For now, though, this focus is on Mammoth Dunes which — I’m comfortable in declaring — the most fun golf course I’ve ever played. And that’s saying a lot. There are a lot of fun courses out there.

When you build a golf resort in a unique setting, the food should fit uniquely in the surrounds. So it goes at this Wisconsin golf mecca, the latest project from Mike Keiser and his family, who also brought us Bandon Dunes. Like McKee’s Pub, at Bandon, on the Oregon coast, Sand Valley’s main hangout, the Mammoth Bar & Lounge, serves the kind of hearty fare you want after a long day on the links, but it does so with a menu rooted in the Midwest.

The Sandbox, a new par-3 course at the Sand Valley Golf Resort in the Town of Rome, more than held its own against some of the best golfers in the state Monday.

The 17-hole course, designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore and featuring wildly contoured greens, was the site of the inaugural Wisconsin State Par 3 Championship, conducted by the Wisconsin State Golf Association.

Only two golfers broke par (51).

If you are a golf nut, follow mainstream golf media, and have been at least half awake over the past year and a half, then you have heard of America’s new golf destination, Sand Valley Golf Resort in Nekoosa, Wisconsin.

I’ll cut to the chase quickly; Sand Valley Golf Resort is the perfect golf trip destination. The golf courses are unique and memorable, but it’s an absolute ‘must visit’ for reasons that extend beyond the golf itself. Plenty has been written about the Sand Valley golf courses, and I’ll gush over the golf in separate posts over the next week. However, it is paramount that the Sand Valley Resort leadership team and its staff receive a great deal of credit. They absolutely must be recognized for their incredible attention to detail, for taking what I had previously thought to be exceptional service to the next level…

Each July the Open Championship showcases a style of golf course that is rarely seen in the U.S. Faded green and brown fairways represent firm and fast playing surface that force players to think about what happens to their ball after it lands. This truly brings to life the imagination and intent of the great architects who built these courses and invokes the imagination of the players who compete on those same courses. Bump and runs, long putts, drives bounding down the fairways...

Sand Valley Golf Resort opens two new courses, Mammoth Dunes and The Sandbox. Three courses now sit on natural sand dunes in central Wisconsin, which is becoming a premier golf destination.

Mammoth Dunes is already regarded as the nation's top new course of 2018. The Sandbox will host the inaugural Wisconsin State Par Three Championship on July 30th.

Click to View the Video Coverage from WISN 2

"NEKOOSA, Wisc. — This place is big. Like, ginormously expansive on a scale that’s playfully indulgent and at times overwhelming to the golf senses...

...The psychological effect of all of this is mesmerizing. Some will find the scale disorienting. I found it compelling."

As good as the original course at Sand Valley is, ask anyone who’s played both layouts – from golfers to caddies – and the consensus seems to be that Mammoth Dunes is better. I thoroughly enjoyed Sand Valley, but was blown away by Mammoth Dunes. There were several well-traveled golfers in our sizeable contingent who in the immediate afterglow said it’s the best course they’ve ever played.

“Each is chock full of memorable holes and vistas. Still, if Coore and Crenshaw were motion picture directors, you'd say that they've delivered a popular movie, one that will be a box office smash, but it won't win the Oscar — even though we ranked it No. 52 in the U.S. in 2017, its first year of eligibility. David McLay Kidd's Mammoth Dunes captures the Oscar at Sand Valley. Its scale for the holes at times dwarfs what the original course presents, its shotmaking demands are stronger and it possesses the greater number of individually memorable holes.”

In a year's time, Sand Valley has become a 53-hole mecca of inland links golf set among rolling hills in remote central Wisconsin. On the heels of last May's opening of the Sand Valley course by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw comes the Sand Box, a 17-hole short course by the duo opening May 1, followed by the May 31 grand opening of Mammoth Dunes, the hyped David McLay Kidd project that allowed some preview play last summer. To keep up with demand, Sand Valley will be adding an intimate residential community, more lodging, a new practice facility, an expanded clubhouse with additional dining and a grass tennis court complex during the season. Perhaps not even developer Mike Keiser could have envisioned Sand Valley becoming so popular, so quickly.

Don't call it a comeback.

It's been more like an epiphany.

At least that's the word David McLay Kidd uses to describe his return to designing fun, rather than frustrating, courses. Kidd, the Scottish architect who developed a reputation for building penal, topsy-turvy tracks such as Tetherow in Oregon and the Castle Course in St Andrews, has warmed to the idea of shaping more user-friendly courses.

Virtual golf design met the real thing in mid-July at Sand Valley Golf Resort in central Wisconsin. Brian Silvernail, winner of Golf Digest's 2016 Armchair Architect contest, spent a weekend consulting with golf architect David McLay Kidd on the site of the resort's second 18, Mammoth Dunes, now under construction. Silvernail's winning design, selected last fall by Kidd and resort owner Mike Keiser from among 532 entries, serves as the template for the downhill, drivable par-4 14th hole.

Silvernail, a 47-year-old Melbourne, Fla. graphic designer who moonlights as a computer golf game architect, got a generous taste of the full experience of building an actual golf hole, from flagging the edges of fairway grassing lines to receiving a crash course in operating both a bulldozer, used to shape fairways and greens, and an excavator, used in carving out bunkers.

Sand Valley, Wisconsin Wisconsin was unusually the focus of the golf world in June when the heartland state of America staged its first US Open. Erin Hills impressed many, especially given it is just 11 years old. And yet its status as Wisconsin’s shining light in golf terms might be short lived, for a new resort with two courses of mouth-watering potential has just opened. Sand Valley is 130 miles north-west of Erin Hills and is the brainchild of Mike Keiser and his two sons, Michael and Chris. Keiser, of course, is the man who left his first career in greetings cards to create Bandon Dunes – arguably the most successful golf resort in the world.

Only an exceptional site would persuade Keiser to do another in America, and Sand Valley appears to be just that.

If you are an avid golf traveler, you probably regard Mike Keiser with the same admiration  New England Patriot fans feel for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. We certainly do. A Chicago-based greeting card magnate by trade, Keiser's foray into golf development began with the quiet back-to-golf basics Dunes Club in New Buffalo, Michigan, whose design, which reminds us of the great Pine Valley, is one of the best nine-hole golf courses in the world.

The Dunes Club being private, the greater golfing public took little notice of Keiser until the 1999 opening of Bandon Dunes on Oregon's remote southern Pacific coast. Naysayers acknowledged the merits of David McLay Kidd's design, but dismissed the place as a curiosity that was so difficult to get to that few but the most determined would go to the trouble to see it. Four more golf courses later, Bandon Dunes Golf Resort is a pilgrimage site for all golfers, especially those who yearn for the sorts of links layouts on which the game was first played.