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. @golfweek pic.twitter.com/Jc2K7sl2W6
— Jason Lusk (@GolfweekJLu) September 9, 2022
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.
When you first started playing around with this concept on your computer, could you have imagined all this ever turning into a real golf course?
I knew that Mike Keiser Sr. had considered trying to replicate the Lido at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort (which Keiser founded) in the past. He made a very good decision to develop Old Macdonald (one of five traditional 18-hole layouts at the famous Oregon resort) instead and utilize the great contours that existed there already.
I had no clue that his sons, Michael Keiser Jr. and Chris Keiser, still had the idea in the back of their minds and were looking for a suitable site. So, the thought of the digital model spurring a real-world creation was not something that entered my mind during the process. My main goals were to play it on my simulator and to give people in the golf architecture community an understanding of what the course was really like.
How did you conduct your historical research?
This was primarily an old-fashioned research project, but it couldn’t have happened before the internet age. When I began the process, I decided to post my progress online on golfclubatlas.com (a forum for golf architecture). Doing so led to a lot of great discussion and critique on what I was doing, but it also triggered a barrage of inbound information from dozens of people who had unpublished photos, diagrams and other information on the original Lido.
I carefully mined every digitized golf periodical from 1914 to 1942, every newspaper article, and put in inquiries with historical societies and other archives. There were only a handful of publicly available images when I began, but by the end I had over 100 photos of the course including aerials, oblique aerials and ground-level photographs.
One of the most important developments was when Craig Disher (a golf and military photo historian) sent me something called an anaglyph, which is a stereoscopic image that can be viewed with traditional 3D glasses. He went to the National Archives and took high-resolution scans of overlapping aerial photographs of the Lido from a 1940 survey flight. By combining the images and color coding them, the resulting image allowed me to see the original course as if I were hovering 100 feet above it.
What other technology was involved?
Aside from the research, the other key to this project was having a tool to translate the research into a model. I not only needed something that would allow me to accurately lay the course out in 2D using aerials, but that would also let me sculpt the contours of the golf course and add the visual elements – grasses, sand, pins, buildings, et cetera.
Strangely, the most effective program for doing this was a video game that contained a golf design component. The real benefit to building a digital 3D model was that I could perform calculations and triangulate features. It even allowed me to identify several ground-level photographs of the course by aligning background landmarks, like the giant LIDO sign that was next to the property. The final stage of the digital modeling process was to match the digital course to every known photograph by panning to the same angle and tweaking each contour until the model looked identical.
Once the digital model was complete, there was an additional technical challenge, and more technology that proved useful. The digital model looked good, but it was trapped in a program that wasn’t designed to output grading plans. Brian Zager, a local tech ninja and golf nut, figured out a way to extract the data from the program by automating the measurement tool in the game to take a measurement every few inches and record the height. That process produced the grading plans that Tom Doak and his team needed to get started.
That same data was also used to program GPS bulldozers, which essentially 3D-printed a rough draft of the golf course onto the ground at the site before the finer shaping was conducted. Brian Zager proved so useful in the process that he is now working for Tom Doak.
What was it like working with the team at Sand Valley, Tom Doak and his Renaissance guys?
The best thing about Tom Doak, Brian Schneider and the others that were on the project was really the lack of ego, which is critical to a restoration project, I would say. There wasn’t a single person involved who wanted to do anything other than to replicate the original design. Nobody wanted to make it better or add their own ideas. If there were any disagreements during the process, they were centered around the evidence and they were resolved by scrutinizing data and photographs until Tom was satisfied that he was building something that was accurate.
During the actual construction phase, I viewed my role as information provider, and I got out of their way in the field. I would visit every few weeks just because I was so excited to see how it was coming along.
Was there a kind of breakthrough moment where you realized, this is actually happening?
I had about a year of on and off conversations with Tom Doak before I really knew that the project was a real possibility. He was trying to get a feel for how the technology worked and for how accurate the modeling was. At one point he said that he had a client who may be interested in building it, but he didn’t tell me who the client was.
The real breakthrough was when Andy Johnson (of the Fried Egg, which produces interesting golf content in multiple formats including in-depth video on course architecture) made the connection between what the Keiser brothers were trying to do and my research and modeling efforts. Michael Keiser Jr. had called Andy to get his thoughts on a potential Lido project, and Andy mentioned that I had been creating a digital version of the Lido. Andy then introduced me to Michael Jr. by email, and we agreed to meet.
I took my laptop up to Madison, gave Michael a tour through the model and explained the research. By the end of the meeting, he told me he wanted to build the course at Sand Valley and I offered to share everything that I had with him to help in the effort.
The only complication was that Tom Doak still needed to be convinced that the modeling was accurate enough to sign on to the project. That part took some more time, but after he saw all of the photographic information that had been assembled, he was convinced it would be a re-creation and not an interpretation.
You’ve played it several times now. What surprises you most about what’s on the ground versus what was in your digital game?
The scale in real life versus the digital environment was very striking the first few times that I saw the holes being formed on the site. In particular, the scale of the fourth hole (Channel) blew me away. Because of the split-fairway design and the risk/reward concept of the hole, I was afraid that modern distance inflation would spoil the strategy on the hole.
In the video game, it’s easy to drive the ball 320 yards and the hole played like a medium-length par 4 where you’d never elect to pursue the safe route down the left fairway. But in real life the hole still holds up as a par 5, and going for it in two is a serious decision to make.
Favorite hole?
My personal favorite hole is the 11th (Lagoon), but I don’t expect many other people to feel that way because of how intimidating it is off the tee. It was the last hole that I digitally modeled because I couldn’t figure out what C.B. Macdonald was going for. It wasn’t a template hole, and it was very abstract with a field of bunkers directly in the landing zone.
I eventually re-read something that Macdonald wrote about his concept for the hole, which was that he wanted to give the player a huge amount of discretion to pick the angle off the tee depending on the pin position and the wind direction. The fairway connects to the second fairway and the 17th fairway, and there is nearly 180 yards of width to pick the ideal path. The green complex is unlike anything that I’ve seen, and it calls for a running approach from the correct angle. In my opinion, it is the one hole on the course that is most like one that you’d find at the Old Course at St. Andrews.
Most surprising hole?
The 17th hole (Long) has surprised me the most. From the original tees, it is a 550-yard par 5 that is dead straight and somewhat narrow. It usually plays directly into the wind or into a quartering wind from right to left, so it plays longer than its yardage. There is a cross bunker that can be difficult to clear in two shots that represents Hell Bunker at the Old Course. So, I expected it to be a demanding hole, but not a likeable hole. However, my mind has been changed after playing it several times now.
It has a very different feel from the rest of the course and is unique because of the way that the hole sort of plays like a half pipe through the heart of the property, bordered on the left by the Alps hill and to the right by the raised 16th tee box. It also has one of the best greens on the course with a dramatic false front that forces you to get creative in order to get an approach close to the pin. Brian Schneider did an incredible job on the green complex. I now consider it to be one of the best holes on the course.
It’s a hard golf course, especially for having been built a century ago. What are your thoughts, especially as a hickory player, on how people of that era might have played it?
A key tenant in the planning and construction process was to retain the original tees so that the course could be played exactly as it would have been in 1918 (additional tees were added further back on certain holes where there was room). It is amazing that those 1918 tees, which measure nearly 6,700 yards, are still challenging enough to accommodate most golfers today.
While researching the course, I read hundreds of newspaper articles from 1918 through 1942 with many accounts of matches, notable shots and descriptions of tournaments. So I was very aware that the course was considered to be the longest and perhaps the most difficult course on the planet when it was built.
I believe that until the Metropolitan Open in 1922, the course record was still 77. In that tournament, which was considered to be a major tournament of the day, Marty O’Loughlin won with a score of 21 over par. Gene Sarazen was the reigning US Open Champion and I believe he shot 34 over par in the tournament.
What other historical courses do you have squirreled away, and do you think any of those could be reproduced?
I have a long list of no longer existing courses that are in various stages of digital restoration. There is an ever evolving list of them written on the whiteboard above my computer in my home office. Mill Road Farm, Overhills, Ocean Links, Olympia Fields Courses II and III, Melody Farms and the Illinois Golf Club are the furthest along, and there are dozens that I’d love to get to in the future.
However, I’ve gotten busy doing renderings for restoration projects on courses that still exist. On the most recent one, I paired with Josh Nezat –a very talented digital designer – to render Jay Blasi’s restoration proposal for Sharp Park Golf Course in San Francisco. That course in its original form was one of the great public courses in the country before storms forced them to add a sea wall which eliminated coastal golf holes and blocked the view of the Pacific Ocean. It can’t be restored to its original form because of the sea wall and an internal wetland, but the plan that we rendered is very exciting and it would be incredible if it happens.
