"At the end of Scotland's Gift, CBM says, "In August of 1926, after 18 years of service" I resigned from the R&A rules committee."
Mac:
That's true, and just three months later he also suddenly resigned from obviously the extremely important presidency of the Kellenworth Corporation, the holding company of The Creek Club which arguably had the most impressive array of heavyweight Captains of the Universe of any golf club ever created.
At that time he was 70 years old. He would live for another thirteen years. But I would challenge anyone on this website to try to chronicle anything else of any significance at all that he had to do with after 1926 in or involving architecture or golf.
I believe, at that point, and even somewhat before, he was pretty much done, and then really done, and perhaps depressed and perhaps feeling ultimately a beaten or even a neglected man somehow. Often, men like that, when they come to a point like that in their lives, what do they do? They go off as he did for an extended time away from it all, as he did to his cottage in Bermuda, and they write their memoirs, their autobiography, their last and final words of advice and feelings, which in fact it looks like "Scotland's Gift Golf" was for Macdonald. I truly think he had come to be or to feel that way, at that point, and to me it is just so hugely ironic, at least for us, so tragic in fact, even if perhaps not uncommon for a man like that, who had seen and done all that he had seen and done and had been through with the entire fabric of golf over so many decades of its aborning and organizing eras over there, over here and around the world.
This is why I think it is so funny really when I get accused from time to time on this website of trying to criticize or minimize Macdonald somehow. Even though I am not completely certain he should have the sole designation as the Father of American golf architecture, for sometime now I have felt that he perhaps should very much be considered not just the real Father of American golf, but, all-in, and all things considered with everything he did spanning two continents in his long lifetime in so many facets of golf----arguably Charles Blair Macdonald very well may be the most important man the game of golf has EVER KNOWN!