 | |
 |
 |
The Good Golf Course1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Itinerary | Home
Then came the bulldozer. Golf-course architects had reshaped the land in the game’s early days, but then it was done with pick and shovel and horse-drawn scraper. With heavy-duty tractors, huge amounts of earth could be moved with ease, allowing postwar designers like Robert Trent Jones Sr. to turn Florida swampland or featureless prairie into tidy, golf-friendly grounds in mere months. Courses like Augusta National, endlessly tweaked and primped over the years – and featuring temperature-controlled greens and water hazards dyed blue – became the norm. Something had to change. Ever since his Bandon Dunes Golf Resort opened to wild acclaim in 1999, Mike Keiser has been the enfant terrible of golf. The resort, located in a largely unpopulated stretch on Oregon’s coast, bucks all the trends. It’s five hours from a large city. It doesn’t allow golf carts, instead forcing players to walk and use caddies. And its courses make the most of the landscape, creating a natural look that is a throwback to classic seaside links. The place is untarnished by the game’s modern intrusions – like GPS units – which led Keiser to coin the resort’s motto: “Golf as it was meant to be.” Although he told his friends who showed up at the launch that the project could well be called “Mike’s Folly,” Bandon Dunes became the world’s hottest golf property. Golf Digest called it the second-best golf resort in the U.S., ahead of famed retreats like Pebble Beach. Cabot Links will be part of an emerging trend toward minimalist golf design, where builders leave the natural landscape intact as much as possible. In an era when golf courses can cost tens of millions to build – casino king Steve Wynn famously spent more than $40-million creating Shadow Creek, a faux-Carolinas track near Las Vegas, complete with pine trees – Keiser’s projects usually cost a fraction of that amount. “This is simply going back to the beginning of what makes golf great,” says Ben Cowan-Dewar.
|
