After lurking around on GolfClubAtlas for well over two years, I finally decided to send Ran an email, stating my interest in joining the site and contributing to the forums.
I’m a 35 year old Canadian, living in St. Catharines, Ontario and I play out of St. Catharines G&CC, a Stanley Thompson designed course right in the heart of the city. Unfortunately, little of Thompson’s original work at St. Catharines remains, as the course has been reworked numerous times, most significantly in the 1960’s after an arrangement with the provincial government and the club saw land exchanged in order to build a highway that connected the city to the port towns of Welland and Port Colborne. Thompson’s protégé Robbie Robinson did most of the work in the 60’s and Ian Andrew is currently working on changes to bring back some of Thompson’s original flair (I hope) through our master plan.
Through this site, I’ve already been fortunate enough to meet Ian on a couple of occasions and actually just had my first GCA golf experience, booting around 20 holes at Eagles Nest GC on Tuesday morning in three hours with Robert Thompson. In fact, both Thompson and Andrew were the ones who suggested I look into playing Riviera CC last fall when I had a few days available after a business trip on the west coast. I’m forever indebted to both for the suggestion.
I’m an avid player and student of the game with great interest in course architecture and history. I am also an avid writer and maintain a personal blog as a means of documenting my great experiences, both in life and in golf.
As an example, here is my long-winded writeup about my experience at Riviera (warning – it’s a three part article, with the golf course writeup starting in part two):
http://nowonthetee.blogspot.com/2007/09/riviera-country-club.htmlI also had the chance to play Oakmont CC in a charity function last autumn through a post on GCA by John Vander Borght and wrote an extensive article on that experience as well.
I would love to amend these articles I’ve written (eliminate details of my scoring or anything else not related to architecture) and present them in the discussion group to compliment the other great posts on these courses. I would hope to contribute in threads discussing Canadian course architecture and I also plan on writing an extensive ‘My Home Course’ article on St. Catharines G&CC at some point.
I also just returned from a vacation in Palm Coast, Florida, where I played a number of rounds at the Hammock Beach Resort, playing both the excellent Nicklaus-designed Ocean Course (formerly known as Ocean Hammock) and Tom Watson's unheralded Conservatory course, which exceeded my expecations. They are two courses worthy of discussion and I intend to get the ball rolling on that soon.
I’m not an architect nor am I in the business but I feel I can be an asset and regular contributor to your forums. I look forward to getting started!