When cultures and societies cross certain thresholds it becomes almost impossible to fathom life before. We once needed atlases, cameras, a Walkman, flashlights, PCs, watches and any number of other paraphernalia to do all the things a basic smartphone can do. And before Mike Keiser came along we almost exclusively constructed golf courses in places where people already lived and traveled.
It’s hard to recall now, but there was a time not very long ago when the idea of building multiple golf courses on a cold and lonely coast of southern Oregon, or in one of the most economically depressed sections of central Wisconsin, or on the hardscrabble north shore of Tasmania would have been considered a laughable folly, at best, and financial suicide, at worst.
But over the course of the last quarter century, Keiser’s Bandon Dunes Resort has become such touchstone in modern golf architecture—a public destination of fantasy and possibility so thoroughly absorbed into the desire of traveling players—that it’s now hard to think of not building courses in far and exotic environments. After Bandon, every door has been thrown open. To construct a course in a suburb or somewhere convenient to an urban complex seems almost like not trying.
In June, Keiser will receive the USGA’s Bob Jones Award, the governing body’s highest honor. The award is presented to individuals who demonstrate “the spirit, personal character and respect for the game” that Jones was known for. Past winners include many of the greats who have shaped and elevated the sport including Francis Ouimet, Patty Berg, Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Nancy Lopez, Herbert Warren Wind, Lee Elder and Juli Inkster, a group with which Keiser keeps easy company.
If the Bob Jones Award is also given to someone who has changed the way we play golf, and who has changed our assumptions about how certain golf courses deepen our connection to the game and the earthly environments we move through, Keiser is in his own company.
Prior to the opening of the first course at Bandon Dunes in 1999, golf development in the U.S. had been operating under two false premises. One was that all the good land for golf already had been used. This widely held notion resulted from a lack of vision and a lack of risk-taking; there didn’t seem to be any more Pine Valley, Oakland Hills or Los Angeles Country Club kind of sites sitting around, so they must no longer exist. The thousands of ordinary, utilitarian and real estate-driven golf courses developed through decades on difficult or non-descript pieces of land from suburbia to exurbia implicitly ratified this conclusion.
Pacific Dunes, 11th hole
Stephen Szurlej
Pacific Dunes, 13th and 14th holes
Stephen Szurlej
Pacific Dunes, 16th hole
Stephen Szurlej
Bandon Dunes
Stephen Szurlej
Bandon Dunes, Fourth Hole
Stephen Szurlej
Bandon Dunes
Stephen Szurlej
Old MacDonald, 16th hole
Stephen Szurlej
Old MacDonald, 16th hole
Stephen Szurlej
Sheep Ranch, 11th hole
Dom Furore
Sheep Ranch, third hole
Dom Furore
And no one yet had the courage to put forth a golf course, no matter how spectacular the land, that was located hundreds of miles from the nearest city or major airport and trusting it would be supported by a small group of almost radicalized, well-to-do players even if they only managed to visit and play it a few times a year. That is until Dick Youngscap built Sand Hills in the mid-1990s. When Sand Hills opened, it was as if the golf world looked quizzically at the landscape of endless rolling sand dunes that appeared ideal for a kind of golf it hadn’t fathomed before and collectively said, “Hmm, I didn’t know you could do that.”
Keiser, an early member, recognized the genius of Sand Hills. It proved there was another way to do golf. Great courses didn’t have to be anchored to established migration patterns, like the beaches of Florida, the Lowcountry of the Carolinas, the Arizona desert, Rocky Mountain summer ski destinations, the Cape, or Upstate anywhere. To the contrary—if the architecture was great and the environment breathtaking, people would find the golf, wherever it was.
Keiser had been moving this direction for some time, thinking intuitively that something had been missing in the kinds of industrial, machine-made courses being built everywhere not like the Nebraska sandhills. He’d already, in 1992, developed his first course, The Dunes Club, a nine-hole slice of Pine Valley-inspired pie outside his hometown of Chicago, just over the Michigan border. Keiser was enamored with playing golf in evocative sandy settings like The Dunes Club, and of the links courses of the U.K. in general, where the turf was firm and the ball bounced. He wondered why that type of golf didn’t exist, or rarely existed, in the States. Was it impossible to recreate, or had no one given it a proper try?
As he stepped away from the recycled-paper greeting-card company that had provided the nest egg to embark on such a pursuit, he began looking for possible links-like sites on the East Coast. It was true that most of the land here with potential for a links—sandy soils on or near the ocean—had been claimed. He moved the search to the West Coast and eventually discovered a place in southern Oregon where the physical and financial ingredients seemed to converge on hundreds of acres of sand-strewn oceanfront cliffs north of the small maritime town of Bandon.
Cabot Cliffs, 16th hole
Dom Furore
Cabot Cliffs, sixth hole
Cabot Cliffs, 11th hole
Dom Furore
As his Bandon Dunes Resort has grown to what is now five 18-hole courses, four of which reside on the ranking of America’s 100 Greatest Courses, and two innovative short courses with par-3 holes tucked into some of the property’s most eccentric dunes, it’s rewired the way golfers around the world think about what they value in golf courses and, importantly, in a golf experience. The ideal of pursuing golf in treeless dunes and gorse, walking on crunchy turf and bouncing shots into huge greens while happily tolerating wind and sometimes sideways rain—it did not exist before. Now these attributes are ingrained and even embraced by legions as the definitive way to play. To make the voyage to Bandon is to become immersed in the other side of golf, to touch and feel a part of the game’s ancient romanticism.
What’s continued to make Keiser a rare and original operator is his restraint. He’s only reluctantly delved into additional projects, always adamant that the land in question be undeniable in beauty and golf potential. A golf capitalist he may be, but an industrialist he is not.
Keiser was seemingly content to continue expanding Bandon Dunes when a young Canadian entrepreneur named Ben Cowan-Dewar lured him into partnering in an equally audacious plan to turn a blustery, forlorn sliver of bluffs overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence in northern Nova Scotia into a kind of Bandon of the east. That wild gambit is now the 36-hole Cabot Cape Breton and home of Cabot Cliffs, the No. 1 course in Canada. He and Cowan-Dewer have continued to work together on a handful of tasteful but appealing (and always scenic) golf developments in Scotland, Saint Lucia, Florida and elsewhere.
When aspiring architect Craig Haltom inveighed him to inspect the thousands of acres of rolling sand dunes he discovered in central Wisconsin that, hidden beneath forests of lumber pine, seemed perfect for golf, Keiser sent a representative to scout the area with the tentative instructions to please come back and report that the land was not viable. The news was opposite—the sand barrens were too good to pass up. Keiser transformed it with sons Michael and Chris into Sand Valley, which next year will open its sixth course, The Commons, a 12-hole alternative layout from designer Jimmy Craig.
If there’s a lamentable footnote to getting to the other side of Keiser’s build-it-and-they-will-come threshold, it’s that so many who have followed have not embraced the other element that makes what he’s done so vital to today’s golfer: an invitation to the public—the retail golfer, as he calls them—to come play.
Barbougle Lost Farm, fourth and fifth holes
Many of the remote destination golf courses that have been introduced since Bandon Dunes, including those still being created, are reserved for a small, very particular type of club member, often the type who can fly in privately. Regular golfers can only look at them the way they’ve always looked at inaccessible cathedrals like Augusta National, Winged Foot, Oakmont and Shinnecock Hills, appreciatively but at unmistakable arm’s length. Keiser, however, has allowed all of us to be actors on some of golf’s greatest new sets. There’s a reason the only other golf course developer who’s been given the Bob Jones Award is Richard S. Tufts, the Pinehurst scion who also drew back the curtain of dream golf for the people.
It’s not nothing to travel all the way to Bandon, or Cabot, or Sand Valley (or Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania, another Keiser investment) and pay for several days of golf, lodging, food and caddies. Only a relatively small percentage of the golf populace can afford to make these pilgrimages, and that’s not even mentioning the challenge of getting reservations (tip: act now for 2026 and 2027). But Keiser’s courses are the rarest thing in a game that historically lurches toward commerce and seclusion: they’re available. It’s a worldview that’s been passed on to his sons, who are currently constructing Sand Valley-inspired public golf projects in Colorado, Texas and Florida.
Most of the major thresholds we pass that change the way we live are driven by forms of technology: the internal combustion engine, vaccines, microprocessors. Mike Keiser’s courses transcended their threshold by going the opposite direction. They embrace the past and remind us that the essentials of golf are timeless and anti-technology, like walking, using the wind and shapes in the ground to guide the ball, and placing the game in the quiet places that slow us down and make us thankful to be in communion with wondrous natural environments.
Perhaps one decision best sums up what has set Keiser apart from any potential peer: across seven courses and nearly three miles of priceless Pacific Ocean frontage at Bandon Dunes, there’s not a single clubhouse, lodge or building. That land, all of it, is reserved for golf holes.
It’s hard to remember the time before Mike Keiser came around.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
