Lords of the links: these days, conspicuous consumption is out—except among CEOs who build their own golf courses - Executive Privilege

Chief Executive, The, Oct, 2002 by Paul Rogers

While the Huizengas remain the only official members of The Floridian, each year they give honorary memberships to about 100 of their friends. The privileges include free golf--the course is open from late October through early April--and the opportunity to stay over at the club and bring guests. The only reason honorary members aren't invited back, Huizenga says, is if they haven't shown up in years. The list is a Who's Who. There are CEOs past and present, including Jack Welch and Bank of America's Hugh McColl, as well as professional athletes such as Bob Griese and Dan Marino, the former Dolphins greats. As Huizenga famously once said, "We don't ever have to worry about playing golf with someone we don't like."

It was the opposite of exclusivity that spurred Mike Keiser to build Bandon Dunes, a year-round 36-hole resort outside the town of Bandon on the southern Oregon coast. The co-founder of Chicago-based Recycled Paper Greetings, Keiser, 57, considers himself a "missionary" of golf. A decade before Bandon Dunes opened in 1999, he built the private Dunes Club on the shores of Lake Michigan, which, he says, as a nine-hole course in a remote area couldn't have sustained itself if it were public.

With Bandon, Keiser sought to replicate the feel of the great links of Scotland and Ireland: pure golf played on foot in a natural seaside setting open to all. "The last thing I wanted," he says, "was a totally private course. I think those are, I won't say obscene, but they're not in keeping with the spirit of golf."

So Keiser took something of a populist approach. After buying the land--a stunning moonscape of dunes, wild grasses and gnarly Irish gorse--he considered running a contest in Golf Digest in which readers would design the holes. When an editor told him the site was too special for that, Keiser hired a young, virtually unknown Scottish architect named David McLay Kidd to design the first of the two courses. But still, in a sense, Keiser reached out to the everyman. He assembled a group of what he calls retail golfers -- friends he'd made over the years, both top-notch players and high handicappers, bankers and blue-collar workers--and sought their input as well. The greens fees at Bandon Dunes, though, aren't exactly populist. For guests of the resort, an in-season (July through October) round of golf costs $140, for nonguests $175.

Above all, he says, developing Bandon Dunes offered a chance at posterity. "It's not about me or my kids or my friends," says Keiser, who declines to say how much he's invested in the resort. "You don't get too many chances to build something that will be there in a hundred years." Of course, building his greeting card business, which has 700 employees and sales approaching $100 million, also has been satisfying. "It's great fun to start something from scratch that employs a lot people," he says. But making decisions in a boardroom simply isn't as "organic," he adds, as standing on a windswept bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and deciding the shape of a green.