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THE NEXT ONE’S GOOD / MIND
Y ou might say it started when WP Kinsella wrote a baseball novel in 1982 called “Shoeless Joe” that used the haunting refrain, “If you build it, he will come.” The extraterrestrials of Stone- henge may have had the notion origi- nally, but Kinsella’s mantra expressed perfectly that if you create something worthwhile, people will beat a path to your door. The book became a movie in 1989, and a solitary baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield romanced a gen- eration. Within a decade two visionary golfers built their “Field of Dreams,” and the Remote Architecture Move- ment was born. The first was in 1995 when Dick Youngscap hired Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore to design Sand Hills Golf Club on what was once the ocean floor in Ne- braska, now ranked No 8 on America’s 100 Greatest. The second was in 1999 when Mike Keiser opened the David McLay Kidd course at Bandon Dunes
on coastal Oregon (No 40). “There was something in the air that led us to links golf,” Keiser said recently. Coore draws a stronger connection. He says if Youngscap hadn’t played Prai- rie Dunes, the Perry Maxwell links-style masterpiece in Kansas, 1100 kilometres from the sea, he would never have built Sand Hills, and if Keiser hadn’t seen Sand Hills (he’s a founding member), we likely wouldn’t have Bandon Dunes, which begat Pacific Dunes (No 21), Ban- don Trails (No 65), Old Macdonald (No 72) and Sheep Ranch (No 115) in Oregon. The sun now doesn’t set on Keiser’s properties from Nova Scotia, Canada, to Tasmania, Australia, to Saint Lucia in the Caribbean to Golf Digest’s Best New Public Course of the Year in the middle of Wisconsin, The Lido. A land rush of imitators have fol- lowed. Keiser stands alone as the single most important positive force in golf during the past quarter century. When he started Recycled Paper Greetings in
1971, he was a pioneer of environmen- tally friendly products and later brought his passion for sustainability to golf. More than anyone, he has had a knack for doing well and doing good at the same time, which his two sons, Michael and Christopher, now propagate. Can you name another amateur who made a billion dollars in the golf business? I first crossed paths with Mike in 1986, although we didn’t really know each other until years later. At the time Golf Digest’s Armchair Architect contest challenged readers to create the best golf hole based on a topographic map, and 22 000 filed intricate designs. Look- ing back now, two entrants stand out: a 10-year-old kid with a Black father and a Thai mother whose name was Tiger and THE LIDO AT SAND VALLEY (BELOW) Opened in Wisconsin in 2023 this is a down-to- the-metre recreation by Tom Doak of The Lido that CB Macdonald built on Long Island from 1914 to 1917. Holes like the “Home” 18th were resurrected from historical documentation.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 13
JUNE 2024
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