Or perhaps the more correct title should be, What Caused the Dark Age?
Lately I have been doing a bit of thinking about where golf course architecture might end up in the next 20 years. We are obviously living through a very fruitful time, but nothing lasts forever, right? So I started mentally comparing the end of Golden Age with now and ended up with a few observations and even more questions.
First off, World War 2 seems like a huge contributing factor, but was it? Obviously the war impacted the construction of new golf courses. Perry Maxwell's work in the late 1930s feels like the end of the Golden Age, and that dovetails nicely with the German invasion of Poland. Though the US wouldn't enter the war for a few more years, a war in Europe and the spooling up of the war machine would lead to fewer (or no) opportunities to design golf courses. But why then, when the world returned to normal and golf courses started being built again were they so different?
Tillinghast and Flynn would both be dead before the end of the war, Ross would soon follow. Thomas and MacKenzie had both long since passed away. With all of this knowledge and experience gone, I've wondered, if a lack of proteges or understudies learning under these masters helped hasten the hibernation of their architectural style? When I think about golf course architecture today, you can see a clear lineage of architects who worked under the Dyes, built up their resumes and went out on their own, then people who in turn worked under them that are now setting out on their own (or are already well established). When Tom Doak and Bill Coore decide to stop designing golf courses, so much of their institutional knowledge will have been passed down that it almost seems like a continuation of today's design principles is inevitable. That seems far less so 80-90 years ago. As far as I know you can't really point to someone who worked under Tillinghast for 10 years and then started doing work in that style. I know that Thomas and Tillinghast both wrote on their craft, but I'm not sure what the availability of those materials was back then? Did the Golden Age effectively die with these architects?
Or am I overthinking this? Could it just be that the end of the war ushered in a less class structured system? All of the great clubs had been built, it was time for a more democratic version of golf. With the move away from a gilded age gentleman's game, was the design suddenly far less important? Much like the rows and rows of post-war homes with little to differentiate one from the other, did golf suffer a similar fate? I am also trying to reconcile this question with the question of why so many Golden Age clubs started planting trees in this period? I'll hang up an listen.