JamieD:
What you said there in your first paragraph is exactly a scenario that a few of us have been proposing (on this thread) may have been the way The Black came to be. You should go back and read some of those posts.
You say it's confusing enough but plausible. You bet it is! It's more than plausible, it's the way golf courses are basically imagined, visualized, created and constructed--certainly the ones of The Black's era. So it's much more than plausible, it's highly probable, that is, if Burbeck actually did "route" the golf course before Tillinghast got there.
So what is a "routing" and what might have Burbeck done before Tillinghast got there? He may have "laid out" the basic progression of the course, the way the holes progressed and flowed, what those holes were (par 3s, par 4s and par 5s) and in their exact order then and today. Essentially that's a basic "routing".
But why would anyone do it in any particular way or fashion? Because they can imagine (even preliminarily) what the course will look like, what the order of the holes need to be and how they fit together, what the individual hole concepts basically can become, what the variety of the course is and where, what the balance may be and how necessary it is to the overall course always trying to use the best of anything on the site.
A preliminary routing such as it may have been if Burbeck did it back then, may have been what's sometimes called a "stick routing" only because dots or Xs were sometimes used for tee and hole sites and they were connected by a center drawn line that deliniated the way the holes were envisioned to go or flow.
More goes into envisioning a good routing than most seem to understand. It truly is like doing a large jigsaw puzzle on the ground because the "pieces" (the holes) have to fit together somehow. This was far more important in that era than today because golfers had to walk!
Finding golf holes really isn't all that terribly difficult sometimes on good land and good sites. But putting the holes (the pieces) together into an interesting "whole" (the routing) providing the necessary variety and balance to the progression of the holes is hard!
And even if you can find the holes and the variety and balance then doing the next part, what is sometimes called "connecting the dots" can sometimes become more than maddening. Basically what "connecting the dots" is is getting the greens and the next tee as close together as possible. And that part in that era was often very difficult and if done well is admirable and indicative of talent, in my opinion!
This all wasn't very easy back then because those men did not have as much ablilty to change the landscape as they do today and basically if you can't fit things together today you can simply make something where you want it and need it.
I can't really imagine what kind of latitude either Burbeck or Tillinghast might have had to change things to fit the pieces together but the fact that Bethpage apparently had 600 WPA workers working on it is not insubstantial at all---that's a lot of man-power for that era to make changes.
But let's just say that Burbeck actually did do the routing of both individual holes, their exact placement etc which created the routing of what The Black is. It's more than plausible, it's probable that Tillinghast may have come in at that point and begun to really develop the "features" of those holes (bunkering, fairway deliniations, angles of them, green orientations and all that goes on at the green-end etc, etc, to perfect the "concepts" and overall "options" that create the "strategies" of those holes!
This is more than plausible to me and would also explain why some of those who really do know The Black and Tillinghast might think The Black is Tillinghast's complete design and routing simply because the "features" that were added to Burbeck's routing really do look like Tillinghast's because they probably are! In this way the courses of some architects can be identifiable as theirs or their particular style.
But other than definitely Donald Ross and possibly William Flynn I'm not sure that any of those people can actually identify a particular "routing" style from particular architects much less Tillinghast of all architects. I don't know all that much about Tillinghast but some of his courses that I have seen and played are not even remotely similar in a routing style!
But if Tillinghast did not actually route The Black and only came in during the next phase of developing the hole concepts with particularly the architectural features (definitely not an unimportant undertaking) I, for one, would have to assume that Tillinghast must have been somewhat in agreement with Burbeck's routing or he might have attempted to change it if he was serious about the project and I presume he was.
But conversely, when anyone understands how difficult it can be to create a good routing in the first place they quickly become aware of how difficult it can be to change it! It's basically the same process in reverse with the pieces already fitting together that have to now be changed and in a "dot connected" routing as The Black may be that could be really hard.
The analogy to this reverse process can probably be looked at a little like trying to fit fence rails into fence posts that are already in the ground and set. Sometimes you have to take a whole bunch of rails (the holes) out to try to fit them into the set posts (the routing) and if you can't do that for some reason you have to start to uproot the posts themselves and reset them somewhere else (start to change the whole routing). If this gets bad enough or hard enough you may have to ditch the entire routing and go back to square one.
That, in my opinion, is how difficult it could be to redo some of those old close-coupled classic course routings. And if Burbeck did do it, Tillinghast probably agreed that it was good and he could work well with it!
I don't even know enough about The Black to know if it is a great routing but if it's such a highly acclaimed golf course it must be. So if Burbeck did it and Tillinghast worked with it without massively changing it, Burbeck should get some real credit because creating the routing on a great classic course takes some talent.
But for all I know this vague fact that Whitten is using that the course was "laid out" (routed) by Burbeck may not be true at all. Maybe Tillinghast did the routing, developed all the hole features and concepts on his own and then Burbeck constructed them when Tillinghast was gone.
But hopefully we will see about that routing and who did it!