Charles Blair Macdonald

So the Lido Prize was a competition first held by the British Country Life magazine in 1914, inviting sports enthusiasts to create a design for a golf hole.

And the competition sort of took its name from the Lido Golf Club to be constructed on Long Island, where the architect was Charles Blair MacDonald.

He was also the sponsor of the competition.

During the process of designing and planning the Lido course, MacDonald invited the Country Life readers and amateur architects to submit designs for inclusion in the Lido course.

And he wins.

Yeah, so that really shot him to fame.

I think a lot more people took notice of him and he's going to have the finishing hole at the Lido and he obviously pops onto CB McDonald's radar as a consequence of the winning entry and it's difficult to tell just how much cred that gave him both locally in golf design circles but also internationally.

Yeah, so you mentioned the judges for that competition.

who knew way more than he let on.

He was the guy who went over to Europe and did note-taking for Charles Blair MacDonald on all the great courses, and then Charles Blair MacDonald joined him on another trip.

But Emmett knew so much.

So Emmett has his golf course.

It would have taken him about three weeks to complete that part of the trip.

So yeah, we have been inspired in part by DJ Pi and his deep dives into CB MacDonald and Pete Dyer that he recorded earlier in the year.

If you haven't listened to those and you're an architecture buff, do yourself a favor and just go and listen to those.

They're multi-hour, two-part productions, but they're just fantastic deep dives.

Let's hear it.

Well, there's a guy named Charles Blair Macdonald, and he is the first person to call himself a golf architect.

Um, he had Scottish roots, but he was from Chicago, but he went back and studied at St. Andrews University in Scotland, so of course he played golf a lot.

And when he came back to Chicago, he was like, "Hey, man, let's get busy on turning Chicago into a world-class golf town," and he started designing courses.

He basically said that the players who placed first had cheated, like, really was a sore loser, so much so that St. Andrews and Yonkers and I think four other golf clubs at the time got together and were like, "We need to come up with a set of rules that can't be challenged or anything like that."

Yeah.

"None of this loosey-goosey stuff, because people like Charles Blair Macdonald are out there.

They exist.

Whether that be net or handicap, because I've seen up here in our club medals, you know, a 75, 76 win in the day because of the weather conditions.

and that's the essence of golf for me and that's why these great golf courses and architects back in the 1900s or late 1800s had a head start in everyone else because they had that education of the Scottish links and it's no surprise that You know, you had CB MacDonald and Seth Rayner and these people coming over to Scotland to North Berwick and Dornach and all these places to the old course, learning their trades and the circumstances of how wind and weather and direction, even down to where does the sun set, you know, because you build a hole that's straight into the setting sun.

that's no use as your final hole because you hit your best drive and lose the ball because you just never saw where it went.

So we could learn a lot.

What I found is I love Seth Rayner.

You know, Rayner moved the dirt from McDonald's at National.

You know, and he did a lot, you know, from Shore Acres in Chicago, or sorry, Shore Acres and Camargo.

Yep.