Dónal or anyone who might care
Many tend to read from the end of threads, and since my posts tend to get buried pretty quickly by a barrage of posts (often by a single poster.) Since my response to Donal is already four deep, I am taking the liberty of reposting it, it order to give it a fighting chance of reaching its intended recipients. Here's hoping this one won't get buried as well.
So, did CBM equate the study of famous holes and replication of them as the birth of GCA? Is CBM belittling the efforts of those that were designing courses before him?
Dónal.
Dónal,
1. CBM didn't replicate any holes so far as I am aware. He tried to replicate parts of a few holes but even on these holes he intentionally made significant changes which he thought to be improvements.
2. In the passage, was CBM "belittling" the efforts of those who were designing courses before him? That seems much more of a subjective projection than an actual attempt to understand what he might have meant.
3. In the main quote in question, CBM was writing about undertaking the tangible project
in 1901 so we must consider the quote as applying to that time frame--
1901 and before.
4. In 1901 the course widely considered the best course in the US was Chicago Golf Club, designed by Macdonald himself. Ontwensia was another top course, and again CBM had a hand in its creation as did his close friend H.J.Whigham. Emmet, another good friend of CBM's, had been deeply involved in the newly created Garden City. So if he was "belittling" anyone, he was including himself, his close friends, and the clubs with with he was most closely associated. Further, he certainly wasn't "belittling" the designs of the great golf holes to which he looked for inspiration and ideas.
5. That being said, there is no doubt that CBM was highly critical of most of the golf courses in America at the time and rightfully so. But he isn't really being critical this quote, I don' think. I think that all he is doing in this quote is is pointing out that
he was unaware of anyone else (in America at least) who was taking a such a decidedly comprehensive and architectural approach to the discipline: the close and careful study of the great courses and golf holes; the distillation and determination of the fundamental concepts which made them great, and the wholesale application of these concepts to produce, from scratch, a golf course entirely based upon the basic principles of sound architecture.[/i]
5. Others may have been considering or even discussing some of these things by 1901 (in fact CBM was, as was HJ Whigham), and a few might have begun to tangibly head in this direction (CBM and HJW included,) but so far as I know no one else in the US had yet taken this "architectural approach" to designing and creating an entire "architectural" golf course from scratch. Do you know of anyone else in the U.S. who had set out to accomplish this by 1901? I don't. Had anyone in the world at this point? I don't know.
6. Instead of assuming he was puffing or lying, why not take him at his word?
What if he was actually unaware of anyone else who had set out to plan and build an entire golf course where every hole was based on sound architectural principles and on fundamental concepts distilled from the great holes? Would he then still be belittling those who came before? If so how so? 7. Probably because of the years and nastiness and caricature of CBM and his friends (SR, HJW, DE) on this discussion board, it seems people tend to simply assume that everything CBM wrote was inaccurate, loaded, and unfairly insulting to the rest of the world, even though the texts rarely if ever support such a conclusion. So many lies, misrepresentations, and insulting descriptions have been written about the man that it is apparently impossible for many to actually consider his words with an open mind. Unfortunately, we seem to be heading in that direction here.