Who did Bernardo write this about in obituary

[NAF]

He hated the too eloquent advocates of "fairness" holding that golfers must take the bitter with the sweet and that perfect justice would make for a dull and dreary game"

Guesses?

[Andy Hughes]

CBM

OT, but I have just began reading my first BDarwin book; what a treat!  Golf Between Two Wars (sorry, had the title wrong initially)

[A_Clay_Man]

Noel, I don't know who it was said about, but my first guess is Max B.

The interesting phenomina that is exactly what happened in GCA. Too many nursemaids for the hoy paloy.

[Sean_A]

Noel

My first guess would be Sir Alister.  I vaguely remember the dull and dreary bit as a quote.

Ciao

Sean

[BCrosby]

I recall the quote but don't recall who it was about.

CBM?

Bob

[ForkaB]

I'll vote for Braid.

[Bob_Huntley]

I'll vote for MacDonald.

[RJ_Daley]

I'll go with A.M., sir.

[Dan Kelly]

I'll vote for Behr -- because of the hatred for the "too eloquent."

[T_MacWood]

CB Macdonald

[NAF]

Indeed, it was CB Mac!

[TEPaul]

"He hated the too eloquent advocates of "fairness" holding that golfers must take the bitter with the sweet and that perfect justice would make for a dull and dreary game"

I guess that depended on whether or not he won the US Amateur, huh? C.B. was a thinker on a grander scale than most and why bother to take the bitter if you can browbeat the tournament committee into cancelling the entire tournament until you finally win it and take the sweet.  

[TEPaul]

I realize that there're some who subscibe to C.B.'s reasoning that the US Amateur should've been cancelled because the US Amateur needed a national association behind it to call it a national championship and that a single club couldn't do that. But one might then wonder why C.B. even bothered to enter a tournament being called a national championship if he didn't think it was one?  

[BCrosby]

Yes, the CBM quote drips with irony. From everything I've read about him, he sounds like a pompous, insufferable windbag.

Except that he was one helluva good architect.

Bob

[TEPaul]

Bob:

I don't know about you but I've always sort of felt that Macdonald wouldn't have been such a great architect if he wasn't such a pompous, curmudgeonly insufferable windbag! I think it definitely helps in creating good and gutsy architecture if an architect has the courage of his own convictions to such an extent that he's willing to punch out some yahoo to within an inch of his life at the bar of their club (Shinnecock) knowing the club might throw him out. And not just that but when they do throw him out to have the curmudgeonliness to steal the chef and the flagpole and take them over to his club next door! Boy, were those the days! You can't do good stuff like that anymore or someone will have you in court for violence, larceny, defamation of character or God knows what else!

How about disenheriting your son-in-law for bragging about being able to drive the 14th green and then going ahead and doing it? Or having a life-size bronze statue of yourself made and billing the membership? Or taking the suggestion of some member that a windmill would be nice, having it built, and then billing him for it? How about following the commenoration of the Macdonald gates running into them in his car on the way home looped out of his mind?

How could anyone not admire a man like this? He was bigger than life!  

[BCrosby]

Tom -

I think you are on to something big. You've hit on a theory of the evolution of gca that explains (almost) everything.

Marx had his dialectical materialism. Now we've got the alcoholic, bloviating curmudgeon theory. We'll call it the ABC Theory for short.

The ABC Theory states that if you are/were an architect and you aren't/weren't an alcoholic, bloviating curmudgeon, you weren't very good.

The facts speak for themselves. On the ABC side we have CBM, Flynn, MacK, Tillie, Behr, and Dick Wilson.

On the non-ABC side we have nice, respectable family guys like Fazio, Arthur Hills, Robinson, Nicklaus, Byrd, Maxwell and Cobb.

In short, if you aren't an ABC type, odds are you aren't a very good architect.  

I rest my case.

Bob

[Andy Hughes]

Bob, interesting.
I look forward to TDoak's self-appraisal