Player’s Corner PLAY AWAY
The Lido Shuffle A long-lost oceanside gem gets reborn…in central Wisconsin? By Tom Ferrell PHOTO BY BRANDON CARTER/COURTESY OF KEISER GOLF
HISTORY IN THE REMAKING: Grassing has begun at the Lido, just outside of the Sand Valley Golf Resort. More than 100 years after the C.B. Macdonald original opened, the scope and scale of the layout still amazes.
ON THE SURFACE, there are few similarities between the Atlantic shores of Long Island and the pine-studded sand deposits of central Wisconsin. Pursue the art of deeper vision, however, and you sometimes stumble upon unlikely opportunities. After all, Herb Kohler and Pete Dye engineered an homage to Irish golf at Whistling Straits, which sits on the Lake Michigan shoreline and has hosted a slew of majors, including this year’s Ryder Cup. But while golf is full of “inspired by” and “in the spirit of” projects, the sons of one of golf’s most famous entrepreneurs are going beyond such guiding principles to re-create the holy grail of golf’s Golden Age—the Lido. Mike Keiser, founder of Bandon Dunes in Oregon, and sons Michael and Chris, owners and operators of Sand Valley Golf Resort, are deeply tied to natural golf sites and designs. So it turned some heads when Michael and Chris announced plans to authentically re-stage a course renowned in its time as an engineering marvel. “I had gotten fascinated with the story of COLORADO AVIDGOLFER | Fall 2021
the Lido—C.B. Macdonald’s great course built in the tidal marshes of Long Island,” Michael Keiser says. “When it opened in 1918, it was the crown jewel of golf’s early Golden Age.” The eminent golf writer Bernard Darwin gushed over the Lido when he visited it shortly after opening. “Besides having a genius for golfing architecture, Macdonald must have the imagination of a poet and a seer. Otherwise, he could never have envisaged making such a course.” Macdonald’s long-time associate Seth Raynor moved more than 2 million cubic yards of sand to fashion a rolling, rollicking site on what had been perfectly flat wetlands. His work changed the entire idea of course construction. Macdonald then carefully laid out his famous template holes—including Alps, Cape, Channel and Redan—and unveiled a golf experience like none the world had ever seen. “Our golf ancestors could have desired nothing better,” Darwin concluded. “The Lido is among the world’s very best.”
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Macdonald, already famous for his designs at Chicago Golf Club and National Golf Links of America, pulled out all the stops at the Lido. He spent a then-astronomical $1.43 million building the course. As part of his bold promotion, he sponsored a contest for armchair architects, promising to integrate the winner’s hole design into the final layout. Naturally, the winner was an obscure English architect named Alister MacKenzie, who would go on to become one of the lions of the craft. But when World War II broke out, the U.S. Navy bought the land and destroyed the golf course, and thus a legend was born. “My dad (Mike Keiser) has always dreamed of recreating the Lido,” Michael Keiser says. “That was his original thought at Bandon for what became Old Mac (Old Macdonald). But there was just no way to truly recreate the site or conditions.” At least, according to conventional wisdom. The Keiser brothers soon discovered the work of coloradoavidgolfer.com
