David,
Finally...at least you finally come right out and say it;
What I said was that Macdonald and Whigham came up with the routing and the hole concepts.
At least let's get our clear positions out here in the open and stop this "I'm just a neutral observer simply trying to find out what really happened" shtick, when you've been an advocate for a pre-determined, pre-disposed position for the past several years.
But to be specific to our present discussion, your essay says about Hugh Wilson "...he did not plan the original layout or conceive of the holes."
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but to me that includes routing and hole design, no?
Yet you then contend I'm misrepresenting your position when I say that you're claiming M&W "planned the designs of the holes."
However, in your next sentence, you say exactly that, correct? You say, "And Mike, in the case of M&W routing and hole concepts are pretty much synonymous. As they explain at NGLA they are looking for landforms where certain underlying strategic principles will best fit!"
David, I don't agree with that at all.
One of the reasons the template holes popularized by Macdonald and Raynor proved so popular is that their concepts were transferrable from Long Island to the mountains of Tennessee to the low-country of South Carolina, to the coast of Hawaii, to the plains of Chicago and St. Louis, to the hills of West Virginia.
There are uphill, and downhill, and flat redans. There are Alps holes on dead flat ground at places like Yeaman's Hall. There are Shorts, and Biarritz's on all sorts of terrain, as well as Road hole concepts, and all the rest....
On 90% of the template holes, their distinguishing characteristics are the placement, angles, and patterns of bunkering or other hazard to create the fundamental strategy of the hole.
That's true of the redan, the road, the Alps, the bottle, the short, the biarritz (with a dip in the green twist), the cape, the long, the eden, the leven, the sahara, even the punchbowl. In fact, the only two template holes I can think of totallly dependent on a land form would be the hogsback, and perhaps the double plateau, which more describes the green site and was usually manufactured.
So, to suggest as I'm sure is coming in the second part of your essay, that many of the holes at Merion were placed on the ground during a half-day of looking over the property nine months prior to fit into some grand design of Macdonald's that no one ever recorded or reported is a fallacious theory on the face of it, and bears no relation to the fundamental truth that even by the time Macdonald designed his next course after NGLA at Sleepy Hollow, he not only turned the redan on it's head with a reverse redan, but created a steeply DOWNHILL one, as well.
To your other point, there is nothing inconsistent in my opinions, or in my contentions. If Hugh Wilson had not planned the course originally, as well as routed it he would not have received the accolades that he did and the evidence shows that he did in fact do that. But he also opened the course as a "rough draft" and updated it and evolved it, and modified it though the next twelve years, and that was noted in his achievements, as well.
That is where all of the evidence points, David.