Melvyn:
Thanks for asking. I don't really have time this evening to do justice to the subject, but I'll give it a start, anyway.
I had been hearing about Askernish from the beginning like everyone else here, and I was curious to see it for myself, but it is a bit out of the way. Luckily, Mike Keiser stopped over to visit the course en route to Scotland a couple of years ago, thought it was wonderful, and called me to say that he had volunteered to give them a bit of money for improvements if I would agree to oversee the work. That was all the reason I needed to make the trip myself, which I did last March with my associate Eric Iverson, en route to the conference of golf architects in St. Andrews.
We spent three days visiting with Ralph and the locals and playing the course and having a look around. It didn't take long to decide that the golf course has been UNDERsold as a golf course; everyone has concentrated on the story of its resurrection, and forgotten to say what a fine bunch of golf holes it offers. In fact, the stretch of holes in the new terrain from #7 to #12 is right up there with the best stretches of holes at Dornoch, Cruden Bay, or Turnberry for golf design and for drama.
Mr. Keiser is not a fan of greens with lots of undulation, and the undulations at Askernish are pretty wild, both in macro and in micro scale; I think he expected that we would do more softening than we've done. I don't think the greens are that severe considering that the speeds are not very fast; but they are very difficult to read, because of course they were just grassed over the native ground and not built by a shaper with maximum grades in mind. In my mind, the only serious flaw in the golf course was that the approaches to the greens had not received much attention, and the random bumpiness of the approaches combined with the smallish greens made it difficult to play links-type approach shots with any level of confidence. So, my recommendations were to do some work to smooth out the approaches on holes 4, 7, and 11; to relocate the greens on holes 6 and 17 where there was just a steep bank right up to the front of the greens and where a lofted shot was unlikely to hold; and to blow up the front section of the #16 green which really wasn't part of the original plan, and which made approach shots to either the front OR the back portion of the green a matter of luck more than skill. [This last recommendation was the most controversial of the bunch, and in the end a compromise was reached, to return the front portion to approach but not remove it, and to enlarge the back portion of the green.]
I also recommended that they start building additional tees, as the originals are so small that they are showing signs of wear even with the limited amount of play the course now receives.
I was well aware in all of this that Martin Ebert and Gordon Irvine were the men really responsible for resurrecting the course, and we would be seen from the outside as the American interlopers, so we made sure to invite them both to participate, and Eric and I spent a good deal of time with Martin getting his take on our suggestions to enhance the golf experience. We had the advantage of having a bit of money to spend on the course, whereas he and Gordon had much less in the way of resources; so we were sure that we could find some agreement on what to do with a bit more support, and we did.
I know that the locals were still a bit nervous about having "a shaper" come in and do work on the course with heavy equipment of any sort, but I was confident that they would be relieved when they finally got to see Eric Iverson in action, tiptoeing around the site and trying to make it look like he had never been there. I think John Garrity's recent article for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED captured this aspect very well; as Eric put it, once they understood he wasn't just some cowboy on an excavator, everything fell right into place.
I was not actually on site for any of the changes; Eric and I discussed them in detail on site, and I knew that he would get them right. Martin Ebert made a long visit while Eric was there to check out the work and make sure he was on the same page we were, and all the work was done early this year, with Eric only on site for a fortnight and some extra labor for six weeks in total to sod things back together.
So, I am now an honorary member of the club who has yet to make his second visit! But I must say that I've done far more for other clubs in America and abroad, and none of them has treated us as warmly as the gentlemen of Askernish, nor thought to make us [Eric as well] honorary members of the club. It really is an honor for us, of which I hope to make better use in the years ahead.
I wish I had some photos to share with you, but alas I did not bring my camera last March, and I haven't been back yet to take pictures of the "after". Other than the new greens at #6 and #17, which won't be in play for a while yet, I really doubt that side-by-side photos of the before and after would really look any different to anyone even with a keen eye; our goal was to enhance the playability of the holes without doing anything obvious at all. Only time will tell if we succeeded in that regard.