Pete,
As it happens, your question comes just as Ran is doing an interview with me, and many of those questions relate to my working with Tour Pros, so you may just have to wait for a complete answer, but here is a basic outline of the Tour Pro collaborations:
There are a couple of pros, like Nicklaus and Palmer, who have their own staffs, but most partner with a Golf Course Architect like myself because they don’t get enough projects to employ someone full time. There are also business and insurance issues for them, but often, my errors and omissions provider will cover them, too, for an additional fee.
In most cases, these guys use their contacts to get the job. I provide them with my basic contract, they add the professional representation things from their contract, and then I sign a sub-contract to provide all the basic Golf Course Architect services only, and they have some legalistic clause about only looking at things from player’s perspective, and not drainage, etc. There have been cases where we signed separate contracts, and in reality, I prefer it that way to get co-credit and because the contracts represent what is really going on, which is a good thing.
Pros tend to equate architecture to daily outing fees. Hypothetically, if they get $50K per corporate outing, they contract to spend four days on site if their portion of the fee is $200K and “throw in” design review, etc. I would say all the pros I worked with ended up giving more days on site than was actually contracted.
They usually walk the site with us before design, and after the routing is done, we usually have one meeting after I have roughed in some concepts. Between those reviews and any general types of conversations, we put in features they would like to see.
Then, they make a few well timed site visits, although half the time is spent with the press, of course. They make further comments, and because of their status, those changes are usually made, although sometimes, an owner or contractor balks if it would cost too much in time or money.
BTW, over the years, I also collaborated with many of my own associates, including Jeff Blume, who used to post here, and John Colligan, whose young associate Trey Kemp posts here. Either may want to add what its like to collaborate with me in charge!
I have also collaborated with similar gca's including John Fought, Gary Baird (more in name only) and Jay Morrish. Working with Fought and Morrish were both great, great exeperiences. As was mentioned last week, I am collaborating with Damian Pascuzzo and Steve Pate at La Costa. In all cases, egos never seemed to get in the way at all. There are a few discussions about theory, and areas where we would all do things differently.
With Damian, we sat down and measured out a bunch of Wilson bunkers to see what it would take to mimic them, because we have personal differences in bunker styles.
When collaborating with Jay, my young associates were just in awe of him as we sat in the conference room and went over design concepts, and personally very pleased if he approved something they had worked on. My guy was edging all the bunkers in the field when Jay made a site visit. He said that while he loved lacy edged bunkers, he would like to see a simple set on one hole for contrast. My associate looked at me, I nodded, and the 11th at Whitestone got built with much smoother bunker edges than the other holes, and one more hole got softened to keep it from standing out.
I have relayed the story here about John Fought and I discussing bunker placement in regards to both walking and cart path circulation, and us both saying "Hmm, I never thought to consider it that way" referring to the others concerns.
As Larry the Cable guy might say, "I could go on all day" with nice remembrances about those days if the field. Despite what a few say about later remembrances of participants in a design project, I can remember some of those even 25 year old events clear as a bell, and will actually spend some time this week writing them down for posterity, just in case there comes a day when I don't remember all those nice days I have had!