In the grainy footage, shot a century ago, a nattily dressed man swings a hickory-shafted club with an easy, practiced motion.
The smooth mechanics aren’t surprising. Charles Blair Macdonald knew how to play the game.
The recently uncovered footage, discovered in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution by Mid Ocean Club member Rick Skelly, is believed to contain the only known moving images of the father of American golf architecture — playing the only course he designed outside the United States, no less.
Smithsonian Institution
“I was reviewing a longer film with classic 1920s Bermuda images when it suddenly switched to Mid Ocean and the 1st tee,” Skelly said in a press release. “I see this older gentleman take the club back, and immediately I think, ‘That’s C.B. Macdonald right there.’ I was blown away.”
The film is more than a historical curiosity. It also has become a research tool.
On Thursday, Mid Ocean announced that the design duo of Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner have been commissioned to restore the famed layout, which Macdonald completed in the early 1920s. As part of its work, Hanse’s team has studied the newly unearthed footage, along with other archival material, to help guide a restoration aimed at recapturing Macdonald’s original vision.
That vision includes the club’s celebrated par-4 5th, a dramatic Cape hole that doglegs around Mangrove Lake and which Hanse has called “one of the greatest holes in the world of golf.”
Hanse is no stranger to Macdonald’s work. His firm has restored several of the architect’s most celebrated designs, including Sleepy Hollow, The Creek and Yale, while also compiling an extensive portfolio of high-profile restoration projects at clubs such as Los Angeles Country Club, Seminole and Pinehurst No. 4.
“Ultimately our goal is to be faithful to Macdonald and restore his work,” Hanse said in a statement. “With the archival information and, ultimately, having a presence on site and being on the machinery myself, we will have an opportunity to get in the ground and faithfully restore what Macdonald and Raynor built on the property.”
Ranked among GOLF’s Top 100 Courses You Can Play, Mid Ocean is renowned for the variety of its challenge and the beauty of its views, moving from rugged oceanside cliffs to inland terrain before returning to the coastline, with template holes including the famed Cape 5th and Redan-inspired 17th. Macdonald himself was especially fond of the property, writing in his 1928 autobiography that there were “no more beautiful golfing vistas in the world” than those at National Golf Links of America, his most famous design — “unless it be those from The Mid Ocean Club in Bermuda.”
Those weren’t empty words. Though Macdonald summered at National (he was of a social class that used seasons as verbs), he wintered in a home overlooking the 5th hole at Mid Ocean every year until his death in 1939.
Hanse, too, has a personal connection to Mid Ocean. He first saw the course while on his honeymoon with his wife, Tracey, four decades ago.
