How many claim to have designed your home course?

[Carlyle Rood]

I recently asked everyone what their home course was and who had designed it.  For myself, I just casually listed the first architect.

However, there are about a half dozen that actually TAKE CREDIT for designing it.  Some have more legitimate cases than others.  Here's my (unresearched, highly undependable, based on hearsay) best guess:

ATLANTA COUNTRY CLUB
* Designed by WILLARD BYRD in 1965.
* Input by JOE FINGER during construction.
* Input by DAVIS LOVE JR during construction?
* Renovation by JACK NICKLAUS during 1980s.
* Renovations actually may have been attributable to JAY MORRISH and BOB CUPP while employed by Nicklaus.
* Piecemeal modifications by BOB CUPP.
* Green complex redesign by MICHAEL RILEY in 2002.

What do you suppose the record is for most architects contributing to a course's design?  Atlanta Country Club was built relatively recently (1965) and it already has SEVEN people making significant contributions to its design.

Personally, I would call it a:

Byrd (1965), Nicklaus (1983), Riley (2002) Design

[Mike_Cirba]

I sort of collect this stuff on each course I play, and I think the leader in the clubhouse is Gulph Mills.  

Is it ironic that the longest listing is also Tom Paul's home club?  

[T_MacWood]

What about ANGC? MacKenzie, Jones, Maxwell, RTJ, Cobb, Fazio, Cupp, Nicklaus, Roberts...I may have missed a few.

[T_MacWood]

I'm betting very few knew ANGC was my home course.

[TEPaul]

I once tried to look through Cornish & Whitten to see which club had the most listings of architects over their history. GMGC has had a lot but I think I recall some such as Pittsburgh Field Club and a few others had more.

Cornish & Whitten probably aren't all that accurate though because they had to depend on each club to tell them what happened there over time and it just so happens that my club, GMGC had preserved all their records in detail from the beginning to the present. As I continue to visit clubs and look at their architectural histories it appears more evident that whatever participation the club and course may have had architecturally has been lost, burned up, thrown out or simply forgotten. Those clubs basically had no way of telling C&W much and so architectural participation isn't known or known very well.

Many of them are becoming intensely interested again though, and it's frustrating now to try to put the facts back together again. The Creek is a great example of that. They are incredibly fortunate to have a member who's a real potential historian of the club who's really into it. And amazingly just recently he found what appears to be basically every single piece of documented history of the club from the beginning to maybe into the 1960s or 1970s that was in the basement sort of hiding behind a boiler or something.

It's amazing stuff to look through and he really has his work cut out for him! The Creek in the beginning had some of the biggest big-timer names as founders and principles I've ever seen--names like Vincent Astor, J.P. Morgan, Marshal Field, C.B. Macdonald, George Baker etc.

Amazing stuff. Architecturally it's really interesting but so far a bit hazy. Flynn was there but we're trying to figure out what he did. Probably the biggest relatively recent architectural influence was Joe Dey until the recent semi-restoration by Doak/Hanse etc.

As significant as the Creek club may be architecturally they have a ways to go to figure out what all happened in the last 75 years!

[Doug Wright]

My home course, Denver Country Club, has been described by some visitors as a veritable museum of golf architecture.  Denver CC's original designer was James Foulis in 1903, making it one of the oldest courses west of the Mississippi. Since then, it's seen more than its share of architects and others who've made their mark. Here's the list, and the years they were involved with the course:

James Foulis (1903)
Donald Ross (1914-1922)
William Flynn (1923-1924)
Harry Collis (1925)
William Diddel (1957-1959)
J. Press Maxwell (1963-1965)
Ed Seay (1975-1978)
Bill Coore (1985-present)

A club member, Fred McCartney, did major golf architectural work on the course from 1925 to 1940. In fact, the wildest green on the course (#4), is credited to McCartney. It's positively Maxwell-esque, much more pronounced than the Press Maxwell greens. Several minor modifications were also made at the suggestion of A.W. Tillinghast in 1936, and two of the club's professionals, William Wilson and John Cochran, became golf course architects and also had some influence on the course's design. So I guess that makes 12 people who had a significant influence on the course. It seems to tie together pretty well, though, which is a credit to those who have had their hands on it and the green committees overseeing it.

Best,

[Joe Hancock]

My home course is so simple that no one claims to have designed it......

Joe

[Mike_Cirba]

Maidstone is another interesting one.  From what I've been able to surmise from the club book, the totality of the present course looks something like this;

Willie Tucker 1896
Willie Park/Adrian Larkin 1899
John Park/C. Wheaton Vaughn 1915
Seth Raynor 1921
Willie Park/John Park 1924 (creating the vast majority of what is there today)
Perry Maxwell 1938
Dick Wilson 1958
Alfred Tull 1963
Brian Silva 1988  

[Jonathan Cummings]

My course, TPC at Avevel built in 1986, has 5 architects of record: Ed Ault, Ed Jr, Tom Clark, Bill Love & Ed Sneed.  But the funny thing is that they were all mostly figureheads to the true force behind the design (he changed many holes before allowing them to be built) -- Dean Beman.

Maybe that's way Avenel is solid top 10,000

JC

[Martin Del Vecchio]

Jonathan, I remember when Avenel opened, and they played the first Kemper Open there.  In general, the players disliked the course, but Greg Norman had a specific recommendation in 1987:

Reporter:  Any changes you'd like to see made in that hole [the 9th], Greg?

Norman:  Yeah, blow it up.

This was after he double-bogeyed it on Saturday and Sunday to fall out of contention.

[Mark_Rowlinson]

It's not my home course - how I wish it were! - but Ganton claims Tom Chisholm, R. Bird, Tom Dunn, Harry Vardon, Ted Ray, J.H. Taylor, James Braid, Harry Colt, Alister Mackenzie, C.K. Cotton and Frank Pennink as its architects.  Tom MacWood added 'You can add Horace Hutchinson and Cecil Hutchison to the list at Ganton--a baker's dozen. I have heard the opinion that Ganton would benefit from a 14th or 15th hand.'  Thirteen hands haven't done a bad job so far, so it must be assumed that one or two more - properly equipped to do so - wouldn't do any harm......

[W.H. Cosgrove]

Would you rather have "too many cooks" or as in the case of my home course, after 37 years, no one knew and worse yet nobody seemed to care....

Jack Reimer and Robert Brout 1967 with a 1985 Master plan by John Steidel.  

None of those architects are exactly household names.  Interestingly, Reimer is still living and is credited with 6 or seven courses in the Seattle area and many more in British Columbia.  His public courses in the Puget Sound region, Lake Spanaway, Cascade at Gold Mountain, and Madrona Links,  tend to be user friendly and all making very good money.  

Begging the question as to whether it is better to seek a national championship or to supply a reliable income stream to the operator?  HMMMMMMM?

[Mark_Rowlinson]

In the UK we've had a lot of recent big-money, name-design courses go bust, such as Loch Lomond (Weiskopf), Chart Hills (Faldo) and East Sussex (Cupp), while any number of humble layouts with the simplest architecture have survived, attracted new golfers, gradually expanded and, after 10 or 15 years, become viable golf courses at the every day end of the market.  Surely it is more important to provide affordable facilities for all golfers than to provide dicey faciltities for the super-wealthy?  

The same might have been said of any number of great US layouts of the depression yeras such as Augusta and Southern Hills.

Clearly, I have no argument.

[david h. carroll]

my solid #2 course, Elkridge Hunt Club, has quite a few and it looks as the one currently working on it is doing a fantastic job

I can't recall the exact timeline but the archies whose fingerprints have touched it are:

Tom Bendelow
Seth Raynor
RTJ Sr
Ed Ault
and now, Brian Silva (and so far it looks fantastic!!)