In his 1938 article, "The Evangelist of Golf," H.J. Whigham provided interesting insight which may or may not help explain C.B. Macdonald's comments about certain aspects of the Lido project. (As reprinted in George Bahto's book of the same name.)
Twenty years ago Pine Valley was the chief rival of the two outstanding Macdonald creations, the National and the Lido. And nothing would annoy Charlie Macdonald more than mentioning these three in the same breath. He always maintained Pine Valley was too difficult and had too many trees. He was probably right, for one of the cardinal points of his faith was that a good golfing hole should be equally interesting and playable for the duffer and the champion. He was indeed so jealous of the National's reputation that he even disliked listening to praise of his own Lido.
Here again he was right. For the National has bee much more than just good golf course: it has been an inspiration of every great course in this country, though plenty of them will not show a trace of the Macdonald style. . . .
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Sven, Note the hole distances on the map and in the article above are more in line with what we might expect of CBM. I think this is because of the way he designed and described his courses. He used a middle figure, not the tips figure. But still they (NGLA and Lido) were always longer than his mythical 6000 yards, except for his "short" tees. One thing to keep in mind is that when he made the 6000 yard comment, we were only a handful of years past the advent and popularization of the Haskell, and it may be that it took him a while to come to grips with just how much the added distance impacted the architecture. From the tips they both ended up being long courses for the time, especially the Lido.