Every new art form or human endeavor has a stage where it reaches critical mass, or mass popularity, or common, majority acceptance.
So it was with golf and golf course architecture after the end of World War II.
With the genius of the GI Bill and the creation of the first Middle Class ever in the United States, suddenly the gap between the pursuits of the wealthiest land-owners and the rest of us closed a tweak, and for a brief shining moment we were probably as close to a wealthy egalitarian society in the 1950s and 1960s as was ever attained by any nation in the history of the world.
During that time, everyman players like Arnold Palmer and Gary Player and the rising ubiquity of television brought golf to a whole new generation who saw in the game the type of rugged individualism and dynamic heroics that most previously only found on the baseball diamond or football gridiron. It certainly helped that great men of vitality and machismo from other sports, such as former boxing champion and US Serviceman Joe Louis seemed to spend many of their free hours on the golfing links.
Suddenly, demand far exceeded supply.
Into that void stepped any number of US architects, and while men like Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Dick Wilson are derided a bit now as being the "Howard Johnson's" of golf, they build HUNDREDS of golf courses across the land at the time it was needed most.
In their steps were the Ed Ault's, and the William Bell's and the William and David Gordon's and another twenty or so of their ilk, each largely geographically localized, but each building courses that were sound, efficient, and sustainable.
Each of these men, instead of creating the latest Southampton, or West Palm Beach, instead created hundreds of little Levittowns across the landscape...courses that brought thousands and thousands of the new middle class into a great game formerly affordable only to the wealthiest 2% of the US population.
It's interesting that we can sit here today and roll our eyes and deride their efforts, and wish for a time when every course built had the cache and artistry of a Cypress Point, or the strategic flexibility of an Augusta, or the character of a Merion, or the brilliance of a Pine Valley, yet in our reach for elevating and stratifying only the highest creative pinnacle of what the game has ever produced, I'm afraid that we might once again become some tiny, self-referential, and ultimately irrelevant minority holding onto the crusty bones of some former time we seemingly all relate to but which few of us have actually lived in.
The truth of the dyamics and realities of modern demographics and economics is that for golf to prosper, the golf courses of the future need to have more in common with Torrey Pines and Mount Pleasant, and Bayou Oaks, and Bonneville, and farmland tracks in Iowa and urban tracks like Cobb's Creek than with Sebonack or Sand Hills.
The former models are relevant and prudently pragmatic; the latter are ultimately our last bastions of escape to a different, romanticized time.
The only relevant model for golf in the 21st century, if we are to go back and learn any real vital lessons of the past, is to create vibrant, playable, affordable courses, right within the urban, population centers, that are available to both the King and the candle-maker, the lord and the serf, and peoples of all races and creeds...and to remember that in the simplest, most relevant, and most sustainable parameters, golf really needs to paradoxically be the most simple and most complex, and the most affordable and richest game all at the same time.