- After playing it, you'll surely agree
BANDON, Ore. – The design and
development of a
golf course is a long, drawn-out process.
There are
the occasional moments of epiphany,
interspersed
with cold, wet days out on the site, slogging
along for
hours looking, thinking and hoping for an idea
to pop
into your head.
With Old Macdonald, newest of the four
courses
comprising Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, the
nearly
four-year effort involved a communal program
that is
rare in golf and that has its own unique
rewards. I
have no idea how “signature designers” can
think
they are achieving anything but public-
relations photo
ops when they fly in with their entourage for a
half-
day of presumptive consulting. The real story,
at least
at Old Macdonald, is far more mundane.
Mainly it
entails walking and talking.
Old Macdonald is the design of architects
Tom
Doak and Jim Urbina. For nearly 20 years,
Doak has
been the lead man at his design firm,
Renaissance
Golf, and he has advocated a scruffy,
idiosyncratic
design style that evokes classic links-style golf
and
adapts it to a variety of sites. The approach
was tied
to his personality, which was that of the “boy
genius”
out to start something of a revolution in the
1990s.
That’s when the prevailing architectural style
was
based on the “wow” factor. That instant
memorability
came at the price of aesthetic overkill.
Courses were
costly to build and maintain, and holes were
too hard
for the everyday golfer.
Bandon Dunes reversed everything. Owner
Mike
Keiser, a golf purist, favored the quirky old
English
and Scottish model in which clubhouses were
sparse,
conditions natural and the game played for fun.
He
was – and is – smart enough to know that the
golf
course has to pay for itself. At Bandon, he
encountered a ready market among folks who
love
traditional golf. Keiser calls them his “retail
golfers,” or
those with a “seven and higher handicap who
are
avid, even if they are not terribly
skilled.”
| |
Editor’s note
• Bradley S. Klein,
Golfweek’s
architecture editor, was part of a three-
member team
that consulted on the design of Old
Macdonald, which
is scheduled to open June 1 at Bandon Dunes
Golf
Resort. As per agreement with
Golfweek,
he donated his consulting fee. This column
offers a
behind-the-scenes look at the design of Old
Macdonald. |
After adding Pacific Dunes (Doak) in 2001
and
Bandon Trails (Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw)
in 2005,
Keiser turned his attention to what was
originally a
landlocked parcel on the northeast side of his
1,200-
acre tract. His favorite architect, Charles Blair
Macdonald, the designer of National Golf Links
of
America, no longer was available, having died
in
1939.
Keiser originally considered doing a full-
scale copy
of Lido Golf Club on Long Island, a
monumental
project that Macdonald did with longtime
protégé
Seth Raynor (a course that did not survive into
the
post-World War II era). But reproducing that
long-lost
gem wasn’t feasible, given the nature of the
Bandon
land.
Keiser turned to another idea – a course
that
would honor Macdonald (and Raynor) by
drawing
upon the great holes from which those
architects had
so steadily borrowed in their own design work.
That meant seeking inspiration not only
from
Macdonald’s own courses but also from where
he got
his ideas – St. Andrews, Prestwick, North
Berwick and
Royal St. George’s, and lesser-known gems
such as
Royal West Norfolk and Littlestone.
Keiser was always one to listen to input
from any
number of folks – visiting designers, members
of his
own staff, or even his friends who had come
out to
visit. In doing Old Macdonald, Keiser went one
step
further and assembled a consulting team to
meet
periodically on site.
The team consisted of George Bahto, who
is
Macdonald’s biographer; veteran
superintendent Karl
Olson, who had championed the restoration of
National Golf Links when he was greenkeeper
there
from 1989-2005; and me.
Our job was to serve as advance scouts,
express
concerns and anticipate issues that might
arise for
golfers.
At our first gathering, a two-day
conversation at
National Golf Links in September 2006, we
agreed on
the basic program for the course: that it
wasn’t going
to consist of copied holes; that it would be big
and
bold and wide and fun; and that it had to differ
from
the other Bandon courses.
As I wrote in a follow-up memo, “This is
not
simply an exercise in three-dimensional design
but
also an effort to evoke the (volatile)
personality of
Macdonald. 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
Macdonald’s
work is that there really is nothing subtle about
it.”
Over the next three years, we watched –
and
variously participated – in watching Old
Macdonald
take shape. Doak and Urbina’s routing started
and
ended on the east side of a big north-south
dune, with
the bulk of the course – holes 3-16 – ambling
about
a massive, natural open field. The original
routing
was landlocked, but that eventually changed in
late
2007 when a decision was made to back the
seventh
and 15th greens and the eighth and 16th tees
onto
the dune overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Sand is an easy medium to work with.
Much of
the work that Doak, Urbina and their shaping
team
achieved was to “melt” the more severe
contours and
to allow the holes to settle into manageable,
natural-
looking land forms. But they massaged the
place the
whole way and made it look, at opening, as if
it were
100 years old.
And did they ever make the place big. It’s
wide,
which it needs to be to remain playable in the
midst
of winds that can come from the north or the
southwest. If ever there were a ground-game
course,
this is it, with fairways 60-70 yards across
and all
sorts of confounding hole locations on greens
that
average 14,600 square feet – three times the
size of
standard U.S. greens.
Architecture purists who might think they
know
Macdonald will come away amazed at the
irregular
and rumpled features. The medium-length,
par-3
Biarritz hole – No. 8 at Old Macdonald – with a
massive crease across the middle of the
20,000-
square-foot putting surface, looks nothing like
any of
its predecessors, most of which are
symmetrical and
linear.
By consensus at the outset, the design
team
wasn’t worried about the scrutiny of
architecture
scholars or course raters. Instead, the idea
quickly
became to create something that would hold
the
interest of the everyday golfer.
The hope, as someone put it during one of
the
many walk-throughs, was that at the end of a
round,
a player would walk off the 18th hole, turn to
fellow
golfers and simply say, “Hey, that was fun. I
wonder
who that Macdonald guy was.”
NOTE: To view a photo gallery from
amateurgolf.com's preview round at Old
MacDonald, click here>