The Lido Shuffle

This is the long-form piece to which I referred on Wednesday, on a subject about which I've long wanted to write.  We'll start in the present tense, with this news story:

One of the most revered course designs in the annals of golf architecture is coming back from the dead.

The original Lido Golf Club, the revered Long Island layout designed by C.B. Macdonald and later destroyed by the U.S. Navy during World War II, is being reborn – in its original form – in the sands of Central Wisconsin. Tom Doak and his Renaissance Design team are heading up the re-creation of the Lido on an 850-acre property adjacent to the Sand Valley Golf Resort.

If you sense Keiser involvement, you’re right.

But rather than Mike Keiser, the visionary behind destination golf resorts such as Bandon Dunes, Cabot Links and Sand Valley, it’s his sons, Michael Jr. and Chris, who are taking the lead on the Lido project. Construction is expected to begin later this year, with total estimated costs of approximately $16 million for the course, infrastructure and a clubhouse. A tentative opening is set for 2023.

The 18th hole at The New Lido in a digital rendering by Peter Flory.

Lots to unpack here, so you might want to freshen that coffee. I've had cause to reference the Lido several times over the years, but always in passing. But you're well within your rights to ask, What is this Lido you speak of?"

From Garrett Morrison at The Fried Egg:

Built during World War I, the original Lido was a massive, unprecedented feat of engineering. Architect C.B. Macdonald and his partner Seth Raynor installed the course on a tract of seaside swampland by dredging an estimated 2,000,000 cubic yards of sand from the bottom of an inland channel. The project cost nearly $800,000—an astonishing sum for the time.

After the Lido opened in 1917, it received widespread praise. A survey by the New York Metropolitan Golfer in the late 1920s ranked it the second best golf course in the United States, behind only Pine Valley. Writer Bernard Darwin called the Lido “the finest course in the world,” and Masters champion Claude Harmon referred to it as “the greatest golf course ever.”

Daniel Wexler, whose book The Missing Links is our source for the above details, described the original course this way:

“It was… the first truly ‘man-made’ golf course, its massive earth shaping rivaling that of almost any project undertaken in the modern era. It was also, without a doubt, a most authentic-looking creation, its barren, links-like expanse broken only by the six-story Lido Club, an enormous clubhouse/hotel erected at ocean’s edge in 1928. And while frequently noted for its great toughness, it was also a strategic masterpiece, providing the player with numerous shotmaking options, several alternate fairways, and some of the best replica holes [also known as ‘template holes’] ever built.”

A Plasticine model of the Lido routing, designed by Macdonald himself.

Boy, does "Replica Hole" sound off-putting.  Not an argument for today, but I'll just say that a "Replica Hole" is what I picture a bad version of a Template Hole" being...

The struggle is to understand what this course was, what it could have been, that having lasted a mere ten years, can maintain its undiminished mystique more than a century after its creation, when no man that played it still lives.  

Anyone needing a Macdonald primer, would do worse than this from Andy Johnson, also of The Fried Egg.  Macdonald is quite simply the Father of American Golf Architecture, and perhaps the father of American golf as well.  He had, at the point we pick up the story, already built the first 18-hole golf course in the United States, Chicago Golf Club, and had completed his masterpiece, The National Golf Links of America, as well as highly-regarded Piping Rock.  That bit, having already peaked in a sense with The National, leads to one of the serendipitous aspects of this tale we'll get to soon.

The first thing you need to know is that, having inspected the 115 acre parcel compromising mostly marsh and swamp, Macdonald wanted nothing to do with it.  Ironic, for sure, but one can understand his reaction to what must have seemed flat, featureless land.  But, also ironically, Macdonald was convinced that that negative was actually a positive (alas, they didn't use the bug/feature metaphor in the day), in that he could create whatever he wanted, as an unlimited budget allowed sand to be pumped to create any contours desired.  One can also readily see the appeal of that to Macdonald specifically, a man renown for his rather elevated self regard.

The 175-yard Eden third at the Lido, with the footbridge to the fourth fairway seen at left.

The next bit is the payoff on that reference above, as Macdonald understood that he couldn't necessarily improve on some of those template holes at The National (an assessment with which I agree), and saw a need for something new.  The widely-respected golf writer Bernard Darwin was in New York in 1914, and Macdonald convinced him to run a design contest, which Darwin did in the magazine, Country Life.  The panel of judges is its own story, including amateur champion and Old-Tom fishing buddy Horace Hutchinson and Walton heath creator Herbert Fowler, in addition to Darwin.

The 20 quid winning prize was awarded for a design that became the Lido's 18th hole, including an ingenuous triple fairway, one of which was on an island in the lagoon.  The entry was submitted by a Dr. Alister MacKenzie, from whom much was to be heard..  Now, a myth has developed that this contest plucked Mackenzie from the anonymity of life as a country doctor, but that just wasn't the case.  He already was a practicing architect, was referred to as such in the magazine, and had already designed Alwoodley, one of his noted successes, though there's also little doubt that this jump-started his career.  To this day, the Alister MacKenzie Society maintains its Lido Design Competition, form which we can only hope to fond new Dr. MacKenzies.

This obsession with the Lido isn't new for the Keisers:

Mike Keiser’s* interest in the Lido dates back at least to 2002, when George Bahto published his C.B. Macdonald biography The Evangelist of Golf. (*To distinguish between father and son, we refer to Keiser Sr. as “Mike” and Keiser Jr. as “Michael.”) According to Stephen Goodwin’s book Dream Golf, Mike Keiser called Bahto to ask if the historian thought it was possible to rebuild the Lido. When Bahto said yes, Keiser invited him to see a property on the Oregon coast.

That property, just north of the recently opened Pacific Dunes at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort, turned out to be ill-suited to a Lido. Keiser ultimately hired Tom Doak and Jim Urbina to design a collection of tributes to Macdonald’s “ideal holes.” The course, under the cheeky name of Old Macdonald, opened in 2009.

This process revealed to the Keisers how difficult it would be to recreate the Lido. Mike Keiser’s golfing friends, whose opinions he always took into account, were concerned that the course would be a mere novelty. For his part, Doak did not want to bulldoze Oregon sand dunes for the sake of an historical homage. Besides, as he told Stephen Goodwin, “I didn’t really believe George or anyone else had good enough information on the Lido to build it just like it had been.”

I think was very much the right call, as the property that became Old Macdonald features massive ridgelines and other interesting landforms that would have been shameful to expose to earth-moving equipment.  And as good as some of those template holes on Old Mac are, in reviewing the course for Larry Gavrich's site way back when (Part I here, followed by II and III), I tried to make the point that the architects did their best work in some cases by ignoring their playbook, and allowing the land to dictate the routing.  

So, what do we know about the project?  To begin with, lots of effort is involved, beginning with the aforementioned Peter Flory:

Now, a decade later, researchers have found more information, and perhaps more important, they have organized that information more rigorously. Leading the effort is Peter Flory, who runs a consulting business in Chicago.

A few years ago, Flory’s work slowed down, and he began looking for a new hobby—“something to be creative,” as he put it in an interview with The Fried Egg, “a kind of zen activity.” Flory became curious about lost golf courses by reading Daniel Wexler’s books. Meanwhile, he was teaching himself the software of The Golf Club, a video game that allows users to create highly detailed virtual builds of courses. “And I thought to myself, What’s the holy grail of lost golf courses?’”

So in early 2018, Flory set out to create a digital version of the Lido. For help with research, he started a thread on the Golf Club Atlas message board. He was surprised by the number of maps, photos, and other archival scraps that came his way. “I became a kind of repository for Lido information,” he said.

What Flory ended up producing in the Golf Club game astonished other Lido researchers.

Which then piqued the interest of all sorts of interesting folks, including Tom Doak and the Kesiers:

Flory’s work received wider attention in May 2019, when Golf Channel aired a brief feature on the history of the Lido. Still, he had no reason to believe that his passion project would end up providing the basis for an actual golf course.

That changed in the fall of 2019, when Flory received a call from Tom Doak, himself a regular poster on Golf Club Atlas. Doak wanted to know more about the virtual build—how accurate it was, how the research had been done. “I think I convinced him that it’s not 100% accurate, but it’s really good,” Flory said. “It’s as good as you can do with the information available.”

“When you looked at the graphics,” Doak told Andy Johnson in an upcoming episode of The Fried Egg Podcast, “you thought, ‘That looks pretty close. I mean, I don’t see anything there that looks like it’s clearly wrong or out of place. That’s kind of amazing.’”

In early winter, Flory’s phone rang again. This time, Michael Keiser was on the line, and he asked permission to use one of Flory’s renderings to pique the interest of prospective Wisconsin Lido members. “Not only did he say yes,” Keiser said, “he offered to help in any way he could.” Keiser invited Flory to Madison for a meeting, and soon the virtual builder was an official advisor for a real build.

That Golf Channel video, featuring Jim Urbina, is here:

Urbina worked for Tom Doak, and is credited for much of the wonderful shaping of Pacific Dunes.  Doak and Urbina had separated at the time Old Macdonald was built, but at Mike Keiser's insistence, Urbina was named a full co-designer.  How's that for a job reference?

This project will be quite the departure for the Keiser family, who have earned their minimalist street cred by eschewing the movement of earth.  In this case, they're recreating a "man-made" course, so heavy equipment will be involved:

To replicate the terrain of the Long Island Lido, a great deal of Wisconsin sand will need to be pushed around—approximately 700,000 cubic yards, Keiser estimates. This is another change of pace for the Keisers, who have garnered praise for how little earthmoving their courses have required.

But unlike, say, the Old Macdonald site, the Lido Conservancy does not have massive landforms that would be tragic to lose. It is relatively flat, and its sandy base is malleable. While a far cry from the seaside swamp where C.B. Macdonald manufactured his masterpiece a century ago, the Wisconsin property can—and will—be refashioned in service of an ambitious vision.

“Compared to what we’ve done in the past, it’s a massive construction project,” Keiser said. “But given the quality of the golf course, it will all be worth it.”

Hey, it's the friggin' Lido, move as much earth as you need to...  Here are some more of those photographic renderings, this of the MacKenzie 18th hole with it's multiple fairways:

And this of No. 4, the Channel Hole:

There's another aspect in which this course will also be a departure for the Keisers:

Although next door to Sand Valley, the new Lido will not be part of the resort. Rather, it will be a private club that allows regular public play. At the moment, the Keisers plan to give members the run of the course on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. From Sunday afternoon through Thursday, tee times will be available within specific windows to Sand Valley guests.

This is the first time since 1995’s Dunes Club that the Keisers have experimented with private golf, and they want to make clear that their Lido will not be an exclusive enclave. It will instead emulate the relaxed model of many Scottish and Irish golf clubs: members will get preferred tee times and other privileges, but visitors will have ready access to the tee sheet.

“There is so much that inspires us about the architecture and culture of golf in the UK,” the Keiser brothers said in a press release. “Golf clubs in Scotland and Ireland generously welcome guests onto their grounds to play their extraordinary links. We look forward to introducing this hospitality to golfers here in the U.S.”

“Private golf [in America] needs to change trajectory,” Michael Keiser added. “Hopefully there will be several different models that will emerge, and this could be one of them.” Keiser is not, however, looking to make further forays into the club business. “The private [element] is very different” for the family, he said, “and it’s a one-off.”

Generously?  That originates less in generosity than in necessity, as the fees paid by traveling golfers supports the Scottish and Irish clubs, keeping dues at a level that the citizenry can afford.  We've had several opportunities to discuss this recently in light of the pandemic shutting down travel, putting most of the clubs in an existential fight for survival.  While club economics are quite different here, it's not like our private clubs don't have their own long-term viability issues.

One last bit, and then I'll move on.  Mike Kesier has worked with most of the name brand architects of the current minimalist era, including notably Coore-Crenshaw, Tom Doak and David McClay Kidd, who got his start on the original Bandon Dunes course.  The name that jumps out as missing from the quiver is Gil Hanse, so enjoy the irony of this:

This isn’t the first time the original Lido has served as inspiration. Gil Hanse recently completed an 18-hole layout at a private club in Thailand called Ballyshear Links that pays homage to the Lido. Hanse also sought to replicate the “lost” Lido in his course, which is opening later this year, but the collaboration between Doak and the Keisers will bring the mythical Lido back for golfers in North America to experience.

Well, Gil does good work, but Wisconsin is a heck of a lot closer than Thailand.  Sand Valley has been very much on my radar, though a trip there has suddenly been pushed back to 2023, at the earliest.