Mount Up

A long-abandoned motel, its beige walls looking like seared papyrus at their edges, flanks my left. The old “MOTEL” sign surely once sparkled as blue as the expansive Western sky above, but the march of time and the unforgiving sun have weathered it to the point where blue is now more of a suggestion. I’m sitting alone in my rental at a gas station, early for a meeting nearby and questioning how this refueling spot even exists—any semblance of a town is miles off in the opposite direction.

While a few stray cars fill up, my mind wanders to how anyone ever arrived in this mostly flat pocket of earth—the Rocky Mountains many miles away to the west—and thought a life could be made here. One car stops, and a couple gets out to go inside. The man comes back out quickly and goes around the back of the building to relieve himself. The station owner doesn’t seem to mind. And it is in this place that I am scheduled to meet Michael Keiser Jr., the namesake of perhaps America’s greatest golf resort developer. His father shifted the paradigm of golf travel, leading enthusiasts worldwide to believe that a difficult journey to play a difficult game was not an obstacle but another leg of a beautiful chase. By the looks of my surroundings, Keiser Jr. is poised to carry on that family tradition.

Forty miles away in Denver, the gears of a major city hum and whir, but this piece of ground seems much farther away than that. It doesn’t quite feel like the moon—or even Nebraska—but it is removed. A place you pass on the way to somewhere else. Soon, though, this gas station, which apparently doesn’t have enough indoor plumbing for a public restroom, will be descended upon by golfers from across the planet. The big money out of the East Coast, private jets from Silicon Valley, the oil guys up from Dallas, the top-100 hunters, regular players on the trip of a lifetime and armchair architects will all trek to this place for the latest offering from Dream Golf: Rodeo Dunes. The gas station owner has no idea that he’s about to hit a gusher that the abandoned oil derrick across the highway probably never enjoyed.

Let’s dispense with the golf clichés. In fact, let’s avoid all we can of the game’s nomenclature. There is no golf in front of me at all—just this landscape. We drive down a winding gravel road lined with rows and rows of natural sunflowers that are about to burst open in the sun. The dust from Keiser’s SUV clouds the path in front of me, then he slows to pause for a horse up ahead, its coat the color of sand, which is fitting, given the soil’s composition. A cowboy is beside the horse, and in the field across the road is a herd of cattle. It all feels a little too on the nose, as if a classic scene from the American West was concocted for the sake of a visiting reporter. But it’s real—just another day out here. The golf course is still a month away from preview play for founders, and several more from welcoming its first guests, but when Keiser pulls into the construction staging area, the humps and bumps—remnants of an ancient sea that once covered this place—are apparent. The land rises and falls like a series of concussive waves, like the EKG of a vibrant heart. In both the immediate and far distance, the rolling blossoms of the sunflowers are broken only by green strips of fairway.

“All we ever search for is great topography,” Keiser tells me. “It’s important that we build great golf courses, but we also look for beautiful and unique sites.”

Rodeo Dunes will bring comparisons to Sand Hills and Ballyneal, but those two clubs—private and remote—are not viable options for most of the golf world. In many ways, Rodeo Dunes is an amalgamation of the two courses, with rolling terrain much like the Chop Hills of Ballyneal and the astonishing natural blowouts of Sand Hills. But this place will be public.

“When I first walked on the property, in 2018, it was the golden hour,” Keiser says. “Not only did it seem exciting and dramatic, but also stunningly beautiful.” Eight long years later, the course will come to life. In a frenzied world where we are constantly reminded time is not on our side, Keiser is in no rush. After securing a partnership on the land, he then turned to a familiar design partner in the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. Coore, whose shamanic methods for developing routings have taken on near-mythical status in the architecture world, was then given by Keiser “as much space and time as possible to get the most out of that site, which I think he’s done.”

Coore, who first began working with Keiser at Dream Golf’s Sand Valley course in Wisconsin, says that in the intervening years between that project and Rodeo Dunes, it’s become clear that “Michael has the ability to assess the potential of golf properties in an amazing fashion. He’s very well versed on what type of sites have the potential to create really interesting, distinctive golf.” Coore says that while walking the Rodeo Dunes site one day, Keiser asked him how it compared to Sand Valley. “I couldn’t help it,” Coore says. “I try to be really low key and downplay all the stuff that we do, but I just remember looking at him and saying, ‘Michael, this is so far and away more gifted for golf than Sand Valley.’”

As Keiser and I walk the Rodeo Dunes routing, one of Coore & Crenshaw’s shapers, John Hawker, is with us. Hawker, who’s been the lead associate on site for the duration of the project, shows me how the course weaves through the landscape and says many of the unique features—fairway knobs and serpentine turns—were naturally there and only required his team peeling back the grasslands. Meanwhile, Keiser assesses everything. He tromps into the rough, where the grass is knee-high from recent seeding and fertilization, and asks the agronomy team what can be done to make some of these areas slightly less penal. That old term his father coined, “the retail golfer,” comes to mind as Keiser expresses concern about golfers finding balls and playing from the rough.

But retail-golfer concessions do not apply to the green complexes, which seem to have more contour than those found at Sand Valley, Sheep Ranch and Bandon Trails, the other courses in Coore & Crenshaw’s Dream Golf portfolio. The greens look like massive potato chips, curling and falling away at their edges and bubbling in their middles, as if given to the whims of heat and frying oil and not a team of excavators and bulldozers. Deep gouges of bunkers lurk behind many of them, hidden on approach but waiting patiently to collect errant balls. Coore admits that these complexes are more adventurous than what they usually build.

“I kept finding these situations where the routing could be knitted together, but, in the process, the holes that were naturally laying on the ground were pretty darn quirky,” he says. “There are holes out there that are just kind of different. What I’m getting at here is that they’re quirky enough that some people, and perhaps even Mike Sr., might have looked at some of these and said, ‘You sure about this, Bill? You sure you and Ben want to build this hole? This is pretty radical.’”

But, he says, Keiser’s enthusiasm as developer, and the freedom he gave Coore & Crenshaw’s team to work, emboldened many of these choices. “He walked all these holes numerous times,” Coore remembers, “and there were places I thought, ‘Man, he’s gonna look at this and go, ‘Really? You’re gonna put the green there? You’re gonna let this be the fairway?’” Coore says Keiser would walk the holes two, sometimes three times, without ever saying anything. Then he would land where Coore’s team did. “Michael never hesitated,” he says.

***

It might seem that Keiser was always fated to get into the family business, but it’s more accurate to say he was destined to be a builder. In college at UC Santa Cruz, he spent a summer apprenticing as a carpenter and discovered an affinity for creating things. His father was building golf courses by then, and Keiser accompanied him on site visits. Still unsure of a career path after graduation, he asked Richard Sattler, his father’s partner at Barnbougle Dunes, if he could come work for him. Given the green light, Keiser moved to Tasmania, Australia, where he worked relentlessly. “I basically didn’t leave the property,” Keiser says. “I would go from work to the bunkhouse.” He engaged in everything—selling tee times, working the bag drop, stocking merchandise. Sattler let him use his car while he was there, and one day, as Keiser was driving, it ran out of oil. “I killed the engine,” he says. “So, it was $5,000 to fix, and I didn’t have any money.” He did the math and realized his salary at the course wasn’t going to cover the repairs, and he refused to ask his parents for help. “I moved up to Surfers Paradise and got a job as the overnight manager of the restaurant. It paid 30 bucks an hour, and I was able to pay him back.”

Keiser came back home to the U.S. with the itch to develop golf courses, but his father counseled against working for him right away. “‘Look,’” Keiser says his dad told him, “‘if you come work for me, you’re always just going to feel like the owner’s son. Just go be a developer, learn how to develop.’ And that’s what I did.” Keiser took a job in his native Chicago at a commercial real estate firm of just three people when he started. “And it stayed pretty small, like six or seven, but the size of the projects they were doing got huge,” Keiser says. “It was this incredible opportunity, and then we would start these side businesses, like copper salvage and snow plowing. I was sitting shoulder to shoulder with [one of the owners], just picking his brain, getting a crash course. And then Sand Valley came along.”

Keiser’s father gave him and his brother, Chris, the seed money, and, from the beginning, it was their project. Keiser threw himself into it. He was 32 and pitched a 600-square-foot tent on the property. Drawing on his carpentry skills, he built “a small outhouse with a sink and a toilet. Then I bought this off-the-shelf steam room and an outdoor shower. It was glamping. The term hadn’t been invented yet, but that’s what it was. I slept like a baby.”

And while he looks back at that time fondly, Keiser says the hours he put in were too long—he would sometimes work 20-hour days—and the project was too hard. But it was an education, and it’s pointed him to where he is today, with Rodeo Dunes on the verge of opening and future Dream Golf projects going in Texas and Florida.

Keiser’s philosophy is to start projects when he has the money. It’s a zag from the more conventional route of drawing on investors to frontload capital. “I couldn’t sleep if I did it that way,” he says. A saying he likes to use is that he sells just enough real estate to fund his golf addiction, meaning the business is funded by real estate to build golf courses, not the other way around. Once he knows the price of something, be it the large lake at Sand Valley or another golf course, he sells enough real estate to pay for the project. And while that might slow their progress, it allows him to “build in zero stress” to the job.

He puts no timelines on the impending projects in Texas and Florida. He doesn’t even have a schedule to start the second course at Rodeo Dunes, where longtime Coore & Crenshaw shaper Jim Craig will take top billing. Keiser also has plans for a shorter course of 4,800 yards, as well as a Himalayas-style putting green, both to be built by Tom Doak apprentice Clyde Johnson.

At Rodeo Dunes, all three courses will start from the same central location, anchored by the putting complex and a small clubhouse and restaurant. This comes from Keiser’s many trips to Scotland, where he’s seen how golf can be integral to the fabric of a city or community. And while Coore & Crenshaw’s course will be the first opened at the resort, it was the land for Craig’s planned second course that first drew Keiser to the place. “The site has opportunities to play on the tops of some of these ridges in addition to through the valleys,” he says. “And I think Jim’s routing just really embraces the incredible variety of that second site.”

Keiser worked closely with Craig at Sand Valley and calls him “just a brilliant architect.” But he also noticed a glaring hole in Craig’s résumé: He had never been to the United Kingdom. Keiser gave him a company credit card and told him to go over there to “get inspired.” Craig asked about the limit on the card, and Keiser replied, “You just start taking trips, and I’ll tell you if you get close.”

Despite all of the excitement for the first two Rodeo Dunes courses, the third, a short course, might provide the clearest window into how Keiser wants to shape the American golf experience. “We need 2,000 more wonderful, affordable golf courses in this country,” he says, defining it as “great golf that’s affordable to play as often as you like—a couple times a week, a couple times a month for children to play. I think that’s really important.” He believes smaller courses are the future not only for the sake of time but to break the herd mindset that good golf must be built to stretch north of 6,500 yards. He’s already started putting this theory into play with the 12-hole Commons course at Sand Valley, and Rodeo Dunes will continue it.

Coore says that, in terms of his enthusiasm, Keiser is “like a puppy. He comes running up to you with a tail wagging and just cannot stay still. He’s just so excited about the potential, the prospects for these sites, and he just can’t help himself. It’s fun to see.” Coore says Keiser is different from his father in that way. Comparisons between the two are inevitable, but Coore feels Michael is already his own person. “You get a sense [that what he is doing with Dream Golf] is just for the love of it. This is not the typical ‘father founded a company and just passed it down.’ I get none of that.”

“I love creating,” Keiser says. “I love working with brilliant creators like these architects, but also people across our team. I guess I don’t know any better way to put it. It is such a great joy.”

As we conclude the course tour, a thunderstorm is moving quickly across the horizon, bearing down as we take in the 17th green, a wicked, twisted, gnarly thing that slopes severely from back to front. It feels more like a nightmare than a dream, but it fits. It will challenge. It will buck. It will ask retail golfers to hold on tight.