"Tom Paul,
After taking THREE MONTHS to lay out and plan the golf course at NGLA and another two months to design it in plasticene before even beginning construction, imagine how Macdonald would have slapped any fool at Merion upside the head had they even suggested such a ridiculous thing as having him design their course in a couple of hours visit, much less a day!
He'd have been highly insulted, I'm certain!"
Mike Cirba:
It is definitely pretty far out of the context of a thread subject like this one but an extremely important and interesting subject nonetheless and one I even once asked David Moriarty if he would be interested in pursuing with me. He refused. I actually asked him again shortly thereafter and he refused again.
What I had suggested to him, knowing his interest in Macdonald himself, and explaining to him my own interest in the man, and not just in the context of his involvement in the American world of golf course architecture but also with his involvement in his larger world of golf administration, Rules, and his life in the business world.
My point to him was some of these people were all one and the same back then, certainly including in the business world. In other words, most all of them and certainly the important and powerful ones most certainly were never strangers to one another!
My addtional point was that even if modern times and those on this website seem to think Charles Blair Macdonald was the King of the Hill, The Father of American Golf Architecture, and apparently in most cases even those powerful men such as Lloyd, Griscom et al from MCC and Philadelphia and others such as Morgan and Vanderbilt and Mackey and Cravath, Whitney, Havermeyer et al with his course projects in New York WERE NOT the kind of men a guy like C.B. Macdonald called idiots and SLAPPED UPSIDE THE HEAD!!!
Not if he felt like keeping his own day job as a floor broker for Barney & Co on Wall Street!
The larger world of Macdonald is truly interesting and I believe I'm going to write it, and maybe as an In My Opinion piece on here some day. I already have the title for it-----"Macdonald's World."
My point is Macdonald really was a massively complex man but what I have seen from him studying his working relationships with men like those particularly around New York and also here, is that Charlie Macdonald definitely knew "when to "HOLD 'em and WHEN to FOLD 'em" and to me that is truly fascinating and very little understood by most. There is also no question that he did have something of a personal problem, at least by the late teens or '20s, he knew it, they knew it, and in that world of those kinds of people back then they also sort of tended to deal with it sub rosa, and I would also have to say somewhat sympathetically or at least empathetically, if you catch my drift.
In the larger context it is a truly interesting tapestry and needs to be told. Parts of it should never be limited or dismissed or ignored of hidden away. Telling it ALL, warts and all, I think only serves to do them all justice for what they really were and what they managed to accomplish in their often complex lives and times!