A few weeks ago, I played the new Lido at Sand Valley and I believe it is an extraordinary achievement. I was stunned by the scale and beauty of the golf course.
In 1922, Bernard Darwin agreed, "The Lido is the work of Mr. CB Macdonald, the creator of the National, and besides having a genius for golfing architecture, he must have the imagination of a poet and a seer....The course is long and very difficult, but it is full of interest and never tricky or fantastic....There are one or two holes, as is usual with Mr. Macdonald's creations, which are modeled on - not slavishly copied from - famous holes at home. There is an Alps from Prestwick and a Redan from North Berwick..."
It made me wonder what would be the next lost course to re-create? I know some purists will say "none." But, if you had to select one, what would it be?
I would vote for Country Club of Detroit in its original configuration. Most don't realize how highly this course was thought of at the beginning of the Golden Age, but the memory of it has been obscured by WW2, the Depression, the 1918 pandemic, and WW1. Tony Gholz recently sent me a photo of the routing which appeared in the Detroit Free Press but I haven't yet figured out how to post photos.
In December 1913, A.W. Tillinghast reported on a conversation with the golfer he seemed to mostly highly esteem: Harry Vardon. "Vardon thinks that the courses in America cannot be compared with those in Great Britain. Probably, he says, the course at the National Club, at Detroit, is the best, while he puts that of the Mayfield Club, at Cleveland, second, with the Toronto course third."