What do you suppose RTJ thought in 1951?

[Joel_Stewart]

When Jones was choosen to "modernize" Olympic prior to the 1955 Open it wasn't as radical as to what he did when he was again called in prior to the 1966 Open.  

As a result, I felt he found his niche around 1960 with the modern era courses.  If you follow his earlier designs and then his later designs you can see the stark contrasts in his work.

[Jason Topp]

Here is an article from 1951 previewing the US Open and interviewing RTJ about the changes to Oakland Hills

http://turf.lib.msu.edu/1950s/1951/510607.pdf

Interesting that it was pretty much a pure penal perspective and that he had calculated that nearly all competitors carried the ball between 230 and 250.

[Dan Moore]

Jason,

Thanks for the link.

Here is the article about RTJ and Baltusrol I referenced above.  

http://turf.lib.msu.edu/1950s/1954/540714.pdf

Bob,

Oddly RTJ did talk about making a course pleasurable for all levels of players.  In the following June 1959 article RTJ states  "The prime purpose of any golf course should be to give pleasure to all golfers, regardless of their playing ability"

Was he just paying lip service?  

http://turf.lib.msu.edu/1950s/1959/590625.pdf

[Jason Topp]

Dan:

Thanks for those links.  

I do not think he was blowing smoke, particularly if you look at his drawings in the one article.  

He saw himself battling technology which he saw as (1) lengthening carry distance for tee shots and (2) increasing accuracy.  He believed that, for a championship test, in order to provide a comparable challenge to a player, fairway bunkers needed to be moved to the 230-250 range and then pinched in order to challenge the good player to drive accurately and eliminate "trickiness."  

For the poorer player, he saw this change as a boon as well because it eliminated bunkers that only the poorer player was likely to find himself in.

Pretty interesting in an era where science was so highly valued.  

[BCrosby]

Thanks Dan. Interesting articles.

I don't know whether RTJ was blowing smoke in the '59 article or not. The piece sounds like a rewrite of something MacK or Thomas or Thompson might have written in the '20's.

(As a side note, the passage in his '59 article about the 16th at TOC is bizarre.)

I do know, however, that RTJ's reputation in the '50's was not based on the warm and fuzzy architecture described in that article. His business model was for big, hard courses that you could maintain. Did he care about the bogey golfer? Sure. But he didn't dominate gca for 20 or 30 years because of his sympathy for the handicap player.

(There are many ironies. For example, RTJ was brought in to redo Herb Strong's Ponte Vedra course in the early '50's to make it more resort-player friendly. At least that was what the advertising said. So there you had big bad RTJ softening a GA course. (The original Strong at PV was a bear. It was highly ranked. A Ryder Cup had been scheduled there for '39 and then cancelled due to the War.))

I think RTJ made his reputation by claiming to be the first architect to face up to the realities of new balls and clubs spurred by steel shafts. His claim was that technology had changed the game and that gca needed to be rethought to match it. Courses needed to be longer and tighter. (Any of that sound familiar?) He positioned himself as the go to guy for people that wanted to build a modern course that would hold up against that onslaught.

And then the icing on the RTJ cake was that these big bad courses would actually be easier to maintain. So what was there not to like?

Bob  

[TEPaul]

"TEP -
I'm not sure rankings drove RTJ or DW to do the tough and tougher thing. Rankings in the major mags didn't get started until the early 80's, no?

Bob:

Hmmm, good point. I guess all I could say about that is I have no real idea about that, the primary reason being I hate magazine rankings anyway, always have.

I better check that out because I've been basing a major point of mine on it for a long time. If I'm decades off I guess I'll have some very serious chronological egg on my face with that point of mine.

I think I probably will have egg on my face because as you saw in an email tonight I had a far ranging and fascinating conversation for about two hours tonight with Alice Dye and I made that point.

When I did there was momentary silence and then she asked: "What magazine or magazines were those?"

I said maybe GOLF or GOLF DIGEST and she said: "I don't think so, not then." She said maybe it was "GOLF WORLD", if anything.

I think I can feel the chronological egg on my face already.

[Mark Bourgeois]

Not including Tom MacW's 1938 list, I thought they got started in 1966 with GD's 200 Toughest.

[BCrosby]

Tom -

Anyone who posts here regularly has gotten an egg to the face at times. I include myself.

But isn't that one of the strengths of GCA? It's such an effective, efficient self-correcting forum. Not unlike a single, sprawling Wikipedia entry.

Mark -

There have been course rankings as far back as Crane's in '24. (Any one know of one earlier?) There was another famous ranking in '38 published in the NLE National Golf Journal. There were some later. But I didn't think there were regular, annual course rankings until the early 80's. And those early ones were based soley on resistance to scoring. (Might RTJ's dominance have influenced magazines to use that particular lens?)

I hope Tom Doak is looking in. He will know.

Bob

[TEPaul]

"Not including Tom MacW's 1938 list, I thought they got started in 1966 with GD's 200 Toughest."

Mark:

If that's true then that would mean I'm off with my "200 Toughest Courses in America" list by up to fifteen years. And if that's true that kills my point about why RTJ and a Dick Wilson went to increased distance in the early 1950s to grab instant recognition via magazine ranking.

[Mark Bourgeois]

But didn't they have something better than some magazine ranking: the US Open? (At least the original Open Doctor...)

[TEPaul]

"But isn't that one of the strengths of GCA? It's such an effective, efficient self-correcting forum.

Bob:

Let's get one thing straight on here once and for all.

I don't do that well with acronyms anyway and it's probably because I'm not that bright.

I've never known when one uses the acronym GCA whether they mean GOLFCLUBATLAS or GOLF COURSE ARCHITECTUURE.

[Mark Bourgeois]

According to an editorial by Jerry Tarde, GD rankings (Tom, isn't it great to write "GD rankings?") came out in 1996 with the "200 Toughest."  Then the magazine began its biennial exercise of the "100 Greatest" in 1971.

Click here for his editor's note.

Mark

[TEPaul]

Mark:

Thanks for that. I definitely have chronological egg on my face, but I think I might wait a while to tell Alice about that. Not the least reason because she already know that.  

Perhaps I wasn't paying close enough attention to what she was saying but I think it was something along the lines of she and Pete were having something of a time of keeping up with the press they were suddenly getting, not to mention the fact that RTJ's publicity machine was trying to swamp press mention of them.

[BCrosby]

Thanks Mark.

Tom -

I agree entirely. I use lower case "gca" to mean golf course architecture. I use all caps "GCA" to refer to this site. Then I really get fancy and use "architect" to refer to golf course architect. But then I'm a pretty wild dude.

Somebody ought to set up a glossary of acronyms and add a button to the left you could click to, because we all use acronyms slightly differently.

After this weekend, I've got a new one: NGLAIFA. National Golf Links of America is f#@*ing amazing. I plan on using it at every opportunity.

Bob

[TEPaul]

I was trying to explain GOLFCLUBATLAS.com to Alice Dye. I got the feeling she may not have heard of this site because I think she said: "Wait a minute, let me get a pencil and right that down."

How would you guys like to have Alice Dye on here?

Can you possibly imagine what a blast and an education that would be?

Here's a tidbit from her I think you'd enjoy and I don't think she'll mind me mentioning it on here.

We were talking about sleepers in GB and how that may've influenced the Dye use of railroad ties and such on architectural features such as island greens and green sides etc.

She said at TPC Sawgrass eventually Pete told her to get outta his face and do to a hole of her own.

So she said she did #13 with "planks" around it rather than Pete's railroad ties. I asked her where she got the planks and she said from a lumber mill.

She said recently Pete had to replace all his railroad ties because they were shot.

Her planks are still fine and she said to Pete: "I bought Cypress planks and they've outlasted your railroad ties, you dumbee"  

[Peter Pallotta]

One of the interesting things that (I don't think) has yet been discussed here about the craftsman-businessman-purveyor of the then-new that was RTJ in the 50s is this:

That golfers seemed to have responded very well to the golf courses he was creating/producing, well enough and consistently/long enough that RTJ was able to build a very fine business and career and reputation. It's a testament to that career (one based on both industry and popular acceptance) that many of the architects who followed him had to define themselves on his terms, either for/against him.

What's particularly interesting to me is that this raises again a question that Tom Paul asked on another thread, i.e. do golfers tend to simply accept what is being offered them as good golf course architecture? Does the consensus/popular opinion about a golf course architect mean that, for most golfers, his style of architecture is THE style of architecture, one that has to be appreciated or endured as the case may be...at least until the next maverick comes along with the talent and drive to alter that consensus/popular opinion?

Peter

[TEPaul]

Bob:

Your journey to the Eastern end of LI was one I was looking forward to for a long, long time.

Take some time to let it sink in, particularly NGLA, and then tell us in a very considered way what you really think.

Try to put your opinion of it into the time and era it was created and then try to drag it forward to today and even into what it might mean to the future of GCA (do you see that---capital acronyms ).

[TEPaul]

Peter:

I hope your questions above will be considered and answered well but in the meantime, consider this:

Tonight, Alice Dye was talking about the publicity juggernaut of RTJ and the way he played it from the early fifties on.

Even I vaguely remember that time.

She said that some of the best architects of the first half of the 20th century may've gotten some respect in the limited world of golf but in a very real sense RTJ took golf architecture and the "golf architect" way beyond that through careful and clever publicity and put the idea and the importance of "the golf architect" in the general public consciousness far beyond golf itself.

Perhaps only in retrospect did he or we realize the time was ripe for that. After-all America and the world had been through something of a hellish first half of the 20th century with the Fin de Siecle, WW1, the depression and WW2. RTJ's career really took off in the second half that would see a time of prosperity with its recreational ramifications that would last until today.

As I think I remember RTJ may've even landed himself on the cover of TIME magazine and back then that was definitely the pinnacle of hitting the Big Time in public consciousness.

[Peter Pallotta]

Tom
you know, RTJ gets more and more impressive to me by the minute. What you and Alice are talking about is someone who managed to create both the medium and the message.

Put another way, he managed to build both an infrastructure for business, and a business model designed to allow him (and only him) to get maximum value from that infrastructure.

In other words, he built the canal and he built the ship, and then he supplied the water to float that ship (and that ship alone) to anywhere he wanted to go. Wow!

I'd better stop while I'm ahead (sort of)

Peter

Did he know (or later realize) that eventually other ships would follow in his wake, and/or that other canals could/would now be built?

Ironically, the medium RTJ created was the very thing that allowed the next messenger to shift consensus/popular opinion away from him.

Did that dynamic exist at all before RTJ, i.e. with Macdonald and MacKenzie and Flynn and Behr-Crane? If not, is that THE difference/shift in the history of golf course architecture? (Actual questions, those)
   

[BCrosby]

RTJ gets more and more impressive to me by the minute. What you and Alice are talking about is someone who managed to create both the medium and the message.

Put another way, he managed to build both an infrastructure for business, and a business model designed to allow him (and only him) to get maximum value from that infrastructure.

In other words, he built the canal and he built the ship, and then he supplied the water to float that ship (and that ship alone) to anywhere he wanted to go. Wow!

I think that is right.

Consider that in 1949 the largest circulation mag in the US (Life) ran a four page article on RTJ's and Bobby's new course at P'tree. It was all about showing signs that the US was getting back on its feet.

But however much RTJ deserves credit for his business model, I'm not sure he did us any favors with respect to how the public thought about gca. To a degree, we are still digging out from underneath it.

Bob

[Mike Sweeney]

Bob:

Your journey to the Eastern end of LI was one I was looking forward to for a long, long time.

Take some time to let it sink in, particularly NGLA, and then tell us in a very considered way what you really think.

Try to put your opinion of it into the time and era it was created and then try to drag it forward to today and even into what it might mean to the future of GCA (do you see that---capital acronyms ).

Bob,

It should also take into consideration that you were traveling with the Anti-Dead Guy Architect. So we also want to hear stories about that too!

[BCrosby]

Mike -

Young stories? Got a million of 'em.

Every time Mike speaks he raises the philosophical question:

Must we mean what we say?

Bob

[TEPaul]

I think we might hear that Mike Young was very impressed with NGLA. I wonder how much of it might have to do with the fact that he apparently shot a 70. I wonder if that will allow him to be objective about the course?  

[KBanks]

RTJ appears to have thought that he routed Capilano. Herbert Warren Wind wrote that he did in the New Yorker.

Did he?

All attributions I am familiar with have Capilano as a Thompson course.

Ken

[TEPaul]

Peter:

Vis-a-vis your post #43, I'm actually old enough to remember the reputation RTJ developed not just in the industry of golf but also in the general public consciousness.

It's probably significant to know that he did that just about the same time Arnold Palmer was creating a whole new and far more widespread reputation for the "Tour Pro" and the professional tour.

Although Palmer and RTJ didn't exactly inter-relate in the way their reputations exploded into the public consciousness both of them obviously saw the recognition of their names and reputations expanded many fold into the non-golfing public's consciousness by the power of the news medium at that time.

I did not realize in detail how RTJ did that or even when he began to do that but last night I think Alice Dye filled in some of that information for me.

For some reason I thought it really began in earnest for him just after WW2 and through the 1950s but it appears now it began in the 1960s and on.

It was basically the same time-frame with Palmer.

I guess I was just off by about 10-15 years with this "200 Toughest Courses in America" list and the significance that may've had for the likes of RTJ and some altered things about his architecture due to it.

The same was basically the case with the architecture of Dick Wilson who never managed to enter the public consciousness like RTJ did but even if Wilson was a distance second to RTJ this way there really wasn't much after RTJ and Wilson, in the public consciousness of that time, that is.