Oregon Drift

When it opens, Bandon’s Old Macdonald may be the nation’s finest public golf course

By John Gunther

BANDON — Excitement has been building at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort for more than three years. This spring, it’s reaching a crescendo.

The resort, already renowned as one of America’s top golf destinations, will open its fourth 18-hole golf course in June. All indications are that Old Macdonald, a tribute to the legendary American golf course architect Charles Blair Macdonald, will be the best of the Bandon Dunes bunch.

‘I don’t think there’s been more excitement about a golf course opening maybe ever, certainly in the last decade,” said Hank Hickox, the resort’s general manager.

The resort’s first three courses — Bandon Dunes (1999), Pacific Dunes (2001) and Bandon Trails (2005) — all have received rave reviews from multiple golf publications over the past decade.

Most recently, Golfweek Magazine ranked Pacific Dunes at No. 2, Bandon Dunes at No. 4 and Bandon Trails at No. 28 among modern courses. (‘Modern” means anything built after 1950.) The magazine also ranked them Oregon’s top three public courses.

‘The Golfweek rankings were pretty cool,” Hickox said.

The staff at Bandon Dunes takes the critical acclaim as a challenge to continue providing outstanding service to the customers, Hickox said.

‘You’ve got to earn it every day,” Hickox said. ‘We’ll do everything to meet the expectations that go up every time these come out.”

The resort staff will have plenty of opportunities to impress guests this summer. With the opening of Old Macdonald, reservations have been brisk, especially considering the economy, Hickox said. The guests coming from outside the area often are planning to stay for up to three nights.

The golfers who make the trek to Old Macdonald will find a course that is receiving high praise even before it opens.

When Bandon Dunes owner Mike Keiser approved the project, he asked Tom Doak and Jim Urbina, who had partnered on the design of Pacific Dunes, to build the course as C.B. Macdonald might have designed it. Macdonald, who died in 1939, was known for taking ideas from many of the great courses in Europe and putting them to use on the courses he built.

Doak and Urbina worked with input from a three-person committee that included Macdonald historian George Bahto. They built a number of the holes with inspiration from great courses around the world, including the famed St. Andrews in Scotland.

Like the other courses at Bandon Dunes, Old Macdonald is a links-style layout. It favors low running shots in the wind and requires golfers to put thought into how they will play each hole.

‘There’s an unrestricted feel out there,” said Ken Nice, the superintendent for Old Macdonald. ‘You have freedom to golf the holes at various attack angles.

‘From a strategic standpoint, so many of the holes are inspired by the greatest strategic holes in the world.”

Ken Brooke, the director of caddie services at Bandon Dunes, has had the privilege of playing many of the world’s best courses. He said Old Macdonald compares favorably with the great links courses of the United Kingdom.

‘It feels to me like Scotland,” Brooke said. ‘Bandon (Dunes) and Pacific (Dunes) are like Scotland and Ireland, but Old Mac feels more that way.

‘As much as everything else here is not like anything else in the U.S., Old Macdonald is one step further than that in terms of being incredibly unique.”

The fairways are generous and many of the greens are huge. The bunkers are varied and in strategic locations.

The best golfers will be challenged by the course, Brooke said, adding that average golfers should enjoy themselves.

‘The mid- to high-handicapper is going to have a good day,” he said. ‘They’re going to hit greens. They’re not going to lose balls. They’re going to have a lot of putts, but they’re going to feel good.”

The reports from caddies who carried bags for golfers playing the 10-hole preview rounds at Old Macdonald last summer were favorable, Brooke said.

Jon Dodson, co-owner of Bandon Golf Supply, the area’s largest golf retailer, said people visiting the store can’t wait for the new course to open.

‘Everybody that we know that’s played it believes it is going to be the premier course out there,” Dodson said. ‘From what we understand, if it doesn’t win every major accolade for a public golf course in America, we don’t know what would.”

C.B. Macdonald’s best-known golf course in the United States, The National Golf Links, opened in 1910. Old Macdonald comes a century later, on June 1.

It’s a day that has been highly anticipated since Keiser announced the course more than three-and-a-half years ago.

‘The buzz has already started,” Nice said. ‘Everybody at the resort, all the way up to the management company and our owner, want to share it with people.”