Yolk with Doak 28: The Lido Club

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast and another episode of the Yoke with Doak.

00:00:08
Speaker 2: So we got some news.

00:00:09
Speaker 1: So Tom and I discussed the latest news, the latest project, one that any golf historian is going to romanticize about, dream about, and it sounds like it is going to be coming to fruition. So without further ado, let's get straight to the pod. I guess I said, without further ado. But if you haven't yet check out our website, go sign up for the newsletter. That's an easy way to support us. Get the newsletter. It's free, so it's not even putting money in our pocket. Sign up for the newsletter. Get your golf news from us. It's three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It's free and it'll keep you up to date with everything going on.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a.

00:00:59
Speaker 4: Frida Egg Frida Egg Friday Friday Bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the course.

00:01:32
Speaker 1: All right, So big news out of Wisconsin. You're going to be rebuilding the Lido course adjacent to the Sand Valley Resort. It will be a private club, but will allow public play from resort guests at Sand Valley. UH tell us about the Liedo Club, the Liedo project and rebuilding it in Wisconsin.

00:02:00
Speaker 3: Well, as you know, people have been talking about how what a shame it is that the lead the old Leedo on Long Island was lost, and g wouldn't it be great if somebody could rebuild something like that for.

00:02:16
Speaker 4: At least fifteen or twenty years, you know. That was sort of the genesis of Old McDonald. Was that George Boto, who wrote McDonald's biography, tried to sell my TUIs are on rebuilding the lido abandoned, you know, on the site for Old McDonald, And at some point Mike had me look at it and I said, well, you know, gee, this isn't really you know, you can't just take the footprint of that golf course and move it to Oregon. You know, so the site is not the same shape. There's a big ridge that you hit over now on the third hole. Lido didn't have something like that. You're not going to knock that all down.

00:03:04
Speaker 3: You know. The ocean is on the wrong side.

00:03:08
Speaker 4: At Leasta of the Beatrice to the south and that old McDonald the cliff is to the west, so you know, and that was just it was a it was a good piece of land and it just didn't make sense to try to turn it into something completely different. We've been a ton of work, but you know, Mike was clearly excited by the idea of doing a McDonald style golf course. He'd had all kinds of architects pitch all kinds of ideas to him, and he wasn't really comfortable with any of them because they were all about like changing the land around, and that wasn't what he'd done.

00:03:43
Speaker 3: With the end In Dunes or Pacific Dunes. So he never got comfortable with that until you know, when George started talking about a McDonald's style course, he was like, well, yeah, I love those.

00:03:56
Speaker 4: You know, I'm a member of too, and I love a national and if we could build something like that, I'd be okay. So so kind of what Georgia had really been proposing anyway, was to take the holes from the lido and put you know, try to fit them on the ground at in Oregon. And I said, well, that's really what McDonald did anytime you hired him to build a golf course. He had all these ideas and he just tried to see where they would fit on the ground. Just don't call it the Lido because you're not really you know, you're not building the whole golf course. You're just trying to build pieces of it like any other McDonald's.

00:04:32
Speaker 2: So, so what changed with Wisconsin.

00:04:35
Speaker 1: So obviously Wisconsin, you're not going to have an ocean, but you're not going.

00:04:39
Speaker 4: To have an ocean, and you know, and I wonder in the back of my mind, you know, the kaiser should know as well as anybody they have in an ocean next to your golf course is worth a lot of points on a ranking. So so that you know, the Lido having been the third ranked golf course in America at some point, I'm sure that had something to do with being right next.

00:04:58
Speaker 3: To the Atlanta Coach. We don't have that going forms.

00:05:03
Speaker 4: But on the other hand, you know, it's a relatively flat, really sandy site, so we can move the dirt around the same way they did.

00:05:12
Speaker 3: You know, the the.

00:05:15
Speaker 4: McDonald's leader on Long Island was an entirely created golf course. It was kind of a swampy flat site and they dredged the inland channel to get the film material to build it. But he built a model of what he wanted to build, and they took a bunch of elevations off it and then pumped all this fill into place. You know, they put like big wooden forms up to try to hauld the material in because it comes in really wet and like it wouldn't stay in place and make a big twenty foot now like they wanted to.

00:05:50
Speaker 3: So you know, they had some It was.

00:05:52
Speaker 4: It was a difficult project and there's been a fortune building but you know, one of the cool to that it was, I mean that almost that way more time working on the undulations of it because it didn't have any to start, and he realized that, you know, it needed to be like a links and it needed to have all these cool undulations in the fairway. So unlike Chicago Golf Club or most of the other courses he built that he just kind of used existing grade for fairways. He actually built all the contours that were there, and they were pretty elaborate from all the pictures.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he designed not only the golf course, but also he designed the topography that the golf course was laid on top of.

00:06:41
Speaker 4: Yeah, the whole landscape, you know, you know, a massive project for those days, you know, not completely, not way different than say what I did at the Raws Course twenty years ago, but that scale of construction, I mean, huge amount of phill and you know, and it had nothing to do with the existing site because there wasn't really anything there to work with. So from that perspective, you know, no one can really argue that we're doing the wrong thing by moving a lot of dirt to make it that way.

00:07:15
Speaker 3: That's how they made the.

00:07:16
Speaker 2: First one talk about that. I assume.

00:07:21
Speaker 1: One of the reasons I saw in Dream Golf that you didn't want to do the lido also was that that nobody had enough good information on the lido to build it like it had been.

00:07:35
Speaker 2: Something changed with.

00:07:36
Speaker 4: That absolutely, yeah, I mean, you know, fifteen twenty years ago. You know, I've seen hundreds of dozens and dozens of black and white photos of the old golf course from every angle, but not every hole, you know, and you know, aerials but areols don't give you any sense of the topography. And then yeah, I've seen I don't know what happened to the model. You know, there was a physical model that they worked off of, and I don't know whatever happened to that, but I've seen pictures of it.

00:08:12
Speaker 2: You know.

00:08:12
Speaker 4: It was just hard for me, based on the other stuff i'd seen to have an idea of.

00:08:17
Speaker 3: How close did they actually build it to the model?

00:08:20
Speaker 4: You know, because when we build a golf course, we don't follow the plants exactly usually, but in that case, you're gonna you're gonna do close, right, because you're you're having somebody pump all this dirt into place to build that feature. You're gonna leave most of those. You might change around a few and think when you get on the ground, now that doesn't look I need to change that, But most of it you went to all that trouble.

00:08:41
Speaker 3: So you're gonna keep.

00:08:44
Speaker 4: But so you know, I know several people on the fringes of the golf business that are always digging around and sending me more photos that they found somewhere else. But you know, like three or four years ago, a guy named Peter Flory, a gofer from Chicago who you know pretty well, started working on a like a computer game version of the lead Up, and he was pretty obsessive about it, and he just went and gathered every photo and every piece.

00:09:23
Speaker 3: Of data that he could possibly find. And you know, after obsessing about it for a while, he got some like light ar data of what it looked like.

00:09:31
Speaker 4: I don't know how, and you know, and he started using like every photo like okay, I'm standing here, and he could triangulate elevations of things.

00:09:43
Speaker 3: You know, he knew.

00:09:44
Speaker 4: Certain elevations of features and then he can start triangulating more off of that. So he did this very sophisticated looking computer game that you know, when you looked at the graphics, you thought, that looks pretty that looks pretty close. I mean, I don't see anything there that looks like gets clearly wrong or out of place. That's kind of a measey. And so Michael Kaiser's idea was to take that and use it as the basis for building the golfers. And you know, when I signed up for the deal, I was like, well, how are we going to get it out of the computer game?

00:10:26
Speaker 3: You know, I don't really you know, I went to MIT, but only for six months, so.

00:10:31
Speaker 4: So I don't have a clue about how in the world, you know what, how that all that data is stored and is it really stored in like does it really have elevations for all those points?

00:10:44
Speaker 3: Or is it's some computer?

00:10:46
Speaker 2: Is it like in a computer language?

00:10:48
Speaker 1: Like is it is it what we would recognize as like or is it like a code?

00:10:54
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's all zeros and ones and there's at some point, but but it is you know, it's based on a lot of data points of elevations that Peter had to figure out from doing everything that he could and then adjust if it didn't look right. So so when I signed up, I was like, I'm still not really sure. Am I going to have to draw a map of this thing just by looking at this computer game obsessively which would.

00:11:25
Speaker 3: Be really hard?

00:11:26
Speaker 4: Ye? Or is there going to be some way that we can spit out a map of this based up, you know, off the computer that looks like a grading plan that we could actually go build. And you know, I didn't know the answer until September or first of October, and somebody sent me a grading plan and you know, I can read the topa map, so you know, looking at the grading plan, I just it took me about five minutes of looking at it to think I don't know if this is perfect, but this is way better than I would have drawn the first time, you know, and you know, so so basically, they got a guy who does computer games to go back in there and you know, write some kind of bot program to pick out a million elevations from it, export those and you know, put it into CAD and make a three D plan grading plan for it, which is pretty crazy, you know. You know, I'm I'm very much low tech in my own designs. You know, most of the decisions we make, we go out in the field and make them, and I don't try to model stuff in advance on the computer and then go build it, because you know, I think the decisions are more efficient out in the field.

00:12:52
Speaker 3: But when you're starting from scratch on something like.

00:12:54
Speaker 4: This and you've got to put a bunch of dirt in place and get it right, if you can do it with that, that's way more efficient. And I'm just dying to see how good it is. I mean, you know, my eye on paper, it looks pretty good. When we get out there, I'm curious to see if it's really that great.

00:13:15
Speaker 3: You know.

00:13:15
Speaker 4: It's a one foot plan which is pretty detailed, more detailed than we would normally drop with that.

00:13:23
Speaker 1: You know, with this project, you're putting something back from like scratch versus you know, when you build a golf course, you're drawing out a plan, you're you know, you're in the field, you're working with the land, You're you're making edits as you go. I imagine this project is going to be a little bit different for you and your team and the fact that there is not going to be that much editing, right, it's way different.

00:13:48
Speaker 3: And yeah, I mean, you know, we're.

00:13:51
Speaker 4: Normally when we're in the field, we change our minds and we think, well, yeah, I could cut that green down, the back of that green down a little more and it would look better. And here we're not we're trying not to make those kinds of decisions. We really want to build the Leado the way the Leado was. But what we you know, what we the decisions we have to make are does that look right? Did the did all this computer information that we got produce something that really looks like that green should look or do we have to keep working on it to get it to what these pictures show and what I know about what McDonald would build. You know, so there's there's still judgment costs to be made. I mean, you know, nothing's precise, but it's it's a very very different process.

00:14:41
Speaker 2: With this just a bigger picture thing.

00:14:44
Speaker 1: And I've just jumped into my mind when you were talking about this, like when say, I just think you know something that popped into mind, like, oh, high value in club where they have these lost Thomas holes, right and they you know they have what would this process? Do you think this is a future process for restoration of holes that have been like completely lost where you know, the landscape's been changed the but we have old photos, old data that we could go back and build these types of models per se of these old holes and then replicate them more efficiently and you know, more precisely.

00:15:26
Speaker 4: Possibly, Yes, I mean I'll be able to answer that question a lot better.

00:15:30
Speaker 3: After we we spend in.

00:15:32
Speaker 4: The next few months working on the lido. But yeah, if you know, Peter and Florie would probably be better person to answer that question than me. But you know, I think it all comes down to, you know, how much data do you have on what the old holes were?

00:15:48
Speaker 3: Like?

00:15:49
Speaker 4: You know, he was able to collect an awful lot about the Leado because it was a famous old golf course, and people took a ton of pictures of it, and there was that model to work from too, and assuming that the model was pretty close to the finished product that they built, so you wouldn't have for OHI.

00:16:06
Speaker 3: You wouldn't have a model.

00:16:07
Speaker 4: But on the other hand, they probably didn't tear up the land all that much when they when they when they built the golf course, changed those holes, so you've got you know, you've got a lot to work with there. You know, like a lot of times some of the old golf courses that I've done restoration work on, you know, if they were if they were taking the easy route, they just brought pill in and built a new new golf hole over.

00:16:35
Speaker 3: The top of the old and then it's like archaeology. You just dig through all the old fill and take it away and the old green is really still down there. I've had that happened a number of times, and I'm always kind of shocked when I see it. That's like, you know, they didn't really do any you know, they didn't tear up the old hole at all, They just buried it.

00:16:55
Speaker 1: I remember when I was out at bel Air one of the days you guys were doing construction and that day Kai found that that old bunker on four at bel Air and he was just digging around and he's like, oh, yeah, I found the bunker and it's just like he just plopped a bunch of dirt on top of it.

00:17:12
Speaker 3: M Yeah.

00:17:14
Speaker 4: And you know, in the fifties and sixties especially, that was kind of the easy way to do things.

00:17:20
Speaker 3: You could.

00:17:21
Speaker 4: You know, everybody's building houses everywhere and it wasn't too hard to get some contractor to bring you phil if you needed it. So a lot of the plans they drew were just, yeah, just truck in fill and build new features.

00:17:33
Speaker 3: Over the top of the old.

00:17:36
Speaker 1: With this project, McDonald talked about how much of earth moving work was that you alluded to that earlier, with you know, basically creating a site. I imagine this is a massive earthwork project for you guys on your end in comparison to most of your work.

00:17:55
Speaker 4: Well, it is Craig Haltam, who is you know who found the land for Sam Valley originally, and you know works for Oliphant Construction. Those guys are doing it. You know, they're staking out and grading everything. So by the time I get there, like you know, this is we're talking on the fifth of January, and the fourth and twelfth halls are already mostly built. They've got that big lake dug out, and they've put dirt in place on those two halls so far and a couple other halls that the lake isn't as deep as it's going to be at. But you know, they're just like doing big excavations in certain places that were at the lower end of the golf course, especially the big pond, and then you know, putting fill in place to try to hit the grading plan that we've got. So by the time I see it, there's going to be a few holes mostly there, and you know, and you know, there'll either be almost.

00:18:53
Speaker 3: No shaping work to do or there'll be quite a bit.

00:18:56
Speaker 4: You know. That's that's when the river meets the road and we find out how hard this is enemy to finish off.

00:19:01
Speaker 1: So you'll first start doing shaping work in the spring of twenty twenty one.

00:19:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably about the first in April.

00:19:09
Speaker 2: That's exciting, you know.

00:19:11
Speaker 3: Whenever the snow gets out of the way.

00:19:13
Speaker 4: I mean, the construction schedule will be you can plant grass there starting about the first. You can plan for grass from about the first of June to the first of September.

00:19:23
Speaker 3: So we want a couple of golf halls ready to plant grass in the first of June. So we have to start shaping in April, put in the irrigation, and do all the finished work in May.

00:19:33
Speaker 4: And plan on the first of June, and then just keep going on that time on that same piece.

00:19:39
Speaker 1: You know, I think it would be probably for listeners that don't know a ton about Liedo, it would be good to do some history on Liedo. You know, we've talked a little bit about about some of it. But you know, how did the lido come about? You know, where was it in the McDonald timeline? And you know, obviously he was a cantankerous fellow CB and you know what got him to do this project because he didn't always do a lot of projects.

00:20:09
Speaker 4: No, he only did I mean, he only has a dozen courses with his name on it. And and Leda was somewhere in the middle of that. I mean, I think it opened for play in nineteen eighteen, so it was a big development project. I mean at that point there was you know, now everything around there is nothing but homes, but but back then that whole south shore of Long Island, the little Barrier Strip where it is, was pretty bleak and open and there wasn't anything there. So it was a development company that wanted him to do the golf course so that you know, there would be a bunch of homes in the area, not not like a typical development in the States now where the homes right up against every fairway. You know, it was it was just a golf It was a core golf course, but you know they're gonna.

00:21:06
Speaker 3: Be tons of homes to the side, so.

00:21:11
Speaker 4: You know, and he wasn't that keen on doing that. And the way they hooked him into it was by telling him, you can build anything you want here. You know, we're just gonna put We'll pump as much dirt as we need to pump. You can build those template halls exactly the way you want. You don't have to deal with with the he'll not be in high enough. You know, you can make whatever you want to make. And you know that appealed to his ego. So eventually they convinced him to do it, and it was really you know, they.

00:21:42
Speaker 3: Started in like nineteen fourteen or fifteen.

00:21:45
Speaker 4: And one of the reasons the golf course is so famous in addition to the fact that it was pretty well regarded when it got done. But one of the reasons it's so famous is, I don't know whose idea it was, probably the developer to have a contest to build to design a hole for the lead up, and they ran it in country Life, the British magazine kind of an upper crust magazine. And you know, that's the competition that Alistair McKenzie won, that kind of got helped make his name as a designer when he was still a doctor who'd only built one golf.

00:22:23
Speaker 3: Course on his own.

00:22:26
Speaker 1: And that's the origins of the Lido competition, which golf died just still runs.

00:22:31
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, they called it the League, don't I don't remember that. I don't remember what they called the competition. I don't think they called it the Leado competition then. But it was to design the finishing hole for this great golf course that they were going to move heaven and earth to build, so you could design anything you wanted, and there weren't, you know, as opposed to the the golf digest competitions now where there are tens of thousands of entries. I think the original Ledo competition country Life had about sixty.

00:23:06
Speaker 3: And you know, and some of them were.

00:23:10
Speaker 4: Some of them were, you know, people on golf, famous people on golf, and some of them were a complete amateur enthusiasts like you would get today. In fact, three not just McKenzie's hall that they turned into the eighteenth hall, but three of the holes at the Leado were based on entries to that competition. One was a hall that Tom Simpson drew that was kind of that they featured. So they had three articles about the competition when it ran. First was Mackenzie's, second was the two runners up, which were by two English guys who were just amateur designers.

00:23:56
Speaker 3: And then the.

00:23:57
Speaker 4: Third was they had a couple of drawings submitted by other famous architects or golfers. And one of them and again this is Tom Simpson before he had designed very many golf courses, but you know, he did a drawing that McDonald apparently liked enough that they used it for the fifteenth hall at Leta. And one of the two runners up was was a long dog leg part four with a bunch of mounds and cross bunkers and stuff, and that was the sixth Hall and that that was the origin of there's there was a hole that Seth Rayner built three or four times on some of his own golf courses. That at a project he built in Newport. It was called Rainers Prize dog Leg. But what that meant was that was a hole from the Ledo competition. The Rainer really liked and decided they built it at Leada. Like hell, he built it on some of his other golf courses too.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, Bluebound the tedhle A Blue Mound is one of those. I think I remember that. I think that's the right length. That's a crazy green there, that is crazy.

00:25:17
Speaker 4: So so you know, so there's there's a whole bunch of publicity leading into the thing because of all this, and then you know, they go ahead and start building the golf course, and the plan was everything in the writing says that they use two million cubit cards to fill and you know, I've I know enough about earth moving to know that.

00:25:40
Speaker 3: Would make some huge features.

00:25:42
Speaker 4: And when I saw Peter's model, the one thing I questioned about it was it doesn't look like I assume the features would be bigger if they really moved two million yards, and he said, you know, I think they just had to use a lot just to get the thing out from being ader water and getting it up to where it was dry ground.

00:26:05
Speaker 3: And that made all the sense in the world. I mean, if all you have to do is put like another let me think about it, five feet six feet of phil over one hundred and fifty acres and that's a million cubic yards of dirt right there.

00:26:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, that's I found it funny at George Boto's book The Evangelist that McDonald had agreed to the to design the project, allegedly, you know, before ever seeing the site. And then he got to the site I was really upset about because it was just a swappy lagod you know. And uh, and he was trying to back out of the deal, and they were like, well, you gave us your word that you would do it, so like kind of roped him back in and they assured him that he could spend as much money as he wanted.

00:26:52
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I could see the same thing. Somebody. Somebody emailed me about a landfill project the other day, So I might get to have that experience someday, you know, at least we don't have to deal with that in Wisconsin. You know, we're starting from a good stand beause and sand there is deeper than anything. You know, that site had maybe ten or twelve feet of elevation change on it, just gentle ups and downs and stuff.

00:27:20
Speaker 4: So it wouldn't have been a bad site for golf the way it was, except it was totally covered by trees. So the first step is get rid of all that and all the roots and debris underneath. That's a ton of work right there, And.

00:27:34
Speaker 2: That's an important point.

00:27:36
Speaker 1: Is like one of the reasons Old MacDonald didn't work for it was that the land was so good for golf itself. Like this is an example of almost more of a blank canvas where you could where you would feel comfortable creating it, right.

00:27:51
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, so, I mean the site wasn't completely flat, but it didn't have a lot of features that you think. You know, that's that's it's not nearly as good a site as the stuff across the road at Sand Valley, which is just more dramatic in the scale of it's probably three times as big.

00:28:10
Speaker 1: How was Ledo different outside of obviously the design competition holes, How is it a different feel from McDonald's most famous course to National Golf Links, well.

00:28:24
Speaker 4: Nationals kind of a big golf course stretched out on a line more or less that you're playing out and back in a big quarter.

00:28:32
Speaker 3: And Leda was a very compact eighteen.

00:28:36
Speaker 4: Holes with a bunch of holes running north and south parallel to each other and really close together.

00:28:41
Speaker 3: You know, the one thing.

00:28:44
Speaker 4: In an ideal world, I'd have just built exactly what they had at Liedo. But it was only on one hundred and fifteen acres and a lot of the fairways were so close together that, you know, people be hitting golf balls onto other halls all day and night.

00:29:00
Speaker 3: If we built it that way today, that probably had something to.

00:29:04
Speaker 4: Do with it not lasting until today because it was you know, there are several holes on it that are just like you can't.

00:29:14
Speaker 3: Can't do that.

00:29:16
Speaker 4: You know. We got to space it out a little bit and leave more room. Now we're not trying to you know, that's all for safety.

00:29:24
Speaker 3: We weren't. We aren't trying to change it to make it longer.

00:29:27
Speaker 4: But by the same token, when you create more space, you also do leave some opportunities to make it longer. So so the finished product we will have. You know, you'll be able to tee off from exactly the same length and play exactly the same hole that McDonald built in nineteen eighteen.

00:29:46
Speaker 2: Like bunkers, all in the exact same spot.

00:29:49
Speaker 4: Yes, but there will be some some more choices of tease now than there were. That that's the that's really the only difference. And you have a little more our root, you know where we where we space the holes wider apart Like in the on the original golf course, if you sliced off the seventeenth t, you'd you'd hit it onto sixteen T or even over sixteen T toward fifteen green, and it was just like, no, that's way too close. So so we space that out wider and it's you know, it'll take a pretty wild slice to get over there now. But instead, you know, so now there's just a there'll be a big mound where sixteen tea was as you play seventeen, so you'll still you know, if you hit it over there right, you're still on the side of a hill or up on top of a hill or something. It'll just you won't be hitting somebody on the other tee.

00:30:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, what were the most famous holes at Ledo.

00:30:52
Speaker 3: Well, the eighteenth hole Mackenzie's hole. They did.

00:30:57
Speaker 4: They didn't build it exactly like a plan in country life. They simplified it a little bit. Because his original hall was like four hundred feet wide and had five routes to play it. They kind of squished it down to three. But you know, those carry distances are all the way he had them. You know, it's a pretty interesting golf hole, and obviously that had a lot of advanced publicity to it. You know. Other than that and the other two holes from the contest that I named, you have a lot of the typical McDonald template holes, including you know, for the alpstole, they built a hill that was like twenty five feet high, you know, to play over or around. And then, by far the other most famous hole on the golf course was the fourth hole, part five, that played along the north end of the golf course, so that the ocean was on the south and then the golf course went completely across the little barrier strip.

00:32:00
Speaker 3: It had a road. It actually had a road through the middle.

00:32:03
Speaker 4: Of it from east to west, which is another reason it didn't last forever.

00:32:07
Speaker 2: Because that would be creating the road.

00:32:11
Speaker 3: I'll get to that in a minute. But you know the road today.

00:32:15
Speaker 4: You know, you would hit over the road four times, and that just wouldn't you know.

00:32:18
Speaker 3: It's a busy, busy town now that there's no way in hell that would work.

00:32:22
Speaker 4: So that would be a big problem if if you tried to if the golf course existed today. But so the channel hole was at the north end of the site, which bordered on Reynolds Channel, which is kind of part of the inner Coastal waterway system.

00:32:39
Speaker 3: You know, you can take just like Florida.

00:32:41
Speaker 4: You can take a small boat through the channel and avoid all the waves on the ocean as you work your way out east. So the channel was quarter mile half a mile across before you get to the mean mean body of Long Island, pretty big body of water, and the channel hole was a part five that you could either dog leg inland and play it a lot longer and play it like a three shot hole, or go straight for the green, you know, in which case you had to carry out like more than two hundred yards to a little island fairway sitting up in the dunes, and if you slice it right, you were in the channel and then from there over water to a really high green, you know, just and you know, kind of like a pine valley hole except a small landing area. You know, it was built so it was a real risk. You know, if you went for the island to take the short cut and you missed it, it was rough enough that you probably couldn't get over the water with your second shot. You know, you'd just be playing a wedge back up onto the fairway that you were trying to hit and still have two hundred yards to go.

00:33:56
Speaker 3: So you're taking a real risk to go that way.

00:34:00
Speaker 1: That's yeah, that it made me remind It reminds me of that that famous Myrtle Beach hole that it's got, that island of fairway in the middle of big lake water. That's just like what I started to think of, you know what I'm talking about.

00:34:18
Speaker 4: And I'm not sure which all you mean there, but you know, I think the cool thing about it is, you know, there's been a ton of holes built like that in the last fifty years, with alternate fairways and everything else, but there's very few of them that the long hitter really pays.

00:34:35
Speaker 3: Much penalty for going for it.

00:34:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, unless it's just watered everywhere, they're still gonna you know, be able. You know, it's you're letting the long hitter take a shorter route.

00:34:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes the way.

00:34:49
Speaker 3: Easier for them.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: And if it's in like a bunker and they're you know, one hundred yards closer, they're like, okay, you know, right right.

00:34:57
Speaker 4: So you know, on most of most holes like that, you don't see too many people take them the long way.

00:35:04
Speaker 3: At the Lido, I think most people did take the.

00:35:07
Speaker 4: Long way, and that's you know, that's one of the things that the technology and how much farther people hit it now really changes the equations. You know, it was only the big carry in nineteen eighteen was two hundred yards off the team to a narrow fairway which was thirty yards wide, which is normal for now. Yeah, you know, so it's going to have to be pretty severe around it.

00:35:39
Speaker 3: But but you know, if you play it from the historic tea, it's going to be kind of a three way layup hole for a good player. And then five six hundred of the green or something like that. So that is one place we've stretched out.

00:35:55
Speaker 4: Well, you know, so space and all the holes, you know, most of the whole run parallel north and the south, so spacing them out more means that the third green gets farther away from the fourth green, which is playing east to last along the top. So yeah, we have plenty more room to build a tee further back and make it a two hundred and fifty or sixty yard carry to that fairway, where the really long players now will still feel like they're taking the same risk.

00:36:25
Speaker 3: That they had to back in the day. What.

00:36:28
Speaker 1: I guess this is a question, you know, with Leedo, what's Golf's like a lure fascination with golf courses that no longer exist.

00:36:39
Speaker 2: I fall into this bucket.

00:36:40
Speaker 1: Why are we crazy about golf courses and always stream about golf courses that don't exist?

00:36:45
Speaker 3: Likelydo I'm not sure, you know.

00:36:51
Speaker 4: I mean I've had two or three of my own golf courses go away, and you know, one of them was really close to my and I do miss it, and it's like, God, I.

00:37:02
Speaker 3: Wish I could go back and play that again. You know, that's a shame.

00:37:06
Speaker 4: But you know, I think there's certainly a few that were like you know, like Leedo, that were thought of as great golf courses back in the day, or you read somebody like Bernard Darwin writing about an old golf course and think, Wow, that must have been awesome. I wish I could see something like.

00:37:26
Speaker 3: That now, but I'm not sure why.

00:37:29
Speaker 4: I mean, it does seem like there's a ton of people that are really fascinated by this story, and I'm not sure what the hook is.

00:37:37
Speaker 3: I'm honestly not sure.

00:37:39
Speaker 4: And by the same token, I know a lot of people that are like, yeah, you know, I don't care about that story at all, and that's fine. You know, if we didn't think it was a good golf course on its own merits, you wouldn't be built.

00:37:51
Speaker 3: You're not just building it for the people that are really hooked into the story. Yeah, there's not enough of that.

00:37:56
Speaker 4: Maybe there are, you know this, I mean, it is a private club. If there's three hundred members that really want that, that's all you really need. But at the end of the day, we think, no, it was a great golf course too, So people are gonna like it because of that, regardless of whether they know anything about the Leado, just the same as all McDonald. It's like there's a lot of people that don't care about McDonald directly, but they like those golf hols.

00:38:25
Speaker 1: Are there any other no longer exists course existing courses that really interest you outside of your out like from the Golden Age, say, uh.

00:38:42
Speaker 4: There's a few, you know. You know, I don't obsess about themselves. So some of the ones that I've heard about, like the old the old Mill Road farm course in Chicago that was supposedly one of Flynn's best courses, I just I haven't really spent enough time looking at.

00:39:00
Speaker 3: My cousins of that to know.

00:39:02
Speaker 1: My cousin's backyard is on that golf course. Wow, which I'm not passive, but I think one of his neighbors has like a bunker in the backyard.

00:39:12
Speaker 3: H So you know, I just don't. I don't know enough about a lot of those, you know. The one that.

00:39:20
Speaker 4: Of all the ones that I read about, the one, the one that fascinates me the most is Darwin's description of Blackheath, the old course in London, the way they played it back in the eighteen hundreds, in the early nineteen hundreds, it was only seven holes, and you know it's it's like in the city of Greenwich, which is a big suburb of London. Now if you know, the land is still there and most of it's a park, but you'd be like hitting it through people and over cars and everything, so you can't really do it anymore.

00:39:56
Speaker 3: And it's not nearly as rough and rugged. But in the day it was.

00:40:01
Speaker 4: It was only seven holes, and two of them were really long holes, like you know, I mean the equipment pack then you could only hit it like one hundred and eighty yards maybe, but the way he describes one of them, it was probably a par six, and you know, in another hole right after it, that was a par five that was still really hard to get to in three with the equipment that they had back in the dead, and it just, you know it, it sounds it just sounds like such a different game. Yeah, be able to you know, to be able to play a golf course. It's that rugged with that kind of equipment, and you know, you can't reproduce it now. I mean, you know, good players hitting the three wood is not hard for them off the fairway. They can just rip it to ninety all day now, And it's like that was really hard to do one hundred years ago. Nobody could. Nobody could play those kinds of shit consistently. So having a hole that yet, did you have three times in a row was a real challenge.

00:41:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a golf course.

00:41:10
Speaker 1: Didn't a lot of the seaside links, traditionalist kind of you know, pooh pooh Blackheath. Wasn't that the like the golf WoT work outside the sea because of how muddy it was there or something.

00:41:24
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:41:24
Speaker 3: I don't think it had the reputation of being muddy.

00:41:27
Speaker 4: I mean it was in general that was the That was the feeling about inland golf was just out.

00:41:33
Speaker 3: The condition suck and it's just it's not golf.

00:41:36
Speaker 4: But that was kind of like a very hard scrabble place, but it was it was fairly highly regarded and it was just hard.

00:41:43
Speaker 3: You know, it was a hard golf course.

00:41:45
Speaker 4: It was seven holes, so you played it three times around to have a round of golf was twenty one holes and you know the standard for good players was breaking a hundred in twenty one all so, you know, averaging a little less than five.

00:42:05
Speaker 3: Was really good.

00:42:08
Speaker 2: So, well, how is how the games changed from Blackeith?

00:42:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, so with Leedo are there, what's you know, what would be your biggest concern? And I guess, uh, you know, is there is there one aspect of it that you're most excited for, outside of the fact that people won't be talking about rebuilding Lido anymore.

00:42:32
Speaker 4: Uh, I'm just really curious to see it come out of the ground and see if it see how close it looks to what I've visualized that it was, you know, because I you know, I wasn't really even part of that process so much. You know, I'm gonna have to take it from there and get across the finish line. But but I'm just dying to see, you know, have a first look at a few holes and see how close they look to what I've always imagined.

00:43:01
Speaker 3: That thing look like.

00:43:02
Speaker 1: I bet that's one of the coolest things about design of the course, is like when you first start to like really see it coming to life.

00:43:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you know, for me, it's like the cliche most people have about golf course architecture is that it's all built to my vision. Like I could have just painted every hole exactly what it was going to look like, and that's not how I work. You know, It's it's like it's a process, and you keep working on the whole and making it better, and you you know, you you see, you see the whole evolve and and you you make it. You take advantage of those things to make it look better and make it look prettier, and you move the t so it aims at something particular and and you know, I don't have that.

00:43:55
Speaker 3: All figured out in advance. I don't really think any other architect does either.

00:43:59
Speaker 4: You know, I think that's just a myth that everybody plays along to because we like people.

00:44:06
Speaker 3: Thinking that we're geniuses.

00:44:07
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's in fact, it's a lot of hard work to get there and so so, and that's the fun part is just you know that the thing keeps evolving and you keep making it better as you go. And here it's it's like, I'm not even there right now. For the process of getting the first half of the first hopefully eighty or ninety percent of it done, you know, that's just taking a plan and building it back to as close as we could draw to what the finished product is. And you know, now we'll have a look at it and see what there what else there is to do.

00:44:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's cool, it's gonna be it's gonna be exciting.

00:44:49
Speaker 1: We'll finally get to know where where a representive close of very as accurate as you could get representation of Leada without Notion stacks up with everything else.

00:45:02
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean personally, I'm you know, I'm not attached at all to what the ranking of it will be. It's just like you know, for me, the goal is to get the reproduction just spot on to what it should be, and that'll be an interesting goal.

00:45:22
Speaker 1: All right, Well, we'll check in over the next couple of years with this. This is an exciting new project.

00:45:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, hopefully by summer we'll have an idea of how it's going.

00:45:33
Speaker 4: We won't get all the whole finish this year, but we'll get a lot done.