Ryan,
You should listen to your solicitor.
Holding up a Sun-Times columnist/reporter to Brad and Geoff, illustrates a real level of sophistication.
Len Ziehm has been covering golf in Chicago for more than twenty years and he has NEVER held himself out as an armchair golf course architecture critic. In this piece, he didn't give the reader a single sentence of analysis; he only reported the critical remarks and found some players to disagree and put the struggles that the club had with "amateur architects" into a factual context.
Here's what two players said:
Instead, players refuted the course's critics after the first day of official practice rounds.
''That's crap,'' Ian Poulter said. ''It's a great golf course. It has a lot of definition. It sets up quite well to my eye.''
Jim Furyk, who won both the U.S. Open and Western Open since finishing eighth in the 1999 PGA at Medinah before the renovation, lauded Jones' changes.
''I liked the golf course when we played it in '99,'' Furyk said. ''Some holes are longer now, but so are we. I saw some significant changes in some of the greens, and I like the change in design. It's a wonderful layout.''
Neither Furyk nor Poulter is an architect or a golf course architecture critic, but they are well qualified to render the opinions that they stated. Let's just be blunt about this little controversy: The purists loathe Medinah for personal and esoteric reasons that are lost on the general population and much of the touring professionals.
Doesn't mean that the pros are right and it doesn't mean that the purists are right. It just means that there is a difference of opinion. We're in America, right?