Along about the time we were getting serious about making plans, weighing dates and times and all the minutiae, one of us had a medical episode. It wasn’t serious, though it could have been, and it was timed so badly I had to laugh. This is the same guy who often says, We gotta do these things, these life-list things, because you just never know … I always tell him to shut up and quit the drama queen shit. He recovered promptly, and there were no lingering effects, so we had no reason not to go, just go and do it.
We drove south on a Wednesday morning, in a rented minivan, into the rain. I was with Barry Bartlett and Kevin Patterson, two guys without whom it wouldn’t have felt right going to Bandon. The rain kept raining and wiped out our scheduled round at Langdon Farms in Aurora, just south of Portland. Three hours later, when we got to Florence, it was pretty okay. We teed off at Sandpines, a really good golf course that deserves better than being an “on the way to” visit. We got in a niner, got minorly wet, ate a great meal in downtown Florence, then split for Bandon.
Day One: Where it began
It was right that we played our first day at Bandon Dunes, the first Bandon course carved from the cliffs and linksland of the southern Oregon coast, the course that first began to shape the legend of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort.
Two of our party had missed Bandon Dunes in a previous visit to the resort, and the third was a first-timer in Bandon, so it was new to all of us.
The David McLay Kidd layout, opened in 1999, is splendid. If its newer neighbor, Pacific Dunes, is higher on the best-of lists (usually tucked in just behind Pebble Beach), does that make Bandon Dunes a lesser course?
Nicklaus is “better” than Palmer, by most measures, but who’s The King?
We teed off in windage that seemed manageable at the time … That we never managed the wind, or anything else in our round, was all right. We got around.
No. 5 is the hardest hole on the course, and you wonder whether it’s because a player is so moved by the ocean spectacle on his left that he loses focus on the shots he needs to hit. On this hole, that’s a drive to the right side of a split fairway, then an approach to a brutally narrow green.
That’s the Pacific, to be specific, and No. 6, a mid-length par-3, is straight ahead from the 5th on the same coastal bluff. Club up here, boys and girls, because you’re hitting into the wind, most days.
Even moving from one ridiculously gorgeous hole to the next, I had to remind myself, more than once, to get out of my brooding brain and take a deep breath and a long look around. At No. 8, it’s around and around and around, a panorama that threatens to tip your visual sensors into overload. If ever you forget you’re there to play golf, this might be the hole.
No. 16 is the only hole where I deposited a golf ball into the Pacific. It’s a lovely hole, the bitch.
Walking up 18, I was tired, ready to stop playing golf for the day, but nowhere near ready to be done with Bandon Dunes. So I’ll be back, if death and doctors and life itself don’t intervene.
Next: Bandon Trails.
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