What was your "hook"?

[Matthew Rose]

Golf Digest. In the mid-80s, they had a recurring feature called The Tournament and TV Guide in every issue, which had small half-page blurbs about upcoming tournaments taking place that month, with partial graphic renderings of the courses they were played on and a complete scorecard (first it was just holes 14-18, then later 15-18).

During 1985, Golf Digest produced color foldout maps of the four major venues (Augusta, Oakland Hills, Royal St. Georges, and Cherry Hills) as well as the TPC of Sawgrass in the issues for the months that they were held in. I was fascinated by these, and tore them out, put them on my wall, and began drawing them. Then I began drawing my own. I was in the third grade.

I still have three of the five in a file folder (don't have Augusta or Cherry Hills anymore, which kills me because I live in Denver now), along with other maps from other GDs as well as Golf World and Golf Illustrated. I collected those for awhile.

I got the World Atlas of Golf (original edition) from my grandma soon after.... unfortunately, I wore out the cover and I have no idea where it is now.

Learning to play the game itself also had a tremendous effect. And that year, my home course changed the order of the holes, and I became curious as to why they did that. That kind of went on a tangent as to "who makes golf holes to begin with?"

[Ash Towe]

Reading the World Atlas of Golf.

Tom Doak telling me about this site after I e mailed him in regards to Cape Kidnappers.

[Tom_Doak]

For me, it was the little course guide for Harbour Town, written by Charles Price, that the course handed out to every golfer when they first opened.  Mr. Price had hung around with Pete Dye while he built the course, and the booklet had a diagram of each hole and two or three simple sentences about how to play it.  [#2 - Drive to the left near the fairway bunker, to open up an angle to the green past the trees on the right.]  It was a modern yardage book, only without yardages, and written clearly and simply enough for a ten-year-old to understand.

[Stephen Brown]

I worked at a 1909 Ross course that had the original hole drawings lining the walls on the way back to the locker room.  The super at the time was Kris Spence and he turned me on to this site.  While at the Greensboro CC I had the opportunity to play most of the greats in the region.  

Been a long time lurker and avid reader of GCA since!

Thanks,

Steve

[Bill_McBride]

When I was in my early teens, my dad brought home a board game we played called, IIRC, "America's Greatest 18 Holes."   Because of that game I became familiar with holes like 18 at Pebble Beach and 16 at Cypress Point, and that there were courses magnitudes better than the rustic course we played in Marin County, Calif.  Then I had an opportunity to caddy at the Meadow Club and found it was really true.  Playing on the golf team at UCSB I got to play the Valley Club and my love of classic courses really took off.  

[Bill Brightly]

My "hook" started 8 years on the 3rd Hole of Hackensack, a long par 3 with a slightly elevated green. Our club president (who had a vision that out course could be restored as Banks) had invited me to go on a walking tour with some guy named George Bahto. George was explaining how the last 35 yards of fairway could be cut to green height, and the left and right greenside bunkers could be extended backwards the same distance. I told them they were crazy, that would be a stupid looking hole!

Although I had been playing Hackensack since 1974, I knew nothing about Raynor or CB Macdonald. But I went home and started researching on line. I typed in National and stumbled across cga.com and read all of Ran's course reviews. Once I learned the lineage from Macdonald to Raynor to Banks, I was hooked. My love of MacRaynor fields was hardened by frequent cga.com battles with Wayne Morrison, who criticized the look as unnatural. Having to defend Macraynors against a formidable opponent forced me to quickly learn my stuff!

[Jason Goss]

For me it was the summer of 2000 when I was interning at Pine Hollow (post Hanse resto) in East Norwich L.I.  I had the good fortune to see Nassau, Westchester, Garden City, Deepdale, Piping Rock, Creek Club, Bethpage, Shinnecock, & NGLA.  I had worked on golf courses for ten years prior to that summer and had played golf for fifteen years and sadly had not paid any mind to the GCA.  After seeing all that great GCA out on L.I. I was hooked on finding out more about the men responsible for it.  Having grown up in SE Michigan, I wish I had paid more attention to what was there before I moved away.  

[Rees Milikin]

It all started for me through skateboarding and the subsequent appreciation for urban landscapes and landscape architecture.  The passion for skateboarding (and the physical toll it takes on my body) isn't as strong today, and has since transferred to a passion for golf and golf architecture.  I have been lucky to have some golfers in my family, and with all of my family living in or around Augusta, the appreciation for golf was always there.  Thankfully, I found this website a while back and have been reading & learning a lot of information that I would not have ever been able to discover on my own.

[Rich Goodale]

Interesting question, Ted

I was "hooked" on the uniqueness of golf when I was introduced to a few cut down hickories and scabby old balls and given the freedom to play with them in our back yard, ~age 8 or 9.  Unlike baseball or tennis or football or ice hocky or basketball or bowling, golf was the only sport that allowed you to design a field of play without any geometrical constraints.  This uniqueness was driven home to me when I finally got to occasionally play on real courses a few years later.  It was obvious and fascinating that all holes were different, and each one itself played differently on a day to day basis, depending on climate and one's mental and physical state.  These facts are still obvious, hundreds of courses and thousands of holes and tens of thousands of swings later.

However, until I read the phrase "golf course architecture" sometime in my 20's, I never thought that the uniqueness and enjoyment I got from golf had much at all to do with the skill or creativity or vision of the persons who were responsible for each course and each hole, particularly the ones who first chose the field of play and then laid out and then constructed the course on each of those fields.  I still tend to think of those tasks as constituting something more like "topograpical engineering" than "architecture," and am more and more convinced that the overall quality of the experience in playing any golf course is far more due to the quality of the stewards of those fields over time than the persons who initially chose the tees and the greens and the possible routes of play.

[Philip Gawith]

My GCA experience dates to SportsPages - a bookshop on Cambridge Circus in London, sadly no more. It was there that i saw the first edition of Paul Daley's series of GCA books - the orange one with a picture of Bandon Dunes 12?13? on the cover. I remember thinking i had to go and play that course. And then the book contained a chapter by Ran about GCA online, which took me to this site - and the rest is history!

[Jim Tang]

Playing Pacific Dunes about a year after it opened.

After playing, I was forced to ask myself, what was it about PD and that style of golf that captured my imagination?  For me, prior to PD, golf had been played on overwatered public parkland courses in IL.  The contrast between the two styles was dramatic.

Ever since, trying to answer that question has led me to down the rabbit hole of golf course architecture.

[Matt Glore]

I planned a Michigan golf trip with two buddies.  One buddy i only see every few months.
He was at a training course for work and the owner of his company told him "In Michigan try to play Dunes Club in New Buffalo"
So he called me three days before we left, asked me about it.  I had never heard of it.

My wife's family lives 20 miles from there in St.Joe for all her life.  I started calling her family and no one believed there was any golf in that area.

Online research steered me to "Dream Golf".  

My brother in law knows the head pro at one of large public courses, he got me on Dunes.  I was HOOKED.  After one wet round I told my wife my goal is to be a member at a location like Dunes Club.  

Ever since I've been an avid reader of GCA, books, traveled to different golf locations for the experiences.

[Matthew Essig]

I guess I should start from the beginning. I started putting when I was 2 or 3 with my dad when he would go out and play golf. I would ride in the cart with him all the time. For some reason that I cannot remember, I never started swinging a club until I was 11 or 12. I was never truly hooked on golf until an exact moment at age 13. I was playing Newcastle near Seattle with my dad. I don't remember which course or which hole, but on one of the par 3's I hit a shot to 6 inches. From that moment on, I was hooked in golf.

The golf architecture hook came from two sources: I started watching golf on television. Every time they would show a flyover of a hole, I became more fascinated on how each hole played and was laid out. The second source came from the uniqueness of golf. It is the only sport where you are trying to beat the surface you are playing on that someone took the time to lay out and create with their imagination. I then started drawing my own golf courses and the rest is history.

[Terry Lavin]

In 2002, I hosted Ran Morrissett and Mike Keiser for a round of golf at Olympia Fields. That's all it took...

[Richard Choi]

My first visit to Bandon Dunes in 2000. Never knew golf could be like that and changed my views regarding golf courses forever.