Oregon's All-American Golf Course
Designing the perfect all-American golf course.
A little more than a decade ago, Bandon, Oregon was one of the more obscure places in the Lower 48. Tucked away on the coast almost five hours from Portland, the community numbered just 2,800 souls—lumberjacks, fishermen, and cranberry farmers, with perhaps a few hippies thrown in for seasoning. It was Mike Keiser, a former greeting card magnate, who put this place on the map by making it the home of Bandon Dunes, one of the finest golf resorts in America. Keiser chose the town because of its remoteness, not in spite of it: He believed that this spot, which has the same blown-out sand dunes, lightning-quick turf, and mercurial weather conditions found in Scotland and Ireland, would be the optimal setting for “dream golf”—with no golf carts or encroaching real estate development to spoil the fantasy.
From the beginning Keiser took calculated risks in his choice of architects, hiring rookie David Kidd for the first course, Bandon Dunes, which debuted in 1999, and Tom Doak, a rising but still relatively unknown star, for the second, Pacific Dunes (2001). Both courses opened to popular and critical acclaim, as did the resort’s third, Bandon Trails (2005), designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. But the fourth course, Old Macdonald Golf Links, which opened this June, represents Keiser’s most daring move yet. Doak, now at the forefront of his profession, was again hired—but not to work in his own trademark style. Instead, Doak and his team were given the task of channeling and interpreting the famously bold designs of none other than the father of American golf architecture: Charles Blair Macdonald.
At this point the story must travel to the home of golf itself. In 1872 the young Macdonald, scion of a wealthy Chicago family, made his way by steamship to Scotland to attend the University of St. Andrews. There the 16-year-old caught the golf bug, playing the Old Course obsessively from dawn to dusk under the tutelage of legendary architect and greenkeeper Old Tom Morris. Macdonald returned home in 1874 profoundly changed by his experiences on the links, but golf in America was still virtually nonexistent. It would be two decades before courses of any reasonable standard arrived, and three decades before Macdonald had the opportunity to put his ideas of what constituted an ideal golf course into practice.
He finally got the chance in 1907, when he set out to create the National Golf Links of America in Southampton, New York. For this seminal design he drew inspiration from the best holes he had played in Scotland and England—the ones that had withstood advances in equipment technology to provide timeless challenges and strategic interest. As Doak puts it, Macdonald believed holes such as the Eden at St. Andrews, the Redan at North Berwick, and the Alps at Prestwick were “something like the essential reading of golf.” Starting with the National and continuing through his entire design career, Macdonald endeavored to re-create as many of those famous old holes as each site would allow.
This is the stuff of connoisseurs: Only the most well-connected golfers can compare the merits of, say, the Cape hole at the National with the Cape hole at St. Louis Country Club or Bermuda’s Mid Ocean Club. Nearly all Macdonald’s courses are owned by elite private clubs. Keiser addresses this point in The Making of Old Macdonald, an upcoming documentary (produced by Michael Robin, executive producer of The Closer): “I wanted to build a course that honored Macdonald’s ideas but made them available to the public golfer for the first time.”
Keiser originally approached Doak about re-creating a long-lost course: the Lido Golf Club, designed by Macdonald in 1914 and considered one of the best in the world in its time. A private club on Long Island, the Lido was hit hard by the Depression, requisitioned by the Navy during World War II, and ultimately sold off to developers. Looking at the maps, “it was clear that the Lido’s footprint wouldn’t fit the property—at best the new course would be an amalgam of Lido holes,” Doak says. “But that wasn’t much different than what Macdonald always did: He had a series of holes he thought were great classic concepts, and he looked for the best places on each site to fit them in.” Doak advised Keiser to abandon the Lido replica but adopt Macdonald’s basic working method.
