How The Lido became an instant must-play for golf junkies
Sand Valley's The Lido in Rome, Wis., opened last year.
Brandon Carter/Courtesy Sand Valley
GOLF recently released its latest ranking of the Top 100 Courses in the U.S. (2024-25), a list that includes 11 newcomers. Some of them you might know. Others you might not. Here, in our newcomer spotlights, we’ll introduce you to these rookie Top 100 gems.
Newcomer spotlight: The Lido / Rank: 30th
Location: Rome, Wis.
Type: Resort
Year opened: 2023
Architect: Tom Doak/Brian Schneider (C.B. Macdonald reincarnation)
What you need to know about The Lido
The Lido, on Long Island’s South Shore, opened for play in 1917, the work of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor. The course met an unkind fate in the 1940s, but not until luminaries like Bernard Darwin had lavished praise on it; Darwin said he thought Lido was the best course in the world “as a battlefield for giants.” Well! Some eight decades later Michael and Chris Keiser decided to recreate the course adjacent to their Sand Valley Resort. Key to the equation was Peter Flory, who open-sourced hundreds of vintage photos of the original Lido and fed them into a software program that modeled the new Lido as accurately as possible. The Keisers then hired Tom Doak and Brian Schneider (who spent more than 230 days on-site) to build the course. This process included the use of GPS bulldozers, though discretion by Doak and Schneider was certainly required in getting the green contours just right. The scale of the course, the depth of its hazards and the size of the greens, which average over 12,000 square feet, is dazzling. Almost all of the great template holes are represented, from the Alps 10th to the Redan 16th, making this course a strategic marvel. Panelist Clyde Johnson calls Lido the “ultimate IQ test for golf-course architecture.” One of America’s great designs is back!
What our raters say
“Much like the Old Course in St. Andrews, Lido cannot be successfully played without careful study and planning. Truly great courses require the player to think their way through the course. Options abound and must be carefully evaluated and sorted out.”
“The Lido is one of those science experiments that ended up curing mediocrity. It reincarnates the most difficult course in the world with some of the most outstanding features in golf, delivered in their most extreme iterations. The Lido hates golfers. All of them, regardless of handicap. That is its purpose in life. It is a journey to the center of the earth of American golf architecture. It was never a “lay of the land” course. The original scraped and piled sands in a manner meant to deliver what was then one of the toughest and most coveted courses in the U.S. It achieves all of that and more.”
“It has all of the Macdonald traits you would expect, but to actually play these versions of the Redan, Alps, Cape, Biarritz and particularly the magnificent Punchbowl 12th hole, you are in for a mind-blowing treat.”
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