Another year has come and gone, what did we glean along the way?
The luster of studying golf course architecture remains as brilliant as ever. Print media doesn’t give it the respect it warrants but eyeballs continue the trend of turning elsewhere for information. Using this internet site as a barometer, all the metrics were up: page views, content, participants in the Discussion Group, donations, emails received, visitors (including the fabulous Dixie Cup gathering), Christmas cards, and on and on. We even received our first poem! The subject matter continues to prove endlessly fascinating. From Old Tom Morris to Amy Alcott, a lot of ground was covered in the Feature Interviews this year. Same for the Course Profiles, which included one of MacKenzie’s early successes outside of Manchester to Emmet’s treasure on Long Island to modern Erin Hills which can stretch to more than 8,000 yards to historic Prestwick and The Country Club. As always, Joe Andriole’s heavy editing and Chris Buie’s magical touch greatly enhanced these photo essays.
The quest for knowledge keeps GolfClubAtlas.com fresh. One dot I finally connected came courtesy of Trey Greenwood’s In My Opinion piece on Coronado’s municipal course and its architect Jack Daray. We have all seen numerous times the famous 1947 photo of the founding architects of the ASGCA in Pinehurst and read its caption that Jack Daray was one of three architects unable to attend. Finally, from the unexpected topic of the municipal course on Coronado Island, I learned about the least known founder of the ASGCA. Additionally, the current narrative about Sunningdale teems with fresh information about Park, Colt, Simpson and the lot. They all represent points on a canvas and together, we continue to try and assemble an overall picture of the evolution of golf course architecture.
In all aspects of life two people can see the same thing and have wildly different thoughts. I just experienced such an incident with my girlfriend who brought home a clay dish that was about 14 inches long, a few inches tall and a few inches wide. I immediately thought, ‘Hallelujah, a gravy boat!’ and visions of thick, hot gravy splashed on everything from bread to popcorn danced merrily in my head. Her scoff told me otherwise,
‘No, Goofy, it’s for serving vegetables.’ ‘VEGETABLES,’ I shrieked in horror,
‘who eats them anymore? Weren’t they just a passing fad, rendered superfluous with the advent of pizza?’ Two reasonable people (or at least a patient, highly learned man and a dictatorial, hot headed female) had profoundly different perceptions of the same object. So it goes with golf courses. The pros and cons, thrusts and parries, passion and despair exhibited on these pages make for great theater especially when it comes to polarizing architecture. Take the Alotian Club, opulently and splendidly set, it features some of the nation’s firmest greens where a 20 foot putt can break virtually the same distance. It is a lot of fun to play but if you believe that walking is integral to the game, you will take exception to its lofty Golf Digest rating. The Trump Course in Scotland generated more posts than any new course in recent years. Some people, including myself, are captivated by its magnificent dunesland environment and array of interesting shots while others are more stingy with compliments. All comments should be somewhat tempered on this fledging links as we wait for the fescue to become dominant and for true links conditions to emerge. Nobody is right, nobody is wrong as it comes down to matters of taste and differences of opinion. And so, the GolfClubAtlas.com Discussion Group rages on -with no end in sight!
At a GOLFWEEK gathering this November at the Pinehurst Resort, the theme of information was explored. I contended, and there were few dissenters, that more information than ever is available today to assist owners, developers, Green Keepers, clubs and resorts about how to present their golf. Unlike the 1970s when I latched onto the World Atlas of Golf for dear life, there is a cornucopia of useful material explaining/opining what constitutes good golf course architecture. Instead of just hoping to find some relevant material, the challenge today is wading through the mountains of available information, analyzing it and distilling the parts relevant for your course.
Though Jack Morrissett above is excited above about the progress at Cabot Cliffs, restoration - as opposed to new course construction - remains in the fore and will be for years to come. Unchecked vegetation, ill-advised course alterations and a misunderstanding of classic design tenets have devitalized so many courses. Golf loses much of its mass appeal when so many of her courses are so poorly presented/conceived. There are many experts to help guide a club in its efforts but not every course/club can afford a Keith Foster or Gil Hanse. That’s okay because 90% plus of courses lack sufficient design merit to warrant their attention anyway!
Fortunately, it is now far easier for clubs to move ahead on their own initiative and free access sites like this can assist them by documenting success stories. If you are serious about making improvements at your club, have a read of Dunlop White’s writings under In My Opinion or Al Jamieson’s January 2012 Feature Interview on the turnaround at the California Golf Club of San Francisco or the course profiles on Sleepy Hollow and Orchard Lake. The prescription is well established: Prune trees and vegetation, restore width, return bunkers to their original loci, and reclaim lost putting surfaces. Let’s face it: Improving the playing experience at your course doesn’t require the intelligence of beating Kasparov at chess.
I am in the midst of reading Ed Viesturs’s new book about his many Everest expeditions. One of the best segments recalls the Poles who drove to Nepal from Poland and in 1980 became the first to summit Everest in the winter. Without state of the art equipment (more accurately, it bordered on the pathetic) they made it to the top through sheer focus and determination. No Sherpas required. It is one of mountaineering’s all-time great accomplishments. Can’t clubs push ahead like those gallant Poles? Do clubs have to rely so heavily on a team of others to fix their own mess when so much quality information is now available?
Clubs, mired in their own inane politics, have to
stop being their own worst enemy as that drives the cost of the game up. A gaggle of consultants are hardly required when your Golden Age course has 3,000 too many trees. Proper work done in-house saves the club money which is vital to re-aligning the cost of the game with the fun of the game. The value of a great Green Keeper has never been higher than today – they are worth their weight in gold to any club. For inspiration on what can be accomplished, look to South Uist and Askernish where a crew of two is all it takes to present an endlessly fascinating course to play with greens rarely quicker than a 7 on the stimp. Or look at what Coore & Crenshaw did by cutting the number of irrigation heads by 60% at Pinehurst No.2. Similarly, per Chris Johnston’s April Feature Interview, Don Mahaffey used less than half the heads on the second Dismal course as were employed on the first one. GREAT GOLF NEED NOT BE EXPENSIVE GOLF, no matter what you are being told.
The corporatized version of golf that beams out of your television is dishearteningly bland. Who is going to be attracted to an expensive sport that takes hours and hours to play? Yuck. Since Thanksgiving, I have followed Chris Buie’s lead and started playing with ~eight clubs. Keep thing simple. Inventing shots is fun. Old Tom Morris’s quote in his December Feature Interview
‘… iron clubs are now so varied that players sometimes get confused amongst them’ is my favorite line of the year. As an aside, Chris and I kept a running tally of approach shots into the 18th green at Southern Pines this year. An uphill hole of 329 yards from the white tees, 19 out of 174 players hit the green in regulation while we were watching from the porch at lunches throughout 2013. We didn’t keep a record but we think that perhaps no more than half could have even reached the green with their two best shots. A lot of the players were tourists so it makes you wonder: who the heck have we been building courses for?!
Doak lamented at that November Pinehurst gathering that no one has asked him to build a 6,000 yard course. How true given golf’s aging population base.
Be it the Andrioles at Askernish (pictured above), the Bradleys, or whoever, memories of father and son golf far out last the banality of the radiantly uninteresting PGA Tour.The beauty of game is its huge spectrum. When asked if I had a good golf year, I reflexively think back to range of courses seen. From Askernish to supremely presented places like Southern Hills and Castle Stuart, 2013 was a 10 out of 10 year for variety. Except for me missing five putts under five feet at Southern Hills and thus going down in flames
to Bitter Cowan-Dewar, mission accomplished! It was all topped off by watching my 76 year old Dad tack around Cabot Links from its silver tees of 6,020 yards. Seeing Dad’s shots bound a good distance along Cabot’s fescue fairways was like rolling the clock back to our UK trips that started thirty years ago. Plus, I finally caught a break there and we had some wind. Not having played golf like that in many years, Dad was like a kid in a candy store. The spirit of the game was truly alive that late October day for the Morrissetts.
GolfClubAtlas.com remains focused on content over page views. We aspire to be like ‘Foyle’s War’ and its tight, nuanced dialogue rather than an inane, glitzy concoction like ‘The Wolf on Wall Street.’ Posts of a bumptious nature only add a layer of film that must be scraped away to get to the good stuff. We take a rather dim view of such assertive posts and posters, especially when it stifles healthy debate. You need to own what you say and therefore you must post under your name or something very close (JSmith works for John Smith). In a similar vein, the Queen spoke about the merits of quiet reflection in her Christmas message eleven days ago. While she didn’t specifically mention this Discussion Group
, her sagacious advice applies: take a few moments before pushing the ‘post’ button. Let’s all resolve to set the highest standard of ‘netiquette.’ It matters immensely to the quality of this Discussion Group how you express your opinions. As always, a few posters will likely lose a seat at the table this year based on boorish conduct. Though regrettable, Ben and I will always move to do what is right for the community as a whole. Remember: people with several thousand plus posts to their name are held to the highest standard possible because their volume of posts makes a difference in how this Discussion Group is perceived. Just because you have
time to post doesn’t necessarily mean that you
should post. We are only after content that adds value. To that end, about ~20 pages of off-topic, non-architecture posts will soon be deleted, an annual tradition that I suppose comes with the territory. Connect NC will be updating our database to version SMF 1.1.19 to match our forum's files sometime this week. I don't know what that means either
other than the Discussion Group will likely be down for 2 or 3 hours at some point.
We would be wasting time here if no one read what we wrote. Happily, that is not the case. In fact, some people deleted their accounts because
too many eyeballs follow this ever-expanding web site. Ben’s and my strong desire is to keep the web site pure, free of clutter, flashing banners and commercials. GolfClubAtlas.com is about good design, so the web site itself needs to physically embrace that ideal. Less is more. As an example of what we don’t want, I attempted to read Fox Sports summary of the NFL games each Monday morning. However, the ads and commercial videos meant that the pages were excruciatingly slow to load and cumbersome to navigate. It was painful to the point that I quit visiting their web site or any of their links. Thanks to all the donors listed in the Contribution Section of GolfClubAtlas.com we remain mercifully free of such impositions. Many supporters are friends and just as many are people that we have never met. Both forms of donors are extremely flattering.
WE THANK ALL and hope to earn your support year after year for what we do.
As always, please email me at rmorrissett@cabotlinks.com with any suggestions on how to improve this site. Someone recently suggested capping any discussion at 5 pages because anything longer invariably veers off course and turns into one personality versus another. To date, we have resisted such artificial barriers but the point has some merit as fresh information rarely comes to light on page 9. What do you think?
GCA’er Jerry Kluger moved near Peter Millar’s Cary, NC facility and has - very kindly - decided to wreck his retirement. He developed the idea to market GolfClubAtlas.com golf shirts in order to promote this web site. Since his Sun Mountain golf bags have been a big hit over the years, Ben and I green-lighted the shirts which feature one of golf’s most beloved logos
on the chest. I tested a few in the fall and Peter Millar’s stretch-y material is ideal. Jerry will post details of this shirt offering in a week or so. We are going to keep it simple and, for now, offer only a few solids and a few striped designs. Each shirt costs $65 plus tax and shipping. Heroically, Jerry is going to manage this project that will require painfully accurate tax records. Talk about not fun - good luck Jerry in helping to further spread the GolfClubAtlas.com name!
We conclude with an apology. In about five months, everyone is going to assume that I am a Philadelphian because so many posts will be about my home area!
Of course, I refer to the two US Opens coming to Pinehurst No. 2. As the fourth generation of my family to be based in Moore County North Carolina, I am proud to see Pinehurst return to the epicenter of golf. No. 2’s raw (real raw, not the fake raw that you see in magazine articles of ‘expensively natural’ courses) look and lack of rough may well be a cornerstone moment in the direction of golf course architecture/maintenance. Stay tuned and please indulge this web site for all the Pinehurst material this spring/summer.
The fact that we all have electricity, shelter, food, free time, internet, carbon laptop, a leather MacKenzie walker with a Galvin Green rain jacket tucked in the pouch
, and the ability to travel and play golf indicates that we are among the luckiest 1% or so of people in the world. To top it off, our cumulative passion for the study of golf course architecture serves as a fulcrum to gain friendships around the world. What AMAZING times we live! Let’s make the most of our opportunities in 2014, always moving forward with gratitude and humility at the fortunes that golf continually rains down upon us.
Best,
Ran & Ben