The September/October 2016 edition of the Yale Alumni Magazine has several of my favorite things on the front cover. A sketch of the Supreme Court at its center, a lavender background, and teasers to three interest pieces: Eugene O'Neill's jewelry box, "Yale's world-class golf course," and New Haven's sushi scene.
But on turning to the second of the three interest pieces (which actually appears first in the magazine), I learned that the adage about a book's cover applies equally to magazines. Andrea DaRif, a 1973 graduate of Yale College who received an MFA in graphic design at the University a year later and who, accordingly to the article, "fell in love with golf while working as the creative director of The Golfer magazine," spends all of six short paragraphs--over an eight-page spread--describing "one of the greats." (For comparison, the only six-page spread on Mr. O'Neill's jewelry box contains 19 much-longer paragraphs of text.) My guess is that the short shrift paid to the course was an editor's doing, not Andrea's--after all, she states in her second sentence that the Course is an "architectural tour de force that almost nobody recognizes as such." If her vision for the article was to remedy that deficiency, I fear that her editors prevented her from fully realizing it.
Those editors clearly believed that pictures were the best way to tell the story, so accompanying the article's six paragraphs are seven large-scale photographs (six from modern times, one from 1925) and a computer-generated aerial image of the Course's layout. The pictures (a full two-page spread looking back down the 2nd hole from the green; a half-page picture of the eighth green from the fairway; a black-and-white quarter-page picture of plus-four-wearing male golfers putting on the 2nd green, with the mostly treeless expanse of the 1st, 7th, and 8th holes in the distance; a full two-page spread of the 9th hole viewed from the tee in early fall; two half-page pictures of the 4th hole, one from the tee, one from the bend in the fairway; and a three-quarter-page picture of the 9th green viewed from behind) are beautiful, but outdated, not reflecting Scott Ramsay's recent tree-removal efforts. And the two pictures of the 4th hole are laid out in reverse order, with the picture from the fairway bend positioned above the picture from the tee. None of the pictures have accreditation, although many were familiar to me, especially the final picture of the 9th green from behind, which appeared in GolfWeek's ranking of the best college courses several years ago.
As for the text, Ms. DaRif, currently an acclaimed author of romance novels, writes well and lucidly (and refreshingly uses the Oxford comma), but spends too much of her limited time on Charles Blair Macdonald. Five of the article's six paragraphs concern him, and only in the sixth do we learn about Seth Raynor and Charles Banks, whom Ms. DaRif describes as "collaborat[ors]." We know that, in the case of Yale, they were much more than that, and Macdonald much less, but so should the Yale Alumni Magazine--after all, the most detailed account of the course's design and construction appeared in their own August 1925 edition (the magazine was known as the Yale Alumni Weekly at the time) and was written by Mr. Banks. Even if the editors didn't have time to look back at their own archives, they could have stopped by the Course's pro shop, where copies of the recently published "Golf at Yale" book lie ready to educate them.
I am obviously thrilled to see the Course receive such billing and exposure, and I recognize that, to an uninformed audience, pictures intrigue more than words. (Then again, the highly informed audience of this site has also in recent years been smitten by high-volume photo tours--which I myself am guilty of propagating, even as to Yale--so the picture focus might just be a sign of the times.) But this is the Yale Alumni Magazine, so I had hoped that its editors would have allowed Ms. DaRif--whose passion for the course and both golf and non-golf architecture is clear--to share more of her words and insights with us, and also that the editors would have taken care to fact-check her words more carefully.
A link to the online version of the article, which presents (higher-resolution versions of) the pictures as a slideshow with the same captions as in the article, is below:
https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4357-yale-golf-course