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Book Notes: Dream Golf

By Jeffrey Standen

Dream Golf: The Making of Bandon Dunes, by Stephen Goodwin (Algonquin, 2006)

To understand Bandon Dunes and appreciate this book, you have to allow me to tell you a golf story. I hate golf stories and I never tell them because they are interesting only for the participants. But I hope this story transcends the genre. It's a story of how I struck five consecutive perfect shots and made a bogey. It's a story I or any number of golfers could tell about Bandon. If you can't see yourself in this story, Bandon Dunes is not for you.

Hole number six at Pacific Dunes is a short and straight par 4. The skinny green, just a few yards wide, is perched on top of a steep hilltop, protected on the left by an absolutely huge sand bunker (probably 20 feet high) and on the right by a slick hillside that takes any ball that rolls to its upper edge on a speedy roll to its bottom, about fifteen or twenty feet below the green. The fairway is very wide, but any tee shot to the left side is dead, due to the sand bunker. Even a straight ball from the tee can be a problem. The proper angle is to take your tee shot way over to the right, hitting directly at (and one hopes over) a large, high-banked bunker that dominates the hillside on the right.

The wind was up and in our face, but I've played here a lot, and before our annual trip I work on keeping everything low, not easy for me since my natural ball is high. I take my drive way right and it barely clears the lip of the bunker, leaving me a perfect look at the green only eighty or so yards away. I lie one. Here I make a small mistake in choosing my next shot. I should have tried a low line drive, landing the ball on the upslope to the green. Instead I take a wedge and hit it just like I planned, but I let the ball get just a little higher than the top of the hill. Big mistake at Bandon. The ball gets pushed back just a little, landing on the green short and left. This is bad. The slope of the hillside trickles the ball over the edge of the green and the ball doesn't stop until it's at the very bottom of one of the steepest and largest bunkers I've ever seen. I see the bottom of my buddy's golf shoes as he gives me the direction for my next shot. I lie two.

Now this sand shot has to go about straight up in the air and land just past the top edge of the bunker. A bit short, and it's back at my feet; even slightly long, and the ball will roll to the bottom of the opposite bank, leaving me with a shot so difficult that we Bandon regulars talk about it frequently. So I practice the swing, hinge my wrists, and force myself to complete the shot before looking up at it. And it works, the ball shooting straight up in the air and coming down softly right over the bunker's top. It's a once-in-lifetime shot, at least for me. I'm just a hacker like most of you, but I have my moments, and this is one of them. My friends are exclaiming, yelling at the ball to release and trickle slowly toward the hole. Their tone changes suddenly, and they now ask the ball to sit. It doesn't. The slick green and shaved hillside take the ball to the very bottom of the other side. I'm in a spot from where I've made a snowman. I once played with a guy who went bunker, hill bottom, bunker, hill bottom. For his next shot he took a wedge and hit it back to the nearby fairway, from where he got up and down. This is a hard, hard shot. I'm twenty yards off the green and I lie three.

The play here will surprise you. A chip is out of the question. Bandon's famous tight lies prohibit your sliding anything with a flange under the ball, and even a lob wedge risks a skull. A bump and run is plausible, but any shot, even with a lob wedge, that puts the ball in the air brings Bandon's ocean winds into play, leaving your ball out of control. The correct shot is the putt. Just hit it through the grass and up the hill. A touch too soft and you'll have to hit it again; even a smidgen too hard and you'll have to hit the sand explosion of a lifetime for the second time in ten minutes. Words can't describe the difficulty of this shot. This is Bandon, where the bluster of the winds and the vagaries of the dunes demand putting from fairways, rough and even sand traps. So I guess at the speed, hit it firmly, and up the hill it goes, coming to a stop about eight feet above the hole, but on the green. You could drop a bucket of balls at the bottom of that hill and not put more than a couple on the green. Yet I'm on, and I lie four.

Some putts at Bandon can't be made. The greens are so fast and have so many tricky breaks that even a good putter from the wrong position may have to grind to three-jack. It's not just the execution, it's the reads. Sometimes we splurge and play with a caddie (a real treat). Their value lies not so much in hoofing the clubs or raking the sand, but in directing the drives, refusing to hand you your wedges from the fairways, and pointing at the line to astonished golfers. It can't go there. But it does, and figuring that out (or believing your caddie) is half the battle. I study this downhill eight-footer, and see a double break, first left, then right, toward the ocean. I touch it, and it wobbles as planned, tumbling into the hole. Had it missed, I'd have had a ten-footer back up, easily. But in it went, and my pals congratulate on my bogey. Two members of my group made par, just driving it right, running the ball up on the green, and two-putting from below the hole. But my hole was better.

This book is, at bottom, an uncritical tribute to a man (Mike Keiser) and his vision. It's a tribute well-deserved. Bandon Dunes is a special place, easily the best place I've ever had a chance to play. The (so far) three courses at the resort present difficult holes, but doable, with no single way to play them. I've hit drivers from the tee and putters from the fairway, three woods on wind-gusting par threes of fewer than 150 yards, and wedges from farther away going in the other direction. Really Bandon shouldn't be called a resort. Everything about the place says golf, and frankly it says golf with men in mind: the colors, surfaces, weather and ruggedness of Bandon seems to twang some strings deep within the male soul. (Bandon's famous "Bunker Bar," with very good Scotch, a stuffed cigar humidor, more than one poker table, a pool table, and whatever sports game up on the screens, twangs something too.) Last time I played there, in a group of 24, on the last day the weather was so rough, with howling winds and sideways rain, that every one of us but two turned back. My buddy and I had the time of our lives, and actually played well. Every once in a while, really as often as I can, I like to close the law books and get away for some of the fun that makes living in Oregon an easy choice, although one not everyone understands: hunting with my boys, fishing with my fishing buddies, a dirt bike ride in the mountains. A golf trip to Bandon comes in at the top of that list. Playing there connects you up with something elemental.

Full post as published by The Sports Law Professor on October 10, 2007 (boomark / email).