Tilly's Best Holes...

[Phil_the_Author]

I am amazed by the responses so far. There have been more than 15 courses mentioned... doesn't that speak to the depth of his work as an architect!

[Matt_Ward]

Phil:

Going beyond the hole listing -- what's fascinating about Tillie is his ability to craft superior membership oriented play (see the likes of Fenway as one great example) and then you also have the top tier layouts he created for championship play such as Winged Foot and Bethpage Black. Some architects can do one category well -- few can do both well.

On the hole front -- I'll also throw in some sleepers that get far too little attentiion ...

The par-3 14th at Southward Ho ! -- equal to what you see with the 10th at WF/W and gets literally no attention. An absolute bear of a hole when facing the prevailing south wind which happens frequently.

The 10th at Alpine (NJ) -- Tillie used existing terrain (before the usage of modern earthmoving equipment) to create this quirky but fun hole -- plays "only" 320 yards from the tips but has been listed among the top ten handicap holes in the MGA section for a number of years. Just a fun hole to play although the uphill slope can be maddening for those playing it the first time.

[Phil_the_Author]

Matt,

I got a chuckle when you stated about the 10th hole at Alpine, "Tillie used existing terrain (before the usage of modern earthmoving equipment) to create this quirky but fun hole..."

What an absolute compliment to Tilly and his entire work crew. Not only the 10th, but the entire creation of Aldecress (Alpine) was a massive undertaking and carving of a golf course out of an extreme piece of land. If it wasn't FOR modern technology of his day it would never have come into being. This is from the book, Tillinghast: Creator of Golf Courses: 

   "To enable them to deal with the site conditions, they first established a large work camp, with a field office and even a commissary. These were needed as the holes were carved out of thick forest, swampland, and tremendous rock. This should not have surprised anyone as the Palisades of the Hudson River is quite close at hand, the cliffs of which are made of some of the most beautiful and strongest rock formations in North America. There was so much rock needing removal that more than thirty tractors were kept in continuous duty to accomplish the task.
   "If that were not enough, the first year of the project was plagued with unseasonable and continuous rain. The second year had the opposite problem as the drought that plagued the mid-west and turned it into a dust bowl was now being felt here in the east. The tractors and vehicles were covered with such a thick layer of dust that Harold Worden observed, “They looked like ghosts.”
   "Even with all of the rock being carted daily from the property, a great deal of it was piled up or crushed on site and laid out as a base for the fairways. Thousands of cubic yards of cinders, manure and peat moss were worked into the soil that covered these over. Today there is no sign of it being an artificial construction; in fact, the course gives the impression of having been carved out of the soil...
   "Among the hundreds of golf courses that I have designed and constructed, Aldecress was by far the toughest course to build that I ever encountered...”

Tilly would be thrilled that someone who has seen as many courses as you have and has the strong background in golf course architecture that you do would today believe that Alpine was a course that "used existing terrain..." This is the ultimate compliment to the work that his entire team did...

[Mike Hendren]

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