"Ask yourself this question.
If you were in charge of the Merion project in 1909, would you turn it over to someone with NO prior architectural experience, someone who hadn't seen any of the great courses, who JUST READ about them ?
You must be kidding."
Patrick:
You just don't get it do you? But that never surprises me, as you know?
That's exactly what Merion did do with Hugh Wilson and it's up to you to figure out both how and why that happened. There is no question at all it happened that way no matter how much you want to argue with us or anybody else on here. To the degree you continue to do that is the same degree you'll slow down the education and understanding of the real true and accurate history of Merion and of men like HUGH WILSON on this thread.
One needs to understand that world, that time, those people like WILSON and his membership and what they were looking at in THEIR time not in something somewhat similar to OUR time.
Most of all this website has just got to stop treating Wilson like some dumb-ass novice who couldn't figure out how to do anything in architecture. The fact is he figured it out remarkably well and we can help you understand better WHY and HOW that was.
This is what guys like Moriarty and MacWood just don't get either, in my opinion----eg they just don't really understand or GET that world back then and the way it really was (obviously WAAY different than ours) and this is what forces them to AUTOMATICALLY go around looking for the likes of a Macdonald for Wilson or a Colt for Crump to do everything for them to make it all make sense to them (the Moriartys and MacWoods and apparently the Muccis too) about that remarkable era and those remarkable "AMATEUR/SPORTMEN" architects who even though YOU think and THEY think were novices who couldn't do it on their own, DID DO IT ON THEIR OWN to a degree far, far greater than most on here think or can apparently imagine. THIS, Patrick, is the beauty, the majesty, and the freaking interest and fascination involved in the golf and architecture of that time with those remarkably people like Leeds and Wilson and Crump and Fownes and Thomas or even Behr and Hunter et al. If you can't get that, if you can't imagine it, you'll simply never understand the accurate history of it!
If this website cannot or does not figure out the realities of that remarkable early time in golf and architecture and how a few of those remarkable men like Wilson and the courses he did and what they really did do WE are just not doing that remarkable TIME in the HISTORY of golf and golf course architecture justice!
Maybe we better give some of you jokers a little bit better background on a guy like Hugh I. Wilson and WHO he was and WHY a club like Merion Cricket Club back then turned to HIM the way they did!
So back the hell off in what you THINK happened and what YOU think Wilson was, would you Skeebo, and try and let us fill you in on what the REAL history was and WHY!