Oregon Drift

One hundred years ago, Charles Blair Macdonald opened a golf course that he hoped would introduce America to the best that golf had to offer.

Macdonald, who learned golf course architecture at St. Andrews in Scotland, the birthplace of the game, brought back ideas from many of the great European courses and put them to use at the National Golf Links in Southampton, N.Y.

A century later, a course that pays homage to Macdonald’s vision and ideals opens next week on Oregon’s South Coast.

Old Macdonald, the fourth course at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, makes its official debut Tuesday.

Early reviews suggest that course architects Tom Doak and Jim Urbina, working with a consulting group of experts, have hit a figurative hole-in-one.

‘This is Scotland,” said Gary Morrow, who has played enough golf courses to know what he’s talking about. ‘You’ve got the gorse. It’s in bloom. It’s just gorgeous.”

Morrow was at Bandon Dunes recently for the Old Macdonald Cup, a tournament that brought together players from eight of the courses built by C.B. Macdonald.

Each of the courses — National Golf Links, Piping Rock, Sleepy Hollow and The Creek Club in New York; Chicago Golf Club; St. Louis Country Club; The Course at Yale; and Mid-Ocean Club in Bermuda — was invited to send eight members. Most sent many more, with the players eager to see a layout that has been touted by some as having the most anticipated opening of any course in years.

‘It’s a great golf course,” said Jim Rogers, who captained the Yale team. ‘The greens are spectacular. The greens are the most distinctive feature, but the landscape is amazing. It’s so similar to Ireland.

‘I absolutely loved it.”

Morrow, a member at St. Louis Country Club, had the same reaction.

‘I did not play well, but that’s not the course’s fault,” he said after a wind-blown practice round.

Rogers was making his first visit to the resort. Morrow has been to Bandon Dunes several times and compares the resort favorably with the home of Pebble Beach, Cypress Point and several other renowned California courses.

‘In comparison to the Monterey Peninsula, in relation to pure golf, it’s its equal or even better,” he said.

Those are welcome words to Bandon Dunes owner Mike Keiser, who hopes to hear many similar comments Tuesday when he stands on the first tee, greeting each of the 240 golfers signed up to play Old Macdonald on opening day — just as he did for the opening of the other three courses.

Keiser was delighted with the response he got from the participants at the Old Macdonald Cup.

‘I’ve been actually shocked that people have such positive opinions about it,” he said. ‘My best case was (golfers would say), ‘I like it about like the other three, maybe it’s as good as Pacific Dunes.’ That’s what I hoped would be the result.”

What he heard overwhelmingly is that the course is fun to play.

Old Macdonald is unlike anything else at the resort, or in the United States.

The fairways and greens are huge, a trait shared by St. Andrews, and something Macdonald aimed for in his courses.

‘It’s wide. It’s big. It’s bold. That’s what we imitated,” Keiser said.

Keiser commissioned Doak and Urbina to build the course as Macdonald would have, if he had the same property. The owner added three consultants — Golfweek Magazine architecture editor Bradley Klein, longtime National Golf Links superintendent Karl Olson, and George Bahto, an architect who is a historian of the work of Macdonald and his protaga, Seth Raynor. Bahto wrote a biography on Macdonald titled ‘The Evangelist of Golf,” and also is working on a book on Raynor.

Doak and Urbina designed holes inspired by the great holes that Macdonald frequently imitated, including the Long Hole and Road Hole at St. Andrews, the Alps at Prestwick, Sahara at Royal St. George’s, the Short Hole at Royal West Norfolk and the most imitated hole in golf, the Redan at North Berwick.

‘Macdonald based the holes on similar strategies — all the best holes adopted to local terrain — that’s the secret,” Bahto said, adding that Doak and Urbina followed that mission perfectly.

‘I don’t think any of us would change anything,” Bahto said. ‘It’s exactly as we planned.

‘The ghost of Macdonald will be hanging around here like he does around National.”

When they were designing the course, Doak and Urbina relied on input from all three consultants, as well as Keiser. But Urbina said the key to the project was knowing that he and Doak were trying to use the same inspiration that Macdonald used, not to duplicate his holes.

‘Once that barrier was broken down, and Keiser’s willingness to let us go with the flow, was the reason it turned out as good as people think it has,” he said.

The architects took the land and Macdonald’s vision and ‘made it even bigger and bolder than Macdonald might have,” Urbina said.

The result is greens that are, on average, larger than those at St. Andrews, and fairways that are wide and varied. Every hole gives players multiple choices for how to attack the flag.

The players in the Macdonald Cup listed three holes as their favorites — No. 3 (Sahara), No. 7 (Ocean) and No. 16 (Alps).

The Sahara includes a dramatic drive over a dune ridge that features a dead oak snag. During the construction phase, Keiser, Urbina and Doak debated the future of the snag and another, which didn’t have the distinctive branches it has and ultimatey was removed.

‘They loved the tree,” Keiser said. ‘I thought it sort of got in the way of golf, but we left it because it was unique. We’re working on how to make it permanent.”

The Sahara was particularly popular for golfers from National Golf Links, who have their own version of the hole that includes a picturesque windmill.

‘At National, the iconic windmill is on the hole,” Keiser said. ‘Here it’s the tree.”

Ocean is an Old Macdonald original and the hole that takes golfers closest to the beach, with an immense green perched on a cliff and overlooking the water below.

Alps features a hill that blocks views of the green from players who don’t hit their drives far enough down the fairway. It’s Urbina’s favorite hole.

‘That was the first hole I ever saw when I went to Scotland for the first time at Prestwick,” he said. ‘It offers scale. It offers strategy. It offers a style of golf only known to a few people who played No. 17 at Prestwick or the third at National.”

Klein said golfers will find 18 great holes, built at a huge scale compared to most courses.

‘The greens are three times bigger than normal,” he said. ‘There’s a lot of flexibility. You have enormous variations.”

Part of what makes Old Macdonald special, though, is what most golfers won’t notice, he said.

‘The great thing about Tom and Jim, everything is deliberate here — nothing is a mistake or oversight,” Klein said.

In a video promoting the course, Doak said Old Macdonald is a fitting tribute to its namesake.

‘I think in the end, our mission statement here was really the same mission statement that C.B. Macdonald had 100 years ago, when he was building the National Golf Links — to take the best ideas of the best golf courses in Britain and Ireland and bring those back to the states and build a course where every hole had outstanding features to it, there were no weak or indifferent holes,” Doak said. ‘And I think Mike liked that from us, that we weren’t just going to build the safe version, but try to build a great version of those holes.”

Keiser had enough confidence in his architects to forge ahead with the project even when the economy was on a downslide.

‘I could have been very pessimistic about the economy and this remote place, and I was,” he said. ‘But because I was already into the construction, I thought I might as well finish it, even though it was imprudent to go ahead.

‘The worst case is that it will be the least popular course on the resort, but it will still be an homage to Macdonald.

‘It was for the betterment of golf. People will say, so this is what golf is. That was Macdonald’s goal. He wanted to introduce links courses to America. He failed because all of them are private courses.”

Bahto is glad Keiser didn’t delay construction.

‘Mike’s vision was really nice,” he said. ‘Every course that Macdonald and Raynor built was an elite course. Let’s build a public course so people can enjoy this architecture.”

That starts in earnest Tuesday.That starts in earnest Tuesday.