While not quite as many these days, I still get around to play and study a lot of different courses (maybe now only 30-40 different ones a year), but I would argue that very few golfers know who designed the courses they are playing. If I had to guess, I would say less than 2%. I am working on two municipal courses right now for example, and I have not come across more than one or two golfers who know who designed the golf courses (the one is a Gordon). Even at my home club, Lehigh CC, until recently, only a handful knew or even cared it was a classic William Flynn design. We had a Master Plan done years ago by a noted architect who completed the plan without knowing that Flynn designed the golf course We have debated on this site many times who should get credit for the design? Is it the architect who did the routing, the one who designed the greensites, the one who did the latest bunkers, …??? When does someone get any kind of credit? If Jack Nicklaus comes in and adds a few new tees, tweaks a few bunkers and changes the grassing lines, should he (or his associates who likely did the work) get credit? Can/should the course promote that Jack Nicklaus came in and updated their golf course?
I see a lot of courses promote their “Fazio” designed golf course because a fair number of golfers know that name. The problem is that many don’t know the difference between a George Fazio or a Jim Fazio or a Tom Fazio design. Many clubs don’t distinguish which Fazio for obvious reasons.
I once played a very high end Tom Fazio design (a high-end residential course) and met with the owner/developer. He told me he was very good friends with Bill and Ben but just couldn’t pull the trigger with them to design the golf course because he needed to sell the home sites and he could do that far better with a Fazio golf course. This goes to Mike’s point that promoting certain architects has merit. I still argue that very few golfers know who designed the course they are playing. I would be willing the bet that even amongst all the golf architect experts we have on this site, only a handful could name the architects for most of the courses within 25 miles of where they live. They sure wouldn’t know the architectural evolution of those courses because it takes a heck of a lot of work/research to find that kind of thing out with any degree of accuracy.
The bottom-line, however, is that making stuff up and/or fabricating false information about a course's evolution is just plain wrong.
Mark