JERRY TARDE: Thank you, John, and congratulations to Peter and Dick and Joe, too. This is really an ultimate honor for me. When I was a student at Northwestern, I used something that I had learned from an old friend who said that when you attend a party like this, you should look around and find the oldest person and then go over and talk to him because you learn something.
When I was going to Northwestern, I looked in the phone book and got Chick Evans' phone number and called him and went to see him and spent a couple of hours with him, and it was one of the great memorable moments of my life and had an influence. Obviously, it's quite a journey over the last 46 years since that night.
I also want to start by saying something at the beginning. I don't want to bury the lead, as they say, in journalism. Mike Keiser is the single most important positive force in golf today.
(Applause)
Mike was always way ahead of his time. When he started recycled paper greetings in the early 1970s, he was a pioneer of environmentally-friendly products and brought his passion for sustainability and the preservation of natural landscapes and sustainability to everything he did, and that's the passion that he brought to golf. It's in his DNA.
More than anyone in the golf industry over the last 30 years, he's had a knack for doing well and doing good at the same time. Lindy and Mike have passed this on to their children. It's great to see.
I first crossed paths with Mike in 1986. I was the new Editor of "Golf Digest," and one of our first big undertakings was an arm chair architect contest in which we challenged our readers to design the best golf hole based on a given topo-map that we published in the magazine. 22,000 golfers filed intricate entries. It's been the most successful contest of any kind ever held in golf publishing.
There were two stand-out entries. One was filed by a 10-year-old kid with an African-American father and a Thai mother, whose name was Tiger. The other noteworthy entry was from a Michael Keiser of Chicago, who called our architecture editor Ron Whitten when the results were announced and politely demanded to know why he hadn't won the contest. Knowing Mike, as you do, you can imagine that conversation.
Well, Ron, I think you're making a mistake. It was about that time that Mike built The Dunes Club, and ten years later came Bandon Dunes, and the world of golf was forever changed.
We also have with us two of the all-time giants of golf architecture. In some ways they couldn't be more different from each other. Bill Coore, I'm told, has only recently got an email address. I'm not sure he has a personal computer, but he is the epitome of old school, and we love him for it.
David McLay Kidd comes from the old country, but he's a licensed pilot and a master of modern technology. David's father was a golf course superintendent, and he was born into the game. He served an apprenticeship at Gleneagles in Scotland, and his breakthrough course, of course, was Mike's original Bandon Dunes, which gained international acclaim for its naturalistic and links-style design.
Among his other works with Machrihanish Dunes, The Castle Course in Scotland, Gamble Sands in Washington State, and Mammoth Dunes at Sand Valley.
Bill Coore started as a caddie in North Carolina and apprenticed with the great Pete Dye. Bill has partnered with Ben Crenshaw since the early 1980s, and they have produced such revered courses as Sand Hills in Nebraska, No. 8 on America's 100 Greatest; Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia; Friar's Head in New York; Barnbougle Lost Farm in Australia; and Sheep Ranch in Bandon Trails in Oregon.
I think it's fair to say that Bill and Ben are the most successful architectural collaborators since C.B. Macdonald and Seth Rayner.
What unites all three gentlemen who are joining us tonight besides their tremendous success has been their commitment to timeless, strategic design, minimalism, respect for the environment, and a naturalistic philosophy in harmony with the land.
So, gentlemen, please join us on stage, and let's get started.
(Applause)
My initial comment about listening to the oldest men in the room, I think the four of us up here qualify for that. Maybe the guy at the end doesn't.
Let's start with Mike. Has anybody had more ideal sites for golf courses than Mike Keiser? I think that has something more to do -- that's not just luck at work.
Mike has been known for espousing certain principles. Dunes plus ocean equal great golf. Another thing he told me that I'm trying to figure out is one plus one equals three.
What's your secret sauce, Mike?
MIKE KEISER: You said two-thirds of it, Jerry. A great dunes site on the ocean with a great architect equals a formula for success. The one plus one equals three was our experience at Bandon Dunes.
The first course was a curiosity, and a lot of people went there and appreciated it and said, Okay, I've done that. We reasoned that if there was a second course, they would stay longer, and boy, did that play out. It was a one plus one equals three, which enabled us to complete the second course with Tom Doak, Pacific Dunes.
Then we proved a new formula of one plus one plus one equals seven when Bill Coore came and built the Trails. I think as long as you keep adding them up until maybe six or seven, you don't have enough.
In my lifetime we will end up -- in my lifetime, I hope -- I have to live a little bit longer, but I think there will be ten golf courses at Bandon Dunes, a site that no one thought made any sense whatsoever back when we contemplated it.
(Applause)
JERRY TARDE: David, you know something about this man. You've been a guy who has worked with him, and that course at Bandon that you did really kind of put your career on fire. What about that course was a revelation and what about the project, the working with Mike? What's your recollection?
DAVID McLAY KIDD: With the greatest respect, Mike is missing one important part of the secret sauce. Having been doing this for 30 years now, I've figured out that there's one ingredient that Mike is not giving himself credit for.
Bill and I can be given amazing sites. We can have incredibly talented people working with us. We can be given all the resources to do it, but if we have an owner that just doesn't get it, you know, if they just don't get it, we are at a loss. In the end we don't have control.
If you have an owner that says, yeah, but I want the cart paths to be asphalt, and I want houses in that position over there, and then I want to build the spa over here, we're kind of beat before we ever get started.
The part of the secret sauce is Mike himself. It's having an owner that truly gets it, and they are able to let us do our thing.
(Applause)
MIKE KEISER: Isn't David diplomatic? All right. You're hired.
DAVID McLAY KIDD: I've got to tell one quick story against Bill. Every time he and I are on stage together, I usually get him.
I'm sitting at Bandon a few years ago. Probably four or five years ago. Mike is looking at his phone, and he says, Do you know what I'm looking at, David?
No clue.
He says, This is a monthly report of the rounds on all the golf courses. Do you know which one is number one?
I'm, like, No.
He says, Mammoth Dunes this month is No. 1. Wow. He goes, Do you know which one is No. 2?
I said, I'm praying to God it's Bandon Dunes.
He says, You know, you're right. It's Bandon Dunes. What do you think about that?
I said, I think you should stop hiring Bill Coore.
JERRY TARDE: Bill, I heard a story once about your fellow Texan, a young Ben Hogan, when somebody stole the four tires off his car, and he was dead broke, and it was the hardest moment in his life.
There was a moment back in the beginning when you were a starving architect. Hard to believe that. And you were living in Huntsville, Texas, and your car broke down, and you had to abandon it at 2 o'clock in the morning and walk home. You said something like, I bet this stuff doesn't happen to Jack Nicklaus.
Looking back, what is it about that lonely road from then to now? It's kind of an amazing journey you've had.
BILL COORE: Well, Jerry, first of all, I'm going to have to talk to Ron Whitten because he is the only person that knows that story until now.
So, yes, my car did catch on fire. Burned up on Interstate 45 right there off the side of the road, and I did say -- and I only mentioned it to Ron Whitten later. I said, I bet this just doesn't happen to Jack Nicklaus. It probably doesn't happen.
But, you know, Jerry, it's been such a wonderful, circuitous, in so many ways weird journey from the car catching on fire to sitting here tonight. You know, it's just a dream come true, and so much that is, as David said, is very candidly due to this man.
(Applause)
MIKE KEISER: These guys are being very kind. They and the site is pretty much it. If I'm one-eighth of a percent, that would be good.
BILL COORE: Well, it's like David said. David, you were exactly spot on. We can be given -- anyone in our profession, we can be given even an extraordinary site, but to be able to couple that with the freedom to work with that site is extremely rare, and Mike has given us, Tom Doak, Rod Whitman, all these different people, the opportunity to do just that. He's given us extraordinary sites to work with, and he's given us the freedom to work with them. That's all anyone in our profession could ever wish for.
MIKE KEISER: These guys are very kind, again, very generous. It has helped them a great deal by me not being a homebuilder. So there are no houses on the courses we've done until my son's, Michael and Chris, have decided they like building homes, and they've done a very good job in hiding the homes so they're not out in front. There's been an evolution from no homes to a few homes, and I think it will stay that modest.
JERRY TARDE: I think we all have a mutual friend and an innovator named Dick Youngscap, who had the idea of a golf course in the middle of nowhere called Nebraska, and he created something on the basis of that theme of "if you build it, they will come."
Mike, you've said that that had a great influence on you. I know, Bill, it has with you. Would you comment on the role of Sand Hills in your thinking?
MIKE KEISER: The very Ron Whitten that we talked about some time ago, or recently, called me two years before Sand Hills opened, but before Dick Youngscap had a financial partner.
And Ron said, Why don't you join Dick, which I had heard about and loved the concept, but I had already bought the site at Bandon Dunes and felt even though I was willing to do one speculative golf course, two was one too many.
So I respectfully declined and was delighted when Sand Hills opened with Bill Coore being the main reason, to great acclaim.
Two years later Bandon Dunes opened in the same time that Whistling Straits opened. So there was something in the air that led us, all three owners and the architects we used, to links golf.
JERRY TARDE: Bill, what role did Sand Hills play in your development?
BILL COORE: Oh, Jerry, it would be impossible to overstate the influence it's had, although at the time none of us thought that was even a remote possibility. When Dick Youngscap called and asked if we would consider doing this, Ben and I went up and looked at the site, and we thought it is truly extraordinary for golf.
Then very quickly thereafter the same thought occurred to us as most everyone else who went up there then that there are no people here. There's no one here. Or as one of the ranchers told me one day, Tom, there's no one out here. There's just cows.
He looked at me and goes, Yep, we prefer them.
If you put it into context, and we do get asked a lot. Just as I'm sure David does about Bandon and stuff, but we do get asked, did you have any idea the influence that golf course was going to have not just in Nebraska, not just in U.S., but around the world?
No, we had no idea. It was just a really good site, and we knew if we didn't do something special, we would fail, but the thought that it might actually work as a club, as a business, it might be able to survive was almost beyond imagination.
So it did. As Jerry and I have talked about some before, and certainly Ron Whitten and I have, there wouldn't be a Sand Hills in Nebraska if there weren't a Prairie Dunes in Kansas. Those two are linked. Not necessarily by ownership or membership or time, but just the fact that Prairie Dunes was there in those dunes in the middle of America far, far from an ocean, and Dick Youngscap knew it, and Doug Petersan, who was the superintendent at Prairie Dunes, who consulted with Dick Youngscap in Nebraska knew it.
There was a direct link there. The fact that Mike Keiser was a founding member at the Sand Hills. The first time we ever met was walking in the sand out there before anything was there. It's interesting how you track these things.
So they're linked, Jerry. They're definitely linked.
MIKE KEISER: It must be something surreal because, as I said, there was Sand Hills. Two years later there was Bandon Dunes, and at the same time Bandon Dunes opened, there was Whistling Straits. So three not necessarily all links courses, but three links-like courses within two years of each other.
I still look back and think that was unbelievable, and the fact that they each did well was far more unbelievable. As Bill said, there was no one there for any of them, but then we came.
BILL COORE: I will say this, Jerry. Mike has made this look so easy with the success at Bandon, the success with Lindy and Chris and Michael and the family at Sand Valley, the success with Ben Cowan-Dewar in a very remote place in Cape Breton, Canada, Nova Scotia. And the success with the Sattler family at Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania, Australia.
People now look at these and say, Oh, let's go build a proverbial "you build it, they will come." He's made it look so easy that you see that happening now over and over and over. Not just here, but all over the world.
DAVID McLAY KIDD: That's probably the question we both get asked the most often. We want to do what Mike did, but the dirty secret that we can't tell anyone -- this isn't going out on broadcast, is it -- is that often they just don't get it.
I'm there. I'm sure Bill has been too. Yeah, but Bandon doesn't have a spa. You know, we really need to put this -- you're, like, uh-oh, I've been here before. I've heard this before. Here we go down the wrong track.
JERRY TARDE: Speaking of that, there is an expression that Mike likes to use, "the retail golfer." I never heard of that before, and I've come to realize that it may have shaped the vision that we've all come to appreciate in a Keiser course. What did you think when you talk about "the retail golfer?"
MIKE KEISER: Everything I had read about in post-World War II golf development had the owner unsure of what he wanted when Jack Nicklaus, Tom Fazio, et cetera, et cetera, asked the owner, What would you like me to do?
They would typically say, I want something tough.
Something tournament-ready?
Yeah, something tournament -ready, something with teeth, a monster.
That was sort of the landscape for 20 to 30 years. You would know better than that, Jerry, as to how long it took. But this was a reputation of just that. It went the opposite way. We don't want a monster. We want something that is fun to play, and that caused me to say that's the retail golfer. That's the golfer who will pay greens fees. Not PGA pros and not great golfers like Bill Sheehan who gets to play free because he's great, but people like me, and most golfers are retail golfers.
Most golfers don't like hearing that they are lousy, but they, in fact, are lousy. I didn't want to say lousy golfers, so I said retail golfers.
(Applause)
JERRY TARDE: The ranking of golf courses is loved and hated by a lot of people, but when it was started by "Golf Digest" in the 1960s, the first list was America's Toughest Golf Courses. That really was the sentiment that you're capturing there. The fact was that people thought of championship courses as just being tough. Over the years we've tried to evolve that sense from tough to great and then redefining what great is.
David, I think you're an expert on this, besides being an expert on links golf. You have had a personal evolution in the way you've designed golf courses and the way you think about them. There's quite a difference from, say, The Castle Course in St Andrews to Mammoth Dunes. Talk about that journey.
DAVID McLAY KIDD: Well, my whimsical answer is if you played The Castle Course and didn't like it, I was getting divorced and having a miserable time, so I wanted to make sure everyone else was to. That's probably not the real truth.
To cut a very long story short, you know, when Mike gave me the opportunity to lead the design at Bandon, which still I pinch myself and wonder why. Thank you, again. I was building that out of instinct.
I was the son of a Scottish greenkeeper. I had spent my childhood playing at Gleneagles and St Andrews and Turnberry, and all these classic, old courses. It wasn't that I intellectually understood them. I just knew them. I had played them so often. I had been around them.
So Bandon was just a natural expression of all I ever knew. If Mike had said, hey, build me something that looks like Tom Fazio, I would have had no clue. I would have never had a clue how to put a cart path in back then because I had never played a course that had one. So it was obvious to me that you had, caddies and you walked, and the fairways were all rumply, and that was the same fescue grass as everywhere.
That wasn't revolutionary to me, even though it made such a difference to Americans that had never really seen it. But then on that platform of success, I was being told golf courses to be successful need to be harder. They need to have golf carts. They need to have irrigation absolutely everywhere.
So as I learned my art intellectually after Bandon, I was using all of these tools I was learning, and the courses were getting more complex. By doing so, probably harder and probably less fun.
The Castle Course is an amazing test of golf. I don't think I regret it, but I did question myself on the back of criticism from people that I really respected. Most of all the greatest of which would be Mike, who told me afterwards, You know, I played it. I don't think I really enjoyed did that much. That hurt.
So I resonated back to what I knew, which was golf from Scotland, golf like Bandon Dunes. The golf that the average player can get around. They can hit a ball and find it and hit it again. They can make bogey pretty easily.
The challenge for me now as I am now the age Mike was when he hired me, in my late 50s, is how do I combine those two things? How do you make a golf course that is actually fairly easy to bogey, but fairly difficult to birdie?
That I think is the thing I challenge myself right now with. How do I stop a good golfer from making birdies without challenge, but allow the lousy golfer, "the retail golfer," to make bogeys and keep hitting the same ball? I think that's a struggle that I probably will have the rest of my career.
JERRY TARDE: As we try to define greatness, we talk in terms of characteristics that make up greatness, and one of them is kind of what you are hitting on with fun. Is fun something that you try to build into a course? And how do you define it? I open it to Bill and Mike as well.
DAVID McLAY KIDD: Well, for me it's -- you know, it's funny. The root fun of golf -- what is the least fun of all in golf? Looking for a golf ball; right? That's the least fun.
But it's actually not. There's actually one thing worse than looking for a golf ball, and that's looking for your golf ball. That's the worst of all. Your partner's ball.
What's the most fun? The most fun is finding it and hitting it again. So for most golfers, birdies are unlikely. Pars feel like birdies. Finding the ball and feeling like you can even fail and recover I think for me is the essence of fun. I don't know what these guys consider.
MIKE KEISER: Well, what we observed in Wisconsin at Mammoth Dunes, which is a not easy course, but its fairways are as wide as 200 yards, and it is easier than most golf courses, and I have never heard anyone say, It's too easier.
Instead I hear, I finished with the same ball I started with, as if that were a measure of fun. There are a lot of measurements of fun that most people don't pick up on, but David has correctly noted that finding golf balls -- looking for golf balls is not fun, and finishing with the one I started with is a mark of success.
BILL COORE: I agree with both Mike and David, Jerry. I might qualify just a touch and say, how do you find the right balance of being an enjoyable experience and still having just enough incentive to try to get better and try to find these little shots, the ways that you measure your own game as improvement. It's not measuring my game against Bill Sheehan's, but it's how would the two of us go out there and play a golf course and find it very enjoyable, the experience?
Like both of you were saying, hopefully you finish with the same ball you started with and without very many penalties strokes in the process. It's still, what's the enticement? What's the enticement to try, keep trying a myriad of shots out there and something that maintains your interest over a very long period of time that doesn't become repetitive to where you feel like -- the worst of all is when you see people hit a shot off the tee, and they pull a golf club out. They haven't even left the tee, but they know what shot they're going to have when they get there. That's not very interesting.
So to us and I think to all of us sitting up here, it's that finding that balance of enjoyment, fun, and still maintaining interest and the incentive to keep trying to get better.
MIKE KEISER: One addition to that, I have found from The Old Course at St Andrews and on from there that big, huge greens are part of the fun of golf because you can say, I hit the green in regulation. I hit ten greens in regulation. Yet, leaving out the fact that in my immense green I was, on average, 70 feet from the hole and three-putted all but one hole. I still had a very good time and had fun, and it's just my putting. I've got to work on my putting.
BILL COORE: I will say, Jerry, the best description or the best definition I've ever heard of somebody defining what is a, quote, "great golf course," because that's such a nebulous term. What does that even mean? But Mike Keiser had the best definition I have ever heard when asked that question, and he just said to me, it's a course you walk off the 18th green and you want to go to the first tee and do it again. That pretty much sums it up.
(Applause)
JERRY TARDE: As somebody whose age now exceeds my club head speed, I'm coming to associate fun with bounce. I really enjoy -- that's why I love links golf so much, going to Scotland and playing the courses where the ball bounces and the fun of the ground game.
Do you think about that? Is that an integral part of the way you design courses?
MIKE KEISER: Frankly, I don't put it that way. I put it in terms of spaciousness, not losing balls. I know what you mean. I don't use it in my day-to-day composing. I'll see what these guys say.
BILL COORE: Well, Jerry, I would say, yes. The answer to your question is yes, we do. We try to pay great attention to the detail of the contours of the ground, knowing that some people will learn to use it and some people won't, but we like to provide the opportunity to where the ground can be your friend.
It's not an adversary. It can actually -- you play golf where David grew up playing and stuff, particularly if the wind is blowing, it's your friend, the ground and learning how to use it. And the fact that it's not just a green out there in this whatever size it may be, mowed putting surface. It's all the ground around it and particularly the ground in front of it leading back for 30, 40 or more yards.
DAVID McLAY KIDD: I would say if I had to guess, I would probably spend 10% of my time in the design process thinking about the bombers and the fast swing speed players on their second shots because they're going to throw darts, and I spend 90% of my time thinking about slower swing speed players and how they might use accuracy over strength to use the contours to their advantage.
You know what, my little crew, like Bill's crew -- you know, I've got my crew that move around. They know that on every project we're doing, I need a basketball inflated to the regulation pressure because we kick a basketball around because we have found it to be the best thing to replicate the roll of a golf ball on the dirt. I'm kicking a basketball around and seeing where it goes knowing that that's going to be a fairly good measure of what a golf ball will do.
When my dad, who is 78, and played off three most of his life, his swing speed probably isn't 75 now. Yet, he can be pretty fast with that 75-mile-an-hour swing speed. So I still want him to be able to play. I want him to be able to beat me even though I can back up a 6-iron. He has no chance of doing that, but he can still beat me because he can hit his little rescue club 140 yards, and the thing will chase 40 yards, and he will still get inside me and hold a putt.
JERRY TARDE: We're getting into an area of the turf that's being used and the irrigation, which brings us to the subject of sustainability and being respectful of the environment. All you guys have been innovators and leaders in that. What do you see with the future of golf as it relates to becoming more sustainable?
MIKE KEISER: I think the biggest one is convincing the retail golfer that brown is okay, and we haven't gotten all the way there yet, but redefining Augusta green to Bandon Dunes brown. I think we're moving in that direction, and that to me would be the number one thing.
(Applause)
BILL COORE: I totally agree with that, Jerry. Plus, I agree with the way David grew up playing golf. Sustainability was basically just part of the natural process.
It's interesting. One of the great quotes or comments I've ever heard, and my business partner, Ben Crenshaw, relayed it to me. He played in the Australian Open, in rural Melbourne back in the 1970s. Afterward he said, Bill, I have never played on a better playing surface in my life. He said, They're just brown as toast, and the greens were fantastic, everything.
He said he went up to the legendary superintendent, who had been there for decades. His named was Claude Crawford. He went up to him and said, Mr. Crawford, I've got to ask you. How do you get the turf like this? It's so perfect, yet it looks like it's almost, you know, uncared for.
He said, Claude Crawford summed up everything I guess you want to talk about sustainability on turf grass for golf course by just simply saying -- he said, well, Ben, in America you try to grow grass. Here we try to keep it from growing.
You think about that. Think about that. Here for so many decades we've tried so hard to promote the growth of grass, meaning grow it and grow it and then mow it and mow it and get it green. All these things that then create all these other factors and processes in that whole process when, in fact, if we can go back a little bit more to nature and to Mike's point, a little less green, a little less perfect, a little less a lot of things, golf is still really, really interesting and far more friendly to the environment.
DAVID McLAY KIDD: Never a truer word.
(Applause)
JERRY TARDE: David, like Bill and Mike, you've been a great advocate of walking and the integral part it plays in golf and the experience of playing golf. Why is that so important, and how do you take it into account when you build golf courses?
DAVID McLAY KIDD: You know, Bandon Dunes wouldn't be Bandon Dunes without walking. It absolutely would not. Believe it or not, there were conversations early on. We talked about could you possibly have people come to this remote place where the weather can be less than perfect and then tell them they can't do anything other than walk? Yet, the walking is so fundamental to the experience. Without walking, there really isn't caddies; right? That's why we're here.
(Applause)
MIKE KEISER: You're absolutely right, David. Early on when the experts were looking at it, they said, let's see, you want to build an 18-hole links-like golf course in Bandon, Oregon, four hours from Portland, 12 hours from Sacramento or San Francisco, and you're going to have carts; right?
No, we think we're going to be, as David said, a walking course, and we hope to draw caddies.
They said, well, good luck on caddies and good luck on being -- we don't want to walk. We have golf carts for cartage, and we ignored that.
We bought the land. We hired an architect who had never designed a golf course, David Kidd. We didn't have carts, and we had caddies, which we've had enough caddies since we started. We now have 500 caddies onsite.
(Applause)
JERRY TARDE: I think that's a great place to end at an event for the Evans Scholars to celebrate walking and caddying. That's the essence of golf. Thank you very much. Thank you, guys.
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