When Mackenzie lost it..

[BCrosby]

Bizarro. I hope they didn't need you in the matches.

BTW, check your email. The missing letter has been found.

Bob

[TEPaul]

"BTW, check your email. The missing letter has been found."

BobC:

Thank you very, very much and I promise when I become ensconced in my wonderful barn office complex and get completely organized I will never again ask you for those kinds of niggling favors.

I herewith and here-in-now extend an open invitation to you and Betsy to come stay in this wonderful office/bedroom complex any time and as long as you like. Tell Betsy she can even go out on the farm and pick out a "man-about-the-house" of her choosing to take back home to Georgia for daily chores and gardening and such. That will save me a considerable amount of postage too. With this inclusion as part of your household, it will become far easier, in the premises, to explain to her the importance of reading and contemplating Max Behr on the patio.

By the way, did you remember to email that letter to the other 2,317 clubs around the world that I mentioned?

[TEPaul]

Sean A:

I'll search wherever it may be found for any and all evidences of that story about The American Construction Company mimicking clouds in some of the bunkers of CPC.

You wouldn't mind, would you, if I get back to you in a year or so on it?

As hard as some things may be for you to believe, I feel I might actually have a few more important things to do before getting to that.  

But do not despair, all good things come to those who watch and wait.

[TEPaul]

Sean Arble:

I don't know how you feel about it but in my opinion, Shackelford is probably the best, most accurate but most of all the most intuitive researcher out there.

Let's see you PROVE him wrong about something he wrote about a course.

You're beginning to sound something like Tom MacWood.

He once asked me how I could prove George Crump ever intended to have hole from hole segregation via trees at Pine Valley if I could not produce something that Crump specifically wrote to that effect.

First of all, Crump almost never WROTE anything about the course, his ideas and intentions. But what he did do is talk to plenty of people about them, and most all of that got recorded by some of his friends.

But here I have a guy like MacWood suggesting if Crump did not actually write it he couldn't have wanted it implying that the fact that so many have said he did must be a lie.

Now I ask you, what kind of bullshit logic is that?

And the man referred to himself constantly as an "expert historian".  

I always felt he was an expert researcher and told him so many times. But I added that I felt in many cases he probably should've passed his research on to others who could analyze it better than he did or could.

But you are right, many stories start as rumors which have a funny way of turning into accepted truths if passed around often enough and long enough. Anything like that should be run to ground.

This was actually the thing with Pine Valley. So many on here, such as MacWood, seemed to think Colt got a bad deal with what the club said he produced there because Crump was over glorified by the club for a number or reasons and given too much credit for the course.

The real irony is that for so long Colt was considered by so many members to have routed the entire course, and perhaps for that reason was the designer of it. The reason they may've thought that is they were mildly aware of a hole by hole booklet by Colt that might suggest such a thing. But very few of them ever saw it or really analyzed it---which without question is completely necessary to do if one wants to understand it and what it meant or not about the way the course was done.

But now all the available material has been brought together and very carefully analyzed via timelines and such with contributing text from Tillie and others.

So, today, the truth of who did exactly what and when is known for perhaps the first time in 90 plus years.

But of course anyone can just step up and say it's all a big lie.  

[Kirk Gill]

Which by the way, if it were true, this would certainly be getting into the realm of landscape design because how those bunkers looked would have very little to do with their function.

Are you asserting that the shape of a bunker is defined exclusively by its function, and that anyone whose thoughts turn to the aesthetic while designing a bunker is engaging not in golf course architecture, but in landscape design, or perhaps just window dressing? I've always felt like bunker design is a place where many designers feel more able to express themselves aesthetically than any other place on a golf course. maybe it's just the striking contrast between sand and grass.....I don't know.

And if the 15th at Cypress Point is over the top bunker-wise, how about the 13th, back in ye olde 1929:

[TEPaul]

"In any case, when a guy writes something and doesn't couch it as opinion, the onus is on him to provide evidence that the statement is true or at least thought to be true by respected sources.  This is why I like a proper biblio/references included as part of any work.  Unfortunately, this style of backing up work is going out of fashion.  I spose people don't care about the backup so authors don't include it."

Sean:

I couldn't agree with you more on what you said there. Weird old Wayno Morrison feels the exact same way too.

But I'm not writing some definitive book on the history of CPC and its bunkers. I'm just discussing them on a website and I just mentioned the things I've read about it somewhere. In my opinion, that probably doesn't put as much of an onus on me to prove it as it might on a guy who's trying to write a definitive book on the subject.

That question to you by Kirk Gill is a very very good one, by the way. I'd love to see your response and opinion and then maybe someone might ask you to prove it.    

PS:

One time I was talking to Friar's Head's Ken Bakst about Flynn and that I was having a hard time proving some issues and such. He thought about that for a moment and then cracked me up by shooting back with:

"Well, then just make some stuff up like everyone else does."

[TEPaul]

"Personally, I think the bunkering around the green is ott, but the sandy waste area off the tee is magnificent."

Interesting.

It can be fairly well proven that the bunkering surrounding the green was made to some extent, but that massive diagonal sand hazard forming the right side of the fairway is harder to say---at least for me with the existing before and after photos.

As Shackelford mentioned the bunkers surrounding the 13th green were essentially "sculpted" by MacKenzie et al out of existing dunes and made more "formal" than what was prexisting and available before and after photos basically proves that.

The really odd thing to me is what Mackenzie did on #9. Before and after photos virtually proves he basically just used the entire natural landform exactly as it was naturally for a golf hole but for some reason he included a rather formal little bunker along the right side in the pre-existing sand waste area.

One wonders why he even bothered.