Q&A: Mike Keiser

Sneak Peek: This article will appear in the Aug. 12 issue of Global Golf Post.

Golf has been a part of Mike Keiser’s life for almost as long as he can remember. He caddied as a young boy growing up outside Buffalo, N.Y., and competed on the golf team at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Keiser continued to play recreationally after graduating in 1968 and still found ways to tee it as he and his college roommate, Phil Friedmann, founded Recycled Paper Greetings in 1971 and within a decade built the greeting card company into a $100 million annual operation. Keiser’s passion for the game grew through those years as he made trips to the British Isles to play classic courses there and also to such New World gems as Pine Valley. But he had no way of knowing at the time that golf was about to become his life and livelihood – and that he was going to turn golf course development upside down in the process. 

Now 74 and the father of four grown children, Keiser constructed his first course in the mid-1980s, a superb nine-hole track n...