I think the article that Ron Whitten cites from a 1918 Atlantic City newspaper should be introduced as evidence.
This is going to be another of those columns where, without any intention of doing so, I will aggravate fans of a legendary golf course architect of the golden past. I'll do it by pointing out their icon didn't do one of the courses they think he did. Here goes: The Bay Course at New Jersey's Seaview Marriott Resort & Spa (host in June, for the sixth straight year, of the Shoprite LPGA Classic, with Annika Sorenstam as defending champion), is not a Donald Ross original.
I know, I know, the resort says it is, all its promotional literature says it is, even the Donald Ross Society says it is. But it isn't.
Ross was involved, as I'll explain in a moment. But first, I need to set the record straight. The Bay Course at Seaview was originally designed by Hugh Wilson, of Merion fame. Which isn't too shabby a pedigree, either.
How can I know that, but the club doesn't? Well, back in August of 1974, Harold Walker, the general manager of Seaview, wrote me in response to an inquiry about the history of the club. "Unfortunately, some years back, when there was a change of ownership in our club," Walker wrote, "the historical information that you are interested in somehow went astray."
A year later, he wrote again to confirm the club's old paperwork was lost. Never to be found again. Like a lot of golf history, Seaview's early documentation apparently got tossed into a dumpster, and thence into a landfill or, seeing as this is New Jersey, dropped to the bottom of the deep blue sea. So I looked elsewhere. It took me 25 years of searching, but I recently stumbled upon a 1918 Atlantic City newspaper article on microfilm. It was a rambling review of the history of Seaview, especially its massive clubhouse (now expanded into a hotel.) The article did mention the course: "Hugh Wilson laid out course and Ross did the trapping," a subhead read.
"Hugh I. Wilson, who also laid out the two Merion courses (bold mine), is responsible for the Seaview course," it said in the text. "Five or six years ago, Clarence H. Geist, then president of the Whitemarsh Valley County Club (outside Philadelphia), decided that there was no earthly reason why Philadelphians and other golfers should go south in the winter to get their golf. He felt that there were scores of men of big affairs who ... could run down to the shore and play over the weekend ..."
The course Wilson laid out could be termed a genuine links, I suppose, as it sits on sandy soil edging the marshes of Reeds Bay, a barrier island removed from the Atlantic Ocean. (In fact, it might even be on land filled in from the bay, which is why it took the crews two years to complete construction.) When I first played the course, back in 1993, it was terribly overgrown with trees, mostly big firs, spruce and cedars, the worst stuff with which to line fairways. They may have cut down on the effects of ocean breezes, but they also cut off most views of the bay. Worse yet, you could see deep hollows along many holes. These were huge old fairway bunkers that had been grassed over decades before, and had 40-foot-tall trees growing from them. I'm happy to say that many of those trees have since been removed, and many of those bunkers were restored back in 1998 under the supervision of architect Bob Cupp Jr., helped by old Ross diagrams unearthed a few years before in the maintenance building.
In the immortal words of George Bailey, was Whigham off his nut?