John F:
Geoff Cornish's consulting at Crystal Downs was limited mostly to changing mowing lines to reduce fairway area, and to "restoring" grassy capes in the bunkers, which were later expunged when the club found 1933 pictures of the course which clearly showed no capes. Tom Mead, the superintendent at the time, did all of the work with Geoff and it led to his interest in design and construction, which is how he came to work for me for a few years. Tom also took the course from poor condition to very good over the five years he was on board, and that certainly helped when the VIPs started to come around and see it.
For better or worse, I think the "discovery" of the course by the rankings was partly my doing. When I first started working on the GOLF Magazine list in 1983, I put it on the ballot of courses to be rated and found that only two of the panelists had been to Crystal Downs -- I had played it in 1982 when a senior in college, and Jack Nicklaus had played it when he was 13 on a family vacation. When I went back in 1986 for a second visit, and the course was in such great shape compared to 1982, I made it a personal mission to get a few more panelists up to see the course and see what they thought.
Ben Crenshaw came the Thursday of the Buick Open in 1986, and played with me and the pro Fred Muller and a member, Ed Cherney, who had offered to fly Ben up for the afternoon after I told Fred that Ben wanted to visit. Ben went back Thursday night and won the Buick, and was wearing his Crystal Downs shirt at the PGA when he skulled himself with a wedge, as Doug accurately remembered.
Ben's interest in the course did encourage a couple of other people to visit, a few others came at my invitation, and some USGA types came as guests of Bob Laubach who was on USGA committees for many years.
Note: No disrespect to Geoff Cornish who was a mentor of sorts to me, but the listings of architects for redesigns in The Architects of Golf always struck me as wrong, because it would encourage architects to tinker with old courses in order to claim them as their own. For that reason I always insist that the GOLFWEEK and GOLF DIGEST rankings do NOT list my name on the courses for which we consult -- even if we've done a lot of work on them, the intent was to honor the original design. Rees Jones seems to have the opposite viewpoint on this subject.