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.