I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
And when I find my.
Ball in a brid egg Frida Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Friday, Frida Egg, brid Egg, Frida Egg, bride Egg Lie.
I'm about ready to run off of the hump course.
Hello and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we have our final installment of our Bandon Deep Dive series. We're focusing on Bandon Dunes. This is a long awaited last piece of this series, but of course I'm here with Andy Johnson to discuss Bandon Dunes. How you doing, Andy, I'm doing great.
I'm you know. I'm excited that this series is going to be done. I will have to find a hope for it on the website where it's easily accessible. But if you haven't, if you scroll through the back catalog, we've broken down every other eighteen hole golf course at Bandon and it is wonderful to get to the final of our installments. The first golf course at Bandon. Bandon Dune's the namesake.
Yeah, we've gone in reverse chronological order, so we started with Sheep Ranch and now we've arrived at Bandon dune'es the og course at the resort. It opened in nineteen ninety nine. It was designed by David McLay Kidd and it met with immediate acclaim. It still is the most popular course at the resort. Right.
It was interesting. I was recently playing with somebody who brought up Bandon Dunes. They're like, you know, band It's just my favorite course there. And I was like, oh, I was like, I was like, and he went on and he goes, you know, I'll never forget in nineteen ninety nine driving up you know that he was in San Francisco, driving up to Bandon and playing that course for the first time, and it was truly, you know,
like it was. He talked about how he played the Reese Jones course that Sandy whatever is down the road.
There's a yeah, there's a rest Jones course in Florence.
Yeah, so you talked about how they played Florence Golf Links first and he was like, what is this And then they went to Bandon Dunes and they were like, oh my god, this is truly spectacular golf on like, you know, in a way It brought a different type of golf to the American scene, and obviously that's been well documented, but this was a really a culture changing golf course for America.
Absolutely, it's it's incredibly important. Now we're going to talk about that, but we're also going to talk about the architecture of Bandon Dunes in a way that people might not be used to. I think that people might not get completely what they expect from this podcast. We are going to be critical of this course in a way
that maybe not many people have been so far. You know that there's there's criticism of anything out there, you can find it anywhere, but generally the reviews of Bandon Dunes are pretty glowing, and I think we might have some more negative things to say than most people would. But before we get into that, I want to just make clear the level of course we're talking about here and the level of course that exists at the Bandon
Dunes Resort in general. Bandon Dunes. This course is spectacular, yes, and I'm sure it was absolutely stunning in nineteen ninety nine and it's still remarkable today. And so I want to kind of set a baseline here. We're talking about a truly remarkable golf course.
I agree. You know, when you're talking about the greatest public golf courses in America, you know, it's definitely on the list of greatest public golf courses in America. You know, where I would put it is far far lower than a lot of other people would When you get past just like it's golf on the ocean and start to look at some of the maybe some of the flaws, I think it kind of knocks it down some pegs, and especially when you compare it to the other golf
courses of the resort. And I think it's important to note, like, you know, this is a very inexperienced architect going to build a golf course, and it was, as you've illuminated a few times, that this was a transition period. And what Banded Dunes to me is is it's kind of stuck between two eras. And I don't want to feel like I'm bashing it, but it is somewhat of a
nineteen nineties golf course on the coast of Oregon. It is not a fully minimalist experience that you would see at the other courses where the features of the golf course really blend in with the nature around it. It is a really stark contrast when you look at pictures of Abandoned Dune's next to Pacific Dunes. In that corner where the eleventh hole Pacific Dunes is and the sixth
hole Abandoned Dunes is. You see the man made artificiality of Bandon dunees really pop when you see those that golf course right next to it, and I think, like, this is beyond just the man made features. I think design wise it is a significant downgrade from the other golf courses at the resort.
Yeah, So first I think we should set the scene for how this course was designed, who was designed by, because it wasn't just David McLay Kidd being the sole voice in the room here. This was Mike Kaiser's project and Jimmy Kidd and Jimmy Kid. Jimmy Kidd, David Kidd's father, who was the director of agronomy at Glenn Eagles in Scotland, was especially in the early stages of this project. There were a lot of voices in the room. Building this
course was a massive risk. A lot of people were saying that Mike Kaiser should not do this, that This was a bad idea. Nobody had really done anything like it before. There had been sand Hills, but that's a private club, and so there was some safety in that. You knew that people were going to be paying a lot to be part of the club, and so you didn't need a lot of business to go there. You don't need people playing sand Hills dawn to dusk every day.
Mike Kaiser needed people to show up to Bandon Dunes. This was a huge risk because it's so remote.
And the idea of resorts were being close to metropolitan areas at the time. You know, like if you think about resorts in the van, like Barton Springs or Barton Creek in Austin would be a great example. Like it's just outside Austin. That's like somewhat of a contemporary of this resort. You know. The ideology was to build the resources where people could easily get to them. In the case of Banded Dunes, this is more of a truly a field of dreams mentality that is now like almost
is the norm. What Mike Kaiser did was he went and found a great piece of land and built a golf course on it. That's now the riding mentality of golf courses. It almost the first question when a new course is being built is is it on sand? You know? And this is what Mike Kaiser really popularized, and obviously sand Hills was at the origin of this.
I can't emphasize this enough. In the late nineties, nobody knew whether this would work, and so I think on this project, on this build, Mike Kaiser had to do a number of things to make it as safe as possible. Now, hiring David Kidd might not have been the safest move, you know, wasn't the safest thing that he possibly could have done. The safest thing that he possibly could have done would have been a higher.
J Nicholas or Tom Fazio or Pete die I'm so.
Glad that he didn't do that, because the course would have turned out really different. It wouldn't have been as natural. The good characteristics of Bandon Dunes that exist now might not have been there because it would have been enormously more conventional if one of those designers had gotten a hold of this piece of property, I think, and so I'm glad that he took a risk on David Kidd.
But in a way hiring David Kidd was less risky than hiring Tom Doak would have been, and for this reason, Mike Kaiser knew that Kidd at this time was a young you know, he was in his late twenties when he was hired, and he was in his early thirties when they were building this course. He was young and inexperienced, and Mike Kaiser figured that he could influence him, that he would have a lot of control over the design process in a way that he wouldn't if he had
brought in Tom Doak to do the project. So hiring David Kid, yes, he was interested in the fact that David is Scottish. He was interested in bringing a new designer and making a splash with a kind of unknown architect. But he also believed that he could influence the design process a bit more if he had a less experienced
architect on the scene. And indeed what happened was that Kaiser was very involved in the design process, and you know, he's remained involved in the design processes of the other courses, just not quite as much as he was for this first one. And Mike Kaiser also brought in a variety of people that he knew well and trusted at the time, including the general contractor for this project, Serviscape, which was
run by a man named Peter Sinott. Peter Sinnott, I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce his name, but Serviscape is a well established contractor in the golf business. This wasn't a kind of David Kids situation where there was as an unknown contractor coming in. No, this was a company that had done a bunch of golf course projects. Kaiser also brought in his friends from the golf industry and outside the golf industry to advise on the project, and a lot of aspects of the course were sort
of designed by committee. Now is this a David Kid course. Yeah? I think ultimately he did design this course, but there were a lot of voices involved in the project, and often what those voices were doing were pushing for more conventional elements to be introduced to the golf course. And I think that that in part explains why we get the course we get where there are some elements of what came next in golf architecture. There's natural landscapes, the dunes.
A lot of the dunes were left alone. There's some bunkers in the middle of fairways. There's some natural undulations in the middle of a lot of the fairway. The greens are big, and a lot of them are wild. A lot of this stuff would become more popular later on and was kind of boundary pushing at the time. But then you also have some parts of bandon dunes that would have been more recognizable to somebody who had been to a lot of golf resorts in the nineties.
You had some artificial mounding around greens, and on the sides of certain fairways, you have returning nines. You know, you don't have a lot of the quirk and strangeness that characterizes courses like Pacific Dunes and bandoned trails. That's just not there. And I think that a lot of that is because Mike Kaiser designed this kind of team that was pushing for the course to be popular.
And I think, obviously if you look back on it, it was successful. What they did was uberly successful. This is one of the most successful golf courses and golf really when you think about it, because it led to more golf courses being built there and the greatest golf resort in America. This was the start of it. You know, there's a lot of things that you can nitpick and critique about Banded Dunes, and I have my opinion and other people have their opinions, and it doesn't make one
person right or wrong. But at the end of the day, in terms of a golf course development project, this was a grand slam project. Now did it yield a great golf course, a truly iconic golf course? I would say no. You know, I think in terms of you know, some of the stuff is kind of dumbed down there, and some of this stuff is is it's a huge letdown in comparison to a lot of the other experiences that
you have out at Bandoned Dunes in my opinion. Now, everybody has their opinion, as I've said, and they are going to feel there are certain ways about the golf course. But to me, this is the golf course I would skip. If I was resented with three days there and I couldn't play all the golf courses, this is the one that I would skip. This is the one that I don't really feel a need to play again. Of all of them, I would spend my time playing other places.
And you know, when you dive into why. I think that it's got the least complexity in its design, it's also got the most flaws, and I think there are things that it does very well. It has some standout holes that I would put near the top of the whole greatest holes at Bandon Dunes. I think the fifth is a great example of one of the best holes at Bandon Dunes. The seventeenth to me, sticks out as one of the best holes at Bandon Dunes. Those are two of the best part fours at Bandon Dunes, and
that is a tough list to be on. But at the same time, there are some huge letdowns there. I think the start of Banded Dunes is by far the weakest start. You know, the first hole is kind of a nothing burger. The second hole is not really anything that is exciting, and it plays up away, you know, and kind of one of the big things that you know, people have heard me talk about these before, but you're sitting on sand and there are just catch basins everywhere
where your ball ends up in. You know, the last time I was there, the first two holes, I was in catch basins and it's just like, this isn't an abandoned Dune's experience when you play the other four courses that you preponderance of these. The third hole is fine, it's a fine hole, but by the time you get to four, you've played three of the most average holes at the resort. That is unlike any other start out there. In the first three holes, all of those golf courses
make a huge impression on you. The fourth hole, I'm not a fan of. People say it's one of the greatest part four us in the world. I think it's super awkward off the tee. The containment mounting out down the left side that's artificially built is really you know, when you compare it to the dunes the natural dunes to the right just looks very, very fake. And I think it's just a It's a really boring t shot in a way, because you know, you just lay back.
You could push driver, but there's not really a place to hit it.
You could you could hit it over the dog leg on the right. Yeah, if the wind is right. I think that's the option that's supposed to be available, But I'm not sure that there is a huge reward for that risk, because that's a really risky play if you push it a little right, you're you're in some tall grass, and but the fairway is really really wide and generous in the place that is safest to play to. So I think most people just end up aiming there and
then taking the approach from there. The approach from there isn't anything particularly super difficult unless the wind is like directly against you or something like that.
And so in the first four holes, like I think, you get out to the ocean and it's a spectacular view. When you turn the corner on the fore, it's a great reveal. I'm not debating that.
And I think I don't think that should be underestimated. You know, the impact of that reveal when you turn the corner and face the ocean. That's a great moment. And I think that that has to be to the hole's credit to a degree. But I think that the impact of that moment is such that people may not pay attention, particularly to the strategy of the whole, which I agree with you, I don't think it quite works.
The next thing that kind of gets at me, and we can get to this, is that this is a walking only golf course and it is by far the worst walk at Banded dunes. It has the least connectivity. I think banded Trails is one that has to traverse difficult ground. But the walks are very esthetically pleasing and interesting in their own way. As we talked about on the Banded Trails podcast, these walks are very EVI and they're very like clear you're usually working walking down like
a cart path and like a barren landscape. And I think like a perfect example of this is the sixth hole, which is probably my least favorite hole on property. It's obviously it occupies a absolutely stunning part of the property. And this is where as I talked about the the differences in construction, mentality and style really are are are glaring between Bandoned Dunes and the other the other courses and its neighbor Pacific Dunes. This is a This is
a par three right along the coast. It was late, a late add to the routing, and it makes it kind of clunky. My complaint with it is like why isn't the green just on the ground. Why it's a beautiful, beautiful setting and the green's propped up, it's built up, and everything runs off on all the sides, when you could have just put the green on the ground on
the cliff, and it would it just been fine. And there's there's beautiful landscape and dunes right around it, and there's just no reason for it to be propped up. And it looks like when you look at it, it looks like a pimple on this beautiful landscape. It's this, it's the most gorgeous face in the world, and it's got this this like ZiT popping out of the land. And to me, like, I can't unsee it. And I'm sorry, you know, I'm sure a lot of people love this
golf hole. But then to make matters worse, you play the hole and you walk one hundred and sixty yards back after you play it to the seventh teeth.
Well, you essentially walk right back to the fifth green. Yes, you play it. You play the hole, and then you then you walk back over it.
Now, like to me, if the golf course went five and then to seven, one of my favorite holes on the course, eight, one of my favorite holes on the course, that three hole stretch might be the best three hole stretch on the golf course. And instead you have this part three that's kind of hemmed in there that adds to a clunky walk, right, because then the eighth green to the ninth T terrible walk. You know, there's the third green to the fourth T is not a great walk.
Like there are all these bad walks within the first nine holes, and you know, I think the ninth hole is pretty average. I think ten to eleven are Ten's a great hole. Eleven okay, But it goes through this stretch of really great holes mixed in with clunkers, and a lot of the walks are very poor. So when you talk about the whole story of the round and the way that the golf course fits together, it's very clunky.
I want to go back to that five six seven sequence that you were talking about. Now. The story behind the addition of those holes is that originally the band in Dune's property was pretty constricted, and the front nine had some issues with parallel fairways like back in fourth routing. It was just kind of wedged in there, whereas the back nine always kind of worked, you know, and the
back nine today I think is definitely better. But what really happened there is that the additional property that they were able to purchase essentially midway through the design process, allowed them to add five six and seven. They didn't have those holes before, and it allowed them to push the fourth green out to the cliffs. So clearly that additional property was huge. But where I think the mistake happened is that they decided to put that sixth hole in.
They might have gotten a little bit greedy and said, hey, we have this extra bit of coastline. We can put a par three there and then we can kind of come back inland. Where I think what they probably should have done when they got that extra property is, yeah, push that fourth green out to the cliffs. Design that fifth hole, which, as you say is is a beautiful hole. I'm not sure the strategy totally works there. This is kind of a sidebar. There's not enough room on the
left in my opinion. There's there's like these center line kind of gnarly hazards, and I don't think there's any reason to play left there because it's so narrow, and that's like the risky option, and I wish there were just a little more rooms so that you were more tempted to go out there. As it is, I think you play right all day. I'm not sure there's any reason not to play right there. But that's again just a parenthetical. All right, they decided to use that extra
coastline for six. I think what they should have done is just, yeah, have that fifth hole, but then turn inland for the seventh hole. Don't get greedy, don't use that extra coastline and then have to walk back. We don't need that hole because behind seven and eight T, behind seven green and eight T. If my recollection is right, there's some really cool dunesland.
Back there, dramatic too big, yeah, huge.
And there's no golf holes there. I think you probably could have put a fantastic par three back there and have that sequence be par four, fifth, par four, what is now the seventh, but then the sixth, par three, seventh back in those dunes, make a wonderful little doneesy lynxy par three and then play eight back how you have it. Nine has issues as a golf hole, but they don't have anything to do with the way the land is used. It has more to do with the
design and the shaping. I think that would have been a more effective routing.
One of the things that Cripple's nine too, is that you know it plays back to the most popular area of the resort, so you know, there have been things that have been added to the ninth hole to corrale balls, keep them from rolling into the putty green, rolling into the clubhouse. Like all. You know that returning nine. I mean, it's the only course on property with a returning ninth hole, and.
It has returning nine s because again, that's a conventional element that they felt they needed to have because they were taking enough risks already they couldn't manage that extra risk of having a debut flagship course that didn't have returning ninees.
So I think one of the things, though, is like one of the things that having the returning nine does for the resort is it's uber popular late night nine hole play is the front nine at Banded Dunes because
you're able to play nine holes. You can get in at four o'clock or five o'clock check in and go play nine holes and everybody feels like you got the trip off to start right Like that is one of the things that having one course that has returning nine does is that's a very very popular late night golf option.
It serves the resort in a really specific and useful way, and so you can't come down too hard on it. For that. But you were just saying before there are stretches of holes that kind of don't quite work as well as other stretches. Did you finish that thought? Do you have anything more to say about the back nine now? I think the back nine is a lot more consistent than the front nine.
Personally, it is a lot more consistent. I think, like, again, there you see some like I'll never forget when I saw the thirteenth fairway, I was just like, oh my god, you know, like this is this is stunning. You know, I think the par three's on the back nine are a little bit of a letdown. They're in beautiful places, but I don't think they're necessarily great holes. I think as that's one of the things that I would you know,
the par three score is like there are they mostly stunning? Yeah, they're like outside of the second hole, they're all very studdying and and aesthetically wonderful locations on the cliffs. But yeah, I think they're letdowns in terms of golf holes. But yeah, the back nine is is much more more coherent, and it obviously occupies some of the best land on at the resort on those cliffs there. I think to me.
What's the holes that stand out on the back nine are the tenth, the thirteenth, the par five thirteenth because of that unbelievable choppy ground in the fairway area. I mean that area is just unbelievable to me. The tenth. I love the center line mound that obscures you know, if you play right or left, you get looks at the hole if you play right down the middle. It's one of my favorite things. When you play down the middle and you're in one of the worst spots, you
can't see anything into that green. I think that hole is I would say in terms of like the least talked about really good hole abandoned dunes is the tenth. And then I think everybody loves the sixteenth. It was interesting. I'm a fan. I haven't played it that much, but I talked to a player that played in the USAM who knows its architecture, and he says it doesn't work.
There's nowhere for somebody to hit it, which was an interesting critique because when you play down in the down wind southern summer wind, you can't hold the green if you go for it. And then also the layup area is almost impossible to hit as well because the ball runs through it. So that was an interesting critique that I hadn't thought of. We played it in the winner,
so we played it into the wind. But that was an interesting comment that has made me kind of think more about the About the sixteenth, his mentality was like, if I hit it and I just end up in the front bunker, that's the best case scenario.
But he's not considering hitting a seven iron off the tee in other words, because there's plenty of room kind of left center on that hole.
I think he was talking about hanging like maybe more of a long iron as the layup and not going as severe as hitting a seven iron. So that was just his thoughts. So, you know, I take that with a great but I think that's one of the most visually spectacular golf holes in the world. So you know, I think at that point you've got to be ten. Thirteen, sixteen, and seventeen are really great golf holes.
Yeah. I think fourteen is a terrific short part four as well. Yeah, with one of the best green sites.
Yeah, sitting down in that little pocket.
Yeah, benches right into that dune really nicely, so natural. The shaping is very successful there. The tie ins between the artificial and the natural really really work on that whole. And if you're laying up, if you're not going for the green, you've got kind of an interesting game of hopscotch to play where you need to avoid a bunch of bunkers that are kind of in the center of
the fairway. You know, you mentioned a few things there that I think were at the time that Bandon Dunes made its debut daring, and one of the big ones is a fairway like the thirteenth Fairway. I think a lot of architects at the time, unfortunately, would have looked at that fairway and said, we can't have this be this tumbling. We have got to flatten this somehow, And a different architect may have come in and graded out that beautiful, you know, linksy, undulating fairway, and that would
have been a real shame. And so one of the things that Bandon Dune's the original course does so successfully is that it allows certain fairways just to be natural. The Seventh Fairway comes to mind, and of course the thirteenth Fairway, and so I think that's one of the
really strong points of the course. It's interesting that the par threes, you know, at least architecturally, don't really work that well, but twelve is so stunning that again, like four, people may not really be paying attention to whether the whole works strategically.
I mean, like it'd be interesting to rank the par threes, uh the property and just where where they shake out, right, you know, because I think like one of the things with sheep Ranch I think my complaint with sheep Ranch is is the par threes feel a sameness to them, and they share some characteristics of Bandon. They kind of feel forced in on the coast, and I think my tastes in the retail golfer as the Kaisers like to say,
are far different. You know, I love a great par three on the ocean, but if it's a mediocre hole on the ocean, I kind of think to myself, well, what if they had done something else here, you know, what if they had done something to push something here so this wasn't necessarily a par three or you know, in the case of sheep Ranch I feel like a lot of the par threes blend in and they have a similar playing characteristic of on the ocean, right.
Yeah, or toward the ocean. You're playing at the ocean, so that you have the ocean view in the background, almost an infinity effect behind the green. The funny thing about Bandon Dune's par three's is that I think that they're well oriented. They're well positioned where they should, except for the sixth hole, which is just kind of this extra appendage. But you know, it plays along the coast. No other par three at and In Dunes plays right along the coast, so at least that oh abandoned.
Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, at the Corse band In Dunes, that's going to always be confusing, but yeah, it plays right along the coast, whereas the others kind of play toward the coast or you know, two is inland. So there's some variety to them, but just the execution of the design isn't all the way there with them. Fifteen I'm not sure what to make of because that hole has been changed since the original course bunker has been taken out. I think there's been some reshaping done. I'm just not quite sure at
this point what they're going for with fifteen. It could be kind of this neat par three a longish par three where you run the ball up onto the green. But that shot isn't super available right now. There's not really places to bank it in or to really use the ground in a constructive way. You know, there's a lot of kind of like rejecting contours, and so the motivation is more to get the ball up in the air and kind of land it soft. But the uh, you know, the great holes at Bandon Dune's are your
part fours. Yeah, inland par four specifically, for the most.
Part, I think like I think seven and eight and ten and uh and seventeen to me, like I think about those holes a lot. I think about the fifth hole a lot. I think the way the fifth sits in its landscape is what draws me to the fifth so much. Is the way it just kind of nestles in there. The green sits in that pocket, like I love, Yeah, I just love how that hole, you know, it looks aesthetically and just the way it embraces. What I wish more of from Bandon Dunes was the way that hole
embraces its landscape. If it did that more throughout the course, I think it would just be so much better, so much better of a course. And instead, you know, especially with the first four holes there, it really feels forced and that, and then you finally get to five and you're like, Okay, this is a hole that kind of sits more into its landscape. Then the same again goes back to that theme of one through four of really you know, kind of like strong arming golf into this.
And then six and seven are kind of a contrast back and seven and eight. Seven and eight are really a contrast back to what you feel with five. So like that to me is kind of like the give and take in a similar thing happens on the back nine. Right, you have ten that feels so natural in such a wonderful hole. Thirteen similarly, But then eleven and twelve, like eleven to me is kind of a goofy hole, and I know it's been changed.
It's been changed.
Yeah, that And I think that's another important point about this golf course. It underwent a big renovation, and you don't renovate a masterpiece.
Yeah, well, I'm not sure that the changes at eleven are for the better. I think the initial concept of that hole is that you had a bunch of bunkers kind of running on a diagonal on the left, and the best place to approach the green from was the left, and there's quite a bit of room out to the right. Now there's also some gorse out to the right, so I'm not sure there's you know, it's that safe to
play out to the right. But they've taken out some of those bunkers on the left, which I think makes the play up the left a bit less risky, especially if you're taking the gorse out of play. So the strategy of that hole just isn't quite coming together for me, and I would say that I just don't see what the advantage is on a lot of holes at Bandon Dune's what advantage there is to being near a hazard, or what advantage there is to playing close to a
particular side of the fairway. I think in a lot of cases, if you're just somewhere in the fairway, you can kind of figure it out from there and there's not any particular penalty for playing super safe.
Would you characterize Bandon as the most fair course at the resort.
It's a terrible question, it is, and it isn't, because we have to define fair.
Like a tour pro would define fair.
Well, I think that David Kidd was not a member of the fair Police when he designed this course. I think he pushed back against a lot of the advice that he was getting to make the course more fair, and to make the course more fair would mean things like making that bunker on the twelfth hole the par three, that little pop bunker in the green, making that less severe.
There was somebody who advised him to do that, and he pushed back against that and said, hey, a lot of links holes have these sort of quote unquote unfair hazards. He didn't grade out some of those fairways to make them more fair, to give a level lie to the player. And so I think in that sense, Bandon Dunes represents a lot of the things that people think of as unfair.
But today, compared to courses like Pacific Dunes and Bandoned Trails, you're just going to get into a lot less trouble at Bandon Dunes.
Yeah. I think it's it's the most kind of what you see is what you get at Bandon. I think you're gonna get the least amount of kind of what people would call bad bounces. With the other courses abandoned holistically, I would put them into the stratosphere of like, hey, these are the very, very best public golf courses in America. Now with Bandon, I would still put it in the class of this is one of the best public golf courses in America, but it's probably down in bucket three
of public golf for me personally. And I think what propels its high lofty ranking really centers around its history. You know, it has a ton of history and being the founding course abandoned dunes, and also its name. It's the namesake for the most popular resort in America.
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dot com. And if you use the code old Mac at checkout, that's one word, all caps O l D m AC old Mac at checkout, you'll get twenty percent off at zero restriction dot com. You know, before we wrap up and get really general, I want to talk about the shaping a little bit, okay, because I think we've referred to it a couple of times, But can we get into that a little bit more deeply because I think that you.
Know, it's your podcast, Scarrett, people.
Don't always know, Yeah, people don't always know what we mean when we talk about bad shaping versus good shaping. Say you're comparing Bandon Dunes to Pacific Dunes or to Bandon Trails in terms of the shaping style, the execution of the shaping, why do you think it's less successful at Bandon Dunes.
Here's the thing about shaping. There are all different types of shaping. Like I love SETH Raider CB McDonald golf courses. Are they natural golf courses? Do they fit into their natural environment? No, they're They're artificial and man made. I you know that being said, I feel like Bandon attempts to be natural to its area, but then when you look at it, it looks very artificial. So the way
that the shaping ties into the surrounding areas. You know, one of the things that I've learned from being out at sites and talking to you know, shapers or architects is the idea of con of horizon lines and looking at the lines that the horizon makes and how you can shape things that fit into those lines right and and aren't obtrusive or like you know you talk about McKenzie, when you build something, you build it so big that
it doesn't feel fake. And that's something that Jackson and con talked about with it, which I think is one of the best LIFs looking manufactured golf courses. Is Scottsdale National Building, something so big that you can't possibly believe
it's fake. What Bandon Dune's is in is that some of the constructed areas, in particular, like the third hole or the fourth hole, where you have that left side, you know that left side, it looks so unnatural because it doesn't look like anything around it, right, And you had examples right across on the other off the other
fairway which you could have mimicked. I remember walking down that hole with you and we were just looking to the right of the hole at this beautiful land and there just like at some of the most stunning land on the golf course, and then you look to the left at this constructed feature and you're like, you know what that those don't Those two things aren't the same. And when they're trying to pull off this natural look it is trying to embrace the environment that is in,
it just falls short in those aspects in my opinion. Now, something that ties in perfect here is drainage. And when you have a bunch of man made hollows in the ground that are created because you're putting drains in. That also makes things look extremely man made.
To be clear, a course like Pacific Dunes has drains, yes, but they're just a little bit harder to identify and pick out of the landscape of the golf course because they've been really tied in to the natural movement of the rest of the property, you know, whereas on a lot of holes Abandon Dunes you can see those scooped out catch basins, and they did like a decent job kind of matching the grades and various things like that, but it's just the work isn't quite as advanced as
it is at the rest of the courses at Bandon Dunes, so that when you walk around holes like three, for instance. You mentioned three before accidentally, but I think three is the perfect example of where the shaping at and in Dune's falls short. There are catch basins all over that fairway that are really easily identifiable. And then if you look up at the green site, they are these kind of regular wavy contours around the green that just don't
fit into anything around them. And once you start seeing that, you can really pretty easily pick out what was made and what's natural, and that just kind of takes you out of the flow of the golf round. It takes you out of this experience that you're having a kind of old fashioned linksy round.
Yeah. And I think like the greatest credit to an architect is when you say something like you had to have made that feature and they say, no, that was there, and you then say something along the lines of God that that feature must have been so exciting when you saw that and knew you could build something over that, and they say, well, we'll we built all that, you know. And I think the thing with Bandon is that it what was made and what was there are very very evident.
And I think the catch base and thing, just like the way that drains are used other places, is that there was small earthwork done to move water to an area where your eye wouldn't see the drain or the drain wouldn't be in play. At Bandon, the drains are directly in your line of play. And it was the first we have a water problem here, let's put a drain in. Let's not do the subtle earthwork to move the move the water out of play and to an area where we can hide a drain.
And it's variable through the course though. That's the thing that's that sort of strange, is that some holes I think are really beautifully shaped, other holes fall short. And I think that that has a lot to do with the way the process worked in construction at Bandon Dunes. The lead shaper at Bandon Dunes, David Kids lead shape was a guy named Jim Haley. Now I don't want to disrespect Jim Haley's name. I don't know much about him. I'm not sure which work exactly he did at Bandon Dune's.
But Jim Haley's resume, the main feature on it is that he spent eleven years as a shaper for Reese Jones. He was part of the kind of conventional golf industry in the eighties and nineties. And I think that some of these shapes that we're talking about, these artificial contours around greens, the way that the catch basins are executed,
are familiar. If you have been to Reese Jones courses from the eighties and nineties, or Pete Die courses from the eighties and nineties, Jack Nicholas courses from the same period, Robert Trent Jones junior courses from the same period. You see touches of that at Bandon Dune's and it's a little bit out of place now that Corn Crenshaw and Tom Doak have built the rest of the courses at Bandon and have taken a really different approach to tying
in their courses to the natural landscape. And just to bring this point home, take a look sometime everybody at some early pictures of Bandon Dunes before Pacific Dunes was built, preferably, but maybe even a little bit after that, just really early days at Bandon Dune's. And for pictures like this, you can go to golf club atlist dot com and look at the kind of courses by country section and click on Bandon Dunes. Look at those pictures, Look at
the bunkers. The bunkers are totally different in style than they are now. The original bunkers at Bandon Dunees looked very much like Glen Eagles bunkers if you've seen Glen Eagles King's Course where David Kid's father was the director of agronomy, where David Kidd kind of grew up working what he was familiar with. The original band And Dunes bunkers look like that, right, they are kind of these smallish a lot of them sort of bathtub like. Okay,
they don't look bad, I don't think. I think the other influence on the original bunker style Bandon Dunes was Mierfield. But they just look completely different from what's getting built at Bandon Dunes now. And they've gone in after these other courses were built, and they have renovated those bunkers, naturalized them a little bit, tried to bring them more in line with what became the style of the resort.
There was a different idea that went into the original band In Dune's course that wouldn't have been as radical back then.
Do you think the golf course would tie together and feel more like its own like if the bunkers still were that style, it might, I agree.
I don't think the original bunkers look bad. I think that, Yeah, there was an overall coherence to what they were doing there, even if it's not what I prefer. Those bunkers were of a piece with the catch basin shaping that you're talking about exactly, with some of the containment mounding that was around the fairways. Even if it didn't tie in all that well to the natural landscape, it tied into itself.
Now Bandon Dunes has a little bit of a hodgepodge feel where they have naturalized these bunkers a little bit, made them a little more dopey or coorry, but they haven't been able to change the shaping of the green surrounds and the shaping of those some of the mounding around the fairways in the same way, because that would be a much much bigger project than just kind of
thrilling up some bunker edges. So I think that's an interesting point, you know, like there was an original style to Bandon Dunes and they've kind of moved away from that because of what the other courses are.
Like if you've ever gone to a Golden Age course that's gotten a bunker renovation, like a great example would be Belvedere, right, is a phenomenal golf course that everybody can play, But the bunkers are of the seventies eighties vein.
Yeah, they're scoopy, they look silly.
Yeah, they're like they're you know, they're they're just like You're like, wait, what where are these here? You know, what what's going on? And obviously they would love to change. It's a high priced ticket that they aren't going to change anytime soon. But like here in this vein, what what's happened abandon is that the original aesthetic of the
golf course that tied everything together. One of the big things that ties an entire course together is the bunkers, and the bunkers related to everything else, and by changing them, they have created this mismatch. I think, you know, when you look at those old photos, like I think the course looks a lot better, Like if you put dope core seaside bunkers on a rainer course, they would look so goofy and that everything else would look just silly.
But what works is everything's manufactured and in a way like Banded Dunes is probably the most manufactured golf course at the resort, and in that vein like it should have. That's where the consistent feel lacks, right.
Yeah, I mean, I think what they were going for with the original band In Dunes was what they thought was a Lynx course, you know, and they were a lot more successful in executing a Lynx concept than a ton of architects had been before them. I mean, just think of your your local link style course that was built in Farmland and compared to that Robert Trench Jones.
The Robert Trench Jones Trail has links courses that are just like monstrosities.
Yeah, and you know in the Portland area we have a ton of these. There's the Langdon Farms, there's Heron Lakes. You know, people who are from Portland know what I'm talking about here. I think most most cities have these style of courses that were built on something flat and in our kitec came in, well what can we do here, Let's build a link style course, let's do some mounding whatever. If you look at the original band in Dunes, it
was so much better than those. I mean, it was a giant leap from link style eighties and nineties architecture, It truly was. But what they were thinking of, I think as a links course was based on what old Scottish links courses, but how they look in the modern era. So think of Mirfield, think of even the old course
at Saint Andrew's. I think what David Kidd was imagining is that he was building a course like that, whereas what Tom Dook and Bill Corr do is they're trying to build courses that look like what original links courses look like with blowout bunkers and really natural duneescapes. Well, by the time those old links courses got to the nineteen nineties, the bunkers had been shored up.
They'd been making like literally for like to to save maintenance. And obviously maintenance practices have gone so far. But like a great example, we have an article on the eighteenth hole Mierfield that Jaeger Kovich wrote, and there's an old picture of the eighteenth hole bunkers from nineteen thirty or something like that, and they're much more wild. They resemble
a Pacific Dunes bunker. They don't resemble what's there now, which is a revetted pot bunker that's very easy to maintain that you know, essentially is much smaller but occupies the same amount of space by swallowing up golf balls. And it's a fascinating thing. Like what Bill core and Tom did is that they matched their golf courses their bunkers to the area, yes, versus putting bunkers in the way that bunkers had been built for the last twenty years.
And Bill Corr and Tom Douk were very influenced by Scottish links courses. The same way that David Kid was. But Bill Core and Tom Doak were not trying to make their courses look like Scottish links courses currently look. They're trying to make them look like they caught Scottish links courses did way back in the day. I think what David Kidd was doing, and that what the whole
team there was doing. Mike Kaiser as well. They were looking at what Scottish links courses look like now or what they looked like in the nineties, and they were more trying to replicate that, which I think is fine, there's no problem with that, but they have kind of walked that back a little bit now in trying to match Bandon Dune's bunkers with the what Doak and Core have done elsewhere at the resort.
Yeah, and I think the golf course band It would be better with those original bunkers.
That's an interesting take. I mean it's yeah, I think I agree with you.
And the thing about it is, like the important point to make about Tom and Bill Corr is they wouldn't build those bunkers at a site that was like, you know, like a perfect example is Tobb's work at common Ground. Common Ground does not have bunkers that look like Pacific dudes, because that's not what that area is like, you know, they match it to the So the bunkers at common Ground look a lot more like the original bunkers at Banded Dunes.
Yeah, and again I don't think that the original Bandon Dunes necessarily matched its environment that well. There were some things that were not successful in the tie ins between the dunes land and the shapes of the golf course, the artificial shapes of the golf course abandoned dunes, but there was at least a coherence to the concept that they were executing at the time, and I think that having some respect for that would be a good thing. But in any case, hey.
Can we make a real quick, real quick the eighteenth hole?
Oh okay, yeah.
Well why doesn't it use the canyon on the right. Why doesn't it do what the seventeenth does?
So well, I don't know, I have no idea, no idea. Yeah, so just to give people a picture.
It could have the best eighteenth all of all of them.
I know. It's well it's an oh my god, like, what an incredible natural feature they have. Yeah, like you have just played these holes along the cliff side of the Pacific Ocean, right, you can't get much more spectacular property than sixteen. And then you turn in and play seventeen and what do you have? This massive ravine that
comes in from the ocean. Incredible. I mean, what a blessing to have a property like that where when you turn away from the ocean you have something that's almost as spectacular as the cliff side and maybe even better for a golf hole. And seventeen uses it really well. Seventeen Green is incredible. That's a great golf hole. It gets you excited. And then eighteen just sort of plays away from Cut Creek it's called Cut Creek and from that ravine, and doesn't you I don't know why I
haven't looked into this. Were there some environmental regulations that applied to the eighteenth hole that didn't apply to the seventeenth I don't know what's going on.
Well, it's just like the eighteenth hole revives me of Tory pipes.
That's that might be a strategic strategic in the sense that it plays away from the Obviously.
It's like you have this amazing natural feature that you don't have to do much of anything to make a great golf hole, especially like a par five, like it just could be, it could be unbelievable, and and then it just like plays away from it and you're like, wait, why why do we go this way? So but anyways, that yeah, I think the discussion on Bandon is complex because, like listen, at the end of the day, the historical aspect of Bandon Dunes, it is one of the most
important golf courses in American public golf history. But it can be that, and it can be not one of the that greatest, truly greatest public courses.
That's okay, yeah, And it can be the case that David Kidd went on to do better courses in the future. Now we could have a similar debate, I think about Mammoth Dunes and Gamble Sands. But Bandon Dune's was his very first effort. And if Bandon Dunees falls short of what Tom Doak and Bill Corr did later at Bandon Dune's, that's no insult to David Kidd. He was in the toughest position of all of them. Here. He was a brand new architect essentially taking on a massive, important commission,
where all these other voices were in the room. He was launching a major new golf resort, and so if the course didn't turn out as well as Pacific Dunes or Bandon Trails, then that's really no surprise at all because Tom Doak and Bill Corr were able to come in later and have more freedom in executing their golf courses. Think about who built Pacific Dunes. It wasn't Serviscape, Yeah, it was Renaissance golf design. Jim Orbina was the construction supervisor.
Brian Slanik. Who else was shaping there? It was Brian Slonik, Don Placik, it was Bruce Hepner. It was an absolute murderer's row of great golf course builders building Pacific Dunes, and the same applies to Bill Kohrer and Ben Crenshaw's courses.
Let me ask you a question, then, do you think that part of that that maybe one of the reasons that David Kids getting the next course abandoned is because he never really truly got to build his course abandoned.
Yeah. I think that's a great point. It sounds like you agree with that point.
Why would you say that because it.
Seemed like a rhetorical question, But yeah, no, I totally agree, and I think it'll be interesting to see how that goes. You know, David Kidd seems to have found his style, you know, starting with starting with Gamble Sands and really coming to the fore at Mammoth Dunes. David Kidd has stayed in his position. This is, yeah, this is. He had kind of a middle period there where he was doing some doing some weird stuff. But uh, he has come into his own as a golf architect. And I'm
not saying that that's good or bad. There can be a debate about David Kidd's kind of recent style of golf courses, but it is his own. This is who David Kidd wants to be as a golf course architect. So it'll be really interesting to see what he produces and how people react to it. I'm glad that there's some variety it is. It is sort of interesting to reflect that after David Kidd. You know, this might seem obvious, but it was. It sort of came as a bit
of an epiphany to me. Recently, the only architects who have worked at Bandon Dunes have been Core and Crenshaw and Tom Doak. Yeah, they've dominated that resort since.
Kid Well dominated Kaiser Resorts, so other voices are are going to be a good thing.
Now. It's hard to equal what the kind of work that Corn Crunshaw do and the kind of stuff that Tom Dope does, But I'd really like to see David Kittry. All right, have we said what we need to say?
I think so. I think that's a good end spot. You know, there's more to come. You know, we'll get more deep dives. Maybe next time we go we'll do a Preserve deep dive. But yeah, this has been fun. If you've missed any of the other other conversations, i'd recommend going and checking those out. We also have twenty minute videos on three of the courses that are kind of focused conversations as well as we have a Sheep Ranch two part video from right at the very beginning
of the pandemic. And then I'm sure we'll cut something up for on the YouTube page for the Banded Dudes conversation we just had, so that'll be something that will be coming to the YouTube page. I'm not going to put a time frame on it at some point.
Yeah, yeah, we don't do great with promises for time frames, but there's a lot of bandoned content out there from the Frida Egg obviously from other outlets as well. I hope that we've provided something that's a little bit fresh in this conversation. It's not an uncommon topic, and so we tried to give you something a little bit different.
I hope that we've succeeded in doing that. But you know, Banded Dunes, it goes without saying at this point is one of the truly great places in the world of golf. It was such an honor and a delight to be there last November and to get to photograph these courses, play these courses, meet the caddies, get to know them. It's just an incredible place, and it's been really fun talking through both the many great aspects of the resort
and the few criticisms that can be made. And I'm glad that we can kind of speak freely about it, that we have this kind of license to discuss the resort in the way that we want to. So it's been a lot of fun. Thanks a lot, Andy, and we'll be back at you soon with some more episodes of the Frida Egg podcast. But we are done at this point with the Bandon Deep Dive series