"The Philadephia Question"--and answers..

[BCrosby]

Brad -

Thanks for the summary.  I still think that if the forum had gone on for a couple more hours, the stark contrast in your views and those of Fazio would have made for a fascinating rumble.  Too bad things ended before that could happen.

The more I hear from Fazio's own mouth (or pen, as the case may be) the more troubled I am.  

Here we have the dominant architect of our era who believes that the architects who preceded him have little or nothing to tell him; who believes that the architectural history of a golf course, even classic courses like Riviera, ANGC, etc., has little bearing on the kinds of changes he wants to make to those courses; who doesn't believe that restorations have any particular value unless that is what the guy paying him says to do.

Remarkable and troubling.  

Remarkable that someone with such a dismissive view of the history of his own profession could rise to the top of that profession.  

Troubling because he is unwilling to use his unique power in the industry to promote architectural goals that are any higher than what the club chairman at his next job wants him to build.

Bob    

  

[Patrick_Mucci]

Willie Dow,

I don't understand your response.

I thought the ten hole short course was fairly true to the Crump design as evidenced at the eighteen hole course, and that the right hand 8th green was a strong duplicate of the original.

[TEPaul]

Pat:

I'll let you in on a little ongoing joke around Philly and Pine Valley.

Ernie Ransome is a man who has a zillion friends in golf and he is known as the man who took PVGC through a long stretch of the modern times really well always preserving and protecting Pine Valley and the memory of Geo. Crump.

Since the very beginning and through the only five presidents to date of PVGC it has always been sort of understood apparently that no one should mess with PVGC architecturally because of Crump and his amazing creation!

There was a time 15-30 years ago or so that Pine Valley had a huge amount of play and that super small #8 was getting beat up pretty bad!!

Obviously with a course like PVGC the thought of doing something completely sacrilegious like redesigning that green was unthinkable so Ernie got Tom Fazio to do the most prudent thing possible--build an alternate green about 30 yds to the right of it to take the pressure off #8. Fazio's right #8 is a great little green and is actually the smallest on the course.

But the purists good-naturedly started in on Ernie and basically have never stopped. Ernie has a great sense of humor and so do the purists who rib him about that green!

It wasn't that long ago apparently Ernie's PVGC friends were sitting down to some kind of major "ROAST" dinner for Ernie and one of them said:

"Ernie, we hope you never do pass, but when you do we're taking your ashes and sprinkling them on your right #8 green and then we're gonna blow the whole damn thing up!!"