The Good Golf Course
They said it couldn’t be built here. How a new links-style course in Nova Scotia is rediscovering an old concept: sustainable golf.

By Christopher Korchin

Breaking some of golf’s dirty habits, a new development in Nova Scotia is reviving the game’s greener past – and the hopes of a town.

If you stand on the wide, sandy expanse below the seaside town of Inverness, Nova Scotia, you might just be able to see all the way to PEI. The view is classic Cape Breton Island, with a group of fishing boats huddled in an inlet to the south. It’s a desolate, grassy stretch of land, resting on the site of long-shuttered mines that have now been capped. There’s very little reason to wander out here in March unless you’re, say, walking a dog along the boardwalk below. There’s also very little reason to come to this tiny former coal-mining town of less than 2,000. So you might ask what Mike Keiser, a recycled-greeting-card baron, is doing pacing through the sand with a handful of advisers huddled in winter coats. The answer: he’s walking along a golf course that doesn’t yet exist, picturing how the holes might hug the curvature of that natural harbour in the distance.

It’s no coincidence that Inverness looks (and sounds) like it should be in Scotland, where golf was born. Mike Keiser, the man behind the famous Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, is breaking ground here this month on Cabot Links, a links-style course that some say is poised to become one of the country’s best. Along with Canadian entrepreneur Ben Cowan-Dewar, new-breed golf architect Rod Whitman and some very inventive town planners, Mike Keiser is about to recycle the hopes of this tiny town and, possibly, change the future of the game.

“GLFSGR8” said a New York State vanity plate spotted not long ago on a large sedan. Yes, golf’s great, but is golf good? It certainly hasn’t been the greenest of games lately, an irony not lost on environmental groups. Then there’s the argument that golf simply puts too much valuable land at the service of too few.

It wasn’t always this way. The earliest Scottish links courses were situated – “built” would be the wrong word, since the land was used just as it was – on the sandy, non-arable scrub that “linked” the beach and sea to higher, more fertile ground. Sheep and cattle grazed on links land, and some historians surmise that the first golf clubs were shepherds’ staffs and that the original Top-Flites were bits of dried sheep dung. Even bunkers seem to have been created by sheep, which would burrow into hillsides and expose the sand beneath the grass.

Great designers like A. W. Tillinghast, who fashioned the extraordinary Winged Foot Golf Club, or Canadian Stanley Thompson (the man behind the Fairmont Banff Springs Golf Course), had a genius for rustic lay-of-the-land courses, following the natural contours of the sites. Playing golf on such golden-age tracks is as much an esthetic pursuit as a physical one.

Then came the bulldozer. Golf-course architects had reshaped the land in the game’s early days, but then it was done with pick and shovel and horse-drawn scraper. With heavy-duty tractors, huge amounts of earth could be moved with ease, allowing postwar designers like Robert Trent Jones Sr. to turn Florida swampland or featureless prairie into tidy, golf-friendly grounds in mere months. Courses like Augusta National, endlessly tweaked and primped over the years – and featuring temperature-controlled greens and water hazards dyed blue – became the norm. Something had to change.

Ever since his Bandon Dunes Golf Resort opened to wild acclaim in 1999, Mike Keiser has been the enfant terrible of golf. The resort, located in a largely unpopulated stretch on Oregon’s coast, bucks all the trends. It’s five hours from a large city. It doesn’t allow golf carts, instead forcing players to walk and use caddies. And its courses make the most of the landscape, creating a natural look that is a throwback to classic seaside links. The place is untarnished by the game’s modern intrusions – like GPS units – which led Keiser to coin the resort’s motto: “Golf as it was meant to be.” Although he told his friends who showed up at the launch that the project could well be called “Mike’s Folly,” Bandon Dunes became the world’s hottest golf property. Golf Digest called it the second-best golf resort in the U.S., ahead of famed retreats like Pebble Beach.

Cabot Links will be part of an emerging trend toward minimalist golf design, where builders leave the natural landscape intact as much as possible. In an era when golf courses can cost tens of millions to build – casino king Steve Wynn famously spent more than $40-million creating Shadow Creek, a faux-Carolinas track near Las Vegas, complete with pine trees – Keiser’s projects usually cost a fraction of that amount. “This is simply going back to the beginning of what makes golf great,” says Ben Cowan-Dewar.

Of course, a conventional thinker probably wouldn’t build a course in Inverness in the first place. The facades of the white wooden houses and businesses that line the main street bear the scars of years of financial difficulty. Paint is peeling, porches need mending. Since the turn of the 20th century, the economy of this town on Cape Breton’s west coast had been driven by coal mining. By the end of World War II, the mines began to decline and by the 1960s they’d disappeared altogether. The dissolution of the town’s primary industry left it searching for a fallback that could replace some of the lost jobs. In the meantime, the mine site lay still, as if time had stopped.

A two-hour drive north, the fabled Highlands Links course (designed by Stanley Thompson) has been, for 70 years, a sustaining factor for the communities of the Ingonish area. The Inverness economic development committee began to ask themselves the obvious question about the land that sat empty just off the main street. Could golf save their town as well?

Before golf can rescue whole communities, however, it has to rescue itself. The current model of the American “golf town” is the gated community, set off in self-exile from the rush of the real world. On some links courses in the U.K., the proximity of the town is part of the fabric of the game, and an extremely errant shot might have a chance of hitting the local pub. But on newer North American courses you’re more likely to hit someone’s retirement bungalow.

Keiser and new minimalists like American designer Tom Doak, who conceived Bandon’s Pacific Dunes, and Canadian architect Rod Whitman, who’s designing Cabot Links, are engaged in a rearguard action that is bringing golf back to its roots. In his 1996 book The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses, Doak celebrates courses like Nebraska’s Sand Hills, where architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw literally “found” the golf holes, moving almost no land. (Keiser, fittingly, was a founding member.) Even the new breed of push carts and stand bags is giving golfers a chance to reconnect with the turf. And with more and more golf courses gaining certification as Audubon sanctuaries and following tougher pesticide regulations, the game itself is greening up.

Cabot Links should open to the public at the start of the 2010 golf season. For John MacIsaac, a local school-board administrator who was instrumental in floating the idea, the opening of the course means more than just a new place to ply his pastime. “I’ll be there before the sun rises, trying to grab that first tee time,” he says. “This course is going to mean a lot to this town, and I want to be there to see a new beginning.”

Maybe golf can be good – as it was meant to be.