. It was our first “charette” in the field.
The term charette refers to a meeting over a set of design plans whereby various agendas and ideas are shared. Charette literally means “little cart” and dates to the nineteenth-century École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a design workshop in which students frantically drafted their sketches and placed them in a cart that wheeled the documents to faculty for formal review. In this case our little cart was a golf course utility vehicle, the bed of which we used to spread out the huge drawing that revealed the first incarnation of Old Macdonald.
Part of the exercise involved seeing how powerful a factor the local winds would be. One afternoon we played a few holes of Doak’s Pacific Dunes (whose back nine laps up against the southwest side of Old Macdonald). At the southerly heading 440-yard fourth hole, with a 20 to 25 mph tailwind, I hit a driver followed by an 8-iron to the back of the green. Two holes later, at the 315-yard sixth, playing now directly into the headwind, I hit two good shots with the same driver and 8-iron and barely nudged the ball onto the front of the putting surface. That’s a difference of plus or minus 125 yards on the basis of a wind that was not unusual at all for the site. Of course, the distance differential is compounded by the firm, fast ground on which a ball hit downwind will roll forever, while a ball hit into the wind tends to balloon up, land softly, and hardly roll at all. The exercise thus made its point; whatever holes were built had to be manageable in dramatic winds, the more so here because the winds were not just swirling but tended to come two-thirds of the time from the north (in warmer weather) and one-third of the time from the south (in late fall through early spring). Calendar aside, the winds could also suddenly reverse themselves from day to day, based on the whim of microclimates.
Keiser joined the group for part of the walk-through of the proposed site. A few associates came along at times as well, including Kemper’s Josh Lesnik, who used to be the resort’s general manager, and Bandon Dunes’ land planner Howard McKee. At one point PGA Tour veteran Brian Henninger, who was on a golf vacation at the resort, joined the conversation. Keiser, always curious about how a course will play and especially mindful of his prototypical retail golfer, couldn’t ask enough questions to make sure we were all on the right track.
One afternoon the five-person design committee sat along a ridge overlooking the likely site of Macdonald’s famed Short Hole—a modest par-3 to a complicated green. We were mainly just looking around until Urbina got up and drew a diagram in the dirt and asked if we were sure that the high handicapper could find a safe path to what was planned as a well-guarded putting surface.
There began a discussion that an architecture junkie lives for—forty-five minutes worth, about holes that inspired us or that shared some of the characteristics we were thinking about for this hole: the eleventh at St. Andrews; the sixth at National Golf Links; the third at Yeamans Hall in Charleston, South Carolina; the fifth at Yale Golf Club in New Haven, Connecticut. It was detailed talk, about the depth of the little depression and the falloff to the rear and the way in which the green would look big but play like a series of small targets if properly knitted together. We sat there, variously drawing with sticks and fingers and boots. And then, satisfied that we had made some progress, Urbina, with a single sweep of his foot, erased a graduate seminar’s worth of work and simply said, “Next hole.”
The high point of the three-day charette came when we brought out the PVC pipes and started marking proposed tees and greens. When we got to the site of the twelfth hole, the par-3 Redan, we all turned to Bahto to establish the marker. As he did, someone noticed a tear on Bahto’s face and observed how apt the emotion was.
“Something got in my eye,” Bahto said, dismissing any allegations of sentimentality.
The big test of Keiser’s tolerance came about two months after that charette. In July 2008 Doak’s associate, Bruce Hepner, had spent two days on a bulldozer shaping out a green for that par-3 fifth hole. At 150 yards from the very back, it earned its name, “Short.” The hole sat in the southernmost corner of the Old Macdonald site and came in between two very long holes. But if the hole played small, there was nothing undersized about the green. Hepner had created an enormous putting surface, over twenty thousand square feet. That’s close to half an acre, about four times the size of a normal green. And this thing sat there perched at natural grade, the surrounding area having been shaved down so that it bled on the right into a massive natural-looking hazard whose floor had to be fifteen feet below the putting surface.
The green itself had all sorts of wild pitch to it, with a shelf in back that fed down into a punch bowl area, a bit of the classic thumbprint flat spot at the center that one normally sees in a Macdonald Short hole, plus enough slope at the leading edge to count as a false front if you came up a little short. The thing just swarmed all over the place, and it seemed as if you could hardly miss it with the short iron that you’d be hitting into it. The trick, of course, was that the hole aimed west, assuring at least a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean beyond, and the approach shot would be buffeted from either side by the prevailing winds that whipped across Bandon Dunes. So, the green had to be big—though maybe not this big. When Hepner was done shaping it out, he and Doak brought Keiser over from the tee to have a look. Might as well find out if the boss was really willing to embrace something on this grandiose a scale. He took one look at it and said he liked it, then spent an hour or so looking at it from close in and pronounced his satisfaction.
Doak’s not the kind of guy to admit if he were ever nervous. But it’s impossible to imagine he wasn’t relieved to see Keiser accept a key element of Old Macdonald. This, after all, was going to be golf design on a vast scale. Only later did someone calculate how large. With an average size of fifteen thousand square feet per green, Old Macdonald’s putting surface combined for a total of 6.2 acres, more than any golf course I can think of, including the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland.
Big greens like that can be accommodating for higher handicappers and thus a welcome relief. But for good players they can prove unnerving. For all the greens in regulation you might end up hitting, you’ll be faced with some challenging cross-country putts. That doesn’t seem to bother the high handicapper. But the scratch golfer quickly loses confidence and gets frustrated when facing ground game conditions that do not allow for easy mastery. I saw this firsthand at the fifth hole when I was paired with a low-handicap golfer who hit the sprawling green in regulation with his short iron but now faced a hundred-foot putt that looked like it was going to break left about thirty feet. After he finished out three-putting, the last one from four feet, he walked off the green cursing such a stupid green with swales and rolls that were so wild and out of control. “You hit that green in regulation and face a stupid cross-country putt,” he said.
“Well, the hole only played 140 yards, and you missed your line by 35 yards,” I replied. “If you had missed a shot that badly on any normal hole and faced a recovery with a wedge that long and severe, you would have thought it fine. So, in fact you were just faced with a normal recovery—the difference is you used a putter instead of a wedge.”
I’m continually amazed in golf course design and construction how the site gradually reveals itself. Or, to be more precise, how a really thoughtful designer can utilize and enhance the land and make it come to life. With Old Macdonald I saw this take place over a three-year period, during which I made seven or eight visits, each for a few days. Most of that time on-site was just walking and talking—looking, thinking, moving on, and stopping to look at something else. A geo-tracker monitoring our trail would have suggested to an observer that we suffered from attention deficit disorder. Partly it’s what happens when you find yourself on such a vast open space. But it’s also the way Doak and Urbina work, which is to say they don’t make snap decisions but tend to focus intently on something, then move on to something else.
By contrast, I’ve seen visits by architects that look like well-organized, tightly scheduled tours. Jack Nicklaus, for example, has a design business that’s part of an ambitious global set of enterprises. He tends to make carefully scheduled field visits, the whole day coordinated by his people. And he will move headlong on a hole-by-hole basis as if allocating twenty minutes per hole—enough time to make quick decisions and not enough time to get bogged down. That’s the approach he took when collaborating with Doak on Sebonack Golf Club—this while Doak was meandering all over the place, walking, talking, and thinking about design issues without making decisions quickly. Given their different work styles, it’s amazing they could work together at all. When I caddied for Nicklaus at the opening of Sebonack in August 2006, he told me that Doak ought to have been penalized two strokes for slow play because he took too long to make up his mind while designing.
Doak’s common response to a suggestion is “I’ll think about it.” At Old Macdonald he thought about things a lot. Often his thoughts came during long walkabouts with Urbina. Other times he’d be out there on his own, working something out in his head, or it might happen during mealtime, when the conversation would inevitably turn to a green complex, a routing issue, or a design element.
One day early in the process we got Doak’s routing plan in the mail. I have tried my hand at developing such routing plans, and they are always hard to complete. So, when I see a completed collection of holes, I am almost always taken aback at the skill involved. And in this case it had to do with the way Doak’s routing seemed to describe the kind of path you’d take if you were out there for a walk. The proposed course was always going to start inland, on the east side of a giant ridge. Doak chose to cross the ridge via a blind tee shot on the third hole that would take golfers over the towering dune into the great big bowl where the bulk of the course lay. From there golfers ambled about until the walk from the sixteenth green to the seventeenth tee brought them back up the hill for two concluding long holes played down back along the east side of that dune again.
It was an elegant solution to the problem of traversing the dunes. But soon it became apparent that one crucial aspect of the site was lacking in the routing plan. Here you were at Bandon Dunes Resort, world famous for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean. The coastal holes of the first two courses drew much from playing on Pacific bluffs. But at Old Macdonald all you had were some precious distant glimpses of the ocean. It came into view as you climbed up and over the third hole. You could see the water from the elevated tee on the short fifth hole. And there were two areas farther along in the round, at the seventh and fifteenth greens, where the holes ran up into the base of the coastal dunes but only on the inland side. Golfers were thus deprived of direct access to what lay beyond.
Well, not entirely. Keiser had plans for an upscale halfway house and wine bar there on the ocean side of that dune, where the seventh and fifteenth holes backed in. The idea was twofold. First, that golfers looking for a snack could hike up there and stop off before playing the next hole. Second, that there would be enough of a menu and a late-afternoon/early-evening view of the setting sun to lure golfers back after golf for light fare. There was room to the north for a small paved path that would carry one of the resort’s vans along so that golfers could get a ride out and back. And it was all part of an idea that someday that far end of the property might be the site for future low-profile guest cottage development.
The halfway house was not a fully developed concept. There would have been logistical issues involved in golfers having to take a break from play long enough to hike up and back. But in any case, at some point after the initial routing, Doak was walking along the dune, contemplating the site for the halfway house, when the proverbial lightbulb went off. He had the idea to bring the golf course closer up into the dune and thereby expose the ocean to it.
The result is the present configuration of the seventh and eighth holes. Instead of staying low under the dune, the par-4 seventh now climbs up the side of the dune and arrives at a saddle-like green that strides the top of the dune. That area had to be shaved down somewhat, enough to broaden out a spot where the seventh green could be accessible from the fairway. The result is an entirely original hole called “Ocean.” It’s not an effort to evoke Macdonald. And for golfers who approach it on their second shot, it contains a surprise in the form of a stunning vista of the Pacific coastline.
The dune-top setting also provides an unexpected bonus when you turn around and look down to the east upon the medium-length par-3 eighth hole, “Biarritz.” This is a classic Macdonald hole, a long par-3 to a sprawling green complex with a massive swale traversing the angle of approach. Here was another twenty thousand–square–foot monster green, set in what looked like a huge sawhorse that formed a raised platform from the ground but that, when seen from the elevated tee, looked generously receptive.
In fact, the whole thing canted from left to right, enough so that in the prevailing summer wind (from the north, or left) you actually had to start the tee shot way out left of the green’s shoulder and trust the wind to ride it back. The elevated tee, created by the move of the previous hole up into the dune, now made the tee shot at the wild eighth the most susceptible to the wind of any on the whole golf course. Also the loveliest to behold, for the perched tee looked down upon the interior golf course, and you could just about spot play on all fourteen holes there—three through sixteen. Nowhere on the entire resort is there a more encompassing view of golf.
For all the drama and scale of Old Macdonald, each of its elements still had to be playable and fit in sensibly. And perhaps it was here, if anywhere, that I played any minor role in the whole process. The vision of the whole that Doak and Urbina consistently displayed always amazed me. It takes considerable courage to see big features that can be worked into shape or, like that dune for the seventh and eighth holes, that can be willed to work for golf. It also takes no small measure of restraint.
One of my tasks was to make sure the blind over-the-dune tee shot on the par-3 third hole was playable by mid-handicappers. This was “Sahara,” based on the par-4 second at National Golf Links, which in turn was adapted from the old third hole at Royal St. George’s in Kent, England—a hole that no longer exists. At Old Macdonald the idea was to get people over the primary dune ridge and to tempt them to hit it left in hopes they could reach the green on this short par-4. To do so would require an act of faith as well as a very bold shot that would have to travel high and far for it to clear the dune. The safe shot down the middle, between two existing snags that stood like goalposts, was only about 140 yards through the air and at a height of 35 to 40 feet. It’s the kind of shot you can easily manage with a driver—unless you have to and are trying hard. To make the carry less intimidating, Doak and Urbina brought down the hill about ten feet. All they did was push the dirt down, and the hill just melted, to the point where I could carry it with a 6-iron shot. Eventually, one of the snags gave way—a shame I thought, though Doak always disliked elements that looked contrived and formulaic, as those two did. At least they left one.
Of all the days I spent at Old Macdonald, my favorite was the afternoon that Karl Olson and I test-drove tee shots over that hill. Quite self-consciously, it evoked for us a famous photo of Bobby Jones test-driving tee shots in the dirt on the eighth hole of Augusta National Golf Club in the early 1930s. At moments like that, you can feel the golf course literally emerging from out of the ground.
Despite the time I’ve spent in the field with golf course architects, I’m never really sure what’s going on in their heads. It’s easy to articulate ideas and strategies, but I have always felt that much of the on-site work comes from a quick visual assessment and response to the scene, as if course design were as much a matter of reaction as a matter of systematic planning on paper. Actually, it’s more about fieldwork and site adjustment than about working things out in advance. Not that you entirely wing it in the field. Without a sound routing nothing can go right. But I’ve seen too many courses designed to within an inch of their life in exhaustive documentary record on paper, and when the plans are handed over to a builder, the result looks like a giant Tupperware party that’s been landscaped into place.
Doak and Urbina, like others who got their start in the business by working on construction crews under Pete Dye, proceed with a minimum of a paper trail and a maximum of time in the field. And so for me it was always an exciting, if uncertain, venture to see with each visit how Old Macdonald had evolved and what puzzles remained to be solved.
Given his work style and temperament, Doak for me was always very hard to approach. I didn’t want to come off as an upstart or as a writer who thinks he’s suddenly a golf course architect. And so I always tried to temper any comments with the understanding that those guys knew what they were doing but that I could see it in terms of an unfolding process and anticipate how it might come out and be perceived down the road by others. In effect I was the resident golf course critic who, on a live, ongoing basis, was formulating and submitting reviews that became part of a feedback loop that went into the making of the golf course.
I have this theory that in every golf course project there’s always one problem hole that doesn’t quite fit or that is the perpetual outlier that can’t be made to work right. And then it’s a matter of the design team working really hard at minimizing the problem and overcoming the underlying issue, lest golfers end up sensing that there’s this one sick hole on the course. My view is that if you approach the design with this in mind, you’re more likely to avoid the perception of the course being dragged down by the one bad hole.
At Old Macdonald the fourteenth hole always bugged me. It was a mid-length par-4 that started at the base of a big dune ridge and climbed steeply as it turned left. The problem for me was that the upslope from the middle of the fairway into the green was way too severe for comfortable playing or for walking. It seemed to me to contrast with the rest of the course. All it takes is one such anomaly that hampers the sensibility of the place, and you’ve undercut sustained effort everywhere else.
If I brought it up directly with Doak, I can’t remember his response, though surely it would have been the kind of distanced engagement (i.e., nonengagement) that characterized so many of his dealings with others. I also know I would have held back somewhat from being direct with him because I did not want to appear as if I were challenging his expertise or prematurely making a judgment on a hole that was in progress toward a point that he could envision. Besides, I wasn’t the designer.
But I was the commentator and the anticipatory critic. And even at the stage of rough grade, that slope worried me. So, I spoke with Urbina, who was receptive to my concerns about it insofar as he listened, took me seriously, and assured me he’d think carefully about it. When a further version of work on that hole did not allay my concerns, I went to Keiser about it, and we walked the area together. He took me seriously, and at that point, having fulfilled my obligation at least to convey my concern, I dropped it. Whether anyone pushed Doak on the matter or he just came around to it himself, I’ll never know. In these and in all other matters, I long ago learned that it’s more important to be effective than to gain affirmation that you’re right about something. Whatever the case, the slope eventually was “melted down” and softened in severity, to the point where it is now far more playable and walkable than it used to be.
That concept of the ground melting is something that I saw all over with Old Macdonald. Sand, being easy to maneuver, lends itself readily to reshaping. And because the native ground contours aren’t tied in to well-established trees, any change in the ground profile will seem natural because it doesn’t suffer the fate of a parkland environment, where you always have to tie back the grades into the bases of existing trees. On a sandy site most of your big shaping operations are achieved simply by pushing the material downhill—which is exactly what allowed that seventh hole to be placed in the dunes and yet still look natural when it was done.
I’ve seen dozens of golf course construction projects, but you get a very different view of the process when you watch it unfold in succession over many months—in this case two years. It always seemed to me that the best design work comes from taking grades down rather than from building them up. When you add to land, it’s very hard to float out the features in such a way as to make them fit. Lowering grade, by contrast, makes it much easier to fit things in. And throughout Old Macdonald the jagged, elevated areas seemed to subside just enough. In part this lowering was from direct mechanical manipulation through earth-moving equipment. The jagged peaks also probably got softened by the effects of wind erosion on exposed sand. Finally, there’s the way in which cultivation of a carpet of turf smooths out the abruptness of landforms marginally and creates more continuity and flow.
There is something about pride of birth in the development of a golf course. The gestation period is measured in years, and when it emerges completed and ready for public consumption, the course takes on a life of its own that will variously thrill, confuse, entertain, and frustrate thousands of golfers each year. To have been a witness to the process with this widely watched and now widely acclaimed golf course has been something of a career marker for me. It turns out that those wide open spaces don’t just happen on their own. Someone has to make them. As with Keiser, Doak, and Urbina at Old Macdonald, someone first has to imagine them.