“If the first course [at Bandon Dunes] is being compared to Pebble [Beach],” Tom Doak told a golf writer in 1999, before his team had even broken ground on Pacific Dunes, “the second course will be more like Cypress Point.” It was a bold statement but not, as it turned out, wildly off-base.
Like Alister MacKenzie’s masterpiece on the Monterey Peninsula, Pacific Dunes is not a big golf course by modern standards. Rather than generating excitement through sheer scale and splendor, it prioritizes balance and variety, with a routing that weaves in and out of different types of terrain: duneland and clifftop, intimate and open, undulating and heaving. Both Cypress Point and Pacific Dunes use the coastline in spectacular ways, but they make an equally strong impression with their inland holes, particularly the short par 4s. Finally, the two courses occupy similar positions in the oeuvres of their designers. Cypress Point was the best property MacKenzie ever worked on, and it came to him just as he reached the height of his powers as an architect. The same could be said of Pacific Dunes—though we should wait until Doak stops building courses to say it with certainty.
Of course, there’s one major difference between Cypress Point and Pacific Dunes. Whereas one is firmly private, the other is open to anyone able to make the journey to the Oregon coast and pay the green fee. Ever since its debut in 2001, Pacific Dunes has been, in my opinion, the greatest public golf course in America—a distinction it seems unlikely to lose anytime soon.
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Take Note…
Doak’s version of “flatter” greens. In 1999, Bandon Dunes founder Mike Keiser played Lost Dunes Golf Club, a new Tom Doak design in Michigan. Keiser was struck by how wild the greens were. He had already hired Doak to build Bandon Dunes’ second course, and he asked the architect to tone it down on the project. “Since Mr. Keiser had pointedly said he preferred flatter greens than I normally build,” Doak explains in his book The Making of Pacific Dunes (which—fair warning—I plan to crib from repeatedly in this profile), “I resolved to keep these smaller and use the contours around the green to provide the challenge, adding interest by varying the degree of tilt within.” Today, Pacific Dunes’ smallish greens and sharp external contours place heavy demands on players’ approach and recovery skills. Ironically, if Keiser had not requested subtler greens, the course may not have turned out to be so exacting.
A fortunate fire. On Halloween 1999, a fire broke out on the beach below Bandon Dunes and raced up the cliffs. The blaze stopped short of David McLay Kidd’s new Bandon Dunes course and the resort’s buildings, but it cleared a great deal of troublesome gorse on the Pacific Dunes site. This was a lucky break for Keiser and Doak. Afterward, they were able to walk the full routing of Pacific Dunes for the first time, which gave Keiser the confidence to move ahead with the project. Less than two months later, construction began.
The Punchbowl. When you stand on the first tee at Pacific Dunes, make sure to look left. There you’ll see the Punchbowl, a 100,000-square-foot putting green inspired by the famous Himalayas course, home of the St. Andrews Ladies’ Putting Club. Designed by Tom Doak and Jim Urbina in 2014, the Punchbowl is free to play and has become a hub of evening activity (i.e., drinking and gambling) at the resort.
