Just so everyone is on the same page regarding David's contention that the Merion Committee went up to NGLA to "look at CBM's
plans, which he contends were his design for Merion, this is what the Merion Cricket Club minutes say exactly;
"Your committee desires to report that after laying out many different golf course on the new ground, they went down to the National course with Mr. Macdonald and spent the evening going over his plans and the various data he had gathered abroad in regard to golf courses. The next day we spent on the ground studying...."
Recall at this time the recently unearthed NGLA articles make clear that Macdonald's NGLA course was still very much a work in progress with new bunkers being added, new agronomic techniques being tried, new grasses sown, and hadn't even opened to the membership yet.
Recall as well that Macdonald had been at Merion a total of one day, NINE MONTHS prior, looking at unmapped land they were considering aquiring, and had issued a single-page assessment largely expressing agronomic and acreage concerns that he suggested the Merion Committee needed to address...not a single word of any design, or that he'd been asked to do anything but consider and report on the proposed land in question.
Then, suddenly, miraculously, after presumably going through some laborious gestation period, and without another day on the property, NINE MONTHS later he has a design for Merion and the Merion Committee has to come out to NGLA to pick it up from him....
Call it Charlie's Immaculate Conception.
Here is what Hugh Wilson himself said about the Merion Committee's two-day trip to NGLA;
"We spent two days with Mr. Macdonald at his bungalow near the National Course and in one night absorbed more ideas on golf course construction than we had learned in all the years we had played. Through sketches and explanations of the correct principles of the holes that form the famous courses abroad and had stood the test of time, we learned what was right and what we should try to accomplish with our natural conditions."
Any mention of a Macdonald plan for the Merion course??
One might think that would be an important detail to mention, especially given the fact that by 1916 when Hugh Wilson said this every newspaper in Philadelphia was already crediting him with the design of both courses at Merion.
Of course, there wasn't a Macdonald plan for Merion, yet David would take that single word out of two contemporaneous accounts and try to suggest that there was, despite all of the other evidence to the contrary.
We're left being asked to believe that Macdonald did a remote control, paper job for Merion, and as the evidence continues to roll-in, there are simply no actual facts left to support that assertion.