[Tom MacWood]

Tom,

What did Flynn have to do with the original design?

CBM was arguably the most important and prominent man in american golf at the time.  One would boast about a course design by him, no?

Please don't tell David that they grew dissatisfied with his design...he doesn't even want to hear that CBM had a drink or two. 

The original design of the East or West?

CBM & Whigham were mentioned prominently early on. Once they began redesigning his name rarely came up. Its not unusual for architects to disavow their involvement under those circumstances.

[TEPaul]

"Wasn't it how to build holes on the land they have?"


Sully:

Right. Up to NLGA for two days, look over CBM's plans from famous holes abroad, talk some agronomy, go out on NGLA the next day and study the architecture, go home to Ardmore, take out your contour survey maps, rearrange the course into five different plans, get CBM and Whigs down for a day to go over the plans and the land, select one of the plans, take it to the Board on April 19, 1911, get approval on the plan and BINGO you have Merion East designed by Wilson and Committee with help and advice from those two good and kindly gentleman, Charlie and Whiggie.

"OOPs, what did we forget? It looks like we forgot something.

Shit, bunkers!! WE FORGOT THE BUNKERS!! Did Charlie and Whiggie mention sand bunkers? A golf course needs bunkers doesn't it?"



Off to GB a year later for some weeks, come home with drawings and we get bunkers on Merion East.

Bingo, WHOOPEE.

Now that wasn't so hard was it Hughie?

"Bullshit, if we knew what we were getting into we probably never would've begun. I'm just a dumb insurance salesman, you know? But even so some of this architecture looks lik a rubic-cube to me. Hey, Flynn, get over here Boy----I've got a job for you to do getting rid of some of this crap. Go to it!"

[JESII]

Tom,

So you think NGLA was the primary reason the Merion guys went to Southampton?

[Jeff_Brauer]

You guys can really try to split hairs, can't you?

TePaul's first PP is a pretty good summary of the actual words of the MCC guys about what they did. Why not take them at their word?

Its not hard to speculate that the underlying motive was to learn about their upcoming task of designing Merion, but its also not hard to say the primary reason was to see NGLA, for its learning potential.

So, what are you trying to get TePaul to admit?

[TEPaul]

"Tom,
So you think NGLA was the primary reason the Merion guys went to Southampton?"



Sully:

Of course I do; otherwise they all could've just met for a few days at Ardmore and developed plans for Merion East right there but they didn't do that did they? They went to NGLA to look at Macdonald's drawings of famous holes abroad and then the next day they studied NGLA's architecture and its princlples.

As Jeffrey Brauer is often wont to say----sometimes the simplest and most obvious answer is the right answer and that just happens to be what they recorded.

But if you guys want to split hairs and speculate forever then I guess that's cool too!

[TEPaul]

By the way, I just found out Hugh I. Wilson was abroad in 1910 and for seven months. He was studying architecture but what he was really studying was the voluptuous Sarah Bernhardt. He was having an affair with her so of course he told Alex Findlay later that he had never been abroad before. That's what dumb inexperienced insurance salesmen who designed world famous architecture did back then!

[Jeff_Brauer]

TePaul,

That is actually one of those obvious points I don't think anyone made before here.  IF the goal was for CBM to route the golf course, on site at Merion would have been the appropriate venue, not NGLA.

I do think you have that last post wrong, though.  The way I hear it, Hugh Wilson didn't say "I have been abroad before", he actually said "I have been a broad before", which I take as evidence that he went to Europe for a very early sex change operation.  

[Mike Cirba]

Sully,

They definitely went to see NGLA.   They were trying to emulate what CBM had done there, it had just opened the previous summer, and if CBM was going to design Merion he would have come down to Philly.

[Dan Herrmann]

Jeff - be careful!  That sounds like Tom Paul humor

[JESII]

Tom,

So you think NGLA was the primary reason the Merion guys went to Southampton?

Maybe I wasn't clear...To learn from what NGLA was in order to build Merion.

[JESII]

In other worde...do you feel the primary purpose of the trip to NGLA was just to see and admire NGLA (as some of us might if we went there today)? Or do you think it was to learn from it in order to best build Merion and at the same time learn the how's and why's from the guy that built it?

[Mike Cirba]

Jim,

The latter, as well as to see his concepts of various holes abroad implemented on the ground.

[DMoriarty]

David,

You are the one arguing that CBM designed Merion yet no one at the club ever thought to give him any credit or bring him back to design the west course, or advise and subsequent and significant changes to his creation over the next eighteen years while the course hosted 3 us amateurs and a us open on his supposed creation.

They not only neglected to cite their creator;  they credited someone else entirely!!  Not only did they claim it was wilson but others like tillinghast were apparently in on it too!!'

If that isn't a conspiracy theory then I don't know what is! 

Mike Cirba.   About everyone involved with Merion East credited CBM and Whigham as working on the layout, including Hugh and Alan Wilson, Robert Lesley, and H.J. Whigham.   Even Findlay, who had met with H. Wilson after his trip abroad, commented that CBM laid out many of the holes.  

So for you to pretend like Merion never said anything indicating that CBM and HJW had worked on the layout is absolutely ridiculous.    

As for your expectation that they would have referred to him as "the architect" of the  course, that is absolutely ridiculous.   While there are a few scattered uses of that term by 1910-1911, that was a term that had not yet come into vogue or common usage.  By your logic, Hugh Wilson wasn't the architect either, given that no one at Merion ever called him the "architect" of the course, at least not exclusive at  M&W.   They all said that the laid the course out on the ground but that the suggestions and advice of M&W were of the greatest help and value.  

In fact, as TEPaul mentioned above,  Merion's board never even mentioned Wilson or his committee.   They sure as hell did mention CBM though!  

Speaking of which, did anyone else notice that TEPaul slipped in that in 1910 H.G. Lloyd proposed by resolution that Merion's Board thank M&W for their help?   Yet another crucial bit of Merion's records that have long been hidden from us.  

Given that Wayne and TEPaul have been showing the Merion Minutes around to various people across the country for a few years now (in direct contravention of both MCC's and MGC's stated policies,) can anyone tell us what exactly the minutes say about this?  
____________________________________________

Jeff Brauer wrote:
"Its clear that they didn't like the CBM rectangular look from the results and they did take out the Alps green soon after the trip, although part of that was eliminationg the road crossings, as per Francis.  There was one passage somewhere about Wilson having a better touch in design, if I remember correctly, and the overall look of Merion is closer to Colt than CBM."

Jeff, I really wish you would consider the actual historical record before writing such things.

1.  First, Merion built their Alps Hole in 1910 and not only did the hole survive for over a dozen years, it was oftentimes highlighted as one of the better holes in various descriptions of the course!   It's demise was uniformly described as because it crossed Ardmore Avenue, which had become increasingly busy.

2.  There was no "rectangular CBM look" in 1911, and there was little or nothing rectangular about the features at NGLA when Merion's committee traveled to NGLA in 1911 to work on the layout of Merion East.  

The following photos are of NGLA circa 1910.   Surely this isn not what you were referring to as the "CBM rectangular look" above?

[JESII]

David,

I don't think you can argue that they went in another direction very soon after completion of the course...for one reason or another.

[DMoriarty]

David,

I don't think you can argue that they went in another direction very soon after completion of the course...for one reason or another.

I don't consider over a decade to be "very soon after the completion of the course."   Do you?   And while some of the changes "went in another direction" (the new 11th for instance, and the new green on the 8th and possibly the new green on the 9th) other changes did not.  For example, the new 10th replaced one CBM template (the Alps) with another (the Cape,) and the changes to one did little more than provide a mirror image of the original hole.    Most of these changes were brought on by space issues (the road) or agronomy issues (rebuilding low lying greens which were not draining well.)  Very few were a different approach to the fundamental strategies of the course.  

As for aesthetics, if anything they seem to have moved more toward the natural look of NGLA at the time.   Ironically, over time NGLA seems to look less like it did in the beginning, while Merion came to look more like NGLA did in the beginning.

But then this is really not the issue here, and perhaps best left for another day.

ADDED:   To clarify, there is some indication that the green-keeping and maintenance practices under William Flynn began to chip away at some of the playability aspects of the course fairly early on, and this may have been a harbinger things to come, but the architectural concept remained largely intact for at least a decade. 

[JESII]

I can't make sense of that middle paragraph because I know very little about NGLA then or now...but are you suggesting CBM continued to guide them after the initial course was built?

Also, I think #10 is a Flynn template more than a Cape...although I have no idea if Flynn was around at the time.

[DMoriarty]

I don't know if CBM was still guiding them or not.   I have always assumed not, but I have recently reviewed some strange old posts by Wayne and TEPaul that make me wonder.  It seems unlikely, but since I haven't researched it and since Wayne and TEPaul are hiding the source material from me, I cant say with any certainty either way.  

But surely Wilson knew about CBM's Cape hole given their trip to NGLA, and given that it had been extensively covered in the press, and given that CBM and Whigham wrote extensively about it in Golf Illustrated.  

Wayne and Tom would have you believe that the 10th was a Flynn template and had nothing to do with CBM's cape concept or even with Wilson, but I don't think the historical record supports that conclusion.   First, every contemporaneous source I have seen credits Hugh Wilson with those changes, not Flynn.   Second, while Flynn did adopt the concept, it was originally CBM's "cape" concept and Flynn even used CBM's "cape" terminology.  So did others, including AWT, and there is reportedly even a cape type hole at Pine Valley.  But it was CBM and HJW who popularized the concept and coined the term for it.  That Flynn and others used the same term indicates a common genealogy.  

Merion's modified 10th was even showcased as a good example of "a so-called cape type of hole" in the Bulletin of the Green Section in 1926, a few years after it was built.  Merion's strong association with that body (and Flynn's) suggests that Merion knew they had themselves a cape hole. 

[Patrick_Mucci]

But you are arguing that the layout of Merion East was not the primary impetus for the trip to NGLA simply because it wasn't written down exactly that way by those guys right then.

In the context of what they were trying to accomplish in the late winter and spring of 1911...get the golf course routed and planned in detail so they could complete the transaction with HDC...how can you conclude that the entire committee (Wilson's Committee) took all that time to go to Southampton for anything other than the planning of Merion East?

Agreed

Keep in mind, this is not an argument that they went empty handed and asked CBM to give them a golf course. I think they had a million ideas and were looking for some guidance out of them...

Here's where I don't agree.

With little in the way of experience, I don't think they had a million ideas.
I think they had a few and were looking for both inspiration, refinement and guidance.

In one of the threads on the "White Faces of Merion" , DavidM or Tom W listed the number of holes considered "templates" at Merion,
I think there were about 5 or so of them.

Let's assume that there's four to six "template" holes at Merion.  
If none of the committee played courses in the UK where those templates came from, then one must conclude that the committee received their inspiration, if not their direction from CBM at NGLA.

If some of the committee played golf in the UK, then the question is, did they visit and play the courses where the template holes originated.

If not, then I think you have to draw the same conclusion as above.

So for me, the key to this issue is, what were the UK playing experiences of Griscom, Francis and Lloyd.

It appears that Toumlin traveled abroad after March, 1911

[Mike Cirba]

Patrick,

Do you know any leader of any project anywhere at any time who gave "suggestions", or who "approved" of their own work?

[Patrick_Mucci]

Tom,

So you think NGLA was the primary reason the Merion guys went to Southampton?

Sully,

No, Merion was the primary reason the Merion guys went to Southampton !

[Patrick_Mucci]

Patrick,

Do you know any leader of any project anywhere at any time who gave "suggestions", or who "approved" of their own work?

I'm afraid that I don't understand the question, could you rephrase it.

Thanks

[Patrick_Mucci]

Sully,

They definitely went to see NGLA.   

They were trying to emulate what CBM had done there,

That's a change in your position.
You're now stating that the Merion committee specifically went to NGLA in order to copy the holes at NGLA at Merion

it had just opened the previous summer,

Mike, according to Macdonald, they had been playing NGLA since 1909, two years prior to 1911.
\
and if CBM was going to design Merion he would have come down to Philly.

I thought Macdonald and Whigham came down to Philly

[JESII]

Pat,

What he's saying is...if CBM routed and designed the golf course, why would he need to select it from a group of 5?



Regarding your earlier comment about ideas, let me ask you this...if you and I were tasked with creating a golf course on a tight piece of land somewhere wouldn't we have all sort of thoughts on what might work simply because we have no real idea of what does not, and can not work? If a professional were asked to go to the same piece of land wouldn't you expect them to come up with a pretty tight, focused and organized idea of potential routings and hole designs? I would.


Mike,

Doesn't the guy that was needed to come in to guide the ship get the credit?

[Patrick_Mucci]

Pat,

What he's saying is...if CBM routed and designed the golf course, why would he need to select it from a group of 5?

Because he might have said, you can route it this way, or that way or another way.
Why don't you see what fits best and get back to me, and then we'll forge ahead and fine tune that plan.

Regarding your earlier comment about ideas, let me ask you this...if you and I were tasked with creating a golf course on a tight piece of land somewhere wouldn't we have all sort of thoughts on what might work simply because we have no real idea of what does not, and can not work?

That's certainly a possibility.

If a professional were asked to go to the same piece of land wouldn't you expect them to come up with a pretty tight, focused and organized idea of potential routings and hole designs? I would.

I'd agree.
But, there may have been more than one viable routing.


Mike,

Doesn't the guy that was needed to come in to guide the ship get the credit?

[JESII]

Pat,

I agree that there could be more than one routing by the pro...my main point is that the inexperienced person or team will not have the knowledge of what cannot work, which means everything is on the table. Best to be able to throw some stuff away...

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