I have always loved this illustration of Scioto Country Club circa 1926. By this time the golf course was already 10 years old. Are some of the elements of this drawing exaggerated? I think, most definitely, they are. Some artistic license was certainly taken with seemingly every tee beeing grossly elevated. Some of the hummocks may have been a little more pronounced than they actually were, but I have to believe the artist was working off of some sort of plan or aerial photo, or both.
The fairway contours are very much what I knew back twenty years ago when I worked there. The general lay of the land was very much what you see in this drawing. There's a hump on the left side of eight that is sizeable and is part of the generally topography. This is graphically represented as it actually looks, not as a mound, but as a gradual slope. My point being that it didn't look like a 'chocolate drop' or whatever you call it, we know that slopes are slopes and mounds are mounds.
Call them chocolate drops, mounds, hummocks, whatever - I think those things had been long erased even before the 1962 renovation. I'd be curious if Jack Nicklaus ever remembers them being there. Could they have been a casualty of the aggressive tree planting program that ensued in the '30's? I don't know, but judging by the way the natural topography is drawn, these mounds were definitely pronounced and unnatural looking. It would appear this was Donald Ross's "thing" way before Andrew Green was ever born.
The bunkers also look very much like what we saw at Oak Hill (see hole 15). Did Ross do the same thing OHCC as he did at Scioto? I have no clue, but from what I was told a lot of Andrew's design decisions were often backed up with some type of photographic evidence. Some holes had more photos than others and made things much easier to argue.
When Mark mentions "sympathetic restoration" I think that rings true. There is some things in this drawing that weren't brought back, that wine cellar of a bunker in the middle of number one (perhaps a "firm kick in gonads" for the golfer that struggles to get the ball in the air), the cross bunker spanning the width of 13 is another that jumps out.
I walked away impressed with what they've done out at Scioto. It looks like a very fun round of golf that would have an appeal to a very wide range of abilities and ages. Does it look as "natural" as MacKenzie or Flynn? No, but it seems to me this is the way it may well have been designed - like it or not.
