I don't know how this will turn out, but I am going to try to attach the entire Logan column.
Storied Merion turns back to move forward
By Joe Logan
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
We have not heard much about it. The folks at Merion Golf Club have been very quiet, seeking no publicity. But for more than a year, the East Course at Merion, one of the most respected and revered golf courses in the world, has been undergoing the most sweeping face-lift and restoration project in its storied 90-year history.
"Back to the future," is how Buddy Marucci, a Merion member and a top amateur on the national stage, recently described the restoration.
Once the project is completed early next month, Merion will have gone a long way toward taking the course back to the way it was in 1930, the year Bobby Jones completed the Grand Slam on the 11th hole at Merion, perhaps the greatest individual achievement in the history of the game.
Even without Jones' celebrated accomplishment, it was also a great time for the golf course.
"In 1930, the course was 18 years old, and it had reached a certain level of maturity," said Bill Greenwood, chairman of the five-member Green Committee, which includes Marucci, that is overseeing Merion's restoration. "But it was still very much the vision of [designer] Hugh Wilson."
Returning the course to circa 1930 has meant big changes. The greens have been enlarged and the fairways widened, and between 80 and 120 mature trees have been taken down. Each of Merion's 123 unique and beloved bunkers has been reshaped, replanted around its walls and edges, and reinforced.
In perhaps the starkest visual change, at the par-4 16th - Merion's famous "quarry hole," often hailed as one of the 18 greatest holes in all of golf - more than 30 towering trees that framed the right side of the quarry have been removed. The result is an entirely different look, as well as the renewed option to play the hole around the right side of the quarry.
If this were most any other golf course, few people beyond Merion's several hundred members would care about the changes. However, this is a virtual shrine, a sacred golfing ground, in a game obsessed with its history and traditions.
With the 2005 U.S. Amateur slated for Merion, Greenwood and the club realize that soon enough every golf magazine, golf historian, golf architect and golfer with any contacts at Merion will beat a path to Ardmore to see for themselves, assess, and no doubt second-guess every detail of the restoration.
Already, there is some criticism, and from a most modern-day source. On the Web site http://www.golfclubatlas.com/, a cyberspace hangout populated by passionate armchair architects, Greenwood has come under considerable fire, along with his committee, Merion in general, and even the architect (Tom Fazio) and construction company (McDonald & Co.) hired to do the work.
The Web site is a cacophony of voices. Some are reasoned, measured and knowledgeable, while others are uninformed and mean-spirited, punctuating their rants with personal attacks on Greenwood and Fazio. Regardless of the tone, the focus of the complaints is on what Merion has done to its bunkers.
In golf course architectural circles, Merion's bunkers have always been known as classics from the golden age of golf course design. Rather than having the neat, smooth edges so common today, Merion's bunkers were uneven, jagged, rough-hewn, seasoned around the edges with wild dune grass and Scottish Broom, the scruffy plant depicted in the club's logo. Worn and weathered by the years, the bunkers had a look, one might say, of a salty, craggy old sea captain's face.
The bunkers have come out of the restoration looking smoother, clean and modern.
They now look "rounded, puffy and upholstered," groaned one Internet critic, after someone posted pictures of the restored bunkers on the Web site. The critic said it was as if a "shiny chrome bumper had been attached to an antique car."
Another fan of Merion's old bunkers accused the club and Fazio on the Web site of nothing less than "act of vandalism" against the golf course.
At Merion, Greenwood and his committee members shake their heads in dismay over the criticism.
They believe they have done the right thing, the prudent thing, the thing necessary to maintain Merion for the next generation and to ensure that it remains among the elite courses in the world. And despite what the critics on the Internet say, Greenwood and the others are convinced that once the outside golf world sees the changes, the experts will agree.
"We are not architects and we are not golf pros," John Capers, a 50-year member at Merion, one of the club's top players and a member of the Green Committee, said recently. "But we know Merion's place in golf and in the game's history."
Capers, Greenwood and the rest of the Green Committee gathered recently to discuss the restoration publicly for the first time.
The restoration, it turns out, grew out of an earlier, smaller project in 1995, to recast the greens in order to get rid of an unwanted strain of poa annua grass.
It was during that project that Greenwood and his committee began examining old photos of the course. What they saw surprised them. Many of the greens, they could see, had been significantly larger years ago, in some cases 25 percent larger. As long as they were digging up the greens, why not take them back to their original sizes, thereby creating delicious new pin positions on several greens?
The improvements to the greens were such a hit with the members that Greenwood and the others began studying the old photos to see what other aspects of the course had changed over time.
First and foremost, they believed they could not ignore the fact that many of the bunkers were badly in need of work. The bunkers, many with steep walls, had begun to cave in, affecting not only the appearance of the bunkers but how they played. Several of the bunkers no longer drained properly, either. After even a moderate rain, they had to be pumped out. Something had to be done. Greenwood and his committee decided that for the sake of consistency, if they restored one bunker, they would have to restore them all.
The committee members could also see that several original bunkers were gone, while others had been added. Trees that had been planted in 1912 had been allowed to grow to the point that they obscured the sunlight from several greens, causing problems. One stand of trees between the 11th and 12th fairways had been planted apparently at the whim of a Green Committee 50 years ago, but nobody knew why. At the 16th, the quarry hole, birds dropping seeds had caused the entire right side of the hole to become dominated by about 30 mature trees. And why, wondered the committee members, had the fairways never been returned to their original widths after the 1971 U.S. Open?
By then, having gathered hundreds of old photos, Greenwood and the others had decided that a complete restoration of Merion was in order.
But to when? What era? What year?
There was no shortage of great eras and moments in the course's 90-year history. Was it at its best when Wilson, the designer, put the finishing touches on the course in 1912? In 1930, when Jones completed the Grand Slam? During Ben Hogan's win in the 1950 U.S. Open? Lee Trevino's victory in the 1971 Open? David Graham's triumph in the 1981 Open? In 1989, when Chris Patton claimed the U.S. Amateur title?
"That was the hard part, deciding on the year, determining when Merion was at its best," Capers said.
After weeks and weeks of discussion and debate, after consulting with the club's Traditions Committee, made up of former club presidents, and after meeting with the current board of Merion, they settled on 1930.
That year, they concluded, Merion was at its very best. Eighteen years after it had opened, the course was fully mature, yet none of the subsequent, unintended changes from man or nature had occurred. It was a time just before the Great Depression and World War II, a span during which even Merion was hard-pressed to keep up its meticulous maintenance of the course.
Once they had settled on 1930, anything that was not there the day that Bobby Jones won the Slam was subject to change. "The scariest part," Greenwood said, "was when you'd see a picture of something you liked from another era." Still, 1930 it was.
To do the physical work, Merion brought in Fazio, the Norristown native who is perhaps the biggest name in golf course architecture today. He was simultaneously redesigning Augusta National, home to the Masters, but he jumped at the invitation from Merion.
The selection of Fazio alone has been cause for howls from the critics on http://www.golfclubatlas.com/. He may be big, and he may be known for his sweeping, big-budget creations, but he is a modernist, in their eyes precisely the wrong man to touch up a classic old design like Merion.
Other observers, including Ron Whitten, the respected architecture critic for Golf Digest, had their doubts.
"Was Tom Fazio the right man to do the job? I don't know," Whitten said. "A lot of architects pay great lip service to restoring courses, but it's hard for them to supplant their egos and styles to some guy who has been dead for 50 years. I can tell you that I've never heard Tom Fazio say he had tried to restore a course."
Whitten, who has yet to see the changes in person, questions whether the work at Merion qualifies as a true restoration or more of a renovation, an updating.
"If you really want to take Merion back to 1930, you've got to shut off the water," he said, referring to the modern irrigation system. "Then you've got to put in bluegrass fairways, rye grass greens, and make people play the course with wooden-shafted clubs. You can't really turn back time."
At Merion, they shrug over such talk. "This was not a design project for Fazio," Marucci said. "We handed him the old pictures and said, 'This is what we want.' "
Restoration or renovation, Merion is quite happy with the result. Once the golf magazines snap their pictures for the world to see, once the course gets back to normal life, the world of golf will approve, they say.
"This is a work in progress," said Bill Iredale, chairman of Merion's Golf Committee.
Soon enough, the distinctive, scruffy Scottish Broom and dune grasses will be planted around the bunkers. They will look more as they used to. Time and Mother Nature will eventually smooth the edges of the bunkers. Iredale believes that even the Internet critics will eventually fall silent.
"That pressed and dry-cleaned look will be gone in a season or two," Iredale said. "The first bunker we did, over by the practice tee, is already beginning to lose the rounded look and show wear."
In the meantime, Iredale feels for Greenwood, the man who has volunteered so much time and work spearheading the project, only to get lambasted on the Internet.
"I'm convinced that someday, years from now," Iredale said, "Bill Greenwood's work will be appreciated, and his picture will be hanging in the clubhouse."
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Joe Logan's e-mail address is jlogan@phillynews.com.