a great course returns

It’s a true story with a touch of fable. In 1917, C.B. Macdonald, the father of American golf course architecture, completed a course by the ocean on Long Island that many regarded as the greatest ever built. A masterwork of artistry and engineering, the Lido was the outgrowth of creative earth moving that transformed a flat swath of terrain into a wondrous, rumpled playground. Its greens were enormous. Its bunkers were expansive and beguiling. Its fairways heaved and fell with brows and hollows. Many of its holes were what are known as templates, iconic designs that have been mimicked at myriad properties around the world.

For years, the Lido flourished. But eventually, smacked by stiff financial headwinds after World War II, the course shuttered. Its acreage was repurposed as a naval base. Closing, though, did little to dim the Lido’s reputation. If anything, absence bolstered its renown. As decades passed, the course acquired a near-mythic aura, becoming golf’s version of the lost city of Atlantis. Golf buffs spoke of it in reverent tones.

Some became so giddy they wondered aloud: What if the Lido could be recreated?

Get this: It has been.

Late last year, the first nine of 18 holes opened on a faithful reproduction of the Lido. The full routing will be ready for play this spring. The new course is not a mere homage to the original; it’s an exacting replica. Every wrinkle of the layout has been recreated to within inches of the Macdonald design. There’s one big difference, though. The reborn Lido is not on Long Island. It is situated in the sand barrens in the center of Wisconsin.

Resurrecting the Lido had been a group effort, led by Michael and Chris Keiser, siblings with an impeccable golf pedigree. Their father, Mike Keiser, developed Bandon Dunes on the southern coast of Oregon, a pioneering resort that awakened the golf industry to a Field of Dreams approach; it proved that if you built courses in remote locations, people would come, provided that the golf was great.

Following in their father’s footsteps, the Keiser brothers became golf developers, devoted to building the kind of classic courses that purists are willing to travel far to play.

No course fits that profile better than the Lido, which sits in the small town of Nekoosa, roughly two-and-half hours from Milwaukee.

“If this were just a very nice golf course lost to history, we’d have no interest in rebuilding it,” Michael Keiser has said of the project. “But the Lido was truly exceptional. Therefore, anything we build that’s not in that upper echelon, we can only blame ourselves.”

To help give the Lido its new Midwest incarnation, the Keisers hired the celebrated architect Tom Doak, whose designs have peppered World Top 100 lists for decades. Doak, in turn, relied on detailed historical documentation of the Lido, including 3D computer models based on photographs and other renderings.

A round at the Lido will double as a kind of trip through time, allowing golfers to experience the beauty and strategic challenges of a masterpiece conceived more than a century ago. Like its defunct doppelgänger, the reborn Lido will test players with such template holes as the Biarritz, a long par-3 defined by a deep gully running horizontally through its green. It will also feature an Eden hole, a short par-3 with a teardrop-shaped green guarded jealously by bunkers; a par-4 known as an Alps hole for the mountainous rise that creates a blind approach shot; and a punchbowl par-4 with a concave green ringed by dunes. No detail has been overlooked. The routing has even been oriented so that golfers will face the same prevailing winds they would have faced on Long Island.

The Lido sits across the road from Sand Valley, a popular golf resort developed by the Keiser brothers, and though it will operate as a private course, limited tee times will be set aside for resort guests.

Be forewarned: Those slots will be snatched up fast.