The Fire Pit w/ Matt Ginella: Building Bandon - Opening Day [PART 2]

It really comes back to that opening day that really capitualized everything. A golf course, we think it as a recreational playground, but I think of it in addition as a consumer product. So when you spill your heart out and you spend a lot of money on a product, let's say, you don't know if it's any good until

That feels good. Five nobody here is getting time. Welcome to the fire pit with Matt Janella.

So I'm just back from my twenty fifth trip to Bandon Dunes, which just happened to fall in between two episodes of this podcast. On the building of Bandon, we refer to the old course as the home of golf. Some say Pinehurst is the cradle of American golf, and the book written about the building of Bandon Dunes is dream golf. Mike Kaiser's dream has become a nightmare for

I gave what would be today a power point presentation, but I did it with poster boards and a sharp eat pains, and I wrote down on these poster boards, you know, like no cart paths, and make you know they would walk, and that the fairways would be uneven and there'd be pot bunkers, and the clubhouse shouldn't be on the water's edge, it should you know, the best green should be on the water's edge.

I said to David, if we deviate any anytime from offering Mike anything more than a true and I mean a true Links experience, Irish Links experience here, you will not hire us as architects.

He will go elsewhere.

Kaiser hired the kids to build it, and he hired Kemper Sports to manage it. He tapped Josh Lesnik, also in his twenties, to be the first general manager. Lesnick explains why Bandon was so unique in the US.

Golf courses were being built close to people, you know, close to cities. People didn't necessarily care about the site for golf. You could have mud and clay and rock under the soil, but if it were close to people and you could put houses around it, That's the kind of golf courses people were building in the nineties, eighties, nineties in America.

This was close to nobody.

This is going back to the golden age when you'd look for the best site for golf and you know, no bank would finance it. No, no, everybody thought it was crazy. Mike's friends thought it was crazy. Mike thought it was.

Crazy against all odds and swimming into the current of trends, Kaiser kept going one hole at a time, and on May first, nineteen ninety nine, on the eve of opening day, he reflected on what if all the doubters were right and he was wrong?

Yeah, you know, Josh and I discussed, you know what happens if no one comes, or what happens if we break even? Because we all had bats the first year how many rounds we would do, and twelve thousand rounds is break even. And most of our bats about how many rounds we would do were less than twelve thousand rounds, so in my group, no one thought we would break even.

The Sheep Ranch opened on June first, twenty twenty, the fifth eighteen hole golf course at Bandon Dunes. Plus there's the Preserve, a thirteen whole Part three course, Shorties, another version of a Part three course at the back of the range, and the punch Bowl, a two and a half acre putting course which you can play for free. Needless to say, I'm not even sure Kaiser could have dreamed something as big as what Bandon has become. But for now, let's go back to the beginning. We're back

In the shop, we said, oh yeah, they're going to be a world class golf course in band And who's going to come to Bandon to play golf?

That was That was a talk right off the bat.

Bob Gaspar, also known as Shoe because he looks like Jockie Bill Shoemaker, was a customer at Mixed Hair Surgeons.

As the story went on, Shoe came in and he was getting a haircut. He said, I'm going to go out. They're looking for a caddy master. He said, I'm going to go out and apply for that. I said, cool, So he did, and of course, as a story went on again he got it.

He was in my shop again.

It's gotten hiss there and.

He says, man, that first day is really filling up I said, wow, I said, is the first tea taken yet? He's I don't know, but I'm going back out there and i'll check and i'll call you. So he did, and he called me. He said, no, it's open.

I Nick, how would you like to be the first one off?

I said yes, and he said you will have to have a bourse him. I said, that's cool, I can do that.

Mike Peters, Mick's oldest son.

Is in Dad, called and said, I got the first tea time for Bandon Dunes. He says, you want to play. I'm like sure. He's like, we need to find two more people. I'm like, okay, we'll see if we can find two more people.

A friend of.

Mine and his father in law joined us, and we showed up that morning and it was a typical Bandon day. It was raining, cats and dogs. We showed up in our golf attire and they handed us Gortek's golf rain stuff because it was pouring down rain.

Josh Lesnik on him memorable day.

Yeah. We opened on May second, nineteen ninety nine.

It was rainy and I'd say fifties, maybe high forties, low fifties, and we were booked from the first tea time to the last tea time.

You know, mostly Oregonians. It was kind of a regular day.

We didn't do a big VIP invitational and invite. We just did whoever's going to make tea times or he let him play an opening day. Mike Kaiser's plan was to be there and hand out the opening day coins to each player.

David Kidd wasn't at Opening Day, but his father Jimmy, who was in town collaborating with the maintenance team, stood next to Mike Kaiser and helped pass out coins to everyone who played that day.

Opening Day was the most surprising thing. I've been at a few opening days, and they were a pretty big and pretty grand affair as well. The opening day at Bandon was anything but grand, anything but baked. It was a wet, miserable day if I remember rightly. It was a typical Scottish links day.

Shoe again with more details.

It was a full ticket once again, I believe two hundred and forty eight people and we didn't have any rooms, so everybody had to stay in town, either stay in town or just drive home again.

Uh.

Local golf, local golf for us as Eugene and Portland. Nobody around here, particularly except for our golf club members play golf here. I had made it up bag tags for everybody, this big stack of bag tags, and I thought this would be cool. We're going to tag the bags once again. We didn't know what we were doing. Cars pulled up, but it wasn't just one car at a time. It was like everybody pulled up. The tags went by the window, you know.

Uh.

It was poor and rain. MIC's up on the tee, He's huddled down. Everybody's trying to smile. All these people here to play golf, pouring.

Micked, the local barber, was the first player at Bandon Dudes that day. Mick Peters and his sons were the first ones to play, and they since have been the first ones to play every single opening, including the preserve, of every golf course in Bandon.

We're going to have a lot more on Mick Peters and his sons and their legacy abandoned in episode ten of The fire Pit, but for now Nick stays focused on his first t shot of the first course.

It was just it was bigger than.

I expect that. I didn't think there would be that many people there watching, and I was so nervous I couldn't already put the ball on the tee.

Mike Peters has been second off on every new course at Bandon Dunes.

It was a lot of fun.

I was like, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? You know, until we walked up onto the tee and then you saw it over the first tea and the whole course. It was like, you couldn't get me.

Out of here.

Yeah, I mean just Bandon Weather.

Yeah, a big deal.

And it was an absolute gorgeous golf course. And I, like I said, I'd never seen it. I had no idea what I was getting into until I stepped on that first tee and it really was on inspiring.

As first off. Mixed tradition is to tea up a ball and with his first swing he only hits the ball a few feet.

I do that, and then I have mister Kayder sign it, and I put it away, and I grab another ball and I hit it again.

But I am at I'm the first guy that hits the ball. There was only I'm not going to say the name, although I have in the past. There was one person that didn't show up the first day.

It was one of my friends down and he decided it was too rainy and cold to show up. Every other person shut up. Was just one person that didn't show up. It was rainy and cold, no doubt, I'll give him a break.

But everybody else played. Who is this guy? He's a local, he's a friend.

He's a uh, he was a friend until he didn't show up.

Shoe showed up. Of course, what would Bandon be without Shoe.

There was a big trailer. One of our local cranberry growers brought a barbecue trailer, backed it up back here, right back to where the where the pub's at. He was cooking hamburgers and hot dogs for everybody. The rain finally stopped, sun came out, it turned beautiful. The cranberry grower's name was Jack, and by the end of the day, because he had a bottle of Jack, hamburgers and hot dogs were flying everywhere.

I swear man, you wouldn't know a boom.

Here it goes. It was great.

It was the greatest experience because it was just it was banded, nothing fancy, you know. The hot dogs and hamburgers were free. Everybody had a great time.

What's the rain stopping?

It was extremely.

Rewarding. It was really it was a really neat day and.

It was fun to see the staff all together and really have the customers out there was great fun day.

Jimmy Kidd on watching Mike Kaiser as his dream unfolded in front of him.

Mike was relatively quiet. He was basically listening to what everyone was saying, and everyone.

Seemed to be happy to be there, even before they had even before they had hit a shot, they were delighted to be there. Maybe it was the the just the atmosphere of an opening day and a golf course. But when they came back in Mike Goness, the comments and the clubhouse and the atmosphere and the clubhouse was just out of this world.

It was an incredible day.

You could always even today, I could you can feel it here in the back of your next standing up because you knew that something had happened to you in a place which was out in the middle of nowhere.

So everything until opening day was rough, and then from then on the golfers took over.

Guys like you, Matt said, this is fun, Link's golf, what we like.

Even at that we weren't sure kind of what it would become. By that point though, we were quite sure our rounds were going to, you know, exceed what our expectations were the first year, because there was an article written in December of ninety seven by Bob Robinson, and he was a well known golf writer, and he wrote a story about Vanda Dune's, you know, almost six months before we opened. Came out in December. We were set to start taking tea times January first of ninety eight.

And I give a huge amount of credit to making that a reality to Josh. You know, he was the one that got the message out there and got people to pay attention and come and look.

And it was those first few people.

I remember Brian Callen Cumming who was with Golf Magazine at the time, and Josh and I played the back nine, I think with him and his reaction was my first experience of an American golf journalist seeing this and saying, wow, this is different. And that was all as I remember it. That was old Josh. He was the one bringing these people and had those connections, and we were seeing that reaction happen because of his skills delivering the message.

What Josh got to do was be fun and fun to be with and hire people and find caddies when everyone said you'll never find caddies, and go to the Portland Golf Show and convince people that it's only four and a half hour drive. So Josh was great on publicity, David was great on building the golf course, and Howard McKee was the magical architect guy.

So all systems are go. Bandon Dune's was open for business, and we learned it part one of this podcast. Kaiser had already bought the land that would become the second course on property. So I asked Mike how soon after opening day of Bandon did he commit the Pacific Dunes a tom Dope design?

Almost immediately, I mean it was within within days. It was overwhelming, And let's give Josh credit for We opened in May, early May nineteen ninety nine, and then the opening day we knew that we had bookings.

Whether people would actually show up, we didn't know.

But as the days ticked by, we realized that all the bookings we had were going to become real rounds that people would drive and fly from who knows where.

You made it, make it a success. So I'd say within the first.

Two months, if not the first couple of weeks, Josh and I and Howard all said yeah.

Let's go.

Because we opened open Pacific Dunes in two thousand and one, two years later, so that tells you that we did.

Could he split on the second golf course last year?

On May second, twenty nineteen, David Kidd was on the first tea for the twentieth anniversary of Bandon Dunes.

You know, it's amazing to think that in twenty years, with fifty thousand approximately visitors per year, we're looking at a million individuals have now visited Bandon Dunes. Sure some of them visit every year, but the number I use is a million people. A million golfers have visited Bandon Dunes now over the first twenty years. That's pretty amazing. I think it awakened in American golfers' willingness to accept nature, that golf through nature is what golf is truly.

Meant to be.

That's why we've seen golf move away from being ornate and overly manicured and become far more natural. It speaks to our current ethos that we want things to be sustainable and have less inputs, less chemicals, less of everything so that nature can take a hold. And Bandon Dunes was the grind zero for that in America twenty years ago.

But his shoe explains the impact of this resort goes a lot deeper than some of the natural sand bunkers throughout the property.

You know, it's really basically made the town come alive, and not only Bandoned, but Koos County actually the entire state of Oregon almost Well, no, it's true. It's true because look how many there's so many people that would never venture west of the Mississippi River that are coming here, and they've never been to Pacific Northwest. I mean, this place is this place is beautiful.

I mean it just is.

And so this has brought people here that heretofore would never have come this way.

But almost almost.

Everybody in town in the county gets a check from Bandon Dunes for one thing or another. Newspapers, flowers, coffee, you know, meat, you name it, and they get a check. And that doesn't even take into consideration a payroll for six hundred and forty in staffers and then an additional three hundred to three hundred and fifty caddies that goes out into the community.

I think, Matt, you know.

For for Mike and I, the one thing we always say to each other is we look at each other and like, can you believe this?

You know, because we.

It's hard to say, you know, like we didn't look at Bandon Dunes as a business every day. We didn't, but we knew we were opening a business, and you can't do things stupid.

We're doing it for.

The love of the game, but it was still a business, and you know, to budget to do ten thousand rounds the first year and end up doing close to thirty thousand, and now you know, multiply those numbers by the five courses now and it's like, we still can't believe it. I can't believe it. Mike can't believe it. I mean, there's no way you could have imagined that it would

Some final reflections from several key players who have helped make Bandon so special. We'll start with Josh Lesnik, followed by David Kidd.

I've been involved with a number of other places, and but Bandon is is uh yeah, it's home.

It's my home away from home. It's my happy place.

I love you know, the second you step foot on that property and breathe in that air and then get to p hit those golf courses and Bandon Dunes being my favorite golf course anywhere in the world, Yeah, there's I don't know that anything could ever take over Bandon Dunes's my favorite place in the world.

I never tire of talking about Bandon Dun's. I never tire of every visit I make. I especially love it when I get to take Bandon virgins there who are not Bandon East as yet to experience the place with a newbie.

Is still a huge kick. And I know it's the same for you guys.

I mean taking I probably take at least one or two Create sms to band in a year, and in that eight sum I try and make sure there's at least one or two virgins and introduce them to the place and know that it's just blowing their minds.

And that's such fun to be part of.

To see that wonder again and experience it through someone else's eyes seeing it for the first time.

I'll never ever tire of that.

Kidd and Leslig again on what they learned from working with Mike Kaiser.

You know, he is the master of cutting through the bas and getting to the heart of the matter. He simplifies things to their absolute core, really really quickly, better than anybody I've ever made before.

I could be doing mental gymnastics trying to figure something out, and I could call Mike and it'd be like he could figure it out in a second and get to.

The get to the mottom of it.

And it's he keeps things really really simple and accomplishes amazing things. Yeah, I mean that would you know everything nothing. He never wanted to see anything that was more than one page. If you sent him anything more than one page, it was too much, too complex, Just don't do it, don't send it to him.

So I mean working.

With him, you know, as I said earlier, I think one of his many legacies and it's all you know, its opinion and people can look back. But I feel like he's with each architect he's worth worked with each golf course architect, they may have built their.

Best golf course with working with Mike Kaiser.

I think that's part of his his brilliance is just working with people and working with the artists David and Tom Doak and Bill Kohr and you know, and keeping it simple and just achieving incredible things. It's amazing, amazing to work with them.

I asked them both, what if there was no Mike Kaiser in your life?

I would still.

Like to think that I would have uh found my way in golf course design. But I wouldn't have the you know, the band and Dunes logo on my shirt and would have made it much much harder and the road would have been a lot longer. But I would still want to believe that I would have managed to be a force of relevance in golf course architecture. You know, there were a number of other projects that I managed to get in and around. You know, I was on

I I'm afraid to think about that, you know, I think, I think I I'm not sure I would have found what I truly love about the game of golf and the business of golf without Mike. I don't know what had taken a long time. I didn't I didn't go play golf in scotlanduntil I was forty years old, and it would have taken me a lot longer to find.

Out what I loved about the game if it weren't for Mike Kaiser.

I mean it's I think he's done that for a lot of Americans probably who have now gotten to abandoned and got onto play Sand Valley and kind of seen.

Dream golf and what makes the game of golf so lovable.

So I don't want to think about what it would be like with no Mike Kaiser and no Abandon Dunes.

Bill Core and Ben crunch I just opened their third course for Mike Kaiser at Bandon Dun's. They've built seven courses for what's referred to as the Dream Golf Portfolio and are under construction on their eighth cab at Saint Lucia. That accounts for almost a third of what kren Crenshaw have built from Scratch, Core and then Crenshaw on the overall impact of Mike Kaiser.

We've gotten so far away more than our share of very special sites, and a great number of those have come from Mike Kaiser.

He's been He is simply the most incredible and.

Should be the most highly acclaimed golf developer in the world. And the products that he puts out there and the care that he puts into them is just beyond comparison.

And he finds these sites, he.

Goes back to that that that nucleus of playing golf on sandy firm ground, and in Mike's case, at least until Sand Valley, it was always about somewhere near the sea.

He just finds it to be. It's a it's a connection to five hundred years of golf history, and he he just I think he believed before he started doing these golf developments that that was a connection that would resonate with American golfers as well as European and other other nationality golfers. And he brought it to us. He gave us the opportunity to experience it.

And he was right.

I mean, it's a it's a It may be the oldest form of golf in the world, but I think it's still the most appreciated.

Maybe it was his first trips over the British Isles, and you know, people make a journey to go see those golf courses in the way they are in their natural state. But Mike was after some sandy ground and picturesque ground, no matter where it was. And he was going to tap into that golfer who wants to travel, much like you know a surfer or a sailor that would go to remote places around the world to enjoy their avocation.

Uh.

You know, you've heard the surfers going, you know, to Tierra del Fuego too. You know who who knows where.

In the Pacific to go find that wave and and and that experience and that's golfers have a way of you know, if they if they're one or two groups that travel together and get to a place and enjoy golf.

That's that's who he's after.

And he's really done a great job UH with that. It's the repeat customer UH in places that eat, sleep, and drink golf. And Bill and I are just a recipient of his outreach. We can't thank Mike enough. And Mike, you know, extends to all the other architects that we know, and they've done a great job too, So it's pretty unique and we're very honored to be part of that.

I got two kinds of letters from men in particular.

Ladies are beginning to go up there, but there's still a small minority of people who play man. So the letters I see go into two categories. The buddy's trip, I was great. Here's a photo. We had a fabinoust ten or eight and twelve will you do it? Eight, twelve, sixteen of you? I like those stories. They're basically all the same saying we had a fabinous time even though it rained, or even though where's the wind.

There's always a wrinkle. But the.

Buddies have a great time, and many of them come back here in and eure Ope. But the ones that really get me are the father's son trips, which are fewer than the buddy trips, but those are very heartfelt, you know, I like you know, we came all the way from Boston. It's been one of my life's dreams.

In particular.

I ask every guest on the fire pit to share their favorite fire pit and give me a reason or two.

Why do you have one?

It's probably the one of growth cottage, Jim. We're building one right now for and I haven't seen it at cheap Branch, so it's going to have some growth.

Cottages doesn't really have a view. You're just part of nature.

And the one that's a cheap branch is going to be resplendent with the visuals. You'll be overlooking the golfers. So wait until you see that right now. It's the Growth Cottages.

I'm looking at it right now, the putting course that Gamble sands. On the far side of it is a fire pit that looks down into the Columbia River Gorge and to the North Cascade Mountains. And it is by far my favorite fire pit.

Ysh, my favorite fire pit experience.

Again, you know, after the playoff and the Uncle Tony Invitational and winning. You know, I think you'll recall I came into the fire pit pretty hot that night.

And I mean, any fire pit where.

Joe Horowitz is playing music should be my favorite, but that night, you know, it was.

That was a pretty special occasion.

I appreciated your advice and that night and we really we enjoyed the fire pit, and we enjoyed Joe.

And that's that fire pit.

Abandoned Dude's near the Grove Cottages is my favorite fire pit, no doubt.

That's the inspiration for this podcast. As I've said before, Without that fire pit, I don't know that we even have a podcast called the fire Pit I mean, that's how special that fire Pit is.

Are you looking for good value on great golf apparel as a listener to this podcast, my friends John Ashworth and Jeff Cunningham at Linksoul in Oceanside, California are offering you a twenty five percent discount on all future orders of what I Wear All Day, every day, on and off the course. Whenever you go to linksoul dot com, just use promo code MATTYG twenty five m A T t y G twenty five. Thank you for listening to The Firepit. It's produced by Alex Upeggi. It's edited by