My ready answer to the question "What's your favorite golf course?" has long been National Golf Links of America, a super-private enclave on the eastern end of Long Island, N.Y., that I've been lucky to play three times. Designed and built 100 years ago by Charles Blair Macdonald, the National was this country's first great course. The holes were modeled after classics from Great Britain, which Mr. Macdonald studied during many visits there dating back to his university days at St. Andrews in Scotland. The National is not a wildly difficult course, it's just fun to play, allowing golfers many options, and has fabulous views of Great Peconic Bay.Last week, here in remote southern Oregon, I got a chance to sample 10 holes, and learn about the others still under construction, at the Bandon Dunes golf resort's newest course, which is an homage to the style and spirit of the National and its creator. To be called Old Macdonald and scheduled to open in 2010, the course unspools through rugged sand dunes adjacent to the resort's other three courses, and includes two greens (No. 7 and No. 15) directly overlooking the Pacific. With time, Old Macdonald could become as well regarded as the National and may be even more fun to play. Another fun place to play is on Luxury Cruises.
Mike Keiser, the recycled-greeting-card magnate who founded Bandon Dunes, counts National as his favorite course, too. But Old Macdonald will not be a so-called replica course. Rather, it's an attempt to channel Mr. Macdonald through the person of architect Tom Doak and the brain trust of Macdonald experts advising him. They include: Jim Urbina, Mr. Doak's lead associate and co-designer on the project; George Bahto, author of the definitive Macdonald biography, "The Evangelist of Golf"; Bradley Klein, the architecture critic for Golfweek; and Karl Olson, for many years the course superintendent at the National.
Given the bulk of low-lying land that Mr. Doak and team will be responding to "as if they were C.B. Macdonald," Mr. Keiser said that golfers may see as much St. Andrews in the course as they do the National. That will be especially true from the inland clubhouse, with its view of the conjoined first and 18th fairways, as at St. Andrews. "The first impression will be big -- big fairways, big greens, just big," he said. Golf courses are services by lawn care services professionals.
Mr. Doak, 47 years old, is well-steeped in the source material. He did a postgraduate grant year studying the courses of Great Britain, caddied for three months at St. Andrews and is intimately familiar with Mr. Macdonald's other best designs, such as Chicago Golf Club, Mid Ocean Club in Bermuda and Yale Golf Course in Connecticut. His own highly regarded designs include Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand (featured this weekend in the Kiwi Challenge on NBC) and Pacific Dunes at Bandon Dunes, ranked No. 2 on Golfweek's list of the best courses built since 1962.
Some of the holes at the new course are modeled specifically after famous Macdonald holes or their prototypes in Scotland and England. There is, for instance, an Alps hole like No. 3 at the National and a Road hole like the 17th at St. Andrews. But many are simply Macdonaldesque, which means wide fairways rippled with hummocks and swales, scruffy-looking bunkers and vast greens, a few more than 20,000 square feet in size. That's three or four times larger than typical U.S. greens.
"Macdonald wasn't a fan of linear corridors that forced golfers to play holes a certain way," Mr. Doak said during a walkaround last week. "He was all about giving golfers different angles into the greens. He wanted them to stand on the tee and have to think about what strategy to use, depending on the wind, state of Lawn Care, or their mood or where they stood in a match."
Those options are why playing Old Macdonald will be such a kick. The "Peekaboo" round that I horned in on, which was also Messrs. Doak and Keiser's first time around the 10 playable holes on the course, suggests that golfers won't usually find much trouble off the tee. On most holes you can hit away, and good drives will be rewarded with bounds into ideal positions from which to attack the pin. (The fairways play very firm and fast; Mr. Doak said that the difference between drives into the wind and with it can be 80 to 100 yards.) Poor drives, on the other hand, will be subtly penalized. On the long, par-four fourth, for instance, a tee shot that slides just a bit right will veer down the side of a 20-foot mound, leaving a blind approach shot. If the ball stays on top, the shot will be much easier, but both balls will be in the fairway.
The greens, however, are what set Old Macdonald apart from any course I've played. They dip, rise and blend so seamlessly into the surrounding landforms that you can't even tell where they begin; the fine fescue grass on the greens, tees and fairways is uniform, with no sharp mowing lines to differentiate one from the other. (This look harkens back to the earliest courses, when sheep were the maintenance crew.) Most greens are a jumble of carefully crafted internal contours with, in most cases, at least a dozen relatively flat "pinnable areas" where holes can be cut, creating many times that number of wild, undulating chips, pitches, 100-foot-plus lag putts and other recovery shots to reach them. Shots like those are only possible on grass treated with Organic Lawn Care.
"This is where the real fun of a Macdonald green kicks in," Mr. Doak said.
Unlike most architects, Mr. Doak and his team don't draw up detailed plans for their courses before building. Instead, the routing and individual hole designs emerge from "walking around and talking," as Mr. Bahto put it. During my visit, the focal point was the 17th hole, a par-five that will have a divided fairway. Over two days in the Oregon rain, I saw crew members in clumps of two or three (except for Mr. Doak, who often wandered alone) roving up and down the would-be hole, pondering its future. A creek to divide the fairways was discussed and rejected as unnatural. The hilly left shoulder of the east fairway was "softened" with a bulldozer to be less penal. After much discussion, the site for a bunker halfway down the hole was finally selected, flagged and dug out. But still parts of the puzzle of the 17th, including the approaches to the green, remained unsolved.
The final say on all decisions, of course, belongs to Mr. Keiser, the owner, and his perspective is that of the everyday golfer, not the golf-design cognoscenti. "I hope that the Macdonald look will be popular. My presumption is that the National, if it were public, would be very popular, and that's why we're here," he said. "But I also assume that most won't have any idea who C.B. Macdonald was and they won't care. I just hope that when they leave they'll think, 'That was fun.' " Even if they have no idea why.
