It has often been said that genius needs a catalyst, and that is what the Medici family of Florence, Italy, provided artists with their financial support during the Renaissance, spurring a creative flourish that lasted from the 15th through the 17th centuries. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were beneficiaries of that largesse. Botticelli and Raphael, too.
Hundreds of years later, a former caddie and college golfer from outside Buffalo, New York, named Mike Keiser played a similar role in golf after making a fortune from Recycled Paper Greetings, a company he had co-founded in 1971. He did that by giving a handful of promising young course designers as well as some veterans of that business the financial wherewithal and creative freedom to produce masterpieces of their own. The result of that patronage came to include Bandon Dunes, Pacific Dunes and Old Macdonald on the southern Oregon coast as well as Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia and the Barnbougle Dunes and Lost Farms layouts in Tasmania. And each one of those quickly assumed top spots on the most reputable golf course rankings.
Keiser’s support of such projects has taken golf course architecture to new heights. Along the way, he almost singlehandedly ushered in a second Golden Age of course design. And the works of the individuals he backed with his commissions and counsel, from David McLay Kidd and Tom Doak to Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw and Jim Urbina, will endure among members of the golf community in much the same way that Michelangelo’s “David” and da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” continue to resonate with art aficionados.
Leonardo da Vinci (left) and Michelangelo were among the artists who benefited from the Medici family’s generosity.
And like the Medicis, bankers of enormous wealth whose patronage spanned several generations, the now 80-year-old Keiser has created a legacy with his two sons, Michael and Chris, who have taken up their father’s mantle with equal adroitness and verve by developing golf course creations of their own, often with the same designers.
At the same time, a next generation of architects who cut their teeth working for those designers or were deeply influenced by their creations, such as Jim Craig, Kyle Franz and Keith Cutten, are starting to make marks of their very own, further deepening Keiser’s impact on the game.
His is a remarkable record, and what he has done in golf course development is but one reason he is so deserving of the Bob Jones Award, the USGA’s highest honor, which will be bestowed upon him today as part of the festivities ahead of this week’s U.S. Open at Oakmont.
“Mike gave us great sites as well as the freedom to create,” said Coore, whose portfolio of Keiser courses includes Bandon Trails and the Sheep Ranch in Oregon as well as Cabot Cliffs and Lost Farm. “He gave us opportunities that we could have only dreamed of. And along the way he changed the world of golf by building more interesting courses that are largely accessible to the public and evoke golf as it has been played for hundreds of years in the British Isles.”
It has never been about the quantity of courses that Keiser has developed, but rather the quality, beginning with his penchant for building minimalist, Old World tracks on spectacular sand-based sites, no matter how isolated they may be. He insisted that golf, not real estate, be the singular focus and the determining factor when it came to making decisions during the design and construction processes.
Another of Keiser’s super talents was picking the right architects for each job, sometimes conducting “bake-offs” that had several designers submitting proposals, and then getting the very best out of whoever got the job.
“Mike’s relationships with the architects were something to behold,” said Josh Lesnik, who was 29 when he began serving as the first general manager at Bandon Dunes in the late 1990s and went on to work closely with Keiser on several other projects. “And you could argue that many of them did their best work for Mike due in large part to the way they were able to work together. Tom [Doak] with Pacific Dunes, for example. David [Kidd] with Bandon Dunes as well as Bill [Coore] and Ben [Crenshaw] with Cabot Cliffs.”
“Working with David Kidd and Tom Doak, and also Bill (Coore) and Ben (Crenshaw). I learned in both industries that it sure helps if you have a genius doing cards or courses for you.” – Mike Keiser
Interestingly, those architects were not the first “artists” with whom Keiser had ever collaborated. He had done the same thing with the designers of the greeting cards that made the company he and his partner Phil Friedmann had started with $1,000 so successful that they sold it for $250 million in 2005.
“I liked working with people like Sandra Boynton, who was responsible for the birthday card that read ‘Hippo Birdie Two Ewes’ and featured a drawing of a hippo, a bird and two sheep,” said Keiser, who will be unable to accept the Bob Jones Award in person after breaking his hip in a fall just weeks ago. “That is also something I have really enjoyed in golf. Working with David Kidd and Tom Doak, and also Bill and Ben. I learned in both industries that it sure helps if you have a genius doing cards or courses for you.”
Keiser is quick to cite one other pearl of wisdom that he picked up in greeting cards – and later applied to his work in golf. And that was the importance of keeping things simple.
“There were a lot of hearts and vases of flowers and flowing verse when we entered the greeting card business,” said Keiser, who graduated from Amherst College in 1968 and then joined the U.S. Navy, becoming an officer specializing in the disposal of explosives. “But we wanted to do something original and smart with New Yorker cartoon humor and simplicity. That is what Sandra and other designers we used were so good at. And what they produced took America by storm.”
Keiser remembers that when he first bought property in Bandon, paying $2.4 million in 1991 for 1,215 acres just north of town, people asked him what brand-name course architect he was going to use.
“They suggested Jack Nicklaus or Arnold Palmer or Tom Fazio,” he said. “But I saw those choices as being hearts and flowers. I had this land on the Pacific Ocean that was perfectly suited for links golf, and my thought was make it all about the site and the golf and keep it simple. Like it is at Royal Dornoch or Ballybunion.”
That approach is what led Keiser to hire a twentysomething Scot in David Kidd to design the first course at Bandon Dunes. And like the Sandra Boynton birthday card, it was an immediate hit, producing a sort of “Field of Dreams” fervor that had people flocking to this place in the Oregon sticks with their sticks.
Kidd was only 24 when he first visited the Bandon Dunes site – and 29 when the course opened in the spring of 1999. And he reflects so favorably on what it was like to work with Keiser all those years ago – and to be currently collaborating with him on another course in Bandon, this time on property just south of town.
“Mike understands and respects the creative process,” Kidd said. “He intuitively understands how to manage that too, knowing exactly when he needs to step back and let the designer do his or her job and when to step in.
“He lets us be creative because he knows that is not his thing. But there are guardrails, and he is not afraid to wonder out loud whether a green might be too sporty or that the walk between a green and a tee is too long. Mike never gives an order per se. But maybe he asks you to think about something. And when he does, you certainly give it serious thought.”
“Look at what he has built, at Bandon and Sand Valley, Cabot and Barnbougle. That adds up to maybe 14 different courses. Multiply that by 18, and you have 252 holes. That’s a lot of golf holes, and there is not a bad one out there.” – David McLay Kidd
Early on, Keiser created a grading system in which he asked colleagues whose opinions he valued to rate individual golf holes at various stages of their development on a scale of 1 to 10.
“Then, we would talk about them,” said Lesnik. “And if there was something that Mike did not like or understand about the hole, he would get the designer to talk him through what he was trying to do. Mike was very exacting in that process. But what came out of it was invariably very, very good.”
More than a decade before Bandon Dunes, Keiser built his first golf course, a nine-hole layout at the Dunes Club in New Buffalo, Michigan, that is so good it occasionally makes a top-100 list even though it is half the size of every other layout on the roster.
“It’s a beautiful site, with sandy soil and lots of pines,” said Lesnik. “Mike wanted to build something that felt like Pine Valley, where he was a member. So he took the architect, Dick Nugent, there for a week. They played the course and walked it and talked about the things Mike wanted to incorporate. By doing that, he gave Dick a framework. And the course turned out to be the best Dick has ever built, by far.”
Lesnik also remembers the field trips he took the National Golf Links of America in Southampton, New York, after Keiser had decided to construct a homage at Bandon to the founder and architect of that classic club and course, as well as the man regarded as the father of golf in America, Charles Blair Macdonald. A course, by the way, that would come to be named Old Macdonald.
“Mike had put together a committee for that job that included the designers Tom Doak and Jim Urbina as well as Macdonald’s biographer, George Bahto, and the course architecture critic, Brad Klein,” Lesnik recalled. “And we spent six days in Southampton, walking 36 holes every day, 18 in the morning and 18 in the afternoon, taking notes and asking questions. Again, that is Mike giving the designers the framework to succeed and creating a very collaborative atmosphere that leads to some very good results.”
Kidd could not agree with that premise more.
“Look at Mike’s track record over the years,” he says. “Look at what he has built, at Bandon and Sand Valley, Cabot and Barnbougle. That adds up to maybe 14 different courses. Multiply that by 18, and you have 252 holes. That’s a lot of golf holes, and there is not a bad one out there.”
It’s a record the Medicis would no doubt applaud.