The Lido at Sand Valley opens to limited resort play this month.
NEKOOSA, Wis. – One of the most anticipated courses openings of recent years didn’t start with a golf architect’s vision or a developer’s financial plan. This project started with a video game created by a Chicago-based financial consultant and eager golf historian who dabbles at length in no-longer-existing golf courses as a hobby.
Peter Flory (@nle_golf on Twitter, with the handle standing for no-longer-existing courses) has never built a golf course, but he’s played plenty – his list of courses played is enough to send even a golf travel writer into fits of envy.
More importantly, he dreams of playing historically significant courses that have been lost over the decades, plowed under for redevelopment or, occasionally, simply abandoned. Flory is also one of the best hickory golfers in the country, collecting and often utilizing a vast store of antique clubs so that he can appreciate how classic courses played in the era in which they were built.
One course topped his list of interest: The Lido, designed by Golden Age architects C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor on Long Island in New York and opened in 1917. The course, reputed to be the toughest and among the best in the world at the time, was plowed under by the U.S. Navy in World War II. Including an 18th hole inspired by Alister MacKenzie’s entry in a course-design contest, the Lido featured many of the classic template holes such as the Redan, Biarritz and Punchbowl that are still in use today.
Peter Flory, the golf history buff whose digital reproductions of the famed Lido led to the course being rebuilt at @Sand_Valley, makes his first own-ball birdie (on the tough 11th) at his dream course brought to life. @golfweekpic.twitter.com/Jc2K7sl2W6
Flory researched the Lido at length, discovering photos and historical narratives that provided insight not only to how it was built, but how it played. His goal was to re-create the course in a video game for his kids and friends to play.
He never imagined it would become a real course again. But this year, thanks to Flory’s efforts, a new Lido opens at Sand Valley in Wisconsin. Built by Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design firm, the new Lido is a painstaking recreation of the original on Long Island. A few tees and greens have been shifted a few degrees to accommodate safety in an modern era where golf balls travel much farther, but the new Lido was designed to be as close to the original as possible.
How close? When asked if it’s down to the inch, Flory has said, “Maybe even better.” Using digital tools undreamed of at the time of the original course’s inception, Flory and Doak efforted to re-create every hump, hollow, bunker lip and green slope from the original course.
It was all made possible because of the interest of fans of classic golf architecture, including Sand Valley developers Michael Keiser Jr. and Chris Keiser, the pair of brothers who greenlighted the project in Nekoosa, Wisconsin. They already operated two highly ranked courses at the resort – the eponymous Sand Valley and Mammoth Dunes – but they were looking for a cool idea for another parcel of land just across the street.
The result of the video game, the research and the financial investment opens to limited resort play June 28. The Lido is mostly a private club, but there will be tee times available to resort guests at select dates and times. Check with the resort for details.
Flory – who now serves as a panelist and ambassador for the Golfweek’s Best course-rating program – shares more insight in the Q&A below.
Golfweek’s experts have ranked the Top 200 courses built since 1960, such as Bandon Dunes, Whistling Straits and more.
Want to play the great modern golf courses in the U.S.? From Hawaii to Boston, we have you covered. So welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2023 list of the Top 200 Modern Courses built in or after 1960 in the United States.
The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on 10 criteria on a points basis of 1 through 10. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings are averaged to produce these rankings. The top handful of courses in the world have an average rating of above 9, while many excellent layouts fall into the high-6 to the 8 range.
To ensure these lists are up-to-date, Golfweek’s Best in recent years has altered how the individual ratings are compiled into the rankings. Only ratings from rounds played in the past 10 years are included in the compilations. This helps ensure that any course in the rankings still measures up.
Courses also must have a minimum of 25 votes to qualify for the Top 200 Modern or the Top 200 Classic. Other Golfweek’s Best lists, such as Best Courses You Can Play or Best Private, do not require as many votes. This makes it possible that a course can show up on other lists but not on the premium Top 200 lists.
There’s one course of particular note this year. Landmand Golf Club in Homer, Nebraska, debuts the highest of the courses new to this list, climbing into a tie for 26th. Designed by Tad King and Rob Collins, Landmand opened in 2022. It and the Sheep Ranch at Bandon Dunes are the only courses to have opened since 2020 to rank among the top 200.
Each course is listed with its average rating next to the name, then the location, the year it opened and the designers. The list notes in parenthesis next to the name of each course where that course ranked in 2022.
After the designers are several designations that note what type of facility it is:
The resort has been dubbed by some to be “a 17-Mile Drive for the southern hemisphere.” These pictures are pretty breathtaking.
Te Arai Links in New Zealand has officially opened its South Course, designed by the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw on a long stretch of beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
The resort has been dubbed by some to be “a 17-Mile Drive for the southern hemisphere” in reference to the famed courses on California’s Monterey Peninsula that include Pebble Beach Golf Links and Cypress Point. That’s a huge hurdle of comparison to jump over, but the photos below are certainly eye-catching and any serious fan of golf travel needs to go for themselves to be the judge.
The resort plans to open its second course, the North by Tom Doak, in October. Te Arai Links follows on the well-regarded heels of the private Tara Iti Golf Club, another Doak design just up the road. The resort is less than a 2-hour drive north of Auckland on the eastern shores of New Zealand.
Te Arai Links is a resort that also includes private memberships, and resort guests will have access to the South and North on alternating days, playing one course as the members play the other. The South opened for limited preview play in October, and it is now fully open for resort play.
“We invite the Monterey Peninsula comparison because we believe it’s apt,” Jim Rohrstaff, a partner in Te Arai Links and its managing director, said in a media release announcing the full opening. “Our good friend Mike Keiser (founder of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon) believes the South Course has as much ocean frontage as any golf course in the world. It’s that connectivity with the sea that distinguishes the South Course from most links experiences, from the golf experience in Monterey, even from Tara Iti just up the shoreline. On the South Course, the beach is just so close. There’s the visual sensation of actually seeing the waves crashing. But golfers can also hear them crashing — on more than half the holes.”
Te Arai Links includes 48 on-site suites with 19 two-bedroom cottages and six four-bedroom villas slated to be completed in the coming months. The resort also will have a 2.5-acre putting green named The Playground that wraps around a pizza barn near the South’s clubhouse and range and will serve as the resort’s communal gathering spot.
From the Scottish Highlands around to St. Andrews, a series of true links astonish with variety, playability and charm.
Where to begin?
That is not a rhetorical question. When laying out a bucket-list golf trip to Scotland, it’s a very serious query, part of a series of such questions that will follow you around the country. Where to begin? Which course next? Toughest of all: Which courses can I bear to skip?
Headed to St. Andrews? There’s a lot more on tap than the famed Old Course, 30 times the site of the British Open – ahem, Open Championship, thank you very much. Will you play the New Course, which seems a misnomer, seeing how it was built by Old Tom Morris in 1895? How about the Jubilee? The Castle, which having opened outside town in 2008 is the newest of the seven courses managed by the St. Andrews Links Trust? Maybe sample a handful of the other layouts not far from the Home of Golf?
Headed into the Highlands for a dream round at Royal Dornoch? Everyone on other courses, on the way and on social media will tell you that you can’t skip nearby Brora (I didn’t) or Tain or Golspie (I missed both, but I already am planning to return). Scouting a classic links trip to Aberdeen? You can’t miss classic links such as Royal Aberdeen, or Murcar Links or Cruden Bay or a handful of others. The options are lined up along the coast. All the coasts of Scotland, actually.
Cabot Highlands, formerly known as Castle Stuart, in Scotland (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)
Headed east? You’ll be told not to miss the courses to the west. Looking north? Don’t miss those gems to the south. Whichever point of the compass you choose and whatever address you plug into Google Maps, there will be dozens of opportunity costs – all those suggestions are correct, even if they create a totally unmanageable itinerary for a traveling golfer on a weeklong holiday.
Weeks after my recent trip, when playing with a group of Golfweek’s Best course raters in California, I barely could finish a sentence about where I played before the questions poured in: Did you play this one, and what about that one? We all process the world through the lenses of our own experiences, and that’s especially true when judging the courses somebody else is, or is not, playing.
The 18th green of the Old Course at St. Andrews sits close enough to the street and town that the afternoon shadows of old buildings stretch across the putting surface. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)
Such was the quandary when I started planning this trip to Scotland. I was lucky, because I knew where I would begin. American course designer Tom Doak is building a new course at Castle Stuart near Inverness, which is being rebranded as Cabot Highlands after its recent acquisition by Canadian company Cabot. I would begin there to hear Doak discuss his plans as well as to sample the original course at the resort.
But from there? I had options. Too many options. The names of famous Scottish links courses roll on and on, and it would take months to see even half of what I had in mind. I had only 12 days on the ground, so I enlisted the help of course booking provider Golfbreaks and the local experts at VisitScotland.com to help set up a trip that would venture high into the Highlands before swinging back down the coast, east to Aberdeen and eventually into St. Andrews.
Scotland, of course, is where the game as we know it was invented, and the best of it is all about links golf in particular. Firm, fast and sometimes almost entirely natural – I coveted the links experience. Of the 550 or so total golf courses in Scotland, fewer than 90 might be classified as true links, depending on one’s given definition – there is great debate among academics and clubhouse drunks about what constitutes a proper links. On this trip I was lucky enough to experience 11 examples. Each was distinctive, and don’t dare think of links golf as some uniform game, because it is the definitive opposite of that. The conditions might be similar, but each layout shines on its own, each bouncy shot promising something unexpected.
Street view in St. Andrews (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)
I played courses that are famed worldwide, and several that are less known outside Scotland. I played in sunshine and rain, wind and calm. I played well, and I played poorly. The only constants were the courses, the terrain and coastlines flashing through my exhausted head each night in whatever accommodations I had scheduled. The trip included planes, trains, buses, shuttles and a blue Skoda SUV – “Keep left, keep left, keep left,” I had to remind myself at the start of each drive on skinny, winding roads, because I couldn’t bear the thought of missing my next round of golf due to something so mundane as a car crash.
There were a lot of miles, a lot of different beds, a lot of nerves in the car. So many good courses, too many bad swings. And it was all perfect.
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Architect Tom Doak will build a new course on the site not far from Pinehurst Resort that once held The Pit.
After years of speculation and hoping on the part of many golf architecture fans, Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina announced Wednesday morning that it will build its 10th golf course just a few miles from the main resort on the site of The Pit, a course that was shuttered in 2010.
Architect Tom Doak landed the job. Plans are for a 2024 opening that coincides with the resort hosting the U.S. Open that year on its famed No. 2 course. Doak designed many of the world’s best modern courses, including Pacific Dunes at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon, Ballyneal in Colorado and Tara Iti in New Zealand, among dozens of others.
“The site is topographically distinct and drastically different from anywhere in Pinehurst,” Doak said in a media release announcing the news. “It’s bigger, bolder and more dramatic. There’s about 75 feet of elevation change, and we’ll work our way up to it around the mid-point of the layout. You’ll have expansive views from this apex over the rest of the course. It will be an unforgettable experience for golfers.”
The Pit, opened in 1985 with a Dan Maples design, was known for its extreme elevation changes and challenges. The layout, which was not part of Pinehurst Resort, did not survive the 2008 financial crisis that clobbered many golf courses around the United States. Pinehurst Resort bought the land on which The Pit sat in 2011.
Architect Tom Doak will build a new course at Pinehurst, slated to open in 2024. (Courtesy of Pinehurst Resort)
Since that time, the sandy site has been the topic of speculation as golfers guessed what the resort might have in mind. Robert H. Dedman Jr., CEO of Pinehurst Resort, had for years said it wasn’t the right time to build on the site. Golf’s recent boom since the start of COVID, which has led to great demand for tee times at Pinehurst Resort and other golf properties in the area, surely influenced the decision to hire Doak and start work on the resort’s first new course to be built in decades.
The resort owns about 900 acres of land near the Aberdeen area, including the site of the former The Pit. A variety of development opportunities will be evaluated with town officials, the resort said in its media release. Those opportunities include additional golf, a short course, a clubhouse, guest cottages and other lodging.
“This exceptional property is a place where many of our dreams of the future can be contemplated,” Dedman Jr. said in the media release. “How those dreams play out will be determined over time, the same way the path forward revealed itself through recent additions like The Cradle, Thistle Dhu and the redesign of Pinehurst No. 4. Adding a Tom Doak design to our collection is another historic chapter in the story of Pinehurst. We can’t wait to read it.”
The site for the new course features rugged dunes left in the wake of mining operations more than a century ago. With natural ridgelines, intriguing landforms, towering longleaf pines, streams and ponds, Doak said in the media release that he envisions a track that complements the resort’s other courses through its contrasts.
“The number one thing that excited us about the project is working with the beautiful sand that’s native to this region,” Doak said. “The sand, the wiregrass, the bluestem grass and other native grasses that grow around the Sandhills create a fabulous texture for golf. It’s something most places just don’t have.”
It will be a busy time around Pinehurst, as the U.S. Golf Association is building a campus that is under construction and is planned to begin to open this year. The resort also was selected as an anchor site for U.S. Opens and will host that tournament in 2024, ’29, ’35, ’41 and ’47.
Architect Tom Doak at Pinehurst (Courtesy of Pinehurst Resort)
And in 2024 all those people headed to the Sandhills will have one more place to play. Doak will work with landscape architect Angela Moser – whose CV includes efforts at Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course, Streamsong Black in Florida and the new St. Patrick’s Links in Ireland among others – on the project.
“Tom Doak builds incredible golf courses on sand, and we’re excited to see what he’ll create in the North Carolina Sandhills,” Pinehurst Resort President Tom Pashley said in the media release. “We’ve worked with some amazing golf architects who’ve embraced our natural aesthetic and believe Tom will do something fantastic on this site.”
See hole-by-hole maps of the popular Houston municipal course that was renovated by Tom Doak in 2019.
Memorial Park Golf Course in Houston, site of this week’s Cadence Bank Houston Open on the PGA Tour, originally was designed by John Bredemus and opened in 1936 on the site of a former nine-holer. After decades of neglect it was renovated by Tom Doak in 2019.
Since that $34-million renovation funded through a foundation headed by Houston Astros owner Jim Crane, the Tour returned in 2020. The popular municipal course also has climbed to No. 15 in Texas on Golfweek’s Best ranking of public-access courses. It will play to 7,412 yards with a par of 70 for the Cadence Bank Houston Open.
Thanks to yardage books provided by StrackaLine – the maker of detailed yardage books for thousands of courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the players face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
Tom Doak lays out the Holy Grail of golf design, and it might not be what you think.
INVERNESS, Scotland – What do you get when you hand over some 150 acres of prime waterfront land in the Scottish Highlands to American golf architect Tom Doak? Not even Doak is sure yet.
But Cabot – the rapidly expanding Canadian company that started with the highly acclaimed Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia – is betting Doak’s work will be worth an overseas flight for traveling golfers.
Cabot acquired Castle Stuart Golf Links and its eponymous 18-hole layout near Inverness, Scotland, in June with development plans that include a second course and luxury cabins just minutes away from the Inverness airport. The property has been rebranded Cabot Highlands. Ben Cowan-Dewar, CEO and co-founder of Cabot, has hired Doak to build the second 18 with plans to break ground in 2023 and a possible soft opening sometime in 2024.
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“We’ve got to get the routing done first,” quipped Doak with a laugh as he met with a small group of American and Canadian golf writers in October at Castle Stuart.
Cabot has expanded rapidly in recent years. The company took off in 2012 in Nova Scotia with Cabot Links, a Rod Whitman design that ranks No. 2 on Golfweek’s Best list of modern Canadian courses. That course was joined in 2015 by Cabot Cliffs, a Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw design that ranks No. 1 on that modern Canadian list.
In the Caribbean, a Coore and Crenshaw design at Cabot St. Lucia is slated to open in 2023. In Canada, the company announced last year the development of Cabot Revelstoke in British Columbia, which will feature a Whitman design scheduled to open in 2024. And in Florida, Cabot has purchased the former World Woods, rebranded it Citrus Farms and is having its two courses renovated with a planned reopening in 2023.
The second course at Cabot Highlands will mark the first time Doak has worked with Cowan-Dewar, but Doak has established himself as one of the premium designers of his era. His course credits, either solo or in combination with other designers, include 12 courses on Golfweek’s Best list of the top 200 modern courses built since 1960 in the U.S., including four in the top 10. He also laid out five of the top 50 Golfweek’s Best modern international courses, including three of the top five on that list.
Gil Hanse and Mark Parsinen designed the original 18 at Castle Stuart in Scotland, now named Cabot Highlands. (Golfweek)
Doak met the handful of writers, including this author, at Cabot Highlands’ clubhouse, then led the group on a tour of some of the property where the new course will be constructed. It’s a stunning site alongside the Moray Firth, a huge bay that is fed from a river that flows through nearby Inverness with waters from Loch Ness.
The original 18 at Cabot Highlands, built by Gil Hanse and Castle Stuart founder Mark Parsinen (who died in 2019), sits high upon cliffs overlooking the Moray Firth with some of the most dramatic golf views in Scotland. That course opened in 2009 and ranks No. 4 on Golfweek’s Best list of modern courses in Great Britain and Ireland. It has hosted the Scottish Open four times.
Doak’s parcel is lower, stretching from the clubhouse, past a 400-year-old castle that gave the property its original name and down a ridge toward the water. The rolling site has been farmed with the land smoothed over as it descends toward the coast, which means Doak’s team likely will move a lot of earth to create interesting internal contours – similar to the original layout at Castle Stuart.
Doak said the new course won’t quite be a true out-and-back routing with nine holes in one direction and nine coming back, but it likely will be close to that with a few redirections along the way. Parsinen originally planned to build a course by Arnold Palmer on the site, but those plans have been replaced.
Doak spoke candidly about the opportunities, challenges and thrill of building on the site and in Scotland in general. He also spoke openly about several of his other projects around the world and how he approaches the lofty expectations that come with building on such a beautiful site. Lengthy excerpts of that conversation are included below.
These photos of a restored Cherry Hills will have you dreaming of Colorado golf.
It’s happy 100th to Cherry Hills Country Club near Denver.
The club in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado – where Arnold Palmer won his only U.S. Open in 1960 – has completed a decade-long restoration of its William Flynn-designed course that opened in 1923. Among many large events, Cherry Hills has been the host site of three U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships, one U.S. Women’s Open and two U.S. Amateurs, and it will again host the Amateur in 2023.
Architect Tom Doak and his Renaissance Golf Design team, largely under the direction of Renaissance associate Eric Iverson on the ground, have restored several greens to their original size matching Flynn’s intent, and bunkers were reworked to reintroduce their original intent. The cross bunkering on the 17th hole, for example, was restored on what was the first par 5 to feature an island green in the U.S.
Perhaps most striking: Little Dry Creek, which in no way is actually dry, was brought more into play on several holes.
The club commissioned Doak in 2007 to develop a restoration plan to focus on strategy while adding length where necessary for future championships. Before completion of the restoration, Cherry Hills tied for No. 70 on Golfweek’s Best 2022 list of classic courses built before 1960 in the U.S. and was the third-ranked private course in Colorado.
Nos. 7 and 14 of the restored Cherry Hills Country Club in Denver (Courtesy of Cherry Hills/Brian Walters)
“The transformation that Tom Doak and Eric Iverson of Renaissance Golf Design have brought to William Flynn’s classic design brings extraordinary pride to our membership,” Cherry Hills president David Keyte said in a media release announcing the completion of the project. “In 2022 we celebrated 100 years as a club, and in 2023 we will be celebrating the centennial of our first round of golf at Cherry Hills, which coincides with us hosting the U.S. Amateur, which is very exciting. The restored shot values on display next summer will certainly remind the golfing world of Cherry Hills’ timelessness and stature as a world-class championship venue.”
More from the media release:
“The Renaissance team also reintroduced the famous cross bunkering on the 17th hole (which features the first island green on a par 5 built in the U.S.) and other strategic bunker work on the first, second, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, 14th and 16th holes. The green complexes on holes three and 13 were completely restored while other greens have been brought back to their original forms to ensure all green complexes match the original Flynn plans. A major tree-management program was also implemented, and several holes were lengthened to accommodate the advances in the modern game. This includes new tee boxes on holes five, nine, 10, 11, 13, 14 and 16.
“Flynn’s ingenious routing of Cherry Hills is truly unique among Top 100 courses. The opening nine weaves as a figure eight on the inside of the property while the second nine wraps in a counterclockwise circle around the perimeter. Cherry Hills is one of only a handful of courses with this unique “Muirfield Plan” routing, named after famed Muirfield in Scotland.”
One major part of the restoration was the return to the original orientation of Little Dry Creek, which runs through the property and was re-engineered to reduce flood potential and manage water flow. It was rerouted from its recent banks to come more into play next to the seventh green, tightly alongside the redesigned eighth hole, in front of No. 14 green, closer to the front of the 15th green that was restored to Flynn’s original dimensions, then down the 16th fairway and alongside that green.
“You can see from all the hole drawings that Flynn routed the holes and implemented strategy based on Little Dry Creek,” Iverson said in the media release. “The way the creek plays now on these key holes brings exceptional strategy and challenge to these iconic approach shots. Holes 14 and 16, for example, are two of the finest and most difficult par 4s in the country, but now with the creek coming in closer to each green, the shot values and premium on the angles into the green are off-the-charts.”
Flynn’s other designs include Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, New York; The Country Club at Brookline, Massachusetts; the Kittansett Club in Marion, Massachusetts; and significant contributions to Pine Valley in New Jersey and Merion in Pennsylvania.
Check out a selection of shots of Cherry Hills by photographers Brian Walters and Evan Schiller below.
Strategy, difficulty and beauty on full display in these photos of Sand Valley’s new Lido course.
NEKOOSA, Wis. – You can’t let your mind wander on a single shot at the new Lido course at Sand Valley in Wisconsin. Not on a putt. Not on a chip or pitch. Not on a single approach, and certainly not on a tee shot. Every swing demands your attention, and there might be no greater compliment for a golf course.
Built as a recreation of the famed Lido on Long Island in New York that was purchased and then demolished by the U.S. Navy during World War II, the new Lido is a stunning test of every aspect of a golfer’s game, especially the mind. It’s no exaggeration to call it the most strategic course – at the very least among a handful of contenders – in the United States.
The original Lido was designed by Golden Age architects C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor, with several individual holes designed by contestants in an architecture contest that included Alister MacKenzie. It was built along the shore on soil dredged from the sea floor, then shaped by teams with horse-drawn equipment. The new reproduction and its many template holes were meticulously laid into place by Tom Doak with a giant assist by Peter Flory, a Chicago-based banker (and Golfweek’s Best course-rater ambassador) who used old photography to generate a digital replica of the New York original. Doak used those digital models to recreate the old layout as closely as possible.
Judging by two rounds this author played with Flory in early September, it’s easy to guess the hickory-equipped golfers of the 1920s had their hands full on the original.
Bunkers seemingly are everywhere. The Lido offers plenty of width, with fairways sometimes playing more than 100 yards wide as they overlap, but the traps appear to be unavoidable, especially the first time a player goes round. Woe to any golfer who gets out of line.
The 11th fairway (center) of the Lido at Sand Valley is flanked on either side by No. 17 (left, in the opposite direction) and No. 2 (right, playing in same direction as 11 with the green in the upper right). With several options for avoiding all the bunkers, the 11th effectively plays more than 100 yards wide. (Golfweek)
Players must stand on each tee and plot their way to the flag. It’s an exhilarating exercise that every course designer should strive to produce, but nowhere is such strategizing more important than at the Lido. A well-struck shot on the wrong line, even one that finds short grass, might as well have found a bunker closer to the proper line. It’s an awkward moment when you realize you picked the wrong angle off the tee – you can see the flag ahead on the green, but you can’t even begin to imagine how to get close in regulation when playing into the new and bouncy putting surfaces.
But if players take the time to study the various pathways offered for the tee ball and choose wisely, then the greens open up. That flag that appears tucked from one side of the fairway probably is reasonably approachable from the opposite side. You have to play the holes backward in your mind before you ever swing.
It’s all complicated by the bunker design. Many of these fairway traps would be better described as trapdoors, with their tops even to the surrounding grades. Most modern course designers flare their bunkers into hillsides or manufactured inclines, giving the players visual clues as to where they should play and what they must avoid. Many of the fairway bunkers at the Lido, by contrast, are flat on the ground and often hidden beyond rolling terrain. It’s hard to stand there and know exactly where all the trouble waits because you can’t see half of it. If your caddie tells you to avoid an area, even if it appears safe from the tee, take that advice to heart. Flory pointed out that the best well-known example of similar bunkering is the Old Course at St. Andrews, where nasty traps often lurk just out of view.
Even those traps you can see aren’t necessarily easy to avoid, and many of the greenside bunkers in particular have fearsomely steep faces – nearly vertical and more than 8 feet high in some cases. Just the intimidating sight of such bunker faces will send some players wayward.
The trouble doesn’t end with the tee shots and bunkers. The waste areas and steep grassed banks surrounding many of these greens present incredibly difficult chips, pitches and blasts to elevated putting surfaces that feature beautiful tiers and ridges. From short and center of many greens, the flags are reasonably approachable to players with solid short games, but most attempts from pin-high or long grow exponentially more difficult. The more you challenge the course in an attempt at a low score, the more the course challenges you back.
So yes, the Lido is difficult. It’s also beautiful, fascinating and incredibly fun. It’s in no way impossible to play, so long as golfers think. As soon as a round ends, most players will want another shot at it to try different routes. A golfer could play it a dozen times and never replicate all the same routes.
Key examples are the fourth, a par-5 that offers a safer route to the left or a risky drive rightward to a small patch of fairway flanked by sandy waste areas. Players who pull off the riskier tee ball are rewarded with a reasonable chance to reach the green in two shots, but those who miss into the sand are faced with a tough second shot over water just to reach the safety of the main fairway.
The tee shot at the par-5 fourth of the Lido provides for a longer, safer route to fairway on the left or a tougher, longer carry to a small patch of fairway to the right that significantly shortens the hole. (Golfweek)
The par-4 11th is another great example of width providing options. Flanked by the 17th fairway to the left and the second fairway to the right, players have a choice of vectors over, around and short of a minefield of bunkers and scrub. In our first round together, Flory went well right off the tee while I fired one off to the left just to be obstinate. We both hit solid tee shots, and our golf balls finished 118 yards apart as measured by laser rangefinder. Flory’s line paid off with a birdie 3, his first on the Lido, while I made a 7.
There are plenty of such examples, especially as the wind and its directions changes. On the wide-open, treeless expanse upon which this Lido was built, the breezes tend to be stronger than at the resort’s other two existing courses, Mammoth Dunes by David McLay Kidd and the eponymous Sand Valley by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw.
We wanted to share some of the photos of our two days at the Lido. Keep scrolling for those, but first the answers to several frequent questions in the days after our trip:
The Lido is still growing in, and the course will not officially open until the summer of 2023.
The resort is allowing small groups of members to play nine-hole preview rounds now while the grass is still taking hold, but many of the bunkers do not yet have sand (as you will see in the photos below). It is still very much a work in progress.
The Lido will accept very limited resort play. It will be a private course operated by the resort, but don’t expect to just show up as a guest and play on a weekend. Details on how to obtain a round on the Lido are still forthcoming. Plan to stay at the resort for any chance, and book earlier as excitement about the Lido builds among golf architecture fans.
Golfweek will present plenty of more coverage on the Lido before it opens, including Flory’s take on how it all came together. We just want to provide a sneak peak on how it all looks and plays.
Red Sky offers private experiences to resort guests, and the rest of Colorado offers more great courses.
Looking for a chance to play two highly ranked private golf courses without paying an initiation fee and annual dues? Colorado might be your shot, as Red Sky Golf Club in Wolcott is for the most part a private club that allows resort guests to play its two courses on alternating days.
Red Sky’s Tom Fazio and Greg Norman courses are both in the top five layouts in Colorado on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for public-access courses in each state. Want to see how the rest of the state’s public courses shake out? Keep scrolling.
Golfweek’s Best offers many lists of course rankings, with the list of top public-access courses in each state among the most popular. All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.
(m): Modern course, built in or after 1960 (c): Classic course, built before 1960 Note: If there is a number in the parenthesis with the m or c, that indicates where that course ranks among Golfweek’s Best top 200 modern or classic courses.
