David Morarty,
If you can swing it, I'd really suggest you try to visit during the Walker Cup this summer. I may be naive, but I think a personal visit might have you thinking that there's really not much (if any) CBM out there.
http://www.2009walkercup.org/cms/
Dan
Great suggestion. I'd rather attend a Walker Cup than any other USGA event, and would love to see Merion again; I need to if I am ever going to write Part II of my Essay. Surely buying a ticket to such an event will be the only way I ever set foot on the place again. [Both Wayne and Tom owe me a round there, but I won't hold my breath in either case.] All that being said, I have many other obligations, and don't know if I'd be able to make that trip happen. Plus, my family would be very disappointed if I ended up murdered and buried in a bunker like TomPaul and his self-proclaimed "posse" have threatened in the past; in jest probably yet as unstable as these guys are, who really knows?
But keep in mind Dan that I have seen the course. I've played it only once but if did make quite an impression, and I am much better at understanding and remembering great golf courses than I am at playing them. (If Wayne Morrison is to believed (and he is not) then I play at a sloth's pace and would have had plenty of time to see every detail of Merion in my one play.) Also, I did live right down the road for spell and was pretty infatuated with the place, and managed to get a peak at it more than once. Don't get me wrong, when it comes to understanding Merion, I am a complete novice, which is one reason I have avoided getting to too much discussion about the modern details of the course. It is also why I have not yet posted a Part II to my Essay. All that being said, and keeping in mind my minimal experience on both NGLA and Merion . . .
I played Merion a few days after playing NGLA (also with hickories) and
I saw CBM all over Merion. Likewise, in most of the depictions of the course as it was then, there was plenty of CBM there.
Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about aesthetics. While there was more aesthetic connection then, they are obviously quite different now. And I am certainly not talking about today's maintenance or tree growth or rough height or fairway lines. I suspect that one who knew the course better could make a strong argument that the current maintenance and set-up masks Merion's architectural greatness rather than enhancing it. What I am talking about are the fundamental principles of great strategic golf holes, as cbm understood them. They were everywhere, along with many of his more idiosyncratic features. The large mound backing the attempted Alps, for example; CBM viewed such mounds as a fundamental component of how an Alps hole should play.
In short, those who present early Merion East as an extension of the dark ages are flat out wrong. So are those who view Merion as a departure from the Macdonald school (building extremely strategic golf courses by applying the principles that underpin the great golf holes.) They have missed or forgotten something extremely fundamental about the course.
Far from a departure from NGLA, Merion was a direct application of CBM's approach. At its core, Merion is not primarily about shot testing or specifying certain requirements to achieve success. It is a strategic masterpiece full of subtle options and subtle consequences not only for proper or improper execution, but also for good or poor decision-making. At least in my uninformed opinion that is what it is.
Look, this would obviously be a more interesting conversation and is really at the core of all of my work about Merion thus far, but we are not ready for this conversation yet. We first need to come to an accurate understanding of how the course came about and what those who were there were trying to accomplish. There has been such resistance to honestly and critically examining even these basic questions, that it makes no sense to move on. Everyone there (or at least those representing those who are there) have their minds made up about the place and they aren't going to listen to the facts. It has been this way since the beginning.
But make no mistake, this is just the beginning from my perspective. All I have been doing is trying to lay the groundwork for the real conversation. Yet we are still miles away. Almost three years have passed since I first posted a section of an article describing Merion's 10th in similar terms to how cbm described NGLA's Alps hole. I was called "stupid" and a liar in that thread as well, and worse. Three years later, and these guys are still carrying on the exact same conversation, and hurling the exact same insults. No progress has been made (when progress is made TEPaul and Wayne quickly backtrack and retrench, claiming he knew it all along anyways.) We are still having the same discussion.
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JWL,
Bunker placement was often referred to as creating mental hazards or creating the problems or creating the mental problems.
My understanding is that Wilson waited to add some of the man-made features like fairway bunkers and some greenside bunkers until after the course opened.. This too is consistent with CBM's approach. CMB wrote that one should wait observe play in order to best understand where to place fairway bunkers.
Dan,
While a few of the low lying greens had to be rebuilt/replaced because of drainage issues, I believe that all the greens were built in 1911. So I doubt that these were the mental hazards to which he refers.