MikeC:
Unfortunately, I can't remember much of anything about Malvern golf club. I can only remember where it was and playing it maybe a couple of times. That was maybe the late '70s or around 1980 just as I got to this area. I'd not really played golf before that time, did not belong to a club, had zero interest or awarness of architecture etc, etc.
Even courses like The Links I was that way. I remember them now in sort of an awakened way. I saw everything back then but it really didn't register, if you know what I mean. I had no ability to make architectural distinctions back then.
I saw it but it didn't sink in--absolutely nothing like now. I remember playing NGLA when I was a teenager and thinking what a queer looking little hole #1 was and after that I recall nothing except, most interestingly, #16!!
Here's an understandable analogy between the way I was then and how I feel now and hopefully see golf architecture now.
When I was about 20 I drove out to the West coast, covering about the last third of the country in one sitting. I got so tired eventually I pulled the car off the road out in flat country in what appeared in the dark of night to be the middle of nowhere. Just before I passed out I could see the amazing firmament above me, a few little twinkling lights from something in the distance and nothing else.
I remember today thinking to myself, I wonder what this looks like out here, I was looking around but I couldn't really tell what was out there? I'd come across hundreds of miles of flat country and I thought that's where I was. I woke up as the dawn was coming, well before the sun, and things were starting to appear, but I fell back to sleep and woke up again as the sun was rising and there right in front of me was the awesome majesty of the Sierra Nevadas with me in my car in the desert just to the east under them!
I'll never forget thinking; "Holy Christ", I had no idea what this looked like or where I was in the dark of the night before and how different it is than I thought it would be. That's the way I look at architecture now (like after the sun rose) compared to back then (which was like the middle of the night) after I pulled off the road!