You ever sit around after playing a wonderful golf course for the first time wondering how cool it would be to play this gem with the course designer so you could understand what was going through his mind. Well if that course was Old Macdonald at Bandon Dunes then your wish has come true.

With the considerable filmmaking skills at work of Los Angeles producer Michael Robin, the DVD “A Journey to Golf’s Past: Creating Old Macdonald” is packed with intimate goodies on the conception, planning, and creation of the latest links offering at Mike Keiser’s Bandon Dunes resort.  For the golf junkie and armchair course architect this is like manna from heaven.

Old Macdonald was the brain child of Mike Keiser who wanted to build a little bit of Scotland in America and honor the genius of C.B. Macdonald the father of golf architecture in America.  With the help of the foremost American expert in links design Tom Doak and his valued associate Jim Urbina they set about gathering characteristics of holes that C.B. had done through his career and composed the best of them into the glistening collection holes that make up Old Macdonald.

The feature presentation is over an hour of interviews with all the protagonists of the project covering the processes of planning, design, and execution of the course construction. The interviews with Mike Keiser give you real insight into his thinking as he has stewarded ambitious golf projects like Bandon Dunes.  It also includes vivid footage of the holes at Old Macdonald as well as their counterparts at St. Andrews, North Berwick, Prestwick, Yale Golf Course, and The National Golf Links.  Doak walks through the characteristics of the original holes at these venues and his interpretation of them in the new holes in Bandon.

There is also detail about construction challenges and techniques when it comes to building a links golf course.  Whether it is hand raking fairways to get them just right, feathering the final contours of the massive greens, or building a sod wall bunker one row at a time this is fascinating to watch.

As is the case with all these DVDs there are some extras to add value to your purchase in the form of “special features”.  The coolest extra is a hole-by-hole tour of the 18 at Old Mac with Tom Doak as your guide.  This is like having a video yardage book with the designer as narrator.  If you have played the course you will find this feature very enlightening.

For ten bucks plus shipping you can find this DVD on the shopping portal of the Bandon Dunes website.  The quality of Robin’s video and production along with the ethereal Scottish sound track by Mason Daring make for a very enjoyable and informative walk through the creation of Old Macdonald.

A Journey To Golf’s Past

Creating Old Macdonald

Michael Robin (2011)

(Click to read the moegolf review of the Old Macdonald Golf Course)

Dream Golf is required reading if you are going to play this new west coast mecca of American golf.  Stephen Goodwin writes a detailed account of the conception, planning, construction, and operation of Mike Keiser idyllic contribution to the inventory of American golf destinations.  Goodwin’s access to Keiser, David Kidd, Tom Doak, Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw and so many other protaganists who were instrumental in this exercise make this an informative read.

To dream of bringing true links golf to America was an audacious ambition on it’s own.  But Keiser, a wealthy entrepreneur from his success building Recycled Paper Greetings, took this a whole step further.  He saw himself as the George Crump of our time-the man who in 1913 conceived and funded the building of the most famous golf course in America Pine Valley on obscure sandy scrub hills outside of Camden, New Jersey.

To this end Keiser not only conceived of the idea he went through the painstaking process of becoming an expert in links golf by assiduously playing all the greatest links venues in the world and tirelessly networked with architects and experts on the subject.  Using his own money and connections he searched for just the right raw venue that could be a home to his dream until he landed on this remote site in southern Oregon.

The book documents Keiser’s immersion in the process and his entrepreneurial risk taking it took to bring it to fruition.  He landed the best young architects of our time before they were famous and full of themselves.  As a result he pushed them on to create something very unique-real links golf courses on American soil.

David Kidd-a young Scotsman-did the first course Bandon Dunes in the late 1990s.  Tom Doak, one of the truly knowledgeable people when it comes to traditional links course design, did Pacific Dunes next in 2001.  Bandon Trails was the work in 2005 of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw who had to negotiate the blending of more rugged inland terrain with the desired seaside features.  Tom Doak came back in 2010 to create Old Macdonald a testimonial course to the pioneering influence of C.B. Macdonald considered by many to be the grandfather of American golf course architecture.

This book provides marvelous insight into the planning of golf courses and the special challenge of bringing authentic links design features to an American seaside venue.  The detail of conversations and the evolved thinking that brought these courses-all of which are in the top 100 in America by the magazine rating listings-to reality makes this a rich and engaging read.

The bonus is that for each course the author played a round with the designer and Goodwin gives a hole-by-hole account of the experience.  This is like getting a course guide written by the architect as a primer before playing the course.  Very cool indeed.

I highly recommend this read whether you are going to Bandon Dunes or not.  If you are going to Bandon it will provide unique insight to the facility and the guys who created and still run the place.  If not you will just become much more knowledgeable about the Herculean effort it takes to create a storied venue.

Dream Golf

Stephen Goodwin (2010)