Rupert O’Neal isn’t quite a hippie in the classic sense, but he is one counterculture-minded dude. For one thing, he’s a Deadhead. Despite his neatly trimmed crop of gray hair and deep familial roots in the high plains of eastern Colorado, he’d feel right at home among the psychedelic storefronts of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, as long as a few of his Ballyneal buddies were along for the ride and there was some good chow in the offing.

Oh yeah, and good golf, too — Harding Park, Olympic Club, the San Francisco Club, even the tough little locals’ nine-holer called Gleneagles. Wouldn’t matter. Because for O’Neal and the true believers who have bought into the sparse and special Ballyneal mystique, it’s all about golf in its purest form, whether you’re in plus fours or khaki shorts, blue jeans or bell-bottoms, whether you’re heading up a Fortune 500 company or a mom-and-pop grocery chain.

Just south of the 2,300-soul burg of Holyoke, in the farthest corner of the Rocky Mountain state — where the rounded Chop Hills stand in for the skyscraping peaks far to the west — prospective members aren’t looking for anything but golf on a true modern minimalist masterpiece among soon-to-be good friends. And if they’re looking for something else, they’ve barked up the wrong sand dune.

“We don’t care if you’re the CEO of Macy’s. We care that you have a passion for what we’re doing, understand why we do it, and in the end that will make us a really strong club,” O’Neal says over a simple menu of halibut, steak and lobster mac and cheese in Ballyneal’s cozy ranch-style dining room one soft summer evening. “And the end is closer than you think.”

By “the end” he means the sound of his membership window closing until further notice. Ballyneal had just over 100 as of last summer with a cap of 130, an unbelievably low number by modern standards. Time is running out for guests to put in a request to sample one of America’s most talked-about modern clubs, either online or through a current member. Once they arrive, head pro Matt Payne, who lobbied hard for the job and loves every minute of it, treats each of them as long-lost family, even teeing it up if he has the time.

So will O’Neal, who is the epitome of a hands-on honcho. Should a guest decide to apply for membership after soaking up a couple days of Ballyneal’s stripped-down, almost family-style version of club community, he’d best leave any haughtiness or a misplaced sense of entitlement far down the winding dirt road that leads to its gate, marked by a tiny sign nailed to a fencepost at the edge of nowhere. Because joining Ballyneal isn’t a trophy; it’s a commitment of soul and spirit — without the excessive cash outlay (the current buy-in is $70,000 with $6,000 annual dues, plus food, lodging and caddie fees).

“We got lucky, built a great golf course with very little money, so we’re servicing very little debt, and our financial partners love it,” O’Neal says. “They’ve invested in a very quiet, exclusive place, and they don’t want it to change. We’ll just keep plugging away like the little engine that could, keep our heads down, and we’ll live happily ever after.”

Such a fairy tale statement defines the O’Neal vision and managerial mindset. Maybe it comes from having such a broad, high-plains horizon against which to measure his matter-of-fact, no-bull corn farmer’s worldview and build on his iconoclastic dream — thereby turning the simplest of business plans into fescue-riddled reality.

As the century turned, Rupert and his younger brother Jim — head professional at Meadow Club, another Bay Area gem — decided to find a way to expand the small, seasonal hunting club Rupert had started on his family’s land into a year-round concern. “We had eight members paying $8,000 a year — no contracts,” he recalls. “They wrote me a check to come and hunt, and it was great, but $40,000 a year didn’t cut it. So I thought, ‘How can I turn eight guys into 30 guys?’ We knew we needed lodging and something else. Jim had been dreaming about golf on this land since he was a little kid.”

In 2001, Jim heard about Pacific Dunes, the second course at the already famous Bandon Dunes Resort, which was expected to turn an up-and-coming architect named Tom Doak into a superstar. “So I got on Doak’s website and did some research,” Jim said from his Meadow Club office in January. “One of his dreams was to build a course in the Sand Hills of Nebraska [Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw had beaten him to it, garnering Best Modern Design honors from national magazines for their work near Mullen, Neb., about a three-hour drive from Ballyneal]. I knew our land was just as good. I contacted his company; he sent out one of his associate architects from Denver, Jim Urbina, to look at the land. I’m sure driving out there, Jim thought this was just another wild goose chase, but once he saw the property, he knew it was great.”

Doak showed up in May 2002, and he shared Urbina’s enthusiasm. This site, just a dozen miles from the Nebraska border, fit perfectly into his vision. “I could see literally hundreds of great holes, but I knew I didn’t have the know-how to put it all together myself,” Jim O’Neal continued. “We needed someone to do it right, a rising talent, not somebody in the Nicklaus or Fazio category, but someone working in the same way we were, more with the land, preserving it rather than trying to create something different. I had studied a lot of books on golf architecture and knew all the great old courses were on great pieces of land where they didn’t have to move all that much [dirt].”

Led by head design associate Brian Schneider, the Doak team spent the better part of two years scouring the Chop Hills for the best 18 holes out of almost limitless possibilities, with just two mandates from the O’Neals — make it walking-only and make it fun. “Doak spent a lot of time out here, and you can see that,” says Cleve Trimble, a retired surgeon from Valentine, Neb., and a member of several golf clubs, including Ballyneal. “He didn’t design this from an air-conditioned office in Boca Raton from some topographical map.”

Adds Rupert, “The guy is a frickin’ goat. He likes to get out there get energized.”

Meanwhile, the brothers tapped into some energy of their own, hitting the road to research how their club should ultimately look and feel. “We went mostly to high-end private clubs,” Rupert says. “That was the business model fairly early. It seemed more difficult to raise capital for a public course than to find a few passionate guys to buy into the dream of a private Tom Doak course. Some guys just love the game. They came out here, looked at this and thought they could be part of something significant on the golf landscape for the next 100 years. Maybe it will be, maybe it won’t, but we’re really happy with what Mr. Doak built.”

The course opened in 2006 along with five ranch buildings housing a pro shop, three lodges named Terrapin, Meadowlark and Ringneck offering 32 beds in 24 rooms (all guy-fitted with wireless, hi-def satellite and big showers, with spa and steam down the hall or next door), the main dining room/bar/kitchen as well as an upstairs grill where poker games are known to break out. From the get-go, it all seemed much more established, as if O’Neal and Doak had unearthed the club’s bones after a century’s slumber under the dunes. That Old World feeling, a windswept gravitas soaked in Guinness and Irish whiskey, fit the traditional-sounding name that O’Neal came up with during a jaunt through Ireland’s greatest private and resort clubs.

“At Ballybunion, I came to understand how the town and golf course worked together,” he says. “I had a great time in the pubs. It’s one of the really great places to play golf. We wondered whether we could use our family name. ‘Bally’ means ‘land of’ or ‘home of.’ We wanted to honor our parents and grandparents who had been here. We weren’t bold enough to go with Bally O’Neal, but Ballyneal sounded very Irish.”

Though it’s nowhere near an ocean, Ballyneal could be the best example of humpbacked, wild-as-the-wind Emerald Isle links golf in the Western Hemisphere. The course was built to be played along the ground and, in its normal brownish-green clothing, definitely goes against the aesthetic grain, at least in American terms. Rupert applauds superintendent Dave Hensley for sticking to the less-is-more gameplan and deferring to nature as the true turf manager. “He has to make it work with all the climate extremes we have. You’ve got to get that right. We were told it would take five years to grow our grass properly, and we still don’t make the course play at its peak unless the climate that year means the grass can get there. Our superintendent has carte blanche; we never force it to get to a certain place.”

Hensley sums up his philosophy on Ballyneal’s website in a column appropriately titled Getting Down with Brown: “Our turf conditions present more options for golf shots, yet the aerial attack is available on a calm day. When the wind blows, the firm playing conditions allow the ball to come alive and ride along the natural contours below the breeze. Ballyneal isn’t for everyone. It is for the golfer who understands and loves linksland golf and turf. Until you see it, touch it and feel it under your feet, you just won’t get it.”

No doubt, he’s right on the money. Ballyneal is not for everybody; even Golf Digest architecture writer Ron Whitten called it “an acquired taste.” But make no mistake, it’s an exhilarating ride once you open your mind. From the opening tee shot over a wildflower-choked chasm (go ahead and mix up the boxes from hole to hole, and don’t look for yardage markers, the caddies are all you need) through the finest short par 4 extant in No. 7 to the final uphill iron to No. 18’s huge, rumpled amphitheater green, Ballyneal incites play-it-again passion and begs you to dig deep into your most creative instincts. In hole-to-hole memorability, strategic elasticity and what’s-next drama on nearly every sensory level — sight, touch, sound, even smell — it surpasses Pacific Dunes.

Doak himself intimates as much. “Of all the courses we’ve built so far, Ballyneal might be the most fun to play. Its wild natural contours come into play on every approach shot, rewarding the player who knows his way around and who can use the bold slopes to backstop his shot or feed it to the hole, while non-thinking golfers play the victim. For the average player, it is not hard to get around, but the good player will always walk away thinking he has left a couple of shots out there, no matter his score.”

Three rounds over two steamy, glorious summer days at a rain-softened Ballyneal — punctuated by the solid looping of several young caddies (several of whom have earned O’Neal-sponsored scholarships to the University of Colorado), incredible meals in both restaurants, solid sleep in the “upscale ranch” accommodations (interrupted by one spectacular early morning bout of lighting and gully-washer rain) and, yes, a member-guest poker soirée of sorts — bore out Doak’s assessment and then some. A perfect level fairway lie doesn’t exist, and it’s often impossible to tell where the green itself begins, which is the way it’s supposed to be on a wall-to-wall fescue layout. There are so many ways for the heaving semi-desert terrain to lead your ball into a spectacular pin-seeking bounce or pull it into one of Doak’s trademark pretty, pitiless blown-out sandpits — to turn birdie into triple and vice-versa — that it does no good to count them, to overthink, to find the One True Way. Call it Zen golf, of the moment, unfolding in a whirl of capricious winds. Make a plan at your peril — better to roll with what the ancient Chops give you, unveil what secrets you can and revel in Doak’s 360-degree canvas of scenic splendor and firm, fast scoring possibility. That’s what led Trimble, a well-traveled student of the game, to sign on the line as a Ballyneal member.

“The essence of golf is wind, tall grass and sand,” he says. “That was all here. What Doak brought in — you can see it on every hole — is the backdrop. You can’t see that on a map. Like between 3 green and 4 tee, the vista is incredible. Even on No. 1, with the green sitting there with a two-humped dune behind it, then the sky.”

The richness of the tableau spread out before Doak and company no matter where they looked led to some fascinating twists and turns in the design process. Rupert points to one small shift that changed the character of the entire front nine.

“They built No. 4 green and were working on 5 tee box, and Tom had figured out where the green should be. Brian Schneider — the lone associate down at Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania, which has gotten rave reviews — kept saying, ‘The big view is 50 yards to the right,’ looking up this big valley with jagged dunes leading up into there. Tom had it up against the ridge. Brian decided it was such a better hole moving the green over … once they did that and built a bunker to the left of it, they were able to do the tee box for 6 just on the other side of the hill where the green was going to be, which gave us the only partially hidden shot into a fairway, turning that into the No. 1 handicap hole. That happened because Brian was able to sit on the property and watch the sunset a couple of times, and say, ‘No, this shot on 5 needs to come from here.’ He had enough faith in his boss that he just built it that way, and when Tom returned he said, ‘Yeah, that’s really good — the one thing you left out is the little bunker in front; take the dirt from that and shape it into another bunker on the left. That became the real nasty-ass strategy, trying to run it in there with a low cut that just feeds into that bunker.”

And so it went as Ballyneal took shape with very little big-shovel action beyond scooping out hundreds of bunkers that, in essence, had always been there, waiting to be uncovered.

The course ends with a pair of epic 4-pars that bring tears to a big hitter’s eyes. Played along a pair of ridges, framed by sawtooth bunkers and gnarled hillsides, they carry Doak’s vision of barely-contained and well-contoured chaos — the well-ordered chaos of nature, that is — to its logical conclusion. Beyond them is the bar, the buddies, the stories spun over plates of pheasant sausage or bison ribeye steaks or halibut flown in from some distant sea. And just outside, always, lurks the first tee, beckoning and beguiling in a way few other courses can match, especially in this sparsely populated parcel of American heartland.

Not a bad accomplishment for a tractor-driving Deadhead, with a little help from his family and friends … and the weight of golf history behind him.

“We try to offer the links experience that Ballybunion had 30 years ago before they were discovered,” Rupert says. “We’re trying to get that charm. We’re not trying to do the Disney version of what Ireland can’t do now. We just believe that this is a golf experience that a lot of people really like, and we’re trying to stay true to that vision.

“It’s a story that’s being written about us again and again — little golf course, middle of nowhere, great architect, will it work, who would go there, are they crazy, is the business model functional. Everybody else is scrambling and we’re sitting here going, ‘This is really fun.’ We’re doing something right.”

www.ballyneal.com