Mark;
Alex Findlay was perhaps as much of a "Johnny Appleseed", cultivating the growth of the game in this country in the early years, as anyone else.
He built MANY courses, mostly on the east coast, where he was employed by one of the major sporting goods companies (which had teamed with a railroad company) to promote the game and build new courses. He worked from Maine to Florida, and as far west as Nebraska where he built a rudimentary nine-holer in the 1880s.
He was great friends with the Vardons and Rays and other celebrities of the game, and was quite an accomplished player in his own right. So enthusiastic was Findlay in promoting the game, he even travelled to the Vatican, hoping to convince the Pope to build a course there.
I've played many Findlay courses, and there are quite a few of them in the Philadelphia area, where he eventually settled in the late teens through the remainder of his life. He kept busy designing courses even after the Depression in that area, and some of his most noted efforts have been mentioned. If you would like to know more about which courses he built, I'd be happy to list some of them.
Generally, he was a functional architect, but one who was rather creative in his routings and use of natural landforms. Some quick impressions of his design style are as follows;
* He was not one for using a lot of fairway bunkers, preferring instead to use the contours of the land to dictate positioning.
* Most of his greensites were bunkered on both sides, at 4 and 8 o'clock, with longish bunkers squeezing the approach.
* His greens tended to be narrow but deep, requiring both accuracy and distance control. The worst sin on Findlay courses is to miss your approaches to the sides due to this narrowness.
* He did very little in the way of creating mounds or other obviously artificial features, although his greens generally rise up a little from the surrounding terrain, and he created mounds on the back side of his bunkers.
* He seemed to love utilizing existing natural water hazards, and the use of the creek at Reading CC for instance, is wonderfully routed in a variety of ways. He also wasn't opposed to using water, particularly creeks, as forced carry shots on approaches and par threes.
* Like many who followed him, such as Ross and Flynn, Findlay loved to build holes where both the tee and green were elevated, driving downhill and then approaching uphill.
* Findlay's greens were generally very naturally integrated into their surrounds, although some do "pop-up" sort of Raynor-like, and were as likely to use natural slope as anything with man-made created internal contours, although a number of his greens have distinct "levels"
* Findlay was not averse to creating steeply uphill holes, particularly on par threes, many of which one can only see the top half of the flagstick.
* Conversely, Findlay created some dramatic drop shot par threes, and some of them still play very long and difficult to this day despite the downhill slope.
* One of his favorite tactics was to build short par four holes where the player is asked to drive directly into a steep sideslope with the hole turning quickly in the direction of the slope. On those holes, the player is tempted to bite off more than they can chew, and missing on the short side is certain death. However, on those same holes, the player who plays too timidly is left with a steeply side-sloped shot with everything running away from them.
* Findlay also seemed to used forested areas in interesting ways, where a player is tempted to keep it close to trouble to gain an advantageous line for the subsequent shot. He also seemed to like to tuck his greensites into little glades and around corners of existing mature trees. However, many of his courses today suffer from overplanting of trees along fairway corridors, which clearly differs from the original design intent.
* Findlay seemed to LOVE blind shots, and I don't know a course of his I've played that doesn't feature at least one of them on the approach, and usually quite a few where the landing area might not be from the tee. My favorite hole of his is the 11th at Reading, which bears some similarlity in the feel of the approch to the Alps Hole at NGLA, except with OB close behind.
I hope this synopsis give you a feel for his style and influence. Please feel free to ask me to clarify or detail any of the above.
