Gentlemen,
Hiring Tom Fazio . . . . . . . I mean TOM f*cking FAZIO?
? . . . . . . to further desecrate the Dunes Course is an act of such breathtaking stupidity, short-sightedness and institutionalized madness, I am moved to question whether the entire governing body of MPCC ought to be medicated and relegated to electroshock therapy.
Admittedly, it would not be accurate to assert MPCC Dunes is a pure Raynor Course because he did not finish it (RIP if memory serves) and I believe that - aside from MacKenzie having a tiff with one of the potentates - Robert Hunter made some modifications to the Raynor plan and completed the project. It has been 12 years since I finished my copy edits for Sleeping Bear Press, so I may be hallucinating.
My sense is the golf course was a sort of Raynor/Hunter/in-house collage hybrid in the same way that several notable tracks in the east are Raynor-Tillie combinations. North Shore CC in Glen Head, NY and Sleepy Hollow come to mind, but I just spent three days in court listening to bullshit, so my brain is foggy.
Like every other thinking person with a micron of aesthetic taste and understanding of strategic arrangements, I was terrified Rees was going to transmogrify a lovely, elegant golf course into an explosion of fecal hubris, but in a rare moment of mental stability, Ress chose something in between. In truth, it is neither fish nor "foul," so given that a back alley abortion butcher was given the task of performing delicate brain surgery, at least the patient did not die.
But as the good Doctor warned in his original book, the best economy is in finality. In other words, spend the dough, do it right and be done. Selecting Rees Jones to defile the Dunes Course - apparently by dartboard, since no sane person would turn him loose on a restoration - contradicts every secular canon, tenet and defensible rationale imaginable. It is akin to playing spin the bottle and finding yourself naked in a lip-lock with Rosanne Barr.
The first rule - after making an egregious error - is to avoid a repeat. That MPCC has chosen to redo the Dunes 15 years after Rees is a tacit acknowledgement the club f*cked up, yet in another mind-bending lapse of reason, is asking a factory firm specializing in cookie cutters to turn a stale rhubarb pie into a wedding cake. It is like watching a bad-decision machine clunk its way towards a cliff.