The Lido

Favorite Hole

No. 17, par 5, 623 yards

On a course filled with mesmerizing ground contours, the topography of the par-5 17th still stands out. The fairway is littered with manufactured humps, making level lies a rarity. A particularly clever contour can be found in front of the bunkers that cross the fairway about 200 yards from the green: there, a central plateau offers an unobstructed view of the green for an extremely well-placed layup.

The green is modeled after No. 14, “Long,” at St. Andrews, and it’s tremendous: its massive false front will repel any approach without enough mustard, and the putting surface pitches away from there. This makes downwind wedge shots especially difficult, so if you lay up, picking a number where you can generate sufficient spin is crucial.

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Overall Thoughts

In December 2019, Michael Keiser Jr. called me to ask what I thought of a crazy idea he had: “What if I brought back The Lido?” My immediate response was that it would be cool, but I had a lot of questions. Where would you build it? How would you even go about re-creating a course that no longer exists?

Michael had a site in mind: a flat, sandy piece of land right next to Sand Valley. It didn’t have the dramatic characteristics of other Dream Golf properties, but it would serve nicely as a blank canvas on which to rebuild C.B. Macdonald’s Lido design.

Coincidentally, at the same time, an acquaintance of mine from the amateur golf scene in Chicago, Peter Flory, was creating a model of The Lido in a simulator program. He had done countless hours of research on the course, compiling Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) data, reading contemporaneous newspaper articles, and digging up old photos in order to produce an accurate representation of what The Lido was. As I began to understand how serious Michael was about reviving the lost course, I sent an email introducing him to Flory. A few months later, the project moved from idea to reality: Michael and his brother Chris Keiser founded a new private club in Nekoosa, Wisconsin, with the goal of re-creating The Lido in as exact detail as possible. They hired Tom Doak and longtime Renaissance Golf Design associate Brian Schneider as the leaders of the design team, and Peter Flory as an advisor.

Flory’s computer model, while stunning, presented a problem for Doak and Schneider: how to transfer the details of the model from screen to ground? That’s where Brian Zager came in. Zager had dabbled in golf architecture, working in a minor capacity for Craig Haltom’s construction firm Oliphant Golf Management, which has served as the contractor for all of Sand Valley’s courses. Zager’s main experience, though, was in designing video-game golf courses. He had the specific skills necessary for rendering Flory’s digital work into a topographical map that Doak and Schneider could use in the physical world. Using this innovative process, which also included GPS bulldozers, construction began in 2021, and the course opened for preview play in the fall of 2022. It has been the talk of the golf architecture community ever since.

Both Lidos, original and new, should be considered landmark feats of golf architecture in their different eras. The original represented a leap forward in golf course engineering; Macdonald and his associate Seth Raynor spared no expense in dredging up a seaside swamp and creating world-class golf out of nothing. The new version is a 21st-century technological achievement, using software, Lidar, and GPS to bring a no-longer-existent landscape back to life. In both cases, however, the result was similar: a terrific golf course that rewards multiple return visits.

What will immediately stand out to all golfers about The Lido is the contouring. The fairways and greens are packed with fascinating humps and bumps. These ground features are one of Macdonald’s great accomplishments, given that The Lido started as a flat, dull site. Not only did he manage to transform a marsh into a functional, linksy course, but he also sculpted every mound and hollow just as he wanted. At first The Lido’s undulations may seem irregular and random, but the more you play the course, the more you see that they are in fact intentional and brilliant; you realize that every one of them has a purpose. Macdonald’s contours create an immense number of outcomes—potential advantages as well as drawbacks—for shots that end up in different places. I doubt there has ever been a golf course where the manufactured features are better thought out.

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A distinctive aspect of The Lido’s contouring is that it was all constructed vertically—up from the grade. Since the original property was a swamp, Macdonald couldn’t dig down without hitting muck. His only option was to build on top of dredged material. The result is a preponderance of vertical features, which creates a great deal of blindness and deception in the design. Some players find this unpleasant.

As the shock of the blindness wears off, though, the course’s intricate strategy reveals itself. On nearly every hole, multiple lines are available, each offering a potential advantage or disadvantage. The differences between these strategic lines are amplified by the excellent, firm turf conditions presented by superintendent Jimmy Humston and his crew. Especially when the wind is up, positioning is paramount to scoring. When you’re out of position, The Lido is unrelenting. But as you learn which spots you need to get to and how to get there, the course becomes significantly easier. The very contours that harassed you when you were in the wrong spots turn into your friends when you’re in the right spots.

The 15th hole, named “Strategy” and based on a design submitted by English architect Tom Simpson to the 1914 Lido design contest in Country Life magazine, is a great example of the course’s optionality and balance of punishment and opportunity. While researching this article, I uncovered an email that Peter Flory sent me in January 2020 describing the hole:

“I finally got to the 15th hole last night. I never thought of this as one of the better holes, but it’s growing on me a lot.

“The basic concept of the hole is that there is a string of bunkers forming a diagonal hazard that was possible to drive over if you kept it right. However, doing that would leave you with a challenging angle to the green. If you chose to lay up, there were three pockets that you could hit to: 1) short right, leaving a long approach to the green with the toughest angle; 2) medium middle, leaving a medium shot in with a decent angle; and 3) long left, leaving a short to medium approach in with the best angle (you would be able to hit a chasing shot onto the green), but with a semi-obscured view due to the mounding around the bunkers. The fairway had a system of berms/mounds that created a pocket for each choice. The green was elevated and had some imposing bunkers blocking the approach from the right. This is an interesting prelude to the 18th hole, where you also have multiple choices but where the middle one gives the best approach. Again, a very interesting match-play hole, especially in the wind. It would be crucial to factor in the pin placement when deciding on your path, and the pin would be fully visible from the tee.”

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This degree of architectural sophistication gives a big advantage to those familiar with the course, which is something I appreciate. A great everyday course is one where you keep learning each time you play it. The Lido is just such a place: the design is so intricate and gives such high rewards to those who have already solved pieces of the puzzle that I’m tempted to say that a factor in weighing a player’s course handicap should be how many times they’ve played it.

While Macdonald’s recovered design at The Lido should—and likely will—be inspirational for many golf architects, the construction techniques used by Doak, Schneider, Flory, and Zager may prove even more influential. The notion of converting a computer model into actual topography will, without a doubt, shape the future of golf architecture. The accuracy and authenticity of the re-created Lido will capture people’s attention and surely lead to new projects. Will a duplicate of Augusta National turn up somewhere, for instance?

I’m more interested, however, in whether this technology will change our idea of what constitutes a “great site for golf.” Obviously, sandy terrain with 20 to 80 feet of movement will always be ideal, but the potential to produce and reproduce large-scale landforms with a combination of Lidar data and GPS dozers will be compelling to clients with poor land but plenty of money.

The technology behind the Wisconsin Lido is here to stay. For better or for worse, it has given golf architects a new way to generate landforms. I hope they use it wisely.

3 Eggs

There is an ethical debate to be had about re-creating golf courses with the exactitude that The Lido’s design team achieved. But since the original Lido was erased from the face of the earth long ago, I’m setting aside those concerns in this case. I’m not sure whether that’s the right or wrong take. Ultimately, though, I find the revived Lido to be one of the most fascinating works of golf architecture I’ve seen. I can’t imagine playing it enough to lose interest in the ground contours, strategic concepts, and greens.

Course Tour

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Additional Content

A Lido in the Sand Barrens (article)