Benjamin,
First of all, thank you for your excellent, well composed (partial!) tour. I am particularly gratified that the course has inspired you to do so. And by the way, if you ever consider diversifying your daytime work experience, consider photography. The images you provided are so stunning that henceforth, my camera, blushing with embarrassment, is going back in the closet to hide!
But now that Mike’s work is done, the question we’re starting to hear from raters who have been through is whether we consider ourselves a Raynor/Travis/ AW Tillinghast course or a Mike DeVries course. Here are the facts and I’ll let others weigh in:
Of the eighteen holes, our 1st through15th are faithful to the routing dating to 1930 when Sunningdale architect number three, AWT, completed his work, and his addition of the drop-shot par-3 12th was the only change of consequence to Raynor’s 1918 course. Mike’s final phase involved building three new holes (16, 17 and 18) and they changed the routing, though the 16th tee and the position of the 18th green changed only slightly. But Mike’s decision to do so has had an enormous positive impact, as these holes are just so much better than their predecessors. But still, one could argue that only three of the 16 holes are DeVries’, giving some measure of weight that the course is less Mike and more, shall we say, “Old Masters.”
That said, the strongest argument for proponents of the DeVries attribution camp: of the 18 greens that date back to the 1930 course, only one, Walter Travis’s 14th, is original (…and we’re talking about the interior of the 14th, only). All other greens are Mike’s. And going back in time, it was his ability to mold greens of real interest that in large part drove our decision to bring him into the project. There were several architects available to us who pretty much specialized in doing restoration work. But our course was so far gone that we needed someone whose body of work included a large amount of original design. (…and now I can say with great pride, in Mike, we hit the jackpot!)
Our DeVries course now displays a long overdue unified aesthetic. It’s steeped in tradition, beautifully restrained and successfully highlights the land. And as Benjamin points out, a round of golf now has a rhythm and flow to it that in great part is due to its routing.
So the heavy lifting is finally over. Though some punch list items remain, the three new holes are receiving notices that are really quite positive. The highest praise we have heard…the holes lay on the land as though they’ve been there forever. I think we can now apply that description to the entire course, and for that we have one person to thank…MDV!
So you can sort of guess which camp I’m in.
And Benjamin, Jim, David and I are looking forward to playing the whole course with you soon!