Tom, your comments raise an interesting question. What qualifies any current or former touring professional as a golf course architect or designer? I have to believe Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Weiskopf, Ben Crenshaw, etc. and many former touring pro's that have their names stamped on golf courses never studied landscaping, agronomy and golf course design while attending college or even during their careers. With that said, what makes them an expert in the field outside of their name?
I find it amusing when PGA professionals feel they can do what you and other experienced and esteemed GCA's do for your livelihood as good, if not better, simply based on the notion that they have played and seen enough golf courses in their lifetime to know what's good design and what isn't. I'm not saying Zac will or won't become a proficient architect and course designer one day, but I think there is this prevailing romanticism pro golfers have that they can design courses better than those that have gone before them and those doing it professionally now simply based on their playing experience.
As Mike Young would say, you're qualified when someone decides they will pay you to do it. And by that definition, starting a project yourself and naming yourself as the designer is a grey area.
Everybody's got to start somewhere. Lots of great designers started out as players with no knowledge of the nuts and bolts of golf course construction. Look at all the golf writers who jump into consulting and design work with no more experience than the players they've scoffed at for doing the same thing. [Some people think that's what I did, because they saw my name as a writer before they saw it as a designer ... but that's because I was getting my experience in the dirt before I'd say I was a designer.]
The problem with arguing about this is deciding what we are arguing about -- how we define what it means to "design a course." There are many levels of "design," and ideally, decisions about the non-golf stuff would all have an impact on the best solutions for the golf holes themselves, but that only happens when someone is involved from bottom to top. How much of this do you want to include as design:1. Deciding on the strategy of the golf holes
2. Deciding on the routing and how the holes fit on the ground
3. Drawing up the grading plan or directing the shapers to build the features in 3-D
4. Figuring out how to handle all the drainage and where it goes
5. Figuring out how to handle the environmental impact of putting a course on the site and what will work from a permitting standpoint.
Any golfer could design a course if #1 is all you mean by "design". You probably drew out golf holes in 2-D when you were twelve years old.
Most golfers could design a course if #1 and #2 is all you mean. Some designs will work far better than others in terms of the transitions between holes, but if you don't consider that part important, you've reduced it to #1 plus managing the scorecard.
Many designers delegate #4 and #5 to their associates or to outsiders, whether they are former PGA Tour pros or ASGCA members or not. If you want to say you have to do #4 and #5, then there are a lot of famous architects who would have to be disqualified, which would be silly.
#3 is kind of the inflection point to me. Real design has to be done in three dimensions. If you rely on somebody else to do #3, they are going to have as big an impact on the "design" as you did, because the devil is in the details, and everything can be changed in the field.