I'm sure there are a ton of people who can answer that better than me. Although George Fazio came from my area and many of his courses are in this area, I really don't know that much about him.
I started thinking about George Fazio because the pro at my course, Terry Hertzog, is about to play in the Hershey Buy.com tournament and was telling me he thought Hershey East G.C. was a bit of an odd design--that most of the greens just sort of stuck up out of the ground and the basic surrounding landscape.
I've played a good number of tournaments and qualifiers and such at Hershey East G.C. and the course and the holes themselves are no more than a vague blur in my memory. I can remember the direction the course moves in and some of the general shapes and some features of the holes but that's about it.
And I told Terry that the greens may look like they do because during construction they may have reamed earth out for bunkers and such and just threw it up right there and made the greens instead of paying more to have it removed or moved to somewhere more meanful. And frankly I was wondering who designed Hershey East and sure enough it was George Fazio.
So I checked out George Fazio's bio and his architectural inventory in Cornish and Whitten. Pretty interesting really.
It seems to me that if George got a really good site he did very well in identifying some of the good landforms for golf and did some very good things with them as holes. With blander landforms on otherwise good sites and sometimes the blander general sites he really didn't do much at all to enhance them for golf.
It seems that the quality of his career inventory is very wide. Some really good golf courses and some very uninteresting ones too. And some that have very good holes and also some very uninteresting holes.
It also seems like George very much might have given an owner about what he paid for. If they didn't pay much they didn't get much--not much in quality golf holes and probably not a lot of effort from Geroge in doing anything about trying to make things better.
So from the little I know about him he seems to have an interesting inventory of courses. Some very good ones, some with some good holes and some not and a few others that aren't interesting at all.
So it seems like George had real talent or at least real potential. When he found a beautiful and interesting natural landform with good golf to it, he had the sense to use what nature gave him and really do it right. But when nature didn't give him much he didn't do much with it. And he didn't seem to do much for an owner who may not have given him much.
Interesting thing to his bio too. He was, for a time the resident pro at Pine Valley. I'm sure at the very least osmosis there must have had a benefical effect on his talents as an architect. They say that Jupiter Hills has some of the look of Pine Valley. I don't know about that, but that one par 3 down there certainly does or did--there's no doubt about that.
If I were to try to capsulize George Fazio's work, I would take that quote of, I think A.W. Tillinghast, who said (paraphrased); "Sometimes you have to take holes that don't have much to offer and knock some sense into them so they can hold their heads up in the proper company of the good holes."
George Fazio either never read that quote or else didn't take it very seriously.