Our own "Question-Man"
himself, Patrick Mucci, asked;
"Why did Rich Goodale leave the site ?
He was bright, articulate and brought and interesting perspective to the site.
What caused him to leave ?
Rich, if you're looking in, please reconsider and return."
Pat:
If you don’t know why RichG left Golfclubatlas, you should email him and ask him, as I did. What he had to say is good to know and instructive. But if you can’t even imagine why he left you probably aren’t paying attention very well.
Rich became dissatisfied and disinterested in what he calls “the community” on here. He felt the same old issues were being rehashed over and over again. And he felt there was a lack of decorum and respect amongst many of the participants. It seems an interest in ongoing arguing and triviality became too much the norm on here and less the infrequent occurrence.
You and I have spoken about these kinds of things over the years and what to do about it and we’ve spoken to Ran about it, and, as you well know, it’s just a hard thing to answer or resolve. It may even be the nature of the Internet with websites that deal with the kinds of things we do on here. It’s always been sort of amazing for me to consider, and it might have something to do with my age, but it looks to me like the shelf-life of a site like this may be inherently limited with its basic subject. I don’t think Golfclubatlas will lose popularity, just that its content and direction will change, as it already has. As Rich mentioned the same old things seem to get rehashed over and over again and the original participants who very well may’ve been the best and brightest out there just lose interest and tend to slip away.
As you know, Pat, the site has become less the entity it once was where fresh golf architecture issues were brought up and dealt with sparely but with some substance and impact (one can't help notice this if they check out how short most of the oldest and best threads were). Over time unimportant and insignificant trivialities seemed to get brought into too many threads (for which I certainly am not blamless
) and arguing and adversity ensued and then worse yet way too many threads became the norm that were just irrelevant and OT to golf architecture. Consequently, Golfclubatlas became more of a general “chat room” than the site dedicated to architectural understanding and really important issues and information that it began as and once was.
Is this somebody’s fault? Perhaps, but that’s probably somewhat ancillary as this kind of thing may be virtually inevitable in this fast and instantaneous communication Internet world we live in and use.
But I’ll tell you, in my opinion, Rich Goodale was one of the best we had. He was well mannered, well informed and pretty damned intellectual and it showed in what he said and how he presented himself and offered what he had to say (often with some humor both self-deprecating and otherwise-----with flashes of clear deep-thinking including even classically based and inspired nuggets of information).
His email certainly inspired me; after considering it for a few hours, I sent my email into Ran Morrissett and asked him to resign me from this website in the very same manner that Rich asked him to----which, as you know, was done.