[Mike_Cirba]

Has anyone seen the confounded Bents of Le Touquet?

Coming this fall, on ABC, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll run to the phone and call your travel agent and book a transcontinental voyage!

Just when you thought it was safe to book a trip on a giant ocean liner, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water,  just when you thought it was safe to go to France, here comes those wacky Bents to upset all your closely held preconceptions, and the rollicking zaniness will cause you to lose all historical perspective.

When the Bents are on, you'll inexplicably feel the urge to read ship manifests for hours at a time, and who among us can't say that from a golf architecture standpoint, they have clearly been all the rage for the past century. 

So, when golf is the game, and Francais is the name, it has to be those crazy Bents that will have you typing away in joy on 1000+ posts threads.   Don't miss the first two-hour episode in which the Bents are shocked when they receive a strange, fated visitor from the west, looking to adopt their youngest and bring him back to America.   Only, on ABC*.



 

[Mike_Cirba]

Man...89 Views and not a single response!   

Darnit...I thought I had come up with the relevant topic of the day and that you'd all jump in providing your own personal experiences and inspirations with the "Bents".

How could you all be missing such an important historical driver right under your collectively misinformed noses?!? 

You're not looking, I tell you!!!






 

[Kyle Harris]

Dude, you've lost it... that's OK...I"ve been there myself...remember the reverse jans thread?

Pure gold.*

*I initially mistyped that as "Pure golf" and almost left it.

[Mike_Cirba]

Dude, you've lost it... that's OK...I"ve been there myself...remember the reverse jans thread?

Darnit Shiv...I believe I've found a CLUE...only to face your disbelief and derision.   Disappointing...really.

[Mike_Cirba]

I'm Sane I tell you....SAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNEEEE!!!!!!

 

[Paul_Turner]

[Mike_Cirba]

Thank you, Paul.

See folks...I told you. 

[TEPaul]

"The course is the most wonderful reproduction of a seaside course, inland. The subsoils and the bunkers, the bents and the turf, are all of pure seaside character, and all are set in the middle of most charming inland scenery."


In my opinion, those remarks contained in the caption to those photographs of Sandy Lodge that Paul Turner posted are much of the meat of understanding Merion, and Wilson, and what he and his committee were trying to accomplish at Merion in an overall sense. It seems most everyone on this site just isn't putting two and two together in this way to be able to understand all that was going on back then at Merion and why with people like Wilson. The truth is it was just as much or perhaps a lot more about grass and understanding it through an OJT learning process as it was about architecture.

But the salient thing to those men is that they were coming to realize they needed to understand so much better the obstacles and limitations with architecture but particularly with grass of constructing INLAND, and they were beginning to understand those limitations and difficulties at the early inland courses like Merion. They were into a mode of trying to emulate seaside architecture and seaside agronomy INLAND so much better than almost ANYTHING much INLAND that came before them.

But where were those INLAND models that basically set that precendent? They were basically in the English heathlands even if perhaps only two courses over here that preceded Merion had gotten their attention too.

Over here maybe only one before Merion realized what the importance may've been for what some of them called "getting into the sand."

Wilson may've realized even before he started Merion East what that might mean and that he wasn't going to do that and what he was up against. That would probably explain almost 1,500 letters solely about agronomy and not much about the actual architecture.

In my opinion, the only one following these Merion type threads who seems to have a real sense of what I mean on this particular post is Peter Pallotta. It just seems like whenever he contributes to these threads his contribution is in a far more important "big picture" sense of what Merion and those who did it really mean in the evolution of architecture than just getting bogged down in endless discussions about something probably completely irrelevant such as ship manifests and their actual reliability or even the importance to Merion's history of the exact dates of trips abroad.

[Joe Hancock]

Is "Le Touquet" French for "The Crotch"?

If so, I've heard of this affliction......

Joe

[Jeff_Brauer]

That 18th hole looks like a Mike Strantz creation at Tobacco Road. 

[TEPaul]

One thing that interests me about that architecture at Sandy Lodge (which really does look like very cool INLAND architecture for that time) is how many of the sand hazards are convex!

[Brian_Ewen]

Interesting history :

http://www.sandylodge.co.uk/pages/History/history.htm

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