With the exception of Martin Davis's piece on the Golf Channel yesterday, I have seen no other mention of the Burbeck Debate.
in the media coverage of this week's Barclays.
As was mentioned earlier on this post back in 2008, much research was done to debunk
Golf Digest's "revisionist assertion" that Burbeck was true architect for the Black and Tillinghast had to share credit with Joe Burbeck in some type of collaborative role, which the magazine to this day still cannot substantiate.
Much of the debunking research was published in
Tillinghast Illustrated in the spring of 2009 in advance of the US Open of that year at Bethpage. For anyone interested the issue is available as a pdf on the Tillinghast web site at
http://www.tillinghast.net/Tillinghast/Tillinghast_Illustrated.htmlIn addition to this debunking, there is another first hand personal attribution in a very touching eulogy on the passing of A.W. Tillinghast in May of 1942, which was written by George Jacobus, President of the PGA. In this Eulogy, Jacobus credits Tillinghast with supervising the construction of the all the courses at Bethpage, which would infer that Burbeck as Superintendent took direction from Tillinghast....Not the opposite.
This eulogy has been republished in the Tillinghast photo biography which is also posted to the Tillinghast web site at
http://my.brainshark.com/Tilly-Pres-Final-4-627131474Lastly, the Tillinghast Association is in the middle of an initiative to republish many of the newspaper articles covering Tillinghast's golf architecture work for the PGA of America and we have found that in many of these articles written by local reporters and national reporters working for the NY Times and the Associated Press, they all credit Tillinghast for the design of Bethpage.
To date, we have Not found one article crediting Burbeck with the design of any of the Bethpage courses.
Joe Burbeck was a GREAT superintendent and his legacy overseeing the golf courses at Bethpage should not be forgotten, but he was NOT the design architect.