Bandon’s new Sheep Ranch is one of its most ambitious designs yet — and, according to one notable local, it just might be its best

BY TONY DEAR

Though he certainly never sought it, Mick Peters is enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. The Bandon barber (a great name for a song or film, but used here simply to denote that Peters cuts hair in the coastal Oregon town, something he’s done for 55 years at his business, Mick’s Hair Surgeons, on Baltimore Avenue) has been the subject of half a dozen interviews, TV and print, since hitting the first official shot on the Sheep Ranch, the fifth 18-hole course at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, on Mon., June 1.

That’s a nice little moment in itself, certainly, but it’s only one-fifth of the story. In fact, Peters has hit the first shot on all five courses – Bandon Dunes (1999), Pacific Dunes (2001), Bandon Trails (2005), Old Macdonald (2010), and now the Sheep Ranch. He also hit the first official putt on the Punchbowl putting green in 2014.

“All the attention has been way more than I ever has been expected,” says the 75-year-old, who now manages a few holes with his grandson on Shorty’s, the resort’s first short course, when he’s not hitting ceremonial tee shots. “It’s been on the local news several times a day since Monday, so we’ve had a lot of people come in to the shop talking about it.”

The Sheep Ranch – or just Sheep Ranch if you prefer, either works – was created by the highly-acclaimed design duo of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, whose impressive portfolio of original designs goes back to 1986 and includes some of the very best, not to say most important, courses of the last four decades (they’ve performed a few major renovations, too – Pinehurst No. 2, most notably).

The 18 holes they laid out on this relatively small parcel at Bandon were born of an original 13-hole “course” that existed here for 20 years before its owners — Mike Keiser, the brains, energy, and money behind the resort, and his busi ness partner of nearly 50 years, Phil Friedmann — decided in the Fall of 2016 that the time was right to transform it into a standard 18-holer.

The term “course” is used loosely — the original Sheep Ranch wasn’t really a course at all, more an open meadow, stretched out over the site of an old wind farm, that doubled as a playground for those golfers lucky enough to know where it was and how to gain access (a couple of phone calls to the right people and the caretaker would come out and unlock the gate). Once on-site, golfers could navigate their way around the greens any which way they pleased.

Those original putting surfaces — arbitrarily positioned it seemed — were built by course architects Tom Doak and Jim Urbina around the time they were finishing up work on Pacific Dunes. Because of the success of that course, plus Old Macdonald (which Doak also co-designed) and Australia’s Barnbougle Dunes, where Keiser had played a major developmental role, Doak looked the most likely candidate to design the new Sheep Ranch, but Keiser had other options. Gil Hanse, whose star was rising rapidly but who had never worked for Keiser, made multiple visits with his design partner, Jim Wagner, to route a course, while Coore and Crenshaw took a stab as well, having authored the resort’s acclaimed third course, Bandon Trails, as well as its second short course, the phenomenal, 13-hole Bandon Preserve.

In the end, Keiser — with Friedmann’s blessing — went with Coore and Crenshaw, saying their track record made them the most trustworthy of a stout list of contenders. Though certainly welcome, the decision put Coore, an uncommonly modest and gracious man, in something of an awkward situation.

“I respect both Tom and Gil tremendously,” he says, “and I consider them great friends. I called them both to ensure there were no hard feelings.”

Neither Doak nor Hanse has ever commented publicly on the subject. Though, because the respect is reciprocal, it’s probably safe to assume that if they weren’t going to get the job, they were comfortable with Keiser’s appointment of Coore and Crenshaw.

Coore acknowledges the land on which the course sits was among the best he had ever seen for a golf course.

“It really was made for it,” he says. “The views, the undulations, the wind, the vegetation or lack of it ... everything was what you’d hope for.”

Not quite everything, perhaps. For one thing, space was at a premium. No, it wasn’t a confined parcel insufficient for a full course, but at 140 acres, it wasn’t terribly big, either, and certainly the smallest of the five courses. And, to make matters more complicated, Keiser wanted several holes to play to, or along, the cliffs.

“Considering the size and the course’s start and end points, routing multiple holes on the coast was hard to do,” says Coore.

Then, there was the soil — predominantly a redshot clay that’s present on the other courses, where it underlays the sand.

“It’s far more evident at the Sheep Ranch,” says Coore. “It drains fairly well, certainly better than really heavy clay, but not as well as sand itself.”

Successfully overcoming the problems of limited space and less-than-ideal soil would perhaps have been a hill too steep to climb for the average course architect. But, as his work at Kapalua, Friar’s Head, Streamsong, Sand Valley, Sand Hills, Trinity Forest, Cabot Cliffs, and numerous other outstanding courses has shown, Coore is far from average.

The routing he devised with the greens of nine holes (the third and 16th holes meet on a huge double green situated on the glorious FiveMile Point) perched on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, beach and Whiskey Run — a creek that separates the Sheep Ranch from the rest of the resort — is, in a word, genius. Not only do you visit the cliff’s edge nine times (more if you add the back tees at a couple of other holes), you also encounter the wind from all angles and, besides the ninth and 13th holes, no holes run parallel to the preceding hole, a fault of many mundane and unimaginative routings. It’s really no surprise that Crenshaw named his partner as perhaps the best router of golf courses that ever lived during a recent podcast with former Golf Channel presenter Matt Ginella.

Coore solved the puzzle by creating that huge double green, and building a number of teeing grounds that served more than one hole, with those holes running in different directions to each other. He admits there were days when he doubted he and Crenshaw would be able to find 18 holes while satisfying all the other criteria.

“I wouldn’t say it was the trickiest routing we’ve ever done,” he says. “But, it’s definitely top two or three.”

Conquering the soil issue was slightly less taxing.

“We simply needed to cut more underground drainage channels than the other courses have,” says Coore, who also conceived the notion of building grass bunkers, a quirk of the Sheep Ranch that Keiser, and Friedmann especially, needed time to ponder.

“Actually, Mike got on board fairly quickly,” says Coore. “But, Phil took some convincing. He lobbied for sand bunkers initially, saying we could have built some of the world’s most beautiful hazards at the Sheep Ranch. And, he was right. But, while you could just dig a bunker out of the sandy terrain at the other courses, we couldn’t do that as effectively at the Sheep Ranch because of the redshot.”

Coore says he and Crenshaw had long thought about designing a course without bunkers, but had never found the appropriate site.

“In his book, The Links, Alister Mackenzie’s California design partner, Robert Hunter, wrote that someday a site would be found whose contours were so good that sand bunkers wouldn’t be necessary.

“Well, we think the Sheep Ranch is it.”

There was another, perhaps more compelling, reason for the turf bunkers, however. The wind can blow hard everywhere at Bandon Dunes, but it will likely be felt most at the Sheep Ranch, where the sand in traditional bunkers would have often blown away.

“And, that would have meant time-consuming and expensive repair work,” says Coore, who adds that he and Crenshaw had built plenty of bunker-less holes, just never an entire course.

The coastal holes at the Sheep Ranch — specifically the sixth and 17th, which both require exhilarating tee shots across the cliffs from all but the forward tees — will obviously get the most clicks, but it’s an indication of Coore and Crenshaw’s wisdom, skill and creativity that the inland holes pose just as many interesting questions as their neighbors to the west. The short, par-4 second, par-4 eighth, par-5 11th, and exacting finishing hole deserve special mention and, together with the cliff holes, make up a 6,636-yard adventure you won’t soon forget.

Assistant Superintendent Eric Langford, who joined the Sheep Ranch maintenance team under Greg Harless and the resort’s Director of Agronomy, Ken Nice, in September of last year, oversaw much of the grow-in period and confirms conditions couldn’t have been much better.

“The COVID-19 lockdown made things tougher, certainly, as a lot of our staff were unable to work,” says the 2016 Iowa State University graduate, who worked at the Pinehurst Resort before moving across the country to Bandon Dunes in 2018. “But, we had just about the right amount of moisture over the winter and early spring.

And, the temperature started rising nicely about three weeks ago.”

The result was a course that, by the middle of May, looked absolutely immaculate. And, the fescue greens (like Old Macdonald, the Sheep Ranch is wall-to-wall fescue), cut at 0.19 inch- es, were rolling perfectly. Perhaps it was a lit- tle green for pure-links lovers, but the surfaces were firm and definitely promoted the ground game so revered at Bandon Dunes.

I caught up with Coore as he drove to the airport to fly to Oregon a couple of days before opening day. He’d seen hundreds of photographs of the course and was pleased with all the reports he’d been getting.

“Everything looks great,” he said. “The thing I’m really interested to see is the mowing lines and how we might tweak them to make the course more interesting and playable.”

Chris Keiser, the younger of Mike’s two sons – brother Mike Jr. is seven years older – was present for opening day in place of his father, who was engaged elsewhere. He says 264 golf- ers turned out, with the first fourball — including Mick Peters, his two sons, and a good friend, teeing off at 6:20 a.m. — and the last group heading out at 5:30 p.m.

“Bill Coore, Phil Friedmann, Bob Johnson (the real estate broker behind many of Mike Keiser’s Bandon land deals), Don Crowe (the resort’s General Manager), myself and many other team members were present for the first tee shot,” says Chris Keiser. “We made an effort to see as many groups as possible tee off and hear where they were from, and we also sat in the bowl surrounding the 18th green to watch groups come in as we wanted to get their im- mediate, unadulterated feedback.”

Not surprisingly, the response was almost entirely positive, with people commenting on the quality of the design, the superb conditions, and the amazing views.

“It really was a successful day,” says Chris Keiser who, like Coore, was looking out for comments on the rough and mowing lines. “Over time, we’ll be able to define the fairways a little more while also thinning out the rough to make it more playable.”

As for Coore, he, too, had approved of everything he’d seen.

“I thought it was very enjoyable, and playable even with a decent wind,” he says. “I played it the day before opening day and finished with the same number of balls I started with.”

And, what of Mick Peters; what did he think?

“Oh, I absolutely loved it,” he says. “It’s nice and wide off the tee which is good for an amateur like me. But, it’s so interesting on and around the greens too.

“In fact, of all the courses at Bandon Dunes, it might be my favorite.”