OK - try this one on for size - something I’ve not discussed with anyone before - not even faithful editor, Gib Papazian:
but first Macdonald:
“The fourth hole at the Lido I consider the finest two-shot hole in the world, but fully 90 percent of golfers will have to play it as a three-shot hole. I absorbed the idea from the sixteenth hole at the Littlestone Club, but the Littlestone Club never took advantage of the remarkable natural opportunity they had there for making a separate fairgreen among the dunes, where there was a perfect setting for it, a narrow width and 100 yards long, with a carry from the tee of 190 to 200 yards. Heaven knows when a player would get out of the rough if they didn’t make this narrow faigreen among the dunes, but once they did they had a wonderful driving iron or brassie shot to the green, which was on an eminence some fifteen to twenty feet above the fairway, with a deep bunker across the face of the green some forty yards from the hole.
The bunker at Littlestone was about fifteen feet deep.
The charm of this hole at Lido is accentuated b the lagoon which encircles the entire fairway and which must be carried off the tee and also carried in the approach to the green, the back of the lagoon being about eighty yards short of the centre of the green.”
The “Evangelist of Golf” - The Story of Charles Blair Macdonald (that imaginary book) has all the drawings and info you could ever want in the Lido section and greatly details this hole - drawings and all. Actually many thanks to Gil Hanse for describing and drawing the hole from the Littlestone Club history.
That small area of land out in the dunes was not used by the club but Macdonald’s saw it as an optional play - I mean this patch of solid non-dune area was out in the middle of no place toward the beach from the inverted "C”-shaped fairway of their hole.
There is a photo of the deep crossbunker in Aleck Bauer’s book Hazards which I have reproduced ion the Lido chapter as well.
According to Gil and especially the drawing in the Littlestone history, the green was set inside a group of dunes also so this was really hard to get to from any direction.
Now the Lido Channel hole: Macdonald Raynor pumped all this sand fill to a height of (what they said) of about 30-feet high for this alternate fairway and the “patch” of fairway was 30 wide X 100 yards long - sand barrens front, left and beyond and Reynold’s Channel on the right. You were there or dead but you could two-shot to the green from there but could never make two-shot from the “normal” fairway” - “normal” ? What a laugh! There was water off the tee-ball (you could drive thru the fairway) - water all along the left for two shots and on the right for all that distance, there was the ever-present off-fairway sand hills filled with sea-bents and eel grass. The third shot had to cross water (the lagoon again) and then the crossbunker to the green. Unfortunately they never described the green in all their writings.
All that said (and digested) - hope I described it well enuf) we have what I was originally thinking about ............ what I think is a great version of that Littlestone 16th / Lido Channel hole (4th).
I’ve been vacationing for more 20 years at Hilton Head and have about 50 rounds over the Harbour Town Links - this before the green fees went thru the roof.
I would like to discuss this with the eminent Pete Dye one day, whose work I admire, but to me the 18th at Harbour Town is, in fact, a version of the Channel hole - buuuuttttttttt with the optional fairway connected to the “C” shaped fairway that routes around the outside of the two indents of Calabogie Sound. Cut that first peninsula off from the mainland with a channel of water and you have the Channel hole.
Off the tee a diagonal carry to either the peninsula (the risky option) or play the safe right side (OB - houses on the right) and take the longer route - there is the requisite crossbunker and the greens sits there protected on three sides with a bailout to the right.
Before the advent of the hot ball / hot clubhead / hot shaft or whatever they allowed, eh 18th Harbour Town Links hole left you with a long club (for most humans) to the green, all carry - this assuming you could get your tee-ball to the peninsula.
Today, a lot of no-tour guys can get a short iron to that green but when I first played there everyone seemed to be left with 190 to 210 to the green after you blasted your drive.
I’d love to talk to Pete about that hole and get his thoughts about it. It may have been planned - it may have been the existing landform, but that is some kind of golf hole - one of my favorite hole on earth.
Remember Harbour Town in the early days? The pros were just about breaking par (and complaining) -then along came Big Jack and shoots a 64 one year and then it seemed the fear factor was gone.
Your thoughts?