This is the second part of a review of Old Macdonald Golf Club at Bandon Dunes.  Text and photos by Scott Simpson

 

Putting greens are to golf courses what faces are to portraits

   – C.B. Macdonald

 

        If the fairways at Old Macdonald are supersized, then the greens are absolutely ginormous.  Those that measure such things tell us that the Old Mac greens total 6.3 acres, topping the previous record holder, that aforementioned muni in the Kingdom of Fife (the reader may quickly tire of comparisons to the Old Course at St. Andrews, but there’s no avoiding it, especially as three of the holes are specifically modeled on Old Course templates).  The green on No. 5, Old Mac’s Short hole, comprises some 20,000 square feet, and that’s on the shortest hole on the golf course (though, as with typical Macdonald short holes, the green is actually several different plateaus with a 9 to 10 foot elevation change, and the challenge is to hit the far smaller target).  The measurement of the greens is amusing in itself, as I would challenge anyone to define where the aprons end and the greens begin, such is the seamlessness of the transition areas.

        As the final step in the evolution of Team Keiser’s experience, Old Mac was the first course at Bandon Dunes seeded entirely in fescue.  This was the subject of much debate and experimentation in building the original

Bandon Dunes course, as there was no certainty as to how fescue, the indigenous grass of true linksland, would perform on the Southern coast of Oregon.  In recounting the evolution of the resort and Old Mac, I rely extensively on Stephen Goodwin’s Dream Golf – The Making of Bandon Dunes, his highly readable and absorbing account of the development of the resort.  To hedge their bets, the original Bandon Dunes course was seeded with a blend of 80% fescue and 20% bent grass, and they gradually reduced the bent percentage in the subsequent courses.  Somewhere, I recall, perhaps in Dream Golf, the difference was explained by analogizing bent grass to playing off wall-to-wall carpet, with fescue more like playing off a hardwood floor.  Old Mac, much more than its sister courses, has that authentic rock hard feel of authentic linksland, with a corresponding effect on play.

        The property itself is mostly flat, with the exception of two significant dunes lines.  The most notable of these is a large dune separating the site from the Pacific Ocean (see below).  The second formation is Back Ridge, a large dune line that runs almost the entire length of the Bandon property and serves as the western boundary of both Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes.  Because the clubhouse needed to be located to the east of Back Ridge, near the road in a small flat section that now contains the first, second, 17th and 18th holes, the routing needed to move the players over and back in the course of play.  This was accomplished imaginatively on the outbound trek by having the players launch their tee shots on the third hole, Sahara, over Back Ridge, with the most aggressive line dangerously close to a dramatic dead cedar tree.

Above, a group of golfers traverses Back Ridge in the early morning light after hitting their tee shots over the dune. The aggressive line comes close to the ghost tree, a distinctive dead cedar visible from most of the course.

 

        From the top of Back Ridge the player gets his first view of the expansive bowl in which the bulk of the golf course is situated.  The land initially appears flat, especially from a distance, masking dramatic undulations, which up close resemble nothing so much as an unmade bed.  But it was a few days later, scanning Old Mac from the 14^th hole at Pacific Dunes, that I saw why so many have compared it to the grounds of the Old Course.  It has that same appearance of uniformity when you first scan the breadth of the valley, but any time you focus on a specific section of the course, the furrows and interesting landforms become evident.  As I once noted long ago about the Old Course, it’s flat as the proverbial pancake, except inevitably for the specific spot on which your golf ball settles.

 

The view looking back from behind the third green, including the ghost tree on Back Ridge. Although any respectable drive leaves only a wedge in, the green is a staggering fifty yards deep. The lag putt may be the most important shot to have in your arsenal at Old Mac, but where does one practice 150 foot putts?

Next:  Hole by hole assessment

Text and golf photos by Scott Simpson

 

   There can be no really first class golf course without good material to work with.  The best material is a sandy loam in gentle undulation, breaking into hillocks in a few places. Securing such land is really more than half the battle.  Having such material at hand to work upon, the completion of an ideal course becomes a matter of experience, gardening and mathematics.  -- C.B. Macdonald

 

        Imagine for a moment that you’re Mike Keiser, circa 2005.  You’re the toast of the golf world as a result of the improbable success of your Bandon Dunes Golf Resort on the remote southern coast of Oregon.  You’ve been told repeatedly that you’ll never lure enough golfers to make the project profitable, that golf cart rental fees are necessary to make the economics work and that Americans will never put up with the cold and wet conditions of the Oregon coast.  But with the opening of each of your three acclaimed golf courses, you’ve served up a healthy helping of crow to these critics.

        You’ve assembled an attractive 300-acre parcel to the north of Pacific Dunes.  This parcel has less extensive ocean frontage than the wildly successful Bandon and Pacific Dunes, but provides the same sandy substrate perfect for links golf.  Every golf architect on the planet has made a pilgrimage to southern Oregon in hopes of burnishing their reputations on this spectacular canvas.  Surely it was just a matter of picking from among these highly skilled architects and awaiting the inevitable fourth masterpiece.

Utilizing the way-cool sweep panorama feature of my new camera, a view of the Old Macdonald property from the adjoining 14th hole of Pacific Dunes. The property appears to be flat from a distance, but up close an endless series of hummocks and landforms are revealed, very reminiscent of the Old Course at St. Andrews.

 

        But if Mike Keiser were prone to conventional thinking, the Bandon Dunes property would still be a gorse-infested blight.  If you’re Mike Keiser, you trust your instincts and you go big, commissioning the most architecturally ambitious golf course project in decades, an homage to a golf course architect whose name most American golfers wouldn’t recognize and whose design concepts -- such as blind shots, penal bunkering and the importance of the ground game – are alien to the evolution of American golf.  Fortunately for us all, Mike Keiser hit it out of the park, creating a golf course one can enjoy as an architectural history lesson, a stout test of golf or both.  Then, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, he named it after the most annoying of children’s songs, ensuring that the endeavor not be considered some dry history lesson or museum piece.

        Living in Chicago, Keiser undoubtedly became familiar with C.B. Macdonald’s work at Chicago Golf Club and Shoreacres.  His extensive golf travels familiarized him with the original courses that Macdonald so revered and he also had ample opportunity to experience Macdonald’s enduring legacy, The National Golf Links of America.  And, in a world where timing is everything, it is somehow appropriate that Old Macdonald opened for play almost exactly one hundred years after the opening of The National.

        As Keiser focused on incorporating Macdonald’s work into his next project, his first instinct was perhaps even more audacious than the ultimate Old Macdonald concept.  He consulted with George Bahto, whom we met during our visit to Sleepy Hollow (read the author's Sleepy Hollow article here), to assess the feasibility of creating a replica of Macdonald’s

legendary Lido Golf Club.  Bahto had authored the definitive Macdonald biography, The Evangelist of Golf.  The Lido, built entirely on landfill at the then-incomprehensible sum of $10 million, including its 400 room Spanish Mission clubhouse, has achieved mythic status in the golf world.  Upon completion in 1915, it was hailed as no less of an accomplishment than The National, but it failed during the Great Depression and no meaningful records or photographs of the golf course have survived.  The Lido, to paraphrase Sydney Greenstreet, is the stuff that dreams are made of.

        In subsequent discussions with Tom Doak, Bahto and others, Keiser’s thinking moved beyond a reproduction of the Lido, as fascinating as that might have been.  At Doak’s urging, he gravitated towards the concept of building a golf course as Macdonald might have, replicating not a specific design but the design process itself.  Keiser was reportedly brutally honest in his intentions, telling Doak and co-designer Jim Urbina candidly that he already had a Tom Doak course and didn’t need a second.  (Urbina had performed the same role, albeit without the design credit, on Pacific Dunes)  He wanted and expected a Charles Blair Macdonald course; specifically he wanted his design team to identify and utilize the natural features of the land, as they envisioned Macdonald would do if presented with the site.

A partial view of the 5th green, Old Mac’s Short hole. This perspective gives a feel for the elevation change on this vast green of more than 20,000 square feet. The 10th green, seen in the background, shares a cavernous bunker with the 5th.

 

        To assure the broadest base of knowledge of all things Macdonald, Keiser assembled a dream team advisory board.  Bahto, Macdonald’s biographer and a golf course architect in his own right, was an obvious selection.  Keiser additionally recruited Karl Olson, longtime greens superintendant at The National, and Brad Klein, architecture editor and in charge of course ratings for Golfweek Magazine.  In one of my favorite vignettes from the development of the project, responsibility for specific holes was allocated to the advisory board through an NFL-style draft.  Imagine the dilemmas involved if you were lucky enough to be on the advisory panel:  Do you grab the Road Hole in the first round of the draft, or gamble that it will still be there when your turn comes up in Round Two?

        Not only did this unwieldy-sounding committee not produce a camel, but the horse they created is a pure thoroughbred.  The wonder is less that they successfully incorporated so many of the classic design templates

from the Macdonald/Seth Raynor oeuvre, but that they were fearless enough to throw out the playbook when appropriate which is, after all, what C.B. himself would have done.  For instance, while the four one-shotters utilize the templates any armchair critic could have predicted -- namely an Eden, Short, Redan and Biarritz -- the preferred routing left three of these on the outbound nine (though this routing seems downright conventional in comparison to neighboring Pacific Dunes, where the back nine includes no fewer than four Par 3’s and only two Par 4’s).  It’s in the longer holes where we see the apostasy from the Macdonald canon to great effect, most notably on the 7th hole.

        The course features extremely wide playing corridors, with some of the widest fairways you’ll ever see, inviting the inevitable comparison to the Old Course at St. Andrews.  This makes the course eminently playable for golfers of all abilities, and it takes some effort or bad luck to actually lose a golf ball.  But the width can be deceiving and is always part of the strategic test of the hole.  Again incorporating the design ethic of the Old Course, the player is typically faced with a choice of lines off the tee.  The inevitable choice is between the safer line, which will inevitably leave a longer or less desirable angle on the approach shot, versus a more aggressive line which will invariably bring the well-placed hazards, mostly penal fairway bunkers, into play.

Next:  Lay of the Land