Define a successful restoration

[Patrick_Mucci]

TEPaul,

I wonder if Pete Dye has ever seen Bethpage Black, pre and post Rees ?

I also wonder about the context in which the alleged statement was made.

I don't see how Pete could make that comment, unless Pete felt that Burbeck was the designer of record  

Bethpage Black's routing remains unchanged as do most of the bunker locations, green contours and fairway lines.

Like viewing a single frame from a movie, I'm not so sure that the whole story is revealed in that one glimpse.

[TEPaul]

Pat:

I have no idea if Pete saw Bethpage Black pre or post the Rees Jones work. I don't think we really need to analyze or speculate too damn closely what Pete Dye apparently said to Mark Fine about Bethpage Black being a "Rees Jones course" now instead of a Tillinghast course. Pete Dye says a lot of off the cuff things---always has---personally I'd take them as just off the cuff and not that seriously.

I went to something like a superintendent's conference in an Atlantic City casino a few years ago, about a year before the Open at Bethpage. The Bethpage super (forget his name--Currier or something close) was one of the featured speakers along with Ron Forse and Geoff Shackelford and a number of others. The Bethpage super spoke at length about the work being done by Rees in preparation for the open. He had slides and pointed out how basically many of the greenside bunkers and the green peripheries were being brought back closer together again as they'd originally been. That kind of thing is restorative--at least that's what he maintained and what appeared on his slides. It made sense to me and he also pointed out how much deferred capital maintenance of that sort there was on the couse from decades of neglect that way.

Basically most all of what that super in charge of the preparation for the Open in conjunction with the Jones project said was completely in line with what Geoff Childs said about the course before and after the Open and the Rees Jones project.