What did the "Classic or Golden Age" architects do all the time ...

[BCrosby]

Pat -

Fazio has built or redesigned five or six courses in the Atlanta metro area. Nicklaus, Rees and Cupp have also done several.

Fazio has also designed two courses within 4 miles of each other in Cashiers, NC. Ditto for Sea Island. Ditto for Rees at Sea Island.

Fazio and Dye have each built multiple courses in the Hilton Head area. There are at least two Fazio courses in the Naples area. Nicklaus has two (or more?) in Naples and Birmingham, AL.

Maybe things are different in the NE, but down this way architects have few qualms about competing against their former employers.

Bob

[wsmorrison]

There is some evidence that one of the reasons that the Country Club of York chose Ross over Flynn (circa 1925) is that their rival club, Lancaster Country Club, was a Flynn and they did not want the same designer.  It seems that the houses of Lancaster and York were rivals in this country as well  

[Jeff_Brauer]

I think its the "signature aspect" of the firms you are thinking of that wasn't as present in the Golden Age.  At one time, and I may be wrong, JN contracts stated he wouldn't do another course within X miles or years to guarantee the value of his signature.  As he got busier, he realized the folly of that and stopped that clause.

Travel made most golf architecture regional in those days.  Besides the practical aspects of a close gca, travel and a smaller game made the original golf circles quite small. Its possible that Tillie attended every golf related event in the NY metro area and had a better chance of selling every course design than any competitor.  Now, you wouldn't likely find Mike Keiser and Donald Trump in the same room.

Also, in the early days of ASGCA, meeting minutes suggest that each member was "protecting" his territory and respecting those of others.  While the biggest names of the Golden Age were certainly national and international in scope, I believe RTJ used the 707 to break down any travel barriers that existed, or any gentlemans agreements.  Now, anything goes, including everyone working everywhere, and one guy working up and down the street.

How  many do the Florida guys have up and down the coast?  How many does Fazio have in Dallas now? (3) How many does Palmer have in Palm Springs?  Heck, even I have three within fifty miles in Minnesota, and a bakers dozen here in DFW, with two more on the way.  

The problem for the gca is the clients wondering if you gave them equal efforts and equal quality courses.  I was lucky that all three of my MN courses got recogition, including consecutive GD back to back best new,so neither feels slighted.  However, I doubt that human nature has changed that much. How do Scarsdale members feel about WF, for instance?

[Jim_Kennedy]

Pat,
It seems like you trip over a Ron Garl course every couple of miles in Fl., something like 80+.



 

[T_MacWood]

Drink and drive?

[BCrosby]

Tom -

It is interesting that Golden Agers could not travel by air, thus geography had a much bigger impact on where they worked. No doubt they drank and drove, but you can drink and drive only so far in one day.

Bob

P.S. On the flip side, I wonder how much of the darkness of the Dark Ages is attributable to the advent of easy air travel.

[Chris_Clouser]

Patrick,

I would disagree with you to an extent.  I believe with the really top level guys in the industry, this may be the case.  The Fazio's, Nicklaus' and so on.  Doak and C&C probably fall into this group.  But I think there are many architects that work on a regional basis.  

Someone like Jerry Slack is a great example.  How many people outside of Oklahoma and Kansas even know this guy exists.  Tim Liddy just recently started branching out of Indiana.  Ron Kern is another guy that comes to mind locally.  

Also, something to think about is that when the famous old guys designed courses they did so in the population centers of the country.  Philly, New York, DC, Chicago, LA.  Back in the 20s who would have imagined that the possibility of building a course in Bend, Oregon even existed?  Where the people were, where the money was and where the deman rested was in the these locales.  I don't think it is a coincidence that they built courses near each other back then.  I also don't see it as a knock against architects today for building courses in various areas of the county.

Also back then traveling was much more difficult so it was much more of a constraint on the architect to travel around the country.  Today, there is nowhere around the country that isn't three to four hours away by plane.  I'm sure if Maxwell were practicing today he would have much less than 50% of his courses in Oklahoma and Flynn would not have been so heavily focused on the East Coast.  

Something else to think about is that, at least this was the case in Oklahoma for Maxwell, certain architects got a lot of add on business from doing one course and the people from the next town seeing it and wanting a similar course.  It was quite a big deal in Oklahoma in the 1920s to have a Perry Maxwell nine-hole course in your town.  "If it wasn't Maxwell, it wasn't good" was the thought at the time.  This created an instantly insulated market against competition as well.  I don't know if this was the case in Philly or New York where Flynn, Raynor and Tillie would possibly compete for jobs.  

Something I wonder about now and wish that I had asked Floyd Farley in my conversation with him was how difficult it was for him to break into the golf design business in Oklahoma.  Perhaps Forrest Richardson would know better how Farley got into it.

[T_MacWood]

Bob
As an example of what you are saying, a number of the most difficult journeys resulted in some of the most inspired work: MacKenzie in Australia, Alison in Japan and Hotchkin in S.Africa. Not to mention what Colt, Fowler, Alison & MacKenzie produced when they first came to America.

[Tom_Doak]

Pat:

It's not "lack of willingness" to design courses close together.

It's that we feel an obligation to our clients, who are paying a lot more for our services than they paid George Thomas, and who feel that we owe them the exclusive use of our name for some period of time.

The more we are paid, the more entitled our clients feel to this kind of treatment.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Bob & Chris,

I"m not refering to courses in the same general area, I"m talking about courses that are literally on top of one another.

Tom Doak,

That was one of the criticisms leveled at Nicklaus after he built The Bear's Club, with a substantial initiation fee, and then built The Ritz Carlton on adjacent property with initiation fees below those of The Bear's Club.

It seems to me, that many of the older or original clubs in an area took the name of the town they were in, and that they chose a prominent architect, and that subsequent clubs in the area, wanting to emulate the more prominent club, retained the same architect to immediately catapult them into position of being a credible alternative.

Today, I think members, especially those paying substantive initiation fees want a unique product, and not just one you can get down the road at a deep discount.

I had heard that when Steve Wynn contracted with Fazio for Shadow Creek there was an agreement that Fazio would not build another course in the Las Vegas area.

[Chris_Clouser]

Patrick,

I didn't realize you meant side-by-side.  Wouldn't that be much harder to do today due to land use restrictions in several locations.  Also the examples cited earlier are in very large municipal cities and with private clubs dating back to when the wealthy were a very interwoven group of people that seemed to roam from club to club.  

I would hazard a guess that this would only happen with housing developments or possibly a resort situation, which I don't think qualifies in this example.  Then the housing developments aren't going to want the same architect as they want something that they think is a competitive advantage in selling their commodity.  

I would think that market demands and the current legal environment for getting clubs up and running in such a small area would make it almost impossible in today's environment.

The best example I can think of the Indy area is the northeast side where within a very small radius there are three courses, River Glen, Prairie View and Plum Creek.  Two of them were being built at the same time and the other just recently went through a huge remodel as part of the housing changes that took place around the course.  That was quite amazing and the only reason that it happened was because of the housing tie-ins that the three courses had and the fact that a river runs between them and actually places them in different towns.  Whereas if these were strictly golf course developments there is no way they would have been approved being that close together.  I know a golf course development was proposed right up the street from Plum Creek and Prairie View and was turned down by the zoning commission.  But as soon as someone wanted to turn that same area into a housing development the zoning commission turned it around in record time.  

[BCrosby]

Pat -

Given the point you are trying to make, the relevant metric is not "on top of each other" but whether they compete in the same market. The examples I gave are all courses that compete for golfers in the same market.

I too think that the first course an architect worked for should be upset. Their contract should have limited the terrritory in which the architect might do later courses. But apparently there aren't many contracts like that down this way. Nor do the architects themselves seem to be burdened with the commendable reservations Tom Doak alluded to.

Bob

[Patrick_Mucci]

Bob,

You have to ask yourself, "What's changed over the last 80 years in this area ?  And, why wouldn't a group of owners trying to develop a new golf course want a well respected architect to design their course even though he did one nearby ?

Is it our obsession with the need to be original, much in the way that template holes are frowned upon today ?

If I owned a good piece of land near Westhampton, why wouldn't I want Doak or C&C, who built courses nearby, to design my new golf course ?

Does it marginalize or enhance the other courses ?

Or, do you follow the Mike Keiser model and find a totally different architect in an attempt to differentiate your course from the others ?