Tom,

I think the rise, albeit medioric, of Canadian golfers like Mike Weir, Jon Mills, David Hearn, James Lepp & Richard Scott are likely attributable to better player development program instigated by the R.C.G.A. Further, more and more junior golfers from Canada are being recruited by NCAA colleges in the United States, especially Kent State.

I do believe that better golf course (read: better golf architecture) will improve the playing ability of golfers in general. However, the NCAA schools and national player development programs are what seem to be producing touring professionals in the 21st century - not architecture. While Australia is blessed with a healthy number of great golf courses, the recent explosion of Australian talent is more a facet of a thriving sporting nation, whose government funds sports programs generously.

TK

Chris is exactly right when it comes to our best players.
Almost all learnt to play on poorer courses although in Melbourne they gravitate to the sandbelt when they get good enough to attract the attention of the recruiters for the club teams.

The link with government programs is tenuous.
The AIS has produced very little in both golf and tennis (not Rafter,Hewitt or Philipoussis) although the Victorian Institute produced Allenby,Appleby Baddeley and Ogilvy - and others who have done well
That was more to do with a pair of great teachers - Steve Bann and Dale Lynch - than anything.

I think it's more along the lines that good clubs are more likely to produce good players, good architecture or both.

A better exercise for this thread may be to list courses in those categories.

Off the top of my Philadelphia biased head:

Good players:
Moselem Springs CC

Good Architecture:
Rolling Green CC
Manufacturer's G&CC
Gulph Mills CC

Both:
Huntingdon Valley CC
Merion CC
Philadelphia CC

On the fence between both and good players:
Tavistock CC (I've never seen it, but it's been described as "eclectic" to me and I know they are doing some renovations).
Llanerch CC

Coincidentally, both at Alex Findlay.

Let us hope that as a result of better work in designing and constructing courses, Australian golfers as a whole may be even more intrigued by this fascinating game. Let us hope too, that the standard of play will be raised thereby and that Australians may thus take their place in the big golf of the world.

Alister Mackenzie, Nov. 13 1926.

"Is there a coralation between the progress of architecture within a nation and the champions they produce?"

I doubt there's any correlation if one is talking about world class touring professional champions. Just looking at say the top ten players in the world right now would seem to prove that out. How many great courses are there in Fiji, for instance?

What Rich Goodale and someone else above said is probably true of world class champions---eg they are very adaptable to courses anywhere and I can't see how that would correlate to the architecture of their nation. The only exception to that I can think of was probably Trevino and his refusal to play the Masters because he convinced himself the course just didn't suit his game (Nicklaus actually mentioned he thought Trevino's aversion to ANGC was nuts and Jack said Trevino probably could've found a way to win there if he hadn't done such a good job of talking himself out of it).

But in a good amateur sense there may be something to good architecture=good players. In the Philadelphia district, at least, that theory was very definitely on George Crump's mind when he built PVGC. One of his distinct goals was to raise the level of tournament players from the region in regional and national championships by distinctly raising the level of a "championship test" with PVGC. (There was even a significant early member of PVGC who promiised to contribute X dollars to PVGC depending on the players from this district making the US Amateur!).

In recent years I've heard Gordon Brewer, the current president of PVGC, say in public on many occasions that the quality of golf architecture in the Philadelphia region has been directly responsible for the high level of amateur champions coming out of this region. Brewer, himself had a good career nationally winning two national championship and coming very close in another. I don't know if what he said about that is provable historically but I do know Philadelphia did produce some notable champions including J.J Mcdermott, Max Marston, Bill Hyndman, of course the incomparable modern amateur Jay Sigel and on the women's side perhaps the most successful American women's amateur Glenna Collett Vare (six US Amateur championships!). On the other side of the state, Pittsburgh, which has a number of excellent courses there is the all time energizer bunny, my old friend Carol Semple Thompson whose national championship production is somewhere around Woods, Nicklaus and Bobby Jones. Thompson has also won 20 state amateur championships! That's right, it's not a typo, that's 20 state amateur championships, and PA is no small state golf-wise.

We've felt relatively recently that some of the best players from this district come from HVGC simply because that course has so many unlevel lies and consequently HVGC players have become better ball strikers for it. But I think the real reason some clubs and even some districts produce good players has more to do with some type of synergistic golf culture within various golf clubs or even districts---eg they tend to inspire each other to do better. Hence clubs around here like Overbrook, PCC, Llanerch, even little Yardley and now Tavistock.

Tom MacWood:

I wonder where you came up with this thread's question. Have you been reading "Greens and Greenkeeping" recently because in it I believe Harold Hilton ruminated on this very subject of architecture and good players vis-a-vis the differing games of early British Isles top players depending on which course they came from. In it he said some got so used to pitching the ball they weren't good at the low run-in shot and vice versa for those from TOC I believe.

"....when Aberdour was in its heyday, it was a 4700 yard par 63 course, with small and fast greens.  No wonder those kids learned how to score and play!"

Rich:

Mmmm, I'm not so sure this idea of yours that young golfers learn to go low has much to do with eventual success as a champion golfer. I mean, come on, how do you think those young lads feel who get used to shooting 57 and 58 at Aberdour's 4,700 yd par 63 when eventually they have to tee it up from the tips at Carnoustie in a national championship?? I'd say they might get a little depressed and overwhelmed, wouldn't you?

If I was training a young lad with potential I'd tell him to get used to ripping the day-lights out of it from the tips (and straigthening it out later). I don't think I'd train him to tee it up every day from the ladies tees so he could just get used to going lower!  

"In my day job for most of the past 30 years (advising large entitites in strategy and organisation),"

Rich:

During your 30 years of advising large entities in strategy and organization do you also advise them to think in a "small pond" mentality so they can get used to the feeling of dominance?  

On the other hand, I am somewhat of a supporter and advocate of your idea of playing against better players on the flat, as a general rule. To say the least, that does tend to raise one's level rather quickly as it removes any semblance of comparability that handicap strokes sometimes produces in one's mind.  

Tony
I was thinking world class championship golfers.

I think it is a difficult point to make. The world has become so globalized during the last 50 years that a lot of people pick up the game of golf in a lot of other countries than their own.

Because a country has a lot of good golfers it is, in my opinion, more a question of how popular the game is (number of players) and in which regard the young talents are picked up by a development program that will help them all the way to the top with the best coaches, etc. That is very, very individual from country to country.

I think it is primarily a question about the total number of players in a country that will determine how many great players evolves. It is, as Tom says, a matter of sheer numbers.

MacD, Hunter, Mack and others argued, quite explicitly, that people ought to care about good designs in the US because it will lead to better golfers in the US.

I'm not sure anyone ever took that argument too seriously. At least not in its literal form.

But it does seem to me that great young golfers have to match themselves against great golf courses to move on to the next stage in their development. For virtually all good junior golfers who come from mediocre courses, playing a great course is a shock to the system. The good ones climb the hill and move on. Others don't make it over the hill.  

It is on great courses that the filtration process takes place. And if your country doesn't have great courses to provide those higher order tests, developing a crop of great young golfers may be delayed or blocked altogether.

Even great golfers go through a learning process. The better the school, the better and the faster they will learn. So MacD, Hunter and MacK do make some sense. Great courses are important finishing schools for great golfers. Absent great courses, great young golfers will have a more difficult learning curve.

If Vijay had spend the first 20 years of his career in Fiji working just as hard as on his game there as he worked on his game in the US, and then one day flew to the US to play on the PGA tour, he would not have been anywhere near as good a golfer. An important (though not the only) part of becoming a world class golfer is learning how you play the best courses in the world.

Bob

Perhaps an excellent golf course enhances the real underpinning of creating top players and that is competitive drive fostered by rare individuals but more so by club ethos.  Huntingdon Valley always had a challenging golf course, the club had many active players in local and broader competitions--both men and women.  Its course was 6300 yards at the turn of the century.  The course was an early practitioner of lengthening as players and technology got better.  When Merion and Pine Valley were built the club realized how behind the times they were and asked for three nines of increasing difficulty...and got them!  

The fact is Philadelphia fared particularly poorly in competitions with New York and Boston.  It wasn't until Merion and Pine Valley developed their championship courses that the district players started to compete on an equal footing and began winning contests.  I think Robert Lesley felt that competition would help the district players when he founded the Lesley Cup which directly influenced Walker and Ryder Cups.  This was in 1905 before the district had multiple championship caliber courses.

It didn't hurt that Max Marston moved from Baltusrol to Merion and Pine Valley  

Bob Crosby said:

"MacD, Hunter, Mack and others argued, quite explicitly, that people ought to care about good designs in the US because it will lead to better golfers in the US.
I'm not sure anyone ever took that argument too seriously. At least not in its literal form."

Bob:

The longer I look into this subject of golf architecture and also those early philosophers of golf architecture and what they wrote and propose in that vein, the more I'm coming to realize how much there probably is in what you just said above as it applies to what happened in the succeeding evolution of golf architecture, particularly in America. After-all we do have the luxury of looking at what the succeeding years brought---a luxury those early architecture philosophers did not have.

It seems to me as noble as that sentiment was on their parts, the thing they really missed the boat on was the sentiments in that vein of the everyday American golfer. History seems to show us that most of those philosophers on architecture at that time when golf was quite young in America just totally overestimated how much the every day golfer in America might care about certain things to do with golf architecture. History seems to have shown us in the ensuing years that you can pretty much just give them anything and they'll be OK with it as long as they can just get out there and whack a golf ball around.  

TE
From now on, to make things as easy and simple as possible, Horace Hutchinson should simply be referred to as "The Man".