Kyle:
It’s a very interesting topic you raise.
I think in the Golden Age, architects and clients had different expectations than today, and our view is skewed by today’s market. Maybe someone was put off by Donald Ross’s stated price, but not like today when lots of projects start out thinking “we can’t afford Jack Nicklaus so who do we call?”
Most business people (and Donald Ross was a business person) will offer some sort of introductory services as a way of qualifying new leads, and it sounds above like Ross indeed did that. The Dedham thing sounds like they passed him over for Fowler originally and he had no interest in working with those people.
98% of architects will take any job where the client agrees to their price and I am only sure of two architects today who you can’t say that about.
It sometimes gets lost or forgotten that Donald Ross was, first and foremost, a golf professional. Yes, he may have focused on construction and design, but we can state that he was in it for the money with absolute certainty. No businessperson is going to outright turn down income, especially if he can hire or contracto qualified people to keep clients happy.
Ross seems to have had enough people in his orbit to never actually have to turn down work. I wonder if he ever had any dissatisfied clients?
One thing I note is that all these articles Sven is posting about Ross's involvement beg a perhaps unanswerable question... what exactly did Ross do? A site visit before construction? Generate plans? Provide those plans and a list of contractors to the client? They seem laden with words like "confer" and "tour" and the like. I've never read a local newspaper that didn't hype up a local project. And Ross built more would-be "finest courses in this district" than anyone.
If so, the statement that Ross may never have seen X amount of his golf courses is true, because the only time he was ever on site was before it was a golf course!