The first course at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, which opened to ecstatic reviews in 1999, brought about two distinct sea changes in the golf industry. First, it showed that golfers would travel just about anywhere in pursuit of an exceptional public golf experience. This model had previously worked for private Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska, but persuading a small group of wealthy people to pay for memberships was a different task than attracting large numbers of fee-paying guests on an ongoing basis. With Bandon Dunes, developer Mike Keiser demonstrated that the Field of Dreams principle—”if you build it, they will come”—applied to publicly accessible resorts. This revelation sent shockwaves through the golf world and spawned a still-thriving subgenre of destination resorts offering sand-based, links-inspired golf.
Bandon Dunes’ second major innovation was architectural. Keiser hired a young, unproven Scottish golf architect named David McLay Kidd and gave him an exciting but formidable brief: turn a seaside tract of dunes and gorse on the Oregon coast into something resembling a British links. What Kidd produced — with input from his father Jimmy Kidd, Keiser, and several of Keiser’s confidants — felt more authentic than any other modern American “links-style” public course. The tumbling wildness of Bandon Dunes’ inland holes, combined with the grandeur of the ones on the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean, garnered immediate acclaim, along with comparisons to Pebble Beach, Royal Dornoch, and Ballybunion.
In retrospect, the course looks more like a bridge between eras than a fully realized example of modern neoclassical golf architecture. Its routing has some clunky passages, and its shaping lacks the sophistication and seamlessness that Coore & Crenshaw and Tom Doak — as well as Kidd himself, later in his career — established as an industry standard. Yet Bandon Dunes remains the resort’s most popular course, and for good reason: it provides an accessible introduction to the “Dream Golf” recipe, mixing familiar and exotic flavors into an exciting dish.
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A last-minute deal. The initial site for Bandon Dunes was somewhat cramped, resulting in some back-and-forth holes in Kidd’s early routings. Keiser knew that the course could be improved if he were to acquire the 400-acre parcel to the north, owned by an eccentric California lawyer named David Shuman. For years, Shuman refused to sell. After he went bankrupt in 1995, however, he became amenable to a $2.3-million offer from Keiser. The deal relieved some congestion in the routing of Kidd’s front nine, allowing the fourth green to be pushed out to the bluffs and the current fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth holes to be created. The rest of Shuman’s property eventually became home to 16 of the 18 holes on Tom Doak’s Pacific Dunes course.
A twilight loop. Unlike any of the resort’s other courses, Bandon Dunes has conventional returning nines. This means guests can play the front nine in the evening — a convenient option for those arriving after a cross-country flight and a car ride to the Oregon coast.
Roughed up. The original bunkers at Bandon Dunes had clean shapes and grass faces. They looked a great deal like the bunkers at Gleneagles in Scotland, where Kidd’s father Jimmy worked as course manager. However, after Doak proved at Pacific Dunes that flashed, ragged-edged sand hazards could be functional on the windy property, the resort rebuilt Bandon Dunes’ bunkers in a more naturalized style.
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