Richard:
I have never believed we stood a very good chance of winning a competition to design a course; the fact that someone is having a competition usually makes me suspicious whether they know what they are doing. I've only ever had a couple of clients who could understand a routing plan well enough to decide who had submitted the best one, and if they're going to decide on the basis of graphics or presentation skills, I'm not going to win there. Also, in most of those deals, someone has gamed the politics and gotten themselves the inside track, and that's not my m.o., either.
On the other hand, I've had enormous success on projects where the client was familiar with our work and called us directly. While David was putting his all into that competition, I was out building Cape Kidnappers and Barnbougle and St. Andrews Beach. And I think I made the right call to concentrate on those.
I really didn't know anything about the competition until it was half over, and I never really considered submitting an entry at that point; remember, I didn't have the same profile then that I do today, and my resume probably wouldn't have mattered much to the Links Trust anyway. I don't know that the Links Trust ASKED anyone to submit a proposal ... they just put out an RFP, and if they had a mailing list, I wasn't on it. But I don't know how many American designers were on it.
I am sort of curious why my not submitting a proposal made it to print at all, nor why it would be labeled by the author as "curious".