Dream Golf: The Making of Bandon Dunes

Mike Keiser, entrepreneur, amateur golf enthusiast, and founder of the successful company Recycled Paper Greetings, turned his unlikely dream of creating a British-style links course on Oregon's rugged coast into one of America's most extraordinary golf destinations. Working against the odds, and making decisions that seemed counterintuitive to most outsiders, Keiser surprised the skeptics and charmed the critics with the result of his efforts. When it opened in 1999, Bandon Dunes was instantly acclaimed one of the best courses in the world.

This book, written with Keiser's full cooperation, is the first all-inclusive account of how he translated his passion into a reality. It reveals the difficulties he had to overcome, the personalities he encountered — most notably two of golf architecture's most controversial figures, Scotsman David Kidd and American Tom Doak — and the goal he has achieved in creating a true golfing utopia in an astonishingly short period of time on a wild, windblown bluff high above the Pacific.

"The story of how Mike Keiser, a golf-loving, greeting-card millionaire from Chicago, fell in love with the rugged, windblown site...and transformed it into not one but three world-class golf courses will appeal to golfers and lovers of golf history on multiple levels." Booklist

Motivated by the simple desire to create the best and purest golf experience possible, one man sets out to build a world-class golf course--"and succeeds beyond all his dreams.

This is the story of a man with a dreamand#8212;as well as the vision and passion to make it come true. The dream was to build a great American links course, one that would contain all the excitement of the famous golfing destinations in Scotland and Ireland, storied places like St. Andrews and Ballybunion. The man was Mike Keiser, an entrepreneur and amateur golf enthusiast, founder of the successful company Recycled Paper Greetings, and Dream Golfis the story of how, with the help of some of the most colorfuland#8212;and occasionally controversialand#8212;men in golf, he transformed a remote area on Oregon's Pacific coast into not one, but three of the most stunning, challenging, and highly ranked courses in the world.

It began modestly, when Mike Keiser decided to build a nine-hole andquot;dunesandquot; course and golf club on the shore of Lake Michigan, near his home in Chicago. The experience prompted him to look further, with the goal of realizing a dream that he had harbored for some time: to bring to American golfers the same kind of experience he had enjoyed while playing some of the legendary courses of the British Isles, andquot;linksandquot; courses that had evolved naturally to fit the rugged, heaving coastal terrain. These ancient courses were the antithesis of most modern American courses, where the features were shaped by bulldozers and all too often look sleek, manicured, and artificial.

No, Bandon Dunes would be a andquot;pureandquot; golf experience, pitting the golfer against the elements, allowing the land to dictate the course, banning the use of carts, making the golfer feel at one with both nature and the game. To achieve that goal would take a great amount of planning and hard work, the struggle of man against nature in shaping the land into three courses that would become the Bandon Dunes complex. Conventional wisdom said it was impossible. And even if he built it, would anyone come to this remote Oregon outpost?

Dream Golfis the first complete account of how drive and determination, coupled with the best minds in the game, created a utopian golf experience in a place of breathtaking natural beauty. It is the gripping and compelling account of how one man followed his dream to its greatest conclusion.

Stephen Goodwin, the author of four previous books, including the acclaimed novel Breaking Her Fall, is a former director of the literature program at the National Endowment for the Arts. He served two terms as president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and currently teaches at George Mason University. He has written extensively about golf and was involved in the development andcreation of a public golf course in Ijamsville, Maryland. He lives in northern Virginia.