What Killed the Golden Age?

[Steven Wade]

Or perhaps the more correct title should be, What Caused the Dark Age?

Lately I have been doing a bit of thinking about where golf course architecture might end up in the next 20 years. We are obviously living through a very fruitful time, but nothing lasts forever, right? So I started mentally comparing the end of Golden Age with now and ended up with a few observations and even more questions.


First off, World War 2 seems like a huge contributing factor, but was it? Obviously the war impacted the construction of new golf courses. Perry Maxwell's work in the late 1930s feels like the end of the Golden Age, and that dovetails nicely with the German invasion of Poland. Though the US wouldn't enter the war for a few more years, a war in Europe and the spooling up of the war machine would lead to fewer (or no) opportunities to design golf courses. But why then, when the world returned to normal and golf courses started being built again were they so different?


Tillinghast and Flynn would both be dead before the end of the war, Ross would soon follow. Thomas and MacKenzie had both long since passed away. With all of this knowledge and experience gone, I've wondered, if a lack of proteges or understudies learning under these masters helped hasten the hibernation of their architectural style? When I think about golf course architecture today, you can see a clear lineage of architects who worked under the Dyes, built up their resumes and went out on their own, then people who in turn worked under them that are now setting out on their own (or are already well established). When Tom Doak and Bill Coore decide to stop designing golf courses, so much of their institutional knowledge will have been passed down that it almost seems like a continuation of today's design principles is inevitable. That seems far less so 80-90 years ago. As far as I know you can't really point to someone who worked under Tillinghast for 10 years and then started doing work in that style. I know that Thomas and Tillinghast both wrote on their craft, but I'm not sure what the availability of those materials was back then? Did the Golden Age effectively die with these architects?


Or am I overthinking this? Could it just be that the end of the war ushered in a less class structured system? All of the great clubs had been built, it was time for a more democratic version of golf. With the move away from a gilded age gentleman's game, was the design suddenly far less important? Much like the rows and rows of post-war homes with little to differentiate one from the other, did golf suffer a similar fate? I am also trying to reconcile this question with the question of why so many Golden Age clubs started planting trees in this period? I'll hang up an listen.

[Sean_A]

Stanley Thompson straddled the periods you speak of. Some of his younger associates did quite well in the dark age.

After a complete mobilisation for war and the Korean War it didn’t take long for golf construction to kick back into gear. I don’t really know why styles changed, but I don’t think it was due to lack of knowledge.

Ciao

[Craig Sweet]

The end of wealth...The depression.

[Phil Young]

The Great Depression killed it. The latter part of the 1920s, from 1927 onward, saw a number of incredible projects that came to a grinding halt. A prime example was the International Club of the Niagara Frontier. Begun in the early part of 1928, this 10 million dollar project was to have five 18-hole and four 9-hole courses on its massive site in Canada opposite Buffalo. Tilly was hired to design these courses and two of them broke ground and were under construction when, in early 1929, the project was halted due to financial problems.
      This was not a fly-by-night project. It was backed by major financiers and politicians in the New York State government. All suffered and pulled out when signs of the Depression began and as quickly and loudly as the it began, the International Club ended and its grandiose plans with it.

      The stock market may have crashed in November, but its underpinnings were already falling apart at the beginning of the year.   

[Steven Wade]

Interesting! I didn't even think of the Great Depression as a culprit, I suppose since it was 10 years prior to the timeline that I was thinking was the end. I suppose that despite my thinking that the beginnings of WW2 are what ground things to a halt, most of these courses are all pre-1929. Thanks for the insight.


That helps with the end of the Golden Age. I guess the answer to why the post-war era offered such a stark contrast to the Golden Age in terms of design style and aestetic is more nuanced?

[Charlie Goerges]

It's funny, I was discussing this not long back with fren'a ours and esteemed colleague Peter Pallotta and the changing of tastes kind of lines up with the changes that happen in a lot of other areas. It might just be a conscious uncoupling with the previous generation(s) and their tastes.


That said, there are lots of other things that go to this, like the depression, like excess industrial capacity for manufacturing heavy earthmoving machinery, the rise of the suburb in the US and the rapid rate of expansion.

[Brian Finn]

One book that can contribute some insight to this discussion is A Difficult Par: RTJ Sr. & The Making of Modern Golf by James Hansen. I found learning about RTJ's career path, including time working for Stanley Thompson, fascinating.  His education, handling of relationships, business strategy, and design philosophy are all addressed, and we see that he played a meaningful role in the transition period. 

I'd also recommend AW Tillinghast: Creator of Golf Courses by Phil Young. The book is excellent in general, but the chapters covering Tilly's work during the Depression era (particularly his 1935-1937 course consulting "tours" of America) are most relevant to this topic. The hundreds of courses where he recommended changes include many highly regarded golden age designs. 

Also, while they may not directly address the question from the OP, Darwin's Golf Between Two Wars and John Strege's When War Played Through: Golf During WWII are both very good books about golf during this time period. 

[mike_malone]

 I’m a fan of social mood. This means that changes in mood precede actions. The Roaring 20’s had a post war positive mood that led to a bubbling stock market and real estate as well. People moved to the suburbs and created golf clubs. Social mood experts like to say that the Great Depression caused the stock market crash not vice versa as many believe. This changed mood is accompanied by a sterner lifestyle .  So as the depression eventually laid the groundwork for fascists then war the appetite for investment in frivolous games diminished.


The interesting coincidence was the abundance of Golden Age architects to fill the needs of the Roaring 20’s desire for leisure.


Wonder who the out of work architects were back then during the dark times.


The 90’s saw an echo of the 20’s followed by a tightening in demand for new courses we continue to experience.


It’s a cycle.

[Phil Young]

Brian, thanks for mentioning my original Tilly biography and the section on his PGA Course Consultation Tour. The 34 pages in that section give very little specific information on the courses that he visited. Please believe me when I say that I am NOT marketing my new 4-volume Tillinghast Chronicles set of books, but if anyone wants to know more about that Tour of courses, Volume III: The Tour that Tilly Took, the 340 pages of this hard cover book goes into great detail on each of these visits. It includes contemporaneous newspaper/magazine articles that were published when he was visiting specific courses, copies of his monthly articles written about this tour and published in the PGA of America magazine, and much more information.
      If anyone is interested please either IM me or email me at philwritesbooks@aol.com. These were printed as very limited editions with only 200 copies printed for Volume II. There aren't many of them left, and there will not be another edition of any type published. For the past year or so i've discounted the price on them for anyone from gca.com who wanted copies and will continue to do so until the last ones are sold.

[Sean_A]

Quite a few excellent courses were built in the 30s. The Gomden Age slowed down, but it wasn’t over.

Ciao

[Tim Taylor]

Outside of socio-economic concerns, I'd posit that heavy machinery and perhaps lesser sites played a role.


Tim

[mike_malone]

Quite a few excellent courses were built in the 30s. The Gomden Age slowed down, but it wasn’t over.

Ciao

It’s a bell shaped curve.

[Brian Finn]

Quite a few excellent courses were built in the 30s. The Gomden Age slowed down, but it wasn’t over.
Ciao

It’s a bell shaped curve.

Golfweek's Top 200 classic courses in the US:
10   Pre-1900
12   1900-1909
46   1910-1919
107 1920-1929
14   1930-1939
  2   1940-1949
  9   1950-1959

[Tom_Doak]

The gap between 1929 and 1946 was so long that most of the people who'd been trained in the business had either died or moved on to other things.  There was no such thing as a restoration business to sustain them, as there was from 2008 to 2021 when new construction was a dead business.


When the business ramped up again in the late 1940's, there were only a handful of prominent firms and they established dominance in the industry by taking up most of the available work.  The difference with this generation is that the prominent firms, for the most part, didn't want to be like Robert Trent Jones Sr., and instead let other designers get some of the work and try to establish themselves.

[Kalen Braley]

I've also wondered if the predominant mindset of those in the builder-biz post WW2 was based in an assembly line approach of efficiency, utility, and economies of scale over artistry, beauty, and interesting golf.  It was certainly necessary in getting equipment and resources to the troops as fast as possible. And by then they certainly would have had the equipment to do such.

[Joe Zucker]

It takes time to learn new technology.  We've seen this more recently with computers.  While the internet was technically invented ~40 years ago, it took a long time to figure out how to make it productive (if we even have...).  Robert Solow famously said you can see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics.  It usually takes a new generation to figure out how to make the most of a technology. If AI is truly groundbreaking, I bet the children of today will be the ones that crack it in 1-2 decades.


Maybe we had something similar with course design.  The post WW2 architects had all these new capabilities to move earth to design courses. In a lot of ways it would have felt silly to leave these tools on the sideline, just as it would feel silly to live without the internet 10-20 years ago or an iPhone today.  You could argue it took until Pete Dye for someone to figure out how to use modern machines well.  He was born into the world of machines and used them better than previous architects.  Just as kids are "digital natives", Pete Dye was a "bulldozer native" in a way Stanley Thompson wasn't.

[Sean_A]

Quite a few excellent courses were built in the 30s. The Gomden Age slowed down, but it wasn’t over.

Ciao

It’s a bell shaped curve.

Agreed, but given the quality of designs, the 30s remain an important part of the Golden Age. Hence the reason I believe it really ran out of steam with the full economic mobilisation for WWII.

Ciao

[Ira Fishman]

I am neither a gca expert nor building architecture expert, but I have always been struck by the parallels between the “Dark Ages” of gca and Brutalism. Culture and sociology mean a lot.

[Steven Wade]

Just as kids are "digital natives", Pete Dye was a "bulldozer native" in a way Stanley Thompson wasn't.

This is a very interesting thought.

[JC Urbina]

Not to stray away from what Killed the Golden Age, I think what Joel said is important.

Joel is absolutely 100 percent correct.  Pete valued the shaper and his bulldozer more than anyone else in the modern era.  Between World War II and Pete Dye, other designers were trying to use plans to help them with the modern era of design.


Pete Dye changed that.


Just as Pete found shapers who could be creative, George Thomas Jr found people he could trust.


From the book Golf Architecture in America -  " So greens were built in those times by rule of thumb, with farm hands to move the soil; and many of them had never seen a golf shot played.  yet even among those raw tillers we found ever so often just as we do today, a man who is an artist.  During the last few years I have had three men of this type turn up.  One was an old Irishman in the crew at Los Angels Municipal course, another a young cowboy from Arizona and lately a ranchman from Utah built some lovely bunkers"


Pete like George Thomas and many of the Golden Age designers found people who were artists and helped the famous Designers of that era, design and build some of the greatest golf courses ever.

[Steven Wade]

Pete Dye changed that.


Just as Pete found shapers who could be creative, George Thomas Jr found people he could trust.

Incredible, I think the question that I was trying to ask was one that's unfolding in these replies: why (with the exception of Peachtree, which may owe a great debt to Bobby Jones) are all the courses from post-war era up until the more celebrated early Dyes largely absent from the discourse as well as the rankings? A 20 year black hole in a 120 year history seemed hard to fathom, but I think we might be getting at an answer to my question.

[Matt Schoolfield]

I'm not here to make normative judgements on the era, and I think there is a boatload of survivorship bias in this thread, in that every old book I read from MacKenzie or Simpson talks about how most courses in that era were crap.

I always assumed the design/aesthetic changes were precipitated by technology (bulldozers and the automobile) changing the economic incentives of golf course design. If you're building a golf course without heavy machinery, you need to build a compact course with a solid routing, and a good mind planning it. This is artisan craftsmanship, probably built on inaccessible or unusable land, in a walkable semi-urban environment (think Scottish villages or San Francisco's west side before the automobile -- places where anything out of a comfortable walking distances is mostly useless except for farming).

If you can just use a bulldozer to build wherever you want, and there is a bunch of greenfield land that can be developed, the economic incentives from real estate development far outpace the need to hire artisans. I suspect during that era speed far outpaced quality, as these courses were being built before even the houses that people would live on, so whats the point in spending a lot on the course?

If I'm correct here, nothing killed the golden age, per se, it was just drown out by oversupply the same way big box stores put mom-and-pop's out of business even when they have decades of quality and expertise. At some point, cheap and convenient quantity beats out quality.

Dare I say that we might still be in that era if it weren't for a few intelligent investors willing to prioritize golf over real estate, starting about 30 years ago.

[John Emerson]

I would agree that the depression influenced the "end" of the golden age the most, but also the break-neck speed of urbanization post-war devoured many potentially good sites for golf, and once environmental regulation (~70's) was enacted, the selection of great sites were severely minimized.

[Ben Hollerbach]

Incredible, I think the question that I was trying to ask was one that's unfolding in these replies: why (with the exception of Peachtree, which may owe a great debt to Bobby Jones) are all the courses from post-war era up until the more celebrated early Dyes largely absent from the discourse as well as the rankings? A 20 year black hole in a 120 year history seemed hard to fathom, but I think we might be getting at an answer to my question.

From the rankings side, I think you can look at them in 2 categories (Timeless & In Vogue) Ever since Golf Magazine began its top 100 rankings in 1985 they have made up of ~72% Pre-War courses and ~28% Post War courses (+/-4%). The Golden Age courses have been very static, while the Post-War courses have been much more dynamic.

Within any given year there are between 8-14% of courses in the rankings who have been opened 10 years or less. Whats happening is as trends change, new courses on trend enter the rankings and adolescent courses who have found themselves off trend fall off.

Since Sand Hills was built in 1994, 44 newer courses have entered the top 100, as of 2023 only 24 remain, with 7 of those 24 entering the rankings in 2021 or 2023.

[Jim O’Kane]

Quite a few excellent courses were built in the 30s. The Gomden Age slowed down, but it wasn’t over.
Ciao

It’s a bell shaped curve.

Golfweek's Top 200 classic courses in the US:
10   Pre-1900
12   1900-1909
46   1910-1919
107 1920-1929
14   1930-1939
  2   1940-1949
  9   1950-1959

Thanks for this Briann. I was just pondering it as I was reading this thread.