Old Macdonald

Old Macdonald is an argument in the form of a golf course. Tom Doak and Jim Urbina designed it as a tribute to Charles Blair Macdonald, the pioneering architect who imported strategic hole concepts from the great courses of Scotland and England and adapted them for American soil in the early twentieth century. The course opened in 2010 as the fourth 18-hole layout at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, and it is the most intellectually demanding round on the property.

Macdonald's legacy rests on his template holes: the Redan, the Biarritz, the Alps, the Cape, the Eden, the Short, and others. Each template embodies a specific strategic concept. The Redan, for example, presents a green angled away from the line of play with a false front that rejects anything short or right. The Biarritz features a long, narrow green bisected by a deep swale. These are not arbitrary design features. They are puzzles that require the golfer to recognize the template, understand its strategic intent, and execute the shot that the template rewards.

Old Macdonald deploys these templates across a routing that covers more ground than any other course at the resort. At 6,944 yards from the tips and par 71, it is the longest course at Bandon Dunes. The slope rating of 131, however, is lower than Pacific Dunes or Bandon Dunes, a paradox explained by the generously wide fairways and the sheer size of the greens. Several putting surfaces exceed 10,000 square feet. These are greens measured in fractions of an acre. Finding the green is not the challenge. Finding the correct sector of the green, the one that provides a realistic birdie putt rather than a 60-foot lag, is where Old Macdonald separates the thoughtful player from the merely accurate one.

The bunkering is the most aggressive at the resort. Deep pot bunkers guard strategic positions around the greens and along the fairways, punishing the golfer who takes the wrong line or fails to account for the wind. Unlike Sheep Ranch, where the absence of bunkers creates a different kind of difficulty, Old Macdonald uses its bunkers as signposts. They tell you where the architect does not want you to go, and by implication, where the correct play lies. Reading the bunkering from the tee is as important as reading the green from the fairway.

The par 3s are the course's showcase. The 5th is a Redan, angled right-to-left with the traditional false front and a collection area left of the green that gathers anything hit to the safe side. The correct shot is a low draw that lands short and right and feeds across the green's natural tilt. On a windy day, executing this shot consistently is a test of ball flight control that most golfers will not pass. The 15th is a Biarritz, with a green that measures well over 100 feet in depth, divided by a pronounced swale. A pin on the far side of the swale from the tee leaves a putt that crests the ridge and rolls away at a pace determined by the firmness of the green. These are holes that teach you something about golf architecture even as they take strokes from your card.

The routing takes advantage of the property's distance from the cliff edge. Old Macdonald sits slightly inland from Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes, which reduces the constant ocean presence but allows for wider corridors and the expansive scale that the template concept requires. The wind remains a factor, though the terrain provides more shelter than the exposed coastal courses. On a calm day, Old Macdonald plays as the most accessible of the resort's championship courses. On a windy day, the enormous greens and fierce bunkering combine to produce a course that exposes flaws in strategic thinking more efficiently than raw difficulty ever could.

For the golfer who views course architecture as a subject worth studying, Old Macdonald is the most rewarding round at Bandon Dunes. It does not have the dramatic ocean exposure of Pacific Dunes or the raw coastal intensity of Sheep Ranch. What it offers instead is a conversation with the history of golf design, conducted on a piece of Oregon linksland by two architects who understood the source material deeply enough to reinterpret it without diminishing it.