"Quote from: Niall Carlton on Today at 03:36:00 AM
David,
I take your point regarding M&W's status, point duly noted. However in the same way that a professional will only provide a service in accordance with his/her instructions I doubt whether M&W would have jumped in and designed the course for them without asking. Again I come to the point I'm interested in which is did M&W design the course or just tell Wilson and his committee how to design and build the course ? I'm not sure that anyone else is interested in this but I certainly am. That MacDonald had a significant influence on the design at Merion, is clear to me, but I think there is a big difference in saying he was an influence and saying he designed the course.
David Moriarty response:
To my mind, whether they "designed the course" versus "told Wilson and his committee how to design and build the course" is a distinction without a difference. This is especially so since they M&W were brought down to determine the final routing.
Niall:
You make some very good points above and you ask one very good question. The point is, as well as part of the point of your question is-----did MCC EVER even ASK Macdonald/Whigam to actually route and design Merion East or even ASK him to actually and physically help them route and design their course?
From every single bit of actual PHYSICAL and FACTUAL evidence and information anyone has from MCC and Merion itself it is telling us that no they never did ask them to do either of those things. It appears from the actual factual evidence and information that they only asked Macdonald to look over a proposed property for purchase and to tell them what he thought about it for a golf course. Macdonald's only letter to MCC very much suggests that to be the case; Macdonald actually said to them in his letter; "The most difficult problem YOU have to contend with is to get in eighteen holes in the acreage you propose buying that will be first class."
CLEARLY, that suggests that in that single day visit in June 1910 to Ardmore, to which he would not return again for ten months, Macdonald looked at the problem (routing and design) as THEIR problem and not HIS problem. Had they actually ASKED him to spend the appropriate time to route and design their course or even actually show them how to do it then it would very much have been HIS problem as well which he obviously would have realized, but that is not at all what he said, is it?
Moriarty apparently has no idea what a distinction or difference even means. And he surely has little idea of the distinction or difference between real factual evidence and completly manufacturered conjecture, speculation and fallaciousness. For God's Sake, now he is trying to tell us that Macdonald and Wilson must have been communicating all the time even though even HE knows there is not a shred of physical or factual evidence of that. Just another example of his odd rationale of; "Well, you can't prove it is impossible, can you?"
After a while his fall back modus operandi and argument always devolves down to his questions like that one or; "Well can you prove it's not impossible?" And he's the one trying to get us to believe that he's relying on FACTS and we aren't?!? It really is unbelievable the way he's been conducting this year long charade. Was there EVER a question or mystery in a whole century of who designed Merion East? Of course not and if there was show me where. Moriarty created the entire mystery and question out of thin air and via this entire charade of his----with a little help and advice from Tom MacWood, of course.
That is really not the point here with Merion, Macdonald or Wilson, it never has been in a century until Moriarty and MacWood (or now HenryE or whatever
) came along and it's not really anyone's interest either. It gets down to simply circular and nonproductive arguments on the degrees of fallacy.
Unbelievably, six and a half years ago, Tom MacWood started this whole Merion/Macdonald charade off by starting a thread asking us if we could tell him who specifically designed each and every hole or concept of Merion East and we told him we simply didn't know that and never could know that because that was never recorded in the first place but that the accurate history of Merion was that "In the main, Hugh Wilson was that architect of the East and West courses" and to a man every member of his committee said so!
It should've been left at that because that's the truth but it wasn't left at that.