What would the GCA landscape look like if...

[John Foley]

in 1989 the Maui Land & Pinapple compnay decided to build it's Plantation Course w/ an architect other than Coore & Crenshaw?

At that time their resume was very limited (Barton Creek either in planning or underway) and there where more well named architects whom may have been bigger names to draw golfers to the resort. What if it went to Palmer & Seay or Nicklaus or RTJ and/or Bobby & Rees or Pete Dye?

If C&C don't do The Plantation course do they make a splash somewhere else, eventaully get found to do Sand Hills, Talking Stick, ND, Friars Head, Bandon Trails etc...

How different does GCA look?

[Garland Bayley]

Your premise seems to be the Ben Crenshaw is not a big name.

I don't think it would have made much of a difference, except perhaps that golf on TV in January would be more boring.

[Tom_Doak]

They still would have done Sand Hills, and the story from there on out would be exactly the same.

A more compelling "what if" would be what if Dick Youngscap could not get the money together to build Sand Hills?  That really could have happened.

[Scott Szabo]

A more compelling "what if" would be what if Dick Youngscap could not get the money together to build Sand Hills?  That really could have happened.

Would we have Ballyneal, without Sand Hills?  

[John Foley]

Garland

No my premise is not that Crenshaw is not a big name. It's that when the architects for The Plantation Course were picked he (& Coore) were a relative unknown quantity from an architecture perspective.

Granted he was a fantastic historian, seen all the great courses and knew what made them great. But he had yet to make his mark.

I would say that because of the Plantation course their brilance became evident. What would have happened if The Plantation course went to another.

I believe eventually there legacy would be as we see it today, it would have taken a different route.


Tom - Why do you say they would have still done Sand Hills?

[Garland Bayley]

My premise is that Ben was a big enough name that the opportunities would have come and they would have the record/influence they have today.

[RJ_Daley]

ding ding ding, we have a winner, and from a man who was on the ground to know all the players at the time.

Dick Youngscapp was a catalyst to opening a new era in GCA.  

DY had previously engaged Pete Dye to design his course in Lincoln, Firethorn.  He had considered Dye first for SH, but as I understand it, Dye suggested his recent understudy Coore, now partnering with Ben, because he knew of their reverance for Prairie Dunes.  I suspect TD was an understudy in the Dye organization, and looking on with knowing interest from his own philosophical POV, and with his own similar visions of GCA to come.

I don't pretend to know all the inside stories, but I know that DY and SH represent a real jumping on spot for the current era.  And, of course C&C had the good sense or the right set of circumstances to have a great construction crew working for them.  I guess you could blame it all on the Texas scene from that time.  The right people for the right situation just sort of fell in place...

[Michael Dugger]

I have a hard time buying into these kinds of thought experiments.  Granted Dick Youngscapp's vision was integral to Sand Hills, but regardless of whether that course got built or not the movement towards more "naturalistic" courses would have fully revealed itself anyways.  

Many of the contributors to this website are evidence of such.  I think someone like Tom Doak would have heeded his passion regardless.  This is a man who is steadfast in his beliefs. What about Mike Keiser?  Greg Ramsey?  Gil Hanse?

The notion of which came first, the egg or the chicken, is difficult to conclude when it comes to GCA of the past decade.  

[Tom_Doak]

RJ:  Your story about the genesis of Sand Hills is nice, but not quite correct.  Dick Youngscap was introduced to Coore and Crenshaw via Ron Whitten, who has been a longtime acquaintance of Dick's going back to when Ron wanted to work on the crew at Firethorn.  Surely, having built Kapalua helped establish their credibility a little bit, but my guess is that Dick would still have liked Bill and Ben just as much and they would have been his choice regardless.

Dick felt some allegiance to Mr. Dye because of the success of Firethorn, and did speak to him about doing Sand Hills, but I believe he played it down because he really didn't think Pete was the best architect for that site.  I have never heard that Pete had anything to say about Bill being chosen for the job, and I know all of the principals pretty well.

Regardless of the construction of Sand Hills, there were a few of us (Bill and Ben and myself at least) who had a different approach to design and construction, and were looking for a chance to apply it -- we had each done a handful of jobs by 1993.  Sand Hills was the poster child which helped popularize the concept and convince other dreamers to act.  We would still have found work without it, but it would have taken longer to get attention for it.

Mike Keiser was an investor in Sand Hills, so he shared that vision, too, but the success of Sand Hills emboldened him to move forward with his vision, so who knows if there would be a Bandon Dunes or not?  And without Bandon Dunes, Greg Ramsay might still have had his idea, but none of the people who funded Barnbougle would have bought on, so I strongly suspect it wouldn't exist.

Ballyneal might be different ... they'd had their dream prior to Sand Hills, so they might have proceeded with it even without Sand Hills' success for encouragement.  Whether they would have found me to design it might be a different story -- Jim O'Neal loved Pacific Dunes, but we have connections on several levels so we might have met anyway.

[John Foley]

Tom - Thanks for the insight and I thinkthe jist of where this would go you captured by saying:

"We would still have found work without it, but it would have taken longer to get attention for it."

It's interesting to speculate how the sites would be if differnet decisions we're made. Would Bandon ever have got done if Mike K wasn't involved in Sand Hills? Heck would it have gotten done it Howard McKee didn't work kike a dog to aquire all the permits to make it happen!!

GCA would still progress and find it's way to what you & others are doing.

[RJ_Daley]

Thanks for the clarification Tom Doak.  By all means then, let's not leave out Ron Whitten in his partication in a growing and renewed awareness of GCA.  Obviously, that from Cornish and Whitten's book, where they specifically mentioned the ideal nature of the sand hills land, that was from Ron's growing up years as a lad in Nebraska.  

Still, the circle appears to be quite small, and the right people for the right ideas and the times that had arrived seemed to all have a certain thread of association running through those days of your lives.  That seems to be the way many great movements in arts and culture, social political trends, etc., begin.  

To me, it is just like the Merion thread.  There was a small circle of golf visionaries in the vanguard.  Now, we can argue for endless hours who contributed what.  But, one thing seems to be undeniable.  They all knew eachother to varying degrees.  The circle was relatively small, and the ideas were large.  

[Tim Bert]

How might Sand Hills have been different if Tom Doak had been asked to design it?  What chain of events might that have caused?