A Brisk Walk Among the Dunes
By Stacey Schmeidel
High atop 100-foot cliffs that hug the ocean shoreline in southwestern Oregon are 2,000 acres of picturesque dunes, rustling sea grass and emerald madrone trees. Overlooking miles of crashing surf, the site is subject to the unrelenting vagaries of weather; the wind is strong, the fog frequent and the rain, when it comes, is cold. But the temperatures are comparatively moderate: 45 degrees in the winter, 75 in the summer, and a clement 60-something most days in between. And when the fog relents and rolls back from the seaside bluffs, the lofty perch provides an endless and heart-stopping view of the Pacific.
I know what you're thinking: What a great place to play golf.
But read on. Because this is not a story about manicured greens. There'll be no talk about the precision required to hit a one-ounce ball 300 yards into a four-and-a-quarter-inch round cup. The name of Tiger Woods will not be invoked; Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Nancy Lopez will not be discussed.
Instead, this is a story about Mike Keiser '67, a businessman who builds golf courses "for fun" and whose three courses—including the two public links on the cliffs at Bandon, Oregon—are among the most highly ranked, the most classic, the most beautiful in the world.
Keiser's workaday surroundings are far more prosaic than the outdoor environments he creates as a hobby. We met on a clear, pleasant September 10 morning at the North Side Chicago offices of Recycled Paper Greetings, a company Keiser established in 1971 with his wife, Lindy, and Amherst friend and roommate Phil Friedmann '67. Founded on the first anniversary of Earth Day, the company has grown from a eco-friendly card company (remember "Hippo birdie, two ewes"?) to a privately held business that produces 100 million cards a year, employs 850 people and registers $80 million in annual sales.
Housed in a nondescript, squat warehouse four blocks from Wrigley Field, the RPG offices can charitably be described as an afterthought. Fluorescent lights do nothing to soften the harsh white walls or the worn yellow shag carpet that seems to crumble dryly underfoot. "Watch your step," Keiser's assistant advises, indicating a small but treacherous unevenness between the floor in her cubby-hole reception area and the firm's "conference room," a low-ceilinged windowless space housing a fiberboard folding table and mismatched canvas director's chairs. The focal point of the room is clearly the "money wall," an organized array of RPG's cards, post-its and notepads, segmented by type ("GW" for get-well cards, "NB" for "new baby") and rearranged each week according to sales popularity.
We meet on a Monday, but Keiser is dressed informally, in khakis and a faded polo shirt that make Casual Friday-wear look dressy. A tall, tan man with an open face and a flat, Midwestern inflection, he speaks directly and authoritatively. He makes constant, probing eye contact, but his head-on speaking style and watchfulness somehow make him seem guarded—until he starts to talk about golf.
Keiser's been playing since he was nine, when his parents began taking him to the East Aurora Country Club outside Buffalo, New York—a club they'd joined so his mother could develop her game. Keiser fell in love with the sport—and with the club's big, juicy hamburgers—and that summer spent every day "playing golf, practicing golf and caddying," working the greens from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. "What a day," he recalls, dreamily.
Amherst, he says, was one of the few colleges "with a golf team bad enough for me to join," and so he did, competing—but, more importantly, playing—with the Jeffs for three of his four college years. He denies being an asset to the team ("I was about the same as I am now," he says, "which is to say sometimes good, sometimes bad, but generally mediocre."), but he speaks warmly of the Mount Holyoke course where the Amherst team used to practice. (Since graduating Keiser has continued to support athletics at Amherst; he and Friedmann are largely responsible for the recent renovations to the Coolidge Cage.)
It wasn't until the mid-'80s that Keiser began thinking about developing courses, and then only idly, "as something that would be fun to do." But while a lot of avid golfers do the same sort of idle dreaming (Golf Digest's first design-a-dream-hole Armchair Architect contest attracted 22,000 entries—some complete with scale models), Keiser turned his fantasizing into an educational project, visiting the best of the world's 25,000 golf courses to learn "what I liked and what I didn't like, why I liked it and why I didn't, whether that matched up with the patron saints of golf and what they do and don't like." He made 50 trips to New Jersey's Pine Valley and visited St. Andrews in Scotland half a dozen times. He played Pebble Beach 15 times.
 groundskeeper Shorty Dow |
"I began to approach golf courses like a literary critic," the former English major smiles. "And I noticed that the courses I liked to golf were the courses that were ranked highest by the subjective ‘experts' who rank these things. And I noticed that the courses I liked tended to be the courses that other golfers liked. And I noticed, too, that most of these courses are old, are classic, are traditional. There were almost no new courses that were nearly as highly thought of as the old classics, which were built in the 1920s or before."
So Keiser began to develop a philosophy of golf courses. "My vision was not to build brand new modern courses—which there are thousands of, and they range from pretty good to terrible," he says. "I wanted to build what would be deemed to be a classic course that is timeless. One that, once built, you couldn't tell when it was built. You might even assume, as is the case with Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes [the two new courses in Oregon], that it was built in the '20s. The vision was to build a course that didn't look modern and didn't look contemporary—both of which to me were bad—but to build them the way all the players and the experts liked, which almost no one was doing. To build throwback courses, traditional courses, classic designs."
The most classic designs, of course, are links courses, which recall the earliest courses of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, where golf was invented hundreds of years ago. In the beginning, golf was men and sticks, tramping through gorse on sandy pastures maintained not by greenskeepers but by sheep. The more time Keiser spent golfing in the British Isles, the more enamored he became with the classic links courses. "They're the ultimate classic courses," he says. "And the very best are works of art, or living sculpture, in their own right. Even a non-golfer would be struck by the landforms," he insists. "If I could do a fast walk with you of all 18 holes at St. Andrews or Turnberry—or, in this country, Pebble Beach—even a non-golfer would say at the end, ‘What a nice walk that was!'"
As he began to develop his philosophy of courses, Keiser found himself in the unusual position of being able to implement the theory he'd been constructing on the road. In 1986, 60 acres of inexpensive land became available just a quarter mile from his summer home in New Buffalo, Michigan. Appalled by a developer's plan to clutter the Lake Michigan shoreline with townhouses, Keiser bought the land "defensively" with no clear plans for its use. But as he began to develop his "points of architecture" for golf courses, it became apparent that the land "was a very good site for golf. It was a lot like Pine Valley, outside Philadelphia—the best golf course in the world, which I had made a pilgrimage to repeated times. So having bought the land, I said, ‘Well, I'll build a golf course. I'll build something that feels like Pine Valley—not a direct imitation, but something with the same feel.' So we built and opened the Dunes by 1988. And it was fun."
To the golf world, it was more than fun. The private links course was quickly named one of the best nine-hole courses in the country, and its eighth hole (a deceptively tricky 480-yard par five) has been cited as one of the best in America.
It wasn't the acclaim, though, that excited Keiser—it was the process of golf course development. Identifying and securing the site, finding the right architect, getting the necessary permits, routing and mapping the course, securing financing, designing each hole—"most of that is really fun," he says, "and I wanted to do it one more time." After scouting fruitlessly for suitable shoreline between Washington, D.C., and Florida, Keiser found 1,200 acres of land in Bandon, Oregon, a small, unheralded town four hours south of Portland and 12 hours north of San Francisco. "The land was remote," Keiser says understatedly, "and that wasn't good. But the rest of it: Wow. It's on the ocean, and the ocean is big and beautiful out there; the sand dunes—which the best golf courses are built on—are formed and shaped and made by the wind, not bulldozers, and they were perfect for golf. And it was inexpensive. So I said yes."
Since most new golf courses are built to sell real estate, Keiser's remote site choice was startling, if not radical. But having secured a stunning site in a town no one had heard of, it's perhaps not surprising that Keiser hired an untested architect for the $3.5-million project at Bandon Dunes. A friend put him in touch with Jimmy Kidd, the longtime superintendent at Gleneagles, a premier golf resort in Scotland. The superintendent's 27-year-old son, David Kidd, was interested in becoming a golf course architect and recently had completed a modest course in Katmandu. Keiser knew that the land at Bandon was ideal for a links course, and he reasoned that since Kidd had grown up at Machrihanish "he had probably absorbed something about good links design." He was impressed, too, by the elder Kidd, and "figured that the son was probably a lot like the father. So I hired him, knowing that if it didn't work out in the first few months I could hire someone else."
In golf, the game begins with the land. And Keiser's courses—like the world's other great links courses—are particularly attentive to natural land structure. While most modern club courses—with their manufactured greens and bunkers, their artificial slopes and plateaus—could have been constructed anywhere, Keiser likes as much as possible to incorporate existing plants and landforms into the course itself. The process of building Bandon Dunes wasn't as much about creating curves and contours as it was about identifying the existing hills and profiles and figuring out how to build 18 ideal golf holes around them.
So over the next many months, Kidd got to know the land at Bandon—walking the dunes with land planner Howard McKee, acquainting himself with the flow and the feel of the acreage, studying the weather, the sun, the wind. Keiser admits that he tended to be pretty hands-on in this routing stage of the process, flying to Oregon every few months to look over the plans that Kidd was developing. "David and Howard did the heavy lifting," he says. "I was the judge," he says, "I was the editor. I was the curator."
At the same time, McKee was trying to obtain the necessary permits—a long, contentious process that involved negotiating with no-growth local residents as well as Native Americans who had historically used the land for annual tribal gatherings. Keiser says that these opponents were eventually persuaded that his proposed use of the land—which involved, he says, a low-impact spreading of sand and grass seed, rather than a redistribution and reshaping of earth—was the best possible commercial use of the acreage.
The Bandon land was so stunning that Keiser wanted to make sure it was perfectly used; his mandate all along had been to develop 18 superlative holes. After a year and a bankruptcy sale that freed up 400 contiguous acres for Keiser's purchase, Keiser was finally persuaded that Bandon Dunes was ready to go. The club opened in May 1999 and quickly became recognized as one of the best in the world, earning a high ranking in Golf Digest's "Top 100 Courses" listing and rapturous reviews from golfers of all levels.
Keiser's philosophy of golf includes a commitment to playability. He considers himself "the ultimate user" and insists that the greatest courses are built not for Tiger, Jack or Arnold, but for golfers like himself. "Most golfers are not good golfers," he says. "Most golfers are lousy. For the average golfer or worse—and I represent that group, and that group is most people—what makes a hole great is two things, in order: its beauty, and its playability, which really means the hole is fun to play."
With its subtle hills, its sere landscape and its breathtaking view of the Pacific, Bandon Dunes easily meets both of these criteria. Made up of two nine-hole layouts that run like figure-eights to the ocean and back, the course recalls the flat, horizontal landscapes of the best Scottish links courses. The fairways are broad and gently mounded, starting low among the dunes and emerging higher along the coastline. Deep bunkers, lined with shrubs and trees, abut the greens, and yellow gorse drapes the sandstone sea cliffs on which the course is built.
After completing Bandon Dunes, Keiser realized that the 400 additional acres he'd purchased in the bankruptcy sale gave him enough golf-suitable land to build another great course on the same location—so he set to work almost right away on Pacific Dunes. "The site is so extraordinary that I felt that the sooner we did it, the better," he says, "first, because building is so much fun, and also because the business component is such that one golf course in Bandon, Oregon—even one that's well reviewed—is not as compelling as two to the Chicagoan, the Denverite and the Dallasite who golf."
For Keiser, routing and developing and Pacific Dunes was even more enjoyable than the work he'd done on his first two courses, as there is perhaps no better land in the U.S. for golf. He worked with architect Tom Doak, a young American respected for following the lay of the land in his courses, and known for his outspokenness—his "scandalous honesty," Keiser says—about the faults of modern design. Built next to Bandon Dunes and in the links style, Pacific Dunes opened in July 2001 and has since received reviews that outshine even those for Bandon, debuting in the top 30 of Golf Digest's "Best" list, and quickly becoming a destination site for avid golfers.
Although adjacent to Bandon, Pacific is a completely different kind of course, with heaving vertical dunes and bumps, and winding, hidden valleys. From the green of the first, short hole, players climb through a series of dunes to the tee of the second hole, where they hit out over a dunescape toward the ocean. In fact, dunescapes predominate, and the course is rich in natural bumps and hummocks. Depending on the time of year, red fescue, ferns and wildflowers color the rough, and patches of huckleberry and wild strawberry dot the omnipresent gorse.
If Bandon Dunes recalls Scotland's best links courses, the sharp ups and downs of Pacific Dunes echo the best Irish courses, which are known for their plunging hills and dramatic verticality. "It almost goes to the personality of the two countries," Keiser says. "Read Burns, and then read Joyce or Yeats."
The links-style layout of Keiser's courses isn't the only indicator of his purist's philosophy. Keiser is proud that both Bandon and Pacific Dunes are public courses, open to anyone who wants to play. He keeps the fees relatively low ($150 during peak months, and $55 in the off-season, compared with Pebble Beach's $350 fees and the $270 cost of playing at Pine Valley). "Most of the best American courses are private," he explains, "but when I decided to play the best in Europe I just called up St. Andrews and said, ‘Can I come play?' Great golf in America is thought of as a rich man's game. You work hard, you make money, you join Shinnecock, and you think ‘Boy, now I really have it made.' People in America seem to collect club memberships. But in Scotland, Britain and Ireland golf is more like bowling—it's everyman's sport. It's both affordable and accessible to the backbone of golf recreation, to the average man and woman. A much better ideal, I thought, think, and will think."
Because Keiser's a purist, those who play his courses shouldn't plan on driving a cart. Except in cases where the player is unable to walk, golf, Keiser insists, is a walking game. "Asphalt or concrete cart paths intrude on nature," he explains. More importantly, carts "interrupt the natural rhythm of the game, which is meant to be a brisk walk. You go to your tee, hit the ball, walk to your ball. If you hit it in the long rough you have to look for your ball, which intrudes on the rhythm and creates a sort of invisible penalty for having a bad shot."
Moreover, the walk must be brisk, he maintains: While the average American plays a four- or five-hour golf game, the golf purist will complete 18 holes in two-and-a-half hours. "If you walk with a purist, you would feel that the five-mile walk, which is about what 18 holes of golf is, is a rather brisk walk for you." One of his favorite rounds was at Pine Valley "with a purist—a Wall Street guy—who played only in the off-season. I've never played with anyone who walked faster; I couldn't keep up! He was walking, and yet it was roughly a 10-minute mile. And he played between 36 and 54 holes a day. He'd use a caddy for as long as they would last, and then he'd continue to play until it was dark, carrying his own bag. This is my definition of a purist golfer.
"Golf," he continues, "is basically hiking, with a game. And if you told me I could never play golf again, I'd say, 'Fine, I'll be a hiker.'" He gets this from his father, he says, an avid outdoorsman who started as a hiker and then turned to tree planting once he began to raise a family in the suburbs. He died in 1991, and to remember him, Keiser and his extended family—children, siblings and spouses—spent a month this summer hiking in the Dolomites of Italy. "It was stunning—really beautiful, and great being outdoors," he says. "I've told all my avid golfer friends that hiking in the Dolomites is almost as good as golf."
For now, there are more courses to play, and more courses to build. Keiser and Friedmann, his classmate and business partner, are working on developing an inland course on some of the remaining Bandon, Oregon, land. "There's no more coastland at Bandon suitable for golf," Keiser says, "but there are some nice pastures, probably currently being grazed by sheep, and we could build a nice course there."
He's also scouting for land in other parts of the world, though he hasn't yet found a location that excites him as much as Oregon did. Still, he remains hopeful—and in love with the game. "Most golfers can't break 100, but they love golfing anyway. Isn't that amazing?" he asks. "There are 25 million Americans, 95 percent of whom can't break 100, which means that they are awful, and yet they're avid golfers. Golf gives you a chance to be outside, to be with your friends, to be—if you're fortunate—on a beautiful course. Is there anything more fun?"