Risk Taking Is Par for the Course

Mike Keiser stopped to point out a giant dandelion growing in the path overlooking the classic seaside links golf courses he carved out of the sand and gorse in this remote corner of the Oregon coast.

“You can’t go to a golf course and see a weed like this,” Keiser said. “It’s part of the wildness here. It’s part of the wildflower thing. They don’t build them like that in the United States.”

Keiser has risked going against the grain and found success -- first with a recycled paper greeting card company before environmentalism was popular and now with three world-class golf courses in a state better known for rain than sunshine.

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort is a monument to the ancient roots of golf as it was played in Scotland and Ireland. It has become a hot destination for golfers around the world and a bright spot in a local economy still trying to find its feet after the collapse of fishing and timber.

Two courses in the resort, Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes, are on Golf Digest’s top 100 in the country. A third, Bandon Trails, opened in June, and is drawing rave reviews.

All three are links courses, carved out of seaside sand in a tradition that grew out of knocking a little ball with a stick around the poor lands between the sea and farm fields. And there are no fairway homes to spoil the view. That would violate Keiser’s unspoken compact with golf enthusiasts.

Keiser, 60, grew up spending every daylight summer hour caddying or playing golf at East Aurora Country Club outside Buffalo, N.Y., where his father was a stockbroker. His father had taken up tennis because it was compact timewise. But the son chose golf because it was not.

“If you are a kid, or a kid at heart, that’s the Tom Sawyer beauty of it,” Keiser said. “It takes a long time to play.”

Facing the draft after majoring in romance poetry at Amherst College, he joined the Navy and served stateside blowing up old bombs. Afterward, on the last night of a ski trip to Colorado, he dreamed of starting a business based on recycled paper. Keiser’s wife wanted him to go to Harvard Business School, but his college roommate, Phil Friedmann, liked the idea.

In 1971, a year after the first Earth Day, they pooled $500 each and started Recycled Paper Greetings Inc. in Chicago. Although Keiser’s father saw no future in the venture, he guaranteed half of the $15,000 first printing bill.

The company has grown to 850 employees with $100 million in sales that rank it third behind Hallmark and American Greetings, said Keiser, who remains an owner and regularly shuttles between the company’s headquarters in a former dairy building and Bandon Dunes.

Keiser, a major contributor to the Republican Party, describes himself as a classic liberal, “in the Founding Father sense” and a fervent capitalist.

“Every once in a while, you have a product that people love. In the capitalist system you get rich,” he said. “I like that system. I don’t like a system where you take a risk and there is no reward.”

The rewards allowed Keiser to indulge his passion for golf -- he carries a 12 handicap -- traveling the world, playing the top courses and choosing the best with the comparative skills he used to study literature in college. He decided that the best were the classic links courses of Scotland and Ireland, and that the best way to enjoy them was to walk.

In 1986, Keiser bought 60 acres along Lake Michigan near his summer home and, inspired by Pine Valley Golf Club in New Jersey, built a nine-hole links course.

Howard McKee was an architect sent to Chicago to design a world’s fair when he met Keiser. The world’s fair never happened, but McKee and Keiser became friends.

McKee, who had a vacation house in Oregon, agreed to look for a piece of property where Keiser could build a full-size links course and persuaded him to look West. The first course, Bandon Dunes, opened in 1999.

“It was a series of good luck, serendipitous events and -- I think, in his case -- being able to take great risks,” said McKee, now a partner in Bandon Dunes and resort architect.

“The vision was malleable, but the principles don’t change,” he said. “It’s honoring the land. It’s building on the natural environment here that gets discovered if you spend time with it. The key is not to violate it.”

That does not make Keiser an environmentalist, McKee said, although he buys land and conservation easements to protect wildlife habitats and special places with a program he calls Bandon Biota.

Keiser took a chance on the designer of that first Bandon course, David McLay Kidd, who then was a 26-year-old working for Gleneagles Golf Developments in Scotland.

“On most other projects you say to the crew ‘The client is coming tomorrow,’ [and] there is somewhat fear and dread,” Kidd said. “I would say, ‘The jet is fueling,’ and it was like, ‘Let’s go. Kick the thing up a notch.’ ”

Keiser admits to a few sleepless nights.

“What was the Oregon brand? Rain. You go to St. Louis and try to sell Bandon Dunes in March, they look at you and say, ‘Why do I want to go there when I can go to Florida or Arizona?’ ” Keiser said.

“My best friends in confidence ... would say, ‘Why don’t you have a market survey done?’ ” he said. “My response was, ‘Why should I spend $50,000 on having a market survey done to tell me there is no market, when I’m going to build it anyway?’ ”

Keiser figured that he could open the first course for $3 million, although McKee persuaded him to spend about $15 million, including rooms and facilities. Not wanting to give a boost to competitors, Keiser won’t say how much he has sunk into the three courses. Thanks to his personal financial success, he needed little outside financing.

“If you want to give something a try, you need your own money,” Keiser said.

As it turned out, the rain was no deterrent for those who wanted a golf destination that was different.

Keiser would have been happy to draw 10,000 rounds of golf a year, but soon was getting 30,000. Last year, the two courses drew 70,000 rounds, general manager Hank Hickox said.

All this although the fairways turn a little brown in the summer and able-bodied golfers have to walk, in the links tradition.

“It works because it is so natural and wild,” Keiser said. “It is a good walk spoiled. But it is a good walk, first and foremost.”

Dana Woudenberg, a private investor, and Jed Billings, chief executive of a highway construction company, belong to several country clubs around Phoenix, but came to Bandon Dunes on a golf safari that began at Pebble Beach in California to see what all the buzz was about. They found Bandon hard to get to, but worth the trouble.

“It’s nothing like back home, but that’s why we’re here,” Woudenberg said. “He took a huge risk to do it this way.”