57 and talking about golf, architecture and life. We had no intention of working together, and for the next year or more, we would talk periodically, and met up a few times. There was no suggestion that we would work together, and to this day I have no recollection of a particular moment that either of us said, ‘We should work together’. It was an evolutionary process; there must have been a time when we decided to work together, but I couldn’t tell you when if my life depended on it.” Coore & Crenshaw was established in 1985, but its first years were slow. They built the Plantation Course for the Kapalua Resort in Hawaii, which opened in 1991, but it was in 1990 that they got the call that changed the world. Lincoln-based buildings architect Dick Youngscap had developed the Firethorn course outside his home city with Pete Dye, and had been travelling to the region of Nebraska known as the Sand Hills since the 1960s. He came to love the area and, knowing that most of the world’s great golf courses were built on sand, began wondering if that area could support something special. He found a particular piece of land, near the village of Mullen, that he thought was exceptional even by the standards of the region, and began contacting golf designers. Dye declined to be involved, as did everyone else Youngscap contacted when they learned where his site was. Finally, the connection that would change the world was made. “Dick was aware of the Sand Hills region, and he likes challenges!” says Coore. “He had worked with Pete at Firethorn, and he spoke to Pete about his new project, and Pete didn’t show a great deal of interest. Dick had sent out feelers to a couple of other design companies, and I don’t think he got much interest from them. He asked Ron Whitten, the architecture editor of Golf Digest, to look at his site, and I had got to know Ron quite early. Ron had seen Rockport, and obviously he knew Ben, and I think he suggested to Dick that he should talk to us. He thought it might be a good fit. Dick knew Doug Petersan, then the superintendent at Prairie Dunes, who I had done some work with before I partnered up with Ben.” What Coore & Crenshaw eventually built in the Sand Hills has been generally recognised as the best course built anywhere in the world since the end of the Golden Age. For that alone, it would have been massively influential, but it wasn’t the course’s quality alone that made Sand Hills so important. Coore and Youngscap both echo the same message: Sand Hills returned golf development to being about the site, not the market around it. Golf development had become so wholly focused on who was going to play the course – and buy the houses that inevitably surrounded it – and the ability to move earth had convinced the industry that the land on which the course would be built was not important. Sand Hills changed that. It reminded developers that the quality of a course is defined most strongly by the quality of the land on which it sits, and, over time, it created a new market of travelling golfers. If you built it, they would come. And it was a founding member of Sand Hills who would take that message to the world. Mike Keiser had made a fortune from selling greeting cards and then built the nine-hole Dunes Club on the shores of Lake Michigan. He then bought a massive tract of seaside land on the southern Oregon coast and created a behemoth. Two other design firms worked at Bandon Dunes before Coore & Crenshaw, but every Keiser project since has featured at least one of their courses. “I think the two most influential people on golf courses that I have met are Pete Dye and Mike Keiser,” says Coore. “Pete changed the direction of golf architecture twice, the first time at Harbour Town, and then he did it again at TPC Sawgrass. And Mike did the same thing, in the perception of what interesting golf is, how to create it, and how to make it accessible to a large number of players. Find a site that is truly gifted for golf, let the site guide you, and you will create something that people will travel a long way to see. “But Mike never dreamed that Bandon would be as big as it is – he just wanted to build something reminiscent of the roots of golf, and he thought there would be a market for it. And he insisted that it shouldn’t be some ultra-private place that only a few could see; he wanted to have something that the public could play – in dunes by the ocean. And “ Sand Hills returned golf development to being about the site, not the market around it” BILL COORE
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