I hoisted John Kavanaugh's comment about the GOLF DIGEST list from another discussion: I give you all the credit in the world for so generously sharing credit on your designs but Digest has gone off the charts with their recent top 100 list. I don't see how giving book writers and sprinkler adjusters credit does anything but rob your profession of credibility. It's not just your designs or Old Mac, every other course listed either has one too many or one too few people listed. Let the architect be the architect.
On a side note I often hear architecture snobs on this site state that the common golfer doesn't know or care who designed the course they are enjoying. At this rate no one will.
I was going to write Ron Whitten a note about that, but no doubt he will be overwhelmed with emails from people complaining about the list for the next two weeks, so I'll just agree with John here.
I've always believed in sharing credit, but trying to list every name that maybe deserves credit for a course is a ridiculous exercise; they are equating the contributions of people who made vastly different contributions. The new GOLF DIGEST version sometimes [but not always] credits a guy who built a couple of new tees on a course the same way as the guy who routed and built it to begin with. [That is a specific example I'm talking about -- but I don't wish to focus on any particular instance of this, because there are so many major and minor injustices.]
So what do we have as a result?
We are redefining what the role of architect means, and including components that were never included before, to the point that almost nobody could ever be given credit as the "architect" by themselves. And on the other end, we are lowering the bar by listing people who got involved many years after the fact and had little to do with creating what's there. Instead of writing about the on-site supervisors and the superintendents and the shapers who have contributed greatly, we try to shoehorn them into the "architect" box, as if that's the only place where they can be properly respected . . . and we demean what an architect actually does.
Not just anybody can figure out where the golf holes ought to go and how they fit together, both physically and golf-wise.Of course, that demeaning has been going on for a long time. Some of the designers whose names we know have subbed out the creative work in their firms to others, but still take all the credit themselves. Famous players who design golf courses have very different levels of experience and involvement in projects, but most get the credit, because that's what they're paid for. The ASGCA has given its younger members credit for courses which they supervised but may not have designed, and also credit for renovations which are a different kettle of fish. I'm not saying these people
couldn't design a golf course; anyone can design a golf course, to some degree. I'm saying they
didn't design some of the courses they're getting credit for.
When Alister MacKenzie showed up to Royal Melbourne in 1926, they put him with Alex Russell, the club champion, and Mick Morcom, the greenkeeper. Russell had an interest in golf architecture, and had already done some noodling about redesigning the course to incorporate the new paddock of land at their disposal.
Most of Dr. MacKenzie's other consulting jobs in Australia consisted of a day or two on site and then a day drawing up some plans and a report, as he had executed most of his work in England from the start of his career. But at Royal Melbourne, MacKenzie spent a lot of time with his two new collaborators, and to make sure they got the gist of what he was trying to teach them, they went ahead and built the green and bunkers for one of the par-3 holes together, while he was still there.
That hole is the par-3 5th West, still one of the most iconic holes in Australia.
That's the only piece of MacKenzie's design work in Australia that he ever saw even half-built. Russell and Morcom took their own skills
plus what they learned from MacKenzie and ran with it and built most of the other work for which the Doctor gets credit. Sometimes they followed his plan; sometimes they did not. And Russell went on to design a few other great courses on his own in the years afterward, most notably Yarra Yarra and Paraparaumu Beach, plus the holes in the back paddocks of Royal Melbourne (East).
Some believe that Russell should get the lion's share of the credit for all MacKenzie's work in Australia, because MacKenzie was involved so little. A few would even go further and suggest that his other work proves that Russell was the real talent of the operation -- ignoring not only MacKenzie's role in planning, but also Morcom's role in getting things built.
I just look at it this way: what was the role of each of them in 1926 when they met? It really couldn't have been much more clearly defined. MacKenzie was the architect, Russell the on-site representative who was going to ensure the design was executed properly, and Morcom the guy who was going to build it. Two of the main reasons that Royal Melbourne is so great is that Russell and Morcom were both much better in their respective roles than 99% of the people who usually do them,
but that doesn't make them the architect.
Almost every project ever has had at least two people filling those same three roles, but in 99% of the other cases, you don't list those collaborators in the design credits.
And yes, Russell later proved to have great talent as an architect on his own. But he had not done much of anything to improve Royal Melbourne before Dr. MacKenzie showed up and shared his years of experience. Likewise, Morcom was a great greenkeeper, but he hadn't previously built any bunkers that looked like that; MacKenzie had been building them off and on for twenty years, and what do you know? Just after he left, Morcom was suddenly great at building bunkers.
In the online version of this new GOLF DIGEST list, I'm listed in the credits for several courses where I would never claim credit myself: courses where we have spent many days and months to restore the original work as best we could, and courses where my associates have made some small-scale changes and I've only been tangentially involved. I'm not trying to minimize the work we've done on any of them, but I didn't design those golf courses.
And neither did some of the guys listed for nearly every course on the list.
Tom Fazio didn't design Pine Valley and Augusta . . . and I'm pretty sure they were ranked #1 and #2 before he ever got involved with either of them.