Dan Kelly (tm);
Did not know you arrived on this website as a result of the Joe Logan article about Golfclubatlas and the Merion restoration project. It seems as if you've been here from the beginning. Anyway, I'm glad you're here and I can't imagine what we would do without our resident lexicographer.
Rich:
'Ad hominem' is a very good term to use for what goes on so often on this site particularly this ongoing Merion subject.
As I've said many times, or tried to, it's a shame the Merion restoration subject and all its many threads on this website took on the cast that it did so long ago. Before that happened the subject and the situation had so much potential for some really good and healthy communication and then due to adversialness and personal swipes from this site all that was lost long ago. It's not that Merion and those who are responsible for it aren't interested in what's said on here---they just won't ever communicate on here and why would anyone wonder about that?
The Internet medium is a fascinating one for ultra swift and comprehensive communication but unfortunately it seem to occasionally completely lack the required "superego" or necessary social consciousness that it generally takes to communicate with people and do it effectively.
And the constant quibbling over bias and double standard on here is just continuing to ruin subject after subject and thread after thread!
Tom Doak:
As Rich said your post #87 is a breath of fresh air on the subject of Merion and it's evolution in the last 20 years or so culminating in their restoration project.
What you mention in that post is more than a breath of fresh air, though. It touches upon not just a minor shift in direction such as cleaning up vegetation in their bunkering. It's far more of a sea-change than that!
And it's certainly not just Merion--it's so many others, probably NGLA and even Pine Valley, Seminole, possibly even Shinnecock to a degree too. My God, even one of the oldest and most long lasting courses of the truly old style--Maidstone--may be considering the new mindset!
What is that slow sea-change and new mind-set? Just as you imply it's the fear of daring to be DIFFERENT! Daring to remain true to those things (sometimes little things) that brought some golf courses to the dance in the first place!!
I don't know how long it's been since you were last at Merion. But it wasn't so many years ago that some of the bunkering at Merion was a virtual jungle--not all but a few. And they were just fascinating in their makeup and variety! A few of them such as the 1-2 on the fairway right on #10 and very much the one just right of #14 were places you didn't want to go not just because you could have a good deal of trouble exticating your golf ball but you also had a pretty good chance of ripping your clothes and probably scratching yourself up somewhat!
And to think that Merion and the USGA actually conducted the 1981 US Open (their last one) that way!! (Remember the photo of David Graham (winner) trying to contort himself into the vegetation (a virtual jungle of plant life and scrub bushes) on that bunker right of #14 green and extricate his ball)?
Why do course like a Merion, NGLA, Pine Valley go this route of cleaning their courses up to the extent of removing much of what was so different about them? I'm sure most know the reasons. It's the new mindset that's basically sweeping the world of golf!
However, one shouldn't generalize about these things too much I suppose. I love the fact that Merion removed the trees that sat in the bunkering on #11 and I love that they removed the trees on the right of the quarry on #16. What I don't love is a fixation in golf that its architecture should formulaically make every golf ball automatically bounce or release off a bunker face into the expectation of a semi-ideal lie or that it's a golfer's birthright that he should receive identical treatment in various places (as Ron Prichard mentioned in a recent interview).
Why did this happen at Merion? Frankly I remember the beginnings of it in some of the best clubs in this area. It happened maybe fifteen years ago when PV had some real conditioning problems and the super-Super, Dick Bator came to town and put them in a condition the likes of which they'd never seen before and only dreamt of. Bator worked on the areas of fairways and greens primarily, though, and did not over-sanitize the rougher areas of PV--including the massive amounts of sand areas.
Then he was off back to Rochester for a time until hired by Merion to do the same thing he'd done for PV. And he did a great job as he always does. But my recollection is the areas of bunkering and such remained as it always had been for a time until finally that too was cleaned up and made to function somewhat more formulaically--and recently PV's was too--and probably NGLA's and Shinnecock's too!
You said;
"I think they lost faith in the fact that they were a BETTER course because of their differences, and sought out someone who would put the course more in line with modern notions of greatness,"
That's such a cogent statement on your part, TomD! I hope you mean it--I know you do--don't back away from it. But this kind of realization is getting harder to sell today--it's flying more in the face of the new mindset in golf of standardized formulaics--and ironically bunkering, that true architectural vestige and tool of an architect's strategic expression is the most prevalent target today! Everywhere you turn today with the proposal to dare to remain different (or what got the course there in the first place) you here someone say;
"That was back then, who cares about that anymore, this is the way golf and all its courses should be today!"