There goes Cirba, making stuff up again.
Which begs the question of why not more of an effort to imitate the original and/or NGLA version of the Alps?
Jim,
They didn't have the landscape for a closer replica. Do you really expect them to have moved mountains? Literally? To me it looks like the focused on the green, and did a decent job with that. Take a look at the construction photos of CBM's Alps at Lido.
Surely we all agree that the discomfort of not being able to see the putting surface while playing an approach shot is not insignificant, it pales in comparison to the discomfort caused by not being able to see anything.
David, I understand all of your quotes speaking of the hole being blind...do you think the flag would have been blind?
From the quotes I think it was substantially blind, and the golfer felt like he was hitting over something something substantial. But how would I know for sure whether it was fully blind or not?
I'm not convinced we even know everything that was there yet about what was specifically on the ground, or really even fully understand how large the mounds were short of the green, or how much the green was sunken. Was there any mounding short of the road? That would have made a big difference.
Here is an section of an oblique aerial photo of the green from 1925, after the hole was no longer in use.
For size perspective, note the automobile on the road, left. Look at the size of the front mounding. Those look like pretty large mounds, don't they? They look a lot bigger than the car. Looking at those mounds one can better understand why the one blurb noted an eight foot slope down to the green from the bunker.
Also, it looks as if there may have been some additional smaller mounding between the bunker and the road. And recall from the other photo that ground level on that side of the road was somewhere around six or seven steps above the level of the road. Cirba has blindly speculated that the road was sunken, based on the past blind speculation of his mentors. From what I can see of the photos, this may be more wishful thinking on their part. I am not certain, but from the photos I have seen it looks as if the road might be terraced with the the ground above the road on the green side and below the road the other.
So all and all there was some pretty formidable ground, and some larger than expected mounds, to carry to get to the green, which was reportedly sunken eight feet below the front of the the bunker. That sounds and looks like it could have been completely blind to me. What do you think?
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By the way, take another look at the photo where the steps up the embankment along the road are visible, at what I assumed was sand in the front bunker. If one zooms in on the image one can see that the white is actually some sort of problem with the photo or else with the copy. There is straight edge of white above the hats and nothing is visible within the strip. Some of the bystanders legs actually disappear at the knees. So we cannot see where the mound stops and the sand begins, and we cannot see how far those people lying against the mound had to climb up to get there.
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Remember David, an attorny ADVISNG on a deal does not mean it was his, or her deal.
If the advising attorney structured the deal, based the deal on unique terms from other of his past deals, drafted the deal, and had final say over the deal, you would not call it his deal? Really? Who then would have been the architect of the deal? The summer intern from the client's office who the attorney was teaching and who took a shot at some editing?
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but he ddn't tak credit for it...
He didn't take credit for Sleepy Hollow or Piping Rock in that article either, so I guess he didn't design those?