ROME, WISCONSIN | I know from past trips to Bandon Dunes that a common topic of conversation over drinks and dinner is which course the golfers assembled like best. It is an amusing exercise that invariably leads to interesting and rather spirited discussions. And I especially enjoy how favorites change year-to-year and trip-to-trip, mine included. One time it is the eponymous course, the first ever built on that property. On another occasion it might be Pacific Dunes. And maybe Old Macdonald, the Sheep Ranch or Bandon Trails sneaks onto the top of the list.
On a recent visit to Sand Valley in this central Wisconsin burg, I checked out the newest additions to its golf menu: Sedge Valley and Lido. And that experience, coupled with a conversation I overheard in the Mammoth Bar here one evening, revealed a new sort of parlor game, one that has devotees of all the Keiser courses now asking one another which resort they prefer.
That’s because the addition of those two tracks, one of which is Tom Doak’s homage to the great heathland courses constructed around London, England, in the early 1900s, and the other a rendition by the architect of the mythical Lido layout that Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor built on the south shore of Long Island more than a century ago, has transformed Sand Valley from a good golf getaway to a great one. And the quality and variety of its courses rival what its highly acclaimed big brother in Bandon has to offer, even if they are half a continent away from the Pacific Ocean.
Established in 2017, Sand Valley is located on land that was once covered by a prehistoric lake. Sand runs more than 250 feet deep in many places, which means the property drains exceedingly well. That makes it a perfect place for golf.
The first course to open here, in May of that year, was an inland links called, appropriately, Sand Valley. It was designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw and routed across well-contoured terrain replete with stands of pines and oaks and waste areas featuring fingers of sand rippled by the wind.
In May 2018, Mammoth Dunes came on line. Created by David McLay Kidd and routed in and around a pair of monstrous sand ridges that form a big “V,” the track boasted some of the widest fairways imaginable and expansive greens tucked into natural bowls and perched on top of hills. Holes varied greatly in length, meaning that players often used every club in their bags during a round.
At that same time, Michael and Chris Keiser, who purchased the resort from their father, Mike, as initial construction began, unveiled another Coore & Crenshaw gem, in this case, a 17-hole, par-3 track called The Sandbox laid out on a restored prairie. The holes ranged in length from 40 to 140 yards, and a handful were templates, among them a Biarritz, a Double Plateau and a Redan.
The Keiser brothers, however, were not done, and at the start of the 2023 golf season, they officially opened the modern Lido after making it available for some preview play the previous summer and fall.
Another popular feature: the full-size canoes that the greens crew place around the course and fill with cans of craft beers and ice.
Together, those elements made Sand Valley a proper golf destination, and as the always-full tee sheets indicated, a popular one as well. But it was not yet on Bandon’s level.
The Keiser brothers, however, were not done, and at the start of the 2023 golf season, they officially opened the modern Lido after making it available for some preview play the previous summer and fall. An exacting re-creation of one of the most celebrated tracks from golf’s Golden Age – and one that had closed in 1942 after only 25 years of operation – it essentially allowed golfers to play a course that had ceased to exist before the vast majority of them had even been born.
The original Lido was a landfill project and regarded as a feat of engineering, with Raynor using some 2 million cubic yards of sand from the bottom of nearby Reynolds Channel in its construction. With characteristic immodesty, Macdonald declared that it was “the most daring experiment of golf course architecture ever conceived.”
That was indeed so, and the par-72 course was also considered an architectural triumph. And in addition to boasting the best-known template holes, it included several other designs of note, the most enthralling of which was called Channel. Inspired by the 16th at Littlestone Golf Club on England’s southeast coast, it consisted of a pair of alternate fairways (one of which was a kidney-shaped island surrounded by a man-made lagoon), two shots over water and a cross bunker some 50 yards in front of an elevated green.
Par at the new Lido also came in at 72, with the back tees measuring a tick more than 7,000 yards and the middle markers that most golfers play at 6,535.
As a rule, the Lido plays harder than the other tracks at Sand Valley. But that’s no surprise considering that Macdonald had wanted his course to be a serious test for even the best players. In order to be true to form, the modern version had to have plenty of bite as well.
“Lido is not my design,” Doak said. “We just built it [based on a scheme that Peter Flory, a course architecture hobbyist and technology pioneer, had painstakingly put together on his computer using historic maps, sketches and images]. The only thing we changed was adding a bit of spacing between some holes, so people didn’t get hurt out there.
“We built some extra bunkers for the same reason. And we put in a few more back tees, which is why this course measures some 400 yards longer than the original.”
Next up was Sedge Valley, with play formally commencing this past July. Laid out on hillier terrain, its most notable characteristics were its par (68) and length (5,829 yards from the tips). And the idea of building such a place at Sand Valley was born of the desires of Doak and the Keiser brothers to provide the same sort of golf experience of those somewhat diminutive and highly regarded heathland tracks outside London, such as Swinley Forest and Rye, both of which were crafted by the great Harry S. Colt.
“I have only wanted to do something like this for 40 years,” Doak said. “Ever since I got back to the States from my year in the United Kingdom [in 1982-83] and saw all those clubs with par-67 or par-68 courses that were 6,000 yards long. No one at those places cared what par is or how long the courses were because the holes were interesting and well-designed, and all they played was match play.”
As much as Doak hoped to create a layout like that, however, he was never able to find a client who shared his desire to do so.
“But then Michael Keiser called,” the architect said.
Keiser and his brother Chris had fallen hard for the idea after a 2015 trip that took them to many of the same London-area tracks Doak had visited decades ago, and for much the same reasons.
A collaboration soon ensued, and the result was Sedge Valley. The layout contains only one par-5 (No. 11), five par-3s and a dozen 4-pars (with four of those measuring more than 400 yards from the tips). Perhaps the most beguiling stretch is from the fifth through the eighth, which has three par-3s (running from 136 to 227 yards from the back markers) as well as a par-4 just 294 yards in length.
“My goal at Sedge Valley was to bring back a more intimate scale and build classically styled holes that everyone can enjoy but which may require some compromises from the long and wild hitters,” Doak said, adding that he enjoyed the process immensely.
“It’s very freeing when you do not have to force yourself to find distance for the sake of having distance. If you want to put together a series of short holes, as we did on the front nine, you can do that. And I could concentrate on finding the best green sites without worrying about how close together they were, because I did not have to worry about stretching the course to more than 7,000 yards.”
The Keiser brothers say they are thrilled with how Lido and Sedge Valley turned out.
“They’re pretty different, which was by design,” Chris said. “The goal was to create something great with each course and make them different at the same time, with really different visuals in what you see on each one and differences in how you have to play each one.”
“It was a lot of fun to build two courses in the same place and have them be so unalike.” – Tom Doak
For Doak, those dissimilarities made the projects especially enjoyable. “It was a lot of fun to build two courses in the same place and have them be so unalike,” he said.
And adding two distinctive tracks to an already formidable collection of layouts is what takes Sand Valley to new heights as a golf destination – and what is initiating a whole new type of discussion among golfers who have visited both Keiser properties.
“We’re really happy with how Lido and Sedge Valley turned out and the individual identity they each have,” Michael Keiser said.
“And we are pleased that’s the reaction we have received from our golfers,” Chris added. “I was on the first tee when we opened Sedge Valley on July 1st and met more than 100 people during the day. They said they loved the course and thought it was as fun as it was challenging, which was just what we wanted to hear.”
From start to finish, I found my first round on Sedge to be a rollicking good time. And I enjoyed the second one even more. Part of that was due to the bucolic setting, and also to how quiet it was throughout our walk. The bald eagle that soared overhead at one point added to the ambience, and so were the occasional sightings of deer browsing along the edges of some holes.
Then, there was the golf course. I appreciated the ample fairways and expansive greens, several of which featured tiers or humps that put a premium on lag putting. Some of the tees were long and snaky in shape, which presented different setup options. The stretch of shorties from Nos. 5 through 8, all of which I parred on the first day, were simply a gas. And the fact that I proceeded to bogey them all the following morning demonstrated that they were by no means cupcakes.
I also relished the split fairways that Doak employed on Nos. 4 and 17, both of which are longish, slightly uphill 4-pars that require accuracy and length on the tee shot as well as some clear thinking as to the best ways to approach the green.
Doak used that same feature on the 18th, which is only 318 yards from the back tees and modeled after another of his creations, the fourth hole at Barnbougle Dunes in the Australian island province of Tasmania. Go left off the tee and face a partially blind approach to an L-shaped green set in a massive dune. Or, take the route to the right, to a narrow fairway on top of a ridge that is more difficult to hit but leaves a more open shot in.
The use of a prominent rock outcropping on the par-3 15th made that 178-yard hole among the most appealing on Sedge. And I also enjoyed the plateau-like green on No. 12 and the way that Doak made 16 something of a Bottle hole by building a string of bunkers down the middle of the fairway.
In addition, I appreciated how the shorter walk on the shorter course was a little less taxing on my 68-year-old legs and made it easier to get in another 18 holes on the same day.
Which was exactly what I did with an afternoon game on Lido.
The Lido, which is the centerpiece of a members’ club that offers some resort guest access, could not be a more different course. It is bigger and brawnier. Much flatter, too, with only the occasional dune, and utterly devoid of trees. And the holes have quite a back story. Macdonald designed most of them, but others that were fashioned in one way or another by other Golden Age greats, such as Alister MacKenzie (No. 18, aka Home), Tom Simpson (the 15th, called Strategy) and the sixth (Raynor’s Prized Dogleg).
The sequencing works perfectly, like a brilliantly arranged record album, with the finishing holes Strategy, Redan, Long and Home serving as appropriate codas to the round.
Interestingly, the MacKenzie and Simpson holes were created for the course architect’s contest in Country Life magazine that Macdonald had conceived as a way of generating publicity for his new track.
I also appreciated that while the original Lido was a marvel of old-fashioned construction engineering by Raynor, the re-creation required some rather heady computer engineering by Flory, who somehow found ways to replicate every bunker position and every undulation in the greens and fairways on the modern edition of the track.
The design flows so easily, with each hole presenting its own unique challenge. The tiered green at the second (Plateau). The greenside bunkering on No. 3 (Eden), and the tough tee shot on the ninth (Leven). The sequencing works perfectly, like a brilliantly arranged record album, with the finishing holes Strategy, Redan, Long and Home serving as appropriate codas to the round. Even if one’s card is full of bogeys.
As for the singular sensation of playing this long-lost track, it feels like a form of time travel that allows golfers to pay a visit to the fabled Golden Age.
After playing Sedge and Lido, I cannot say definitively which one I liked best.
And choosing one resort over another is also not possible, though I can say without equivocation that Bandon Dunes and Sand Valley now stand on fairly equal ground.
Maybe the best way for me to respond to the question about which of those I prefer is best answered by my posing interrogative.
Can’t we do both?