North by Northwest

It’s difficult to imagine a more consequential golf course built in, say, the last 50 years than Bandon Dunes. But I’d be willing to bet a plane ticket to Southwest Oregon Regional Airport that most of the folks making their bucket-list trip to that famous piece of coastline have no idea that the trail passes through a little nine-hole golf course in an even littler place on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

Years before Mike Keiser fell so deeply in love with the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean that he repurposed the largesse of his Chicago-based recycled-greeting-card business into North America’s great seaside links, he liberated a rough-hewn piece of dunesland between the serpentine Galien River and the beach, nearly in the backyard of his vacation home in New Buffalo, Michigan. It was land on the fast track to a bleak future as townhouses. Golf wasn’t on his mind when he made a quick cash offer to take those 70 acres off the market, but, as time passed and he played in some of the world’s most renowned open, sandy courses with his sons, Michael and Chris, the investment would blossom into the Dunes Club, Keiser’s homage to Pine Valley and the jumping-off point of a great leap of faith.

Though New Buffalo has long been a summer haven for Chicagoans, it was far from a gateway to golf when I was growing up in a beach community on the other side of the Indiana-Michigan state line. It felt like an entire time zone away. (And it is, actually: Although they’re just a few miles apart, Michigan is in Eastern time and northern Indiana is in Central.) To us, New Buffalo was the place you went to circumvent Indiana’s blue laws and buy beer on Sundays. As if to prove the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same, today the state line is festooned with cannabis dispensaries.

Back in those days, to me New Buffalo also meant work. It was where I spent hot summer nights on the late shift in a steel-castings plant with a couple of gruff old men named Jocko and Gil, another guy whose name I can’t recall (though I won’t forget him telling me about carrying a Browning automatic rifle across Korea) and a fourth who grew up in the same Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood as Jack Nicklaus and thought college kids like me should know that even when someone gets rich and famous, they can still treat guys who pour steel in a foundry like an old friend.

The Dunes Club isn’t hard up against Lake Michigan’s shore. It’s more like a freshwater Royal Lytham and St. Annes, separated from the water by a row or two of pricey houses. The lake is visible from just a few vantage points on the golf course, but if you think it doesn’t have an effect, all you have to do is stand on the eighth tee in a three-club wind and try to keep your cap on. When Keiser bought the place, that point on the property was being sand mined for the construction of new on- and off-ramps on I-94. Sand left behind by the Wisconsin glaciation eons ago had been big business at the southern tip of Lake Michigan for generations. On the other side of the state line, there once was a 200-foot-tall dune called the Hoosier Slide; by 1920, it had completely disappeared, having been carted off a shovelful at a time to make blue-colored glass for companies like Ball Brothers.

Transforming his newly acquired acreage into a place with a deeply rooted golf sensibility and a Pine Valley vibe began rather unceremoniously, with Keiser hiring Dick Nugent, a Chicago-based golf architect whose portfolio didn’t resemble Pine Valley–esque layouts in any way. But he trusted Nugent, and to soak up the feel Keiser was determined to achieve, the pair flew to New Jersey. “I played golf for three days, and he hiked around and took notes,” Keiser tells me. Play at the Dunes Club opened in the fall of 1989.

“I had no idea if anyone would pay an initiation fee and annual dues to play a nine-hole golf course,” says Keiser. “Even though I was paying an homage to Pine Valley, I didn’t know if it would sell in the Midwest. When there was enthusiastic support from day one, that slowly but surely told me that building golf courses on sand dunes is a pretty fun thing to do. I liked being in the greeting-card business, but I liked building the Dunes Club even more. Why don’t I do one more?” 

It was the headwaters of his own Oregon Trail.

If Pine Valley was the model, the unpretentious links of Scotland and Ireland supplied some of the DNA. The Dunes Club has an honor-box feel in a first-class cabin. “You walk in the door and you feel like you’re at your house,” says Todd Molitor, the general manager. “It’s all self-serve. The soda fridge is here. The beer fridge is around the corner. I get to see you at least three times: greet you, cook for you and then send you on your way.”

The course is hidden in plain sight, lost down a narrow road separated from the lake by impressive homes. There is no sign proclaiming its existence. No grandiose entryway. The clubhouse isn’t any fancier than a place to stay out of the rain. The kitchen is a pair of Weber grills, manned by Molitor. There are no tee markers per se, just medallions that give the distance—and lots of teeing areas. All nine holes stretch and contract like exercise bands. There are open sandscapes, yucca plants, bluebird houses, magnificent oaks and scrubby Scotch pines. The club’s tradition says that whoever wins the last hole picks the teeing spot for the next one.

The first hole can play anywhere from 415 yards to 294. That variety is typical. The first par 3 can go from 131 yards to 200, with lots of different angles. The second par 3 is equally flexible, including a 90-yard shot from something dubbed “the Blueberry tee.” The course is strictly walking, either carrying your clubs or with a caddie, though some rare exceptions have been made. Mike Ditka, the NFL Hall of Famer and Chicago Bears legend with certifiably bad wheels, was allowed to use the utility cart. At the appropriate point in the tee sheet, the grounds crew will change the pins so that players doing two loops have new targets the second time around.

In 1986, Keiser entered Golf Digest’s inaugural “Armchair Architect” competition, overseen by the magazine’s architecture editor, Ron Whitten. He didn’t win. In 1989, Keiser invited Whitten to join him for a round at the Dunes Club. “At that time, he wanted to do a golf course made from Armchair Architect holes,” Whitten recalls. “He said he had a spot out in Oregon that he had an option on, and he wanted me to go out and tell him if it would be a suitable place to do it. So I went out to Bandon and went around it for two days. I got back and called Mike and said, ‘No, no, no. This is too good a piece of property to mess it up with a bunch of amateurs.’”

As for the Dunes? “In my mind, it’s the No. 1 nine-hole course in America,” says Whitten, who in addition to steering Keiser away from Armchair Architects also pushed him toward Dick Youngscap, who was looking for investors for a project out in the Nebraska wilderness. After Sand Hills opened in 1994, the “build it and they will come” mentality was firmly entrenched in Keiser’s mind. Bandon would open five years later, a decade after the Dunes.

Jim Urbina has been the architect-on-call for the Dunes Club since 2010, when Keiser wanted to make changes to the greens and bunkering. “I first visited the Dunes Club in 1995,” says Urbina. “I thought it was a very special and unique place. It’s simple, fun, understated—all of that. It’s charming, that’s for sure.”

For the last 15 years, he and Keiser have walked the course each summer. “I play it every year with Mike—sometimes with a full bag, sometimes with one club,” Urbina says. “In fact, our last round together was with one club. He asked me to choose my favorite club, and I chose a 7. He said, ‘I already have the 7 in my hand, Jim. You’re going to have to pick another club.’”

The Dunes’ most legendary one-club stroke, however, is the one that was never struck. Because the sandy bits and deep bunkers can be daunting with less than a full bag, one of Keiser’s local rules in their one-club competitions is that each player is allowed one throw per hole. Kirk Cousins, the Michigan State University alum who will be quarterbacking the Atlanta Falcons this year, was playing the ninth when his partners reminded him he still had a throw. He tossed it into the cup on one bounce from 60 yards out to win by a stroke.

The Senior PGA Championship was played up the coast at Harbor Shores Golf Club for the sixth time in 2024, and over the years it’s not been unusual to see the occasional Lee Janzen, Graeme McDowell or Tom Lehman getting in a quick nine at the Dunes. Nor is it uncommon if, say, Michael Jordan pulls through the gate.

Keiser learned to play and caddie at East Aurora CC in New York, and caddies have played an important role in most of his courses, starting with the Dunes Club. It still has a corps of 16 to 20 caddies available for the season, which runs roughly from April 1 to November 1. Almost all are local, and a couple of them are in their 80s. The oldest, Joe Meindl, is damn near 90. Born and raised in Germany, he came to the United States in 1957. A master sausage-maker, he worked for Oscar Mayer in Chicago until he started his own business, which he operated for 25 years. Rather than live in the city, Meindl settled his family in nearby La Porte, Indiana, and commuted. He played his first round of golf at La Porte’s public Beechwood Golf Course in 1960 and fell in love with the game. “In my prime time, I was a 5 handicap,” he says, still trailing a German accent. “Since I turned 80 years old, I’m shooting my age. I was lucky enough to play Pebble Beach one time. That was in 1966. The green fee was $68. I thought it was a little high.”

Meindl has been caddying at the Dunes for a quarter of a century. When Bernhard Langer took a day off from the Senior PGA and dropped in for a round, Meindl was on his bag. “Where he was born and where I was born, we were only 35 miles apart,” says Meindl. “We started out, we spoke German. We ended up speaking English. We had a great day. When the round was over, he put his arms around me and he said, ‘Joe, it was a pleasure talking with you today. You and me, we’re going to go to the players tent and have lunch and some beer.’ I said, ‘I’m in.’”

Meindl has carried Keiser’s bag many times. “Caddying is my passion. It’s a labor of love,” he says. “I told Mr. Keiser that the Dunes Club is my mistress. I told him my goal was to be the oldest carrying caddie in the world.”

Keiser replied that it seemed like a pretty lofty goal. Just the sort that’s always run through these 70 acres.