Primarily, I'm interested in the evolution of all this---why some things happened in various times, how and for what reasons.
Tom:
I agree and I think that two major influences on the work we've done at Seawane have been:
1) the work of Dye, and other modern architects, that have inspired an otherwise flatish piece of land (the extreme example being Whistling Straights) in combination with the current membership's perception that we had a flat piece of relatively uninteresting land besides the water influenced holes. This perception is certainly a product of the impact that the bordering neighborhood had (unfortunately, the club never owned this bordering land). I think this perception was also exacerbated by the negative impact to the property over time from the tree over growth. Which, ironically, this perception is the main reason why thousands of trees were planted in the first place. In retrospect, ideally we would have first removed all 4,000 plus trees and played the course for a season before doing anything else, but we're a club not a GCA experiment
.
2) the second major influence is that since we are not the original membership that retained Emmet and since so much time has passed even if we were, only a small percentage of us hold a strong sense of historical value for what Emmet did, and, to a person, we're all actively involved in the current project in some fashion. In spirit, our membership, including myself, wants a course and club for the future, not one of the past, and so I believe that played a role in deciding to go the renovation route.
I've said before that I would have preferred as detailed a restoration as possible, accounting for gains in distance with bunker placement, but I don't think that would have been any better a product than what's currently on the ground. Again, however, I think things would have been done differently if we had the same land that Emmet had.
One thing that I've learned through this project is that unless a course has immense historical value, e.g. ANGC, Pine Valley, GCGC, National (no, I have no East Coast bias
) change, even radical change, can be a very good thing. Not trying to state the obvious, I think that the ultimate architecturial test for a course like Seawane, which I will qualify as having already been radically changed by external forces over time and where substantial restoration can't replicate original playing conditions, is whether you want to head to #1 tee after walking off #18 green.
We now pass that test with flying colors (IMO).