The outliers of GCA....

[Tom_Doak]

No offense to Tom Doak, but he is no outlier. Having RTJ break ground for him at Cornell probably opened up the minds of the Ag School/professor that let him go to Scotland for a year. Tom left MIT to attend Cornell, if I remember correctly, because at MIT he was an outlier in the golf industry. At Cornell, he got in the inner circle. Those letters to famous clubs probably mentioned RTJ, Cornell and his year in Scotland. Next comes Pete Dye and The Confidential Guide and the rest is history.
 

Half of that is dead wrong, of course.  Nobody in my department at Cornell knew much of anything about Trent Jones, I had to remind them he went there, and I've still got the scholarship application for my year overseas, which may have mentioned him but only in passing.  [Pete Dye and Ben Crenshaw and Geoff Cornish wrote letters of recommendation for me, among others; Mr. Jones did not.]  I left MIT because they had no program remotely applicable to golf architecture, though that year was critical to helping me understand what I really wanted to do with my life, and what I didn't.  I am not sure what the "inner circle" was at Cornell, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't in it; anyone in my department would have called me an outlier, or worse.  And those letters to famous clubs always mentioned that I was a student at Cornell, but usually concentrated on the architect of the course in question and why I wanted to see that particular course.  I don't think I ever mentioned Mr. Jones, and I sure didn't mention my year in Scotland, because that came AFTER I'd been to all the U.S. courses.

Well, okay, you were more than half wrong.

P.S. to M.Y. - Mr. Jones did not get a Landscape Architecture degree.  I don't think Cornell offered one then.  He was only there two years, taking classes in this and that ... I'm not sure if he actually got a degree for his self-made program or not.  But, you should consider whether to broaden your definition from "Yale connection" to "Ivy League connection" as most would do.  Are you trying to protect a friend at Brown??

[Tom_Doak]

I will now turn the thread back to Mike.  I've read Gladwell's book and really enjoyed it; I will tell you later whether I think it applies to me or not, but I'd rather let Mike continue his thoughts instead of the thread becoming a bunch of inaccurate speculation about my own career.

[Adam Clayman]

Doubt this will fuel fodder but here's some random thoughts.
I once listened to Barry Greenstein talk about luck.  He used a bell shape curve and said that most people are on either side of the middle. One side being lucky the other being unlucky. Then there are those who are farther away from the middle, those are the outliers. As matter of fact, there was a guy who had access to one of the internet poker sites security code. He was caught cheating because he was so far off the middle, his outlier status sent up a red flag. Just this week, someone calculated the trading results of members of congress. They out perform the S&P index by 6%. That's an amazing outlier.

As for GCA, it's an outlier all on it's own, just being a business, (Look at the Ams of the early 20th century) but, I would assume it still requires luck and hard work to be considered successful. Whether that work is learning women's perfumes  or learning how to pleasingly shape a landscape into compelling golf.

[Mike_Young]

TD,
I was "speculating" on the RTJ degree.
Yes, Ivy League would probably be a better description.  I do know that RTJ2 is in the Bohemian Grove group and I wonder if there are any GCA's in the Skull and Bones or the Porcellian Club.  Perhaps Bob Crosby could tell us.  I do think those Ivy League, Northeastern US connections were very critical.  As for Brown, how did you know I had a friend there?  

But now I will turn the thread over to you and begin with some speculation  
I also break golf architects into three other groups.
The first group is those that wanted to be golf architects at a young age and worked towards it from that moment on.
  The second group is the group that went into it because the family was in it and it was the most logical thing for them to do.  
The third group consist of the guys that got out of Landscape architecture program and via the interview process they went to work for a GCA.  Over the last 10 years I have spoken to the UGA LAR class a few times and would ask how many wanted to become a golf architect.  Half would raise their hand.  I would ask how many had heard of Seth Raynor and maybe two hands would go up.  I would then ask if any had read Golf Architecture in America and maybe one hand.  That would be the guy I would ask to intern.  

I would speculate and label yourself, Ian A, Jeff B ( until he gets scientific on me) and myself as being in the first group.  And all took different paths.  And there are plenty of others I don't know that did the same.  This group seems to be the most content within the business.  There a re some grumpy pricks we have all seen in this business and in most cases they had worked under some signature and when they went out on their own they were not revered as they had been under the signature.  They seem to be the most discontent.  (please note there are many exceptions here also)

I speculate the biggest difference between you and the signature is that you "live it" and eat sleep and breathe the "design" whereas the top signatures are more into the "business".  If you don't think the design will work then you would most likely say no but the signature firms are more focused on getting the job and would find a way to make it work in their minds.

I'm done...it's yours....

[Phil McDade]

As I read Outliers, it seems that Gladwell is arguing success in something well beyond anyone/thing else in the field (Gates, the Beatles) is a result of a combination of:
-- talent/potential;
-- opportunity (or happenstance);
-- and spending an inordinate amount of time (his 10,000 hours of practice theory, which to me seems silly, but I see his broader point) doing that one thing, which allows the person with talent and opportunity (right place and right time) to succeed well beyond anyone else.

So it's not just that Lennon and McCartney were musical geniuses (they were, i.e., talent). They also came around at the exact time (1960) that music fans were looking for something new (opportunity), and they played more than 1,000 club dates in Germany (inordinate time doing one thing) perfecting their craft.

To me, the clearest example of an outlier who fits in the Gladwell theory is Michael Phelps. He is unusually talented, physically, to be a world-class swimmer (he has perhaps the perfect body for a swimmer -- 6'4", with a wingspan of a much taller man, and a very long torso and ((for his height)) short legs -- which is why he's the best butterflier ever in the sport). He does one thing time and again -- in the seven years leading up to the Bejing Olympics, he never took a day off practice (not one). But he had an amazing set of circumstances (happenstance, or opportunity) to help him succeed -- he just happened to grow up in Baltimore, which happens to have one of the country's best swim club, and was identified very early on by the nation's best swim coach as having vast potential (Bob Bowman famously took aside Pehlps' mother when Phelps was 11 and asked her if she was prepared to have Michael train to become an Olympian. Four years later, at the age of 15, he was.

What's this got to do with golf? I think, for purposes of this site's defining mantra , we're looking for outliers in the wrong places (for those suggesting RTJ Sr. and Doak, to pull out two examples used so far). To me, the outliers in golf architecture are Henry Fownes and Oakmont, George Crump and Pine Valley, and perhaps even CB Macdonald and NGLA. By nearly any measure, Oakmont and Pine Valley rank among the five or so best courses in the world. NGLA, for GCA junkies, probably does as well.

Take Fownes (and his son William). He had a certain amount of talent, having played in the 1901 US Open. He had opportunity -- making loads of money in the steel industry, and plenty of land available in the rolling hills of Pittsburgh to create a championship course (and, I'd argue, wasn't constrained by any nearby courses or conventional thinking about what a championship course should be, given there were so few anyway when Oakmont was built). And (critically, I think) he spent along with his son an inordinate amount of time on that one thing -- building and perfecting Oakmont. He designed no other course. He spent nearly three decades at Oakmont, and his son spent nearly 40 years closely involved with it. http://www.usga.org/news/2010/May/Fownes--The-Oakmont-Architect/

Crump and Macdonald arguarly had a similar singular devotion to one course -- Macdonald less so, perhaps, and Crump's involvement w/ PV short-circuited by his death.

To me, those courses -- and the men who produced them -- are the outliers in golf course architecture.

[David Kelly]

 He has a theory, finds material that supports his theory, and lays it out in an enjoyable format.  This generates discussion. 

I agree however that is not how the scientific method works - which is a problem.   Basically as a cultural theorist I think he comes up with a lot of half-baked theories that his skills as a writer allow him to put over more than do the inherent merits of the theories.

[Tom_Doak]

Phil:

Of course, I loved the book, because I saw the parallels right away.  Success in anything takes talent, opportunity, and hard work -- so I'm not sure that Gladwell has discovered much new, with that formula -- but he is right on in finding different professions where timing was everything.

I probably had the 10,000 hours in [from reading The World Atlas of Golf until I'd memorized it, to traveling around seeing great courses, to working on construction crews] by the time I was 21 or 22.  Not many other guys could honestly say the same.  And I networked like crazy -- if only by accident, trying to learn everything I could and see every course I could see.  And I did have the Ivy League background Mike talks about, too; most clients haven't cared, but I think it's helped with a few of the more important ones.

It turned out I was born at the right time, but just barely.  The standard career path for a golf course architect is to apprentice for someone for 10-12 years and to start out on their own at 35-40 years old, or even older.  It's hard to find clients when you are younger than that.  So, the guys who are 60-65 now are the ones who really hit the peak of the market.  But, I always had a sense of urgency, so I started on my own at 26, and that enabled me to make a name for myself before the other guys my age, and before the business dried up.  [Those of us at the back end of the baby boom are late to the party for most things where the baby boom makes prices skyrocket and then crash after the peak -- housing, investments, etc.  At least I got the career part right!]

My book (and my writing in general) helped me stake out a position for myself, but it was really the position I took that set me apart -- that the worthwhile projects were the ones with great sites.  Mr. Dye, Fazio, Nicklaus, and others couldn't afford to say that, because it would write off 90% of their potential clients, and they didn't want to do that; and most other architects figured they couldn't afford to take such a stand, because there weren't many projects that fit the description.  I figured out early that I would be happy with getting some of the 10% of projects that were left over.  And, I took that view just before things started to boom, and made a reputation for myself as being one of the guys you'd want to talk to if you had the right piece of ground. 

But, it still took some luck that my career was on the ascendant right when the people who really paid attention to property -- Mike Keiser, Mark Parsinen, Julian Robertson, etc. -- decided to build their dream projects.  I would like to think that some of my writings helped some of them to see the light, but other than Mr. Keiser, I'm not sure if that's so.

[Mike Sweeney]

Half of that is dead wrong, of course.  Nobody in my department at Cornell knew much of anything about Trent Jones, I had to remind them he went there, and I've still got the scholarship application for my year overseas, which may have mentioned him but only in passing.  [Pete Dye and Ben Crenshaw and Geoff Cornish wrote letters of recommendation for me, among others; Mr. Jones did not.]  I left MIT because they had no program remotely applicable to golf architecture, though that year was critical to helping me understand what I really wanted to do with my life, and what I didn't.  I am not sure what the "inner circle" was at Cornell, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't in it; anyone in my department would have called me an outlier, or worse.  And those letters to famous clubs always mentioned that I was a student at Cornell, but usually concentrated on the architect of the course in question and why I wanted to see that particular course.  I don't think I ever mentioned Mr. Jones, and I sure didn't mention my year in Scotland, because that came AFTER I'd been to all the U.S. courses.

Well, okay, you were more than half wrong.

P.S. to M.Y. - Mr. Jones did not get a Landscape Architecture degree.  I don't think Cornell offered one then.  He was only there two years, taking classes in this and that ... I'm not sure if he actually got a degree for his self-made program or not.  But, you should consider whether to broaden your definition from "Yale connection" to "Ivy League connection" as most would do.  Are you trying to protect a friend at Brown??

Tom,

What is up with you and RTJ? What happened that you keep this obvious distance when his name is mentioned?

Nobody knew him? I was there after you but THE ROBERT TRENT JONES GOLF COURSE was there when I was there.

[paul cowley]

TD,
I was "speculating" on the RTJ degree.
Yes, Ivy League would probably be a better description.  I do know that RTJ2 is in the Bohemian Grove group and I wonder if there are any GCA's in the Skull and Bones or the Porcellian Club.  Perhaps Bob Crosby could tell us.  I do think those Ivy League, Northeastern US connections were very critical.  As for Brown, how did you know I had a friend there?  

But now I will turn the thread over to you and begin with some speculation  
I also break golf architects into three other groups.
The first group is those that wanted to be golf architects at a young age and worked towards it from that moment on.
  The second group is the group that went into it because the family was in it and it was the most logical thing for them to do.  
The third group consist of the guys that got out of Landscape architecture program and via the interview process they went to work for a GCA.  Over the last 10 years I have spoken to the UGA LAR class a few times and would ask how many wanted to become a golf architect.  Half would raise their hand.  I would ask how many had heard of Seth Raynor and maybe two hands would go up.  I would then ask if any had read Golf Architecture in America and maybe one hand.  That would be the guy I would ask to intern.  

I would speculate and label yourself, Ian A, Jeff B ( until he gets scientific on me) and myself as being in the first group.  And all took different paths.  And there are plenty of others I don't know that did the same.  This group seems to be the most content within the business.  There a re some grumpy pricks we have all seen in this business and in most cases they had worked under some signature and when they went out on their own they were not revered as they had been under the signature.  They seem to be the most discontent.  (please note there are many exceptions here also)

I speculate the biggest difference between you and the signature is that you "live it" and eat sleep and breathe the "design" whereas the top signatures are more into the "business".  If you don't think the design will work then you would most likely say no but the signature firms are more focused on getting the job and would find a way to make it work in their minds.

I'm done...it's yours....

For the record (if one is being kept)...I'm a First Grouper!