[Tom_Doak]

Maybe the word “template” is a sticking point but it’s hard for me to believe Macdonald didn’t think at all about them. That he used a bunch of the same ones on all his courses was not random.

I agree that he used most of the same holes and ideas as a starting point for his designs.  I just don't think he thought of things in terms of templates since he had no engineering background.  Indeed, I think the engineered look of his and Raynor's courses was not deliberate on his part, but more a function of not having people with golf course construction experience. 


When he reminisces about The National in his book, he writes that "The only thing that I do now is to endeavor to make the hazards as natural as possible."  And toward the end of his chapter on Architecture, there is this line:


"I should like also to suggest that the construction of bunkers on various courses should have an individuality entirely of their own which should arouse the love or hatred of intelligent golfers."


He sounds like a man who recognized the limitations of templates.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Good points, and I have seen that at least the artistic personality isn't really as concerned about money.  I think RTJ retained most of his passion.  I don't think you spend 300 days a year traveling the world just to make money.  Success, practicalities, family, age, etc. all can work that direction, though.

When I went to Mr. Jones' office to interview with him in 1983 [at someone else's behest], on my return from overseas, he made an offer to me and then said to Roger Rulewich as an aside, "Of course he will want to work with the best in the business," referring to himself.  Based on that, I've just always assumed that it was the ego driving him at that point, not the money.


I was glad to get to spend a little more time with him later on, to soften my view from that first encounter.


Anyway, he was right to a point; the difference was I thought Mr. Dye was the best.

One of my great memories is writing to RTJ at about 15 years old (maybe as young as 12) and getting a warm, generous letter back from him, encouraging me.  And a few other times when he actually asked to have dinner with me (including that membership incident, but also one year at the Ryder Cup and a few other occasions.)  So, my view of him probably started out softer. 


That said, I think we all get softer in our views of the world as we age and acquire experience.


I also note that Pete went out of his way to be different than Jones, and had a high opinion of him, even if he had the wish to outdo him and be completely different.  Ambition is probably the biggest common thread among anyone who has succeeded in this business.


And, by the way, years ago, I was (correctly) chastised by a long departed and somewhat despised member here, who pointed out that the geometric bunkers did really start with Raynor, and CBM did prefer a much more natural look, and that NGLA really didn't have that gemoetry.

[Tom_Doak]

In today's day and age, does the determination that Raynor's courses are "great" and therefore he is a "genius" come before or after learning the golf course is a Raynor design?


Inertia is a powerful force.

Well, sure, but the power of name brands is huge in the modern world and Seth Raynor is by no means the only architect who gains from that.


I remember vividly the first time I heard of Mountain Lake, in about 1987 or '88.  Rick Smith, the teaching pro, had just been there and came back raving about it, but he didn't know who had designed it.  Fred Muller and I had never heard of the place, but after Rick described some of the deep bunkers, it occurred to me it might be a Raynor design, so I asked if it had a long par-3 with a deep swale through the green.  I guess Rick had never seen a Raynor course to that point, and he was very excited about all the holes we know are templates.  So to ascribe their popularity to his name is probably a stretch.

[Tim Martin]

Maybe the word “template” is a sticking point but it’s hard for me to believe Macdonald didn’t think at all about them. That he used a bunch of the same ones on all his courses was not random.

I agree that he used most of the same holes and ideas as a starting point for his designs.  I just don't think he thought of things in terms of templates since he had no engineering background.  Indeed, I think the engineered look of his and Raynor's courses was not deliberate on his part, but more a function of not having people with golf course construction experience. 


When he reminisces about The National in his book, he writes that "The only thing that I do now is to endeavor to make the hazards as natural as possible."  And toward the end of his chapter on Architecture, there is this line:


"I should like also to suggest that the construction of bunkers on various courses should have an individuality entirely of their own which should arouse the love or hatred of intelligent golfers."


He sounds like a man who recognized the limitations of templates.

Macdonald and Raynor by most accounts formed a mutual admiration society. That said I don’t believe that someone with the personality and resolve of Macdonald would settle for Raynor’s engineered style of construction if he wasn’t pleased with it. He certainly could have conveyed his wishes to Raynor if he didn’t approve. Finally I think it’s more likely it’s exactly the way Macdonald wanted it.

[Tom_Doak]

I also note that Pete went out of his way to be different than Jones, and had a high opinion of him, even if he had the wish to outdo him and be completely different.  Ambition is probably the biggest common thread among anyone who has succeeded in this business.

As Pete described it to me, at the very impressionable age of 20, he had a lot of respect for Mr. Jones's work, but eventually he just thought that, "Somebody has to do something different."  I didn't have the sense that it was about competing for work at all; more that he believed that everything was getting homogenized and that was bad for golf, because he recognized that a lot of the courses he admired were quite different from the prevailing style. 


That was probably the most significant of all the conversations I had with Pete, and I was still the most inexperienced guy on the crew at that point.

[Tom_Doak]

Macdonald and Raynor by most accounts formed a mutual admiration society. That said I don’t believe that someone with the personality and resolve of Macdonald would settle for Raynor’s engineered style of construction if he wasn’t pleased with it. He certainly could have conveyed his wishes to Raynor if he didn’t approve. Finally I think it’s more likely it’s exactly the way Macdonald wanted it.

Tim:


I was giving Raynor a lot of credit for Macdonald's style there and you took it away from him.  Whose side are you on?


My experience has been that most people who want to be a golf course architect have no ideas at all about how to build a course when they start out, and have to resort to trial and error to find something they can do successfully.  For example, when I built High Pointe I had never built a flashed sand bunker and struggled to figure out how, even though I had seen a lot of them.  It took me 3-4 years to get the hang of them, through studying them and hiring a couple of guys who could do it.


My guess is that Macdonald was no different -- especially since he had way fewer examples to draw from than I did.  I'm not saying he wasn't happy with that style, but I'm guessing his use of it had a lot to do with hiring an engineer to help him put his ideas into the ground.  And the quotes I provided might indicate to some people that he wasn't entirely happy with some portions of that style, with the benefit of hindsight.

[JC Jones]

In today's day and age, does the determination that Raynor's courses are "great" and therefore he is a "genius" come before or after learning the golf course is a Raynor design?


Inertia is a powerful force.

Well, sure, but the power of name brands is huge in the modern world and Seth Raynor is by no means the only architect who gains from that.


I remember vividly the first time I heard of Mountain Lake, in about 1987 or '88.  Rick Smith, the teaching pro, had just been there and came back raving about it, but he didn't know who had designed it.  Fred Muller and I had never heard of the place, but after Rick described some of the deep bunkers, it occurred to me it might be a Raynor design, so I asked if it had a long par-3 with a deep swale through the green.  I guess Rick had never seen a Raynor course to that point, and he was very excited about all the holes we know are templates.  So to ascribe their popularity to his name is probably a stretch.

The templates no doubt have merit, however, it wasn't Raynor who came up with the templates, he just implemented them where he could.  And, many of the holes on the courses of his I've played that aren't templates aren't that noteworthy.

[Mike_Young]

Mike,


BTW, I noticed you mentioned the "drafting board" in another post.  Have you given up on Vectorworks?

I still have it but most anything now that is not sent to an engineer is done on single hole sheets by hand...

[Peter Pallotta]

TD -
for me your story about Rick Smith reflects what, at the end of the day, is the coolest thing about CBM-Raynor, i.e. that a top-flight golfer comes back from a first-time play raving about a long Par 3 with a deep swale through the green. Which is to say: with something akin to a 'beginner's mind' and fresh eyes, the golfer who loves golf will find the essential (if not quintessential) essence of golf in examples of great golf course architecture. It may not be 'art' borne out of an artistic temperament, but it nobly fulfills the  primary function of the craft.

[Mike_Young]

 Indeed, I think the engineered look of his and Raynor's courses was not deliberate on his part, but more a function of not having people with golf course construction experience. 

I think that was a huge part of it at the time...

[Tim Martin]

Macdonald and Raynor by most accounts formed a mutual admiration society. That said I don’t believe that someone with the personality and resolve of Macdonald would settle for Raynor’s engineered style of construction if he wasn’t pleased with it. He certainly could have conveyed his wishes to Raynor if he didn’t approve. Finally I think it’s more likely it’s exactly the way Macdonald wanted it.

Tim:


I was giving Raynor a lot of credit for Macdonald's style there and you took it away from him.  Whose side are you on?


My experience has been that most people who want to be a golf course architect have no ideas at all about how to build a course when they start out, and have to resort to trial and error to find something they can do successfully.  For example, when I built High Pointe I had never built a flashed sand bunker and struggled to figure out how, even though I had seen a lot of them.  It took me 3-4 years to get the hang of them, through studying them and hiring a couple of guys who could do it.


My guess is that Macdonald was no different -- especially since he had way fewer examples to draw from than I did.  I'm not saying he wasn't happy with that style, but I'm guessing his use of it had a lot to do with hiring an engineer to help him put his ideas into the ground.  And the quotes I provided might indicate to some people that he wasn't entirely happy with some portions of that style, with the benefit of hindsight.

Tom-Like the other point we discussed neither one of us has a definitive answer. The difference between modern day and then was that they were making it up as they went along on the construction side. There was nobody to call in if they got stuck.

[Sven Nilsen]

My guess is that Macdonald was no different -- especially since he had way fewer examples to draw from than I did.  I'm not saying he wasn't happy with that style, but I'm guessing his use of it had a lot to do with hiring an engineer to help him put his ideas into the ground.  And the quotes I provided might indicate to some people that he wasn't entirely happy with some portions of that style, with the benefit of hindsight.

It wasn't hindsight. 


Read the very last line of the article I posted above.  He went into the whole thing thinking that artificiality should be avoided.

[Tom_Doak]

My guess is that Macdonald was no different -- especially since he had way fewer examples to draw from than I did.  I'm not saying he wasn't happy with that style, but I'm guessing his use of it had a lot to do with hiring an engineer to help him put his ideas into the ground.  And the quotes I provided might indicate to some people that he wasn't entirely happy with some portions of that style, with the benefit of hindsight.

It wasn't hindsight. 


Read the very last line of the article I posted above.  He went into the whole thing thinking that artificiality should be avoided.

Sven:


The part he wrote in 1928 surely WAS hindsight, an observation on the work he had done.


That he hoped to do that in 1907 kind of supports my point, that he just didn't know how when he started.  [He had already built Chicago Golf Club by then, of course, and quite possibly his goal was a reaction to how it had turned out.]  By the same token, I think probably 98% of the golf course architects in history have said that artificiality should be avoided, even if they didn't care at all -- as Jeff B says, that's "just good marketing".  But I have no doubt that Macdonald meant it in 1907, and meant in 1928.  His goal was to emulate the courses he'd seen in Scotland and England, and many of those were quite natural in appearance.

[Sven Nilsen]

I left out the word "just."  Should have read "it wasn't just hindsight."

[Jim_Kennedy]

Wow  - anyway, artistic (uncoupled from temperament) can be defined as possessing creative qualities that enable a person to excel at producing creative works...or being aware of, or sensitive to, aesthetic values, et al. I tend to think SR fits into those definitions.
 
Raynor's seen as a staid, straightforward engineer, yet he is lured by Macdonald into cutting himself loose from what would seem to be a rather unadventurous situation to set about roaming the country, and beyond, to create golf courses...He himself lures the academic, Charles Banks, possibly another 'captive' to steady employment, into joining him on his journey...but he doesn't stop there, he entices Ralph Barton, another academic, to cast off his shackles and throw in with him...that is artistry in and of itself! 
 

[Bill Brightly]

For all the years that I've been hanging out on GCA.COM I've read the many mild knocks on Seth Raynor's work because he "stuck to the same music." The knocks are never too loud, I guess it's hard to argue when his courses are so beloved and he has ten courses in the top 100, including his involvement at Piping Rock and NGLA.


I've always felt these mild slights were unfair. Raynor was hired by guys in New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, etc. etc. to build the holes that Macdonald deemed to be the best in the world. He built courses at a time when there was no commercial air travel and getting from place to place throughout the US was not easy. Few people in Pittsburgh would ever expect to play many of Raynor or Macdonald's courses; building one of their own would make perfect sense at the time to the leaders of these golf clubs.


Raynor was never hired to take a piece of land and "find" the best possible holes; he was hired to build in a template-style. Using his engineering skills, he did so in a masterful fashion. An artistic fashion.


He did not play the same music. He used a lot of the same chords, but arranged them beautifully in hundred of different songs. And guess what? People still love his music; it is timeless. If that bothers Raynor critics or even causes some architects to strike out in their career determined to build holes in a non-template approach, so be it!

[Paul Rudovsky]

1.  Bill...I strongly agree.


2.  If CBM didn't like Raynor's work, why did he write the Board of Governors of his beloved Chicago GC (which by then had hosted a mere 3 US Opens, 4 US Ams, and 1 US Women's Am) telling them they needed to have Raynor lead the renovation of the course...and they should stay out of Raynor's way when he does it.  In that letter CBM says Raynor "has laid out now between fifty and sixty golf courses from Florida and Missouri to Maine; and so far as I know there are no golf courses in the country that compare with his."

[Sean_A]

For all the years that I've been hanging out on GCA.COM I've read the many mild knocks on Seth Raynor's work because he "stuck to the same music." The knocks are never too loud, I guess it's hard to argue when his courses are so beloved and he has ten courses in the top 100, including his involvement at Piping Rock and NGLA.

Raynor was never hired to take a piece of land and "find" the best possible holes; he was hired to build in a template-style. Using his engineering skills, he did so in a masterful fashion. An artistic fashion.

Bill

I agree.  Accusing an archie for lacking imagination when delevering what the customer paid for is a very harsh take.  I think folks need to have a serious amount of knowledge about project instructions etc before damning an archie.  There is a very real difference between what was achieved architecturally and the perceived quality/style etc of a golf course.


Beyond all that, how the hell can anyone these days say with any real knowledge which ODG had artistic temperment or not?  This is a fool's errand. 

Ciao

[Tim Martin]

When Raynor arrives he builds a series of winners in NGLA, Piping Rock, Sleepy Hollow, St. Louis, Greenbrier and Lido. After the nearly universal acclaim of these courses he is going to flip the script on design principles when he goes out on his own? Why?

[Ronald Montesano]

Ińigo Montoya...100% Spaniard (Red and Yellow) Nothing Indigo about him.
This thread grew in interest when Sven jumped in. I'm hoping that the great Northern writer himself (Pietro) jumps in with a take on artistic temperament.

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