Consider this...
If a very beautiful house or building was designed by a leading and innovative architect for very tall and fat people (high archways, 12 foot ceilings, wide doorways, sturdy fixtures) the chances are a very small and thin person - and certainly the majority of average-sized people - could enjoy it too. There would be less consequence or disincentive for anybody to live in the well-designed and appointed big man's house than there would in the second case where the same innovative architect builds the same nice house but specifically for the small and thin person...
Now there's a bit of a problem. There are real inconveniences and consequences for anybody but a small and thin man to live in this house. Now depending on just how small and thin you aren't, this house could be a real pain in the ass and not a joy or a respite at all from the daily world. If you're me, I'm going to be very cranky and just seek to rent somewhere. If you're John Daly or a Stadler or Ernie Els, you won't even go in the front door.
For me, the very great house that Crump and supporters built is for the small man...the man that thinks he's really doing something by playing the game of golf well and suffering match and card misfortune when he doesn't. It is however great, i finally got to see a Crump Cup a few years back and it is a marvel and didn't disappoint my eye in the least. The scale was both more dramatic and more intimate than I anticipated. 90 years of tradition and my own keen sense of curiosity didn't hurt the impression.
I would love to play it a few times, but even if God blessed me with the good fortune I could never play more than a round a year there...I want to have fun. I do not want the anxiety of heroic deeds, looking for some balls and casting off many others. If I were on game enough to turn a regulation par at the difficult 13th and then cast a nice lofted iron safely on the 14th, it says nothing about anything, because the next time I play I could play similarly and return two double bogeys.
Im not a crack player - even when I was a 4.5, I was not so. I was practiced and had a good short game, a variety of partial shots and knew the proper tactics to avoid big numbers, but what good does that do me when the ball is pulled into a forest of sand or against a high lip bunker or... doesn't hit the green!
That's for someone else, not me. It's a marvel for the purpose - but that purpose is a small house. Because it is indeed a beautiful house and houses roughly resemble one another - it has foundational design features found in the best houses designed for the most people but as is, it the best house the Danny Devito's can make for themselves.
Maybe it's completely perverse to suggest to this board, but if I had any "Hell" bunkers on my par 5s, they would be a ridiculous easy carry or they would be 100 yards out of the way of play or they would be little bigger than a pot...isn't that more truly fun than just saying, "Oh the Long at 14 St Andrews has the famous Hell and that's a great hole and I'm going to make my own Hell on my longest hole"??
I mean I'm not insinuating any deficiency on the part of Crump and the geniuses of his era for doing what they did, it was was the real frontier then and they have provided many memorable golf experiences by their hand. Yet, I think a mixture of outrageous slopes and ridiculously easy obstacles to pass. To me it's much more aesthetically pleasing to pass a little obscure trap miles from play and have the caddies say the hole is named for that bunker called Hell. i ask why, it can't come into play and he says "just get into it once and you'll know." That is more of a terrifying yet charming adjunct of swinging at a golf ball than some 200 yard hit and hope over a wasteland.
But the St. Andrew's Hell wasn't made to be Hell, it got that way from extant usage and centuries of curses thrown at that juncture of the course. To make a Hell copy is in its own way both strangely sufficient AND deficient to the purpose, probably why St. Andrews is often imitated, never duplicated.
Golf is a game. It needs amusement and fun and affirmation. That how it is usually born into the soul, through its fun, not its disappointments and lost balls and punished mis-hits. Everyone knows their first good hit or their first birdie. Only the most craven of us remembers their first lost ball, OB or water hazard kerplunk.
I sunk a few fathoms from the topical surface, but this is all to say that golf course architecture that isn't fun first may be great and wondrous and a marvel and still miss the point.
By the standards of greatness essential to the offerings of those supporting Pine Valley as necessary to any great list, Trump national Briarcliff played from the tips should satisfy any challenge to the crack golfer Crump could ever dream.
Now is that great architecture though it has an island green in a waterfall and a hazard/boundary penalty available on every hole?
cheers
vk