Mike
I don't know why, but for whatever reason Heilman doesn't give us any key dates. He begins with the Annual report of 1910 and then ends with constrcution beginning in the spring of 1911 and the course opening 9/1912. We are left conclude the events he desribes in between happened between 1910 and spring 1911, incuding Wilson's trip abroad. He got that wrong. He also uses Wind's quote comparing Wilson's trip to CBM's trip. We all know CBM studied those holes before designing the NGLA, and the obvious inference is Wilson did the same.
Heilman's greatest mistakes are his multiple sins of omission. Tolhurst can be partially excused because I don't think he had the same info at his disposal (his greatest resource was Heilman's book), and he didn't know squat about golf architecture history. Heilman was clearly more competent, and had the information at his disposal but chose not to use it.
He had Wilson's 1916 account, which mentions the trip occured sometime after the NGLA visit. He would've known when the NGLA visit was from the minutes.
Tom,
I think you're being a little too harsh on Heilman. I'm also not certain that we aren't all making broad assumptions about golf course architecture that I don't believe others made years ago.
For instance, even if he did make the connection that when Hugh Wilson said "ever good course I saw
later" and recognized that his trip had to follow his visit to NGLA, I'm not sure that seeing that the NGLA visit was early March 1911 would have seemed odd to him.
After all, the course wasn't even under construction yet, and all that was determined in the next month and a half was the final routing. There could have been plenty of time in his mind sometime after that while the course was being plowed and seeded to go abroad.
I think we make a fundamental mistake when we try equate the act of routing the golf course as wholly dependent on the idea that Wilson went abroad to get ideas for his golf holes. Frankly, I don't think any of these early writers made that a dependency whatsoever and it clearly wasn't in this case.
If you think about the "principles" of the great holes, or even the strategies of the template holes, almost all of them are dependent simply on generally rote bunkering strategies that define them. We know all of that took place later...the "problems of the holes", or the "mental hazards", if you will, as they were described in the early writing.
We sit here and think about modern architecture and how everything is planned out in advance and built to spec for day one and that includes all of the dimensions and bunker placements, sizes, depths, etc...
Hell, we even can 3-D it on CAD and do simulated flyovers.
That isn't what was done here at all. Even the hole with the Eden green, the 15th, was not an Eden hole at all, but a par four instead. The 3rd green is not like a redan green at all, but it was a cool green on a natural plateau so a redan bunkering scheme was employed and the tee set a bit at an angle, and voila! there you had it. We know after Wilson got back from abroad and saw the real original Alps he admitted that he still had a "lot of making" to do to have anything worthy of the original, or even worthy of the one he saw Macdonald build at NGLA prior.
So, I think we are applying our modern prism to something very different than what is done today. This idea that he went abroad to get ideas for the golf course was not dependent on it having to have been prior to a routing of 18 tees and greens, while trying to creatively use what was already on the ground in terms of natural hazards and features at all, and I truly don't think anyone prior to our modern times would have made the assumption that it did....particularly not those documenting early accounts.
I also think you're inferring too much into what HWWind wrote. I think he was talking about the final product as a comparision between NGLA and Merion, and not referring to the version of 1912 Merion that he could never have seen.
Jim,
I've been trying to call for an hour now but I keep getting a message that your phone's been disconnected.
