A One-Question Survey on How We Got Interested in Golf Architecture

[Matt MacIver]

Started around 20, prob played #2 15 years later.

[John Kirk]

I thought the answer would be six years ago at the age of 40 while playing Cabo del Sol - Ocean.  I remember chuckling to myself thinking that if there were 96 courses in the world better than this one, I've got to get out of the NW more often.  I think my zest for interesting architecture was solidified yesterday though while I played my local overpriced-so it must be good course.  Position A on every fairway is right at the 150 marker and every pin location is just a drab as the rest.

I'm guessing Ghost Creek?  Only #8 and $17, and sometimes #13, #15 and #17 might defy that rule.

[Nick_Christopher]

Crystal Downs - I was a 13 year old caddie and wondered what all the fuss was about...I quickly learned!

[John Emerson]

Mid Pines, Pine Meedles, and Pinehurst at 22.  At the time I was a turfgrass student at University of Kentucky.  I wasn’t sure why these places were good, or better, or unique, but I was determined to understand why.

[John Cowden]

Grew up on Pasatiempo, played PB and CPC at age 14.  That was just how golf was.  But standing on the first tee at Bandon in 1999, the world shifted beneath my cleats.  And I haven’t been the same since,

[Rich Goodale]

My paternal grandfather gave me a set of cut down hickories when I was 8 or 9, and I "designed" and played a 3-hole "course" in our back yard.  The longest hole was about 70 yards.  The course never made the GD top-100, alas......


My first GD top-100 was well before they started that feature in 1966, but in 1957, when I was 10, I played with my grandfather in the Winchester CC father-son tournament.  We finished 2nd in the grandfather/grandson flight (we were one of the two contestants in that flight.....).  My grandfather was 73 at the time, and he had been club champion at Winchester in 1913.  I played rarely after that as baseball, tennis and sailing took over all my summer time and we did not belong to a Country Club


Fast forward to 1967 when I started to play more often at Stanford GC, which was also in the GD-100 then, playing with one of my uncles' castaway clubs and frat friends.  I didn't play with modern clubs until I got a set from my maternal grandmother when I graduated in 1968.

[Matt Wharton]

I was 30 years old (spring of 1999 I believe) and my major professor David Chalmers took me, my wife Darless, and good friend Andrew Green to the Homestead.  We played the Old Course early that morning then after lunch capped off the day with a round on The Cascades.  The Cascades was definitely a memorable experience.

[Shelly Jones]

My first top 100 was Olympia Fields North when I was in my 30's.

[Bob Montle]

Growing up, there were fifty courses within ten miles of my house, and my Dad took me to all of them. Some were simple, flat and cheap.  Others were new and higher priced and very popular despite being extremely penal.  This was the sixties.

When I was around 12, I was very vocal about the holes I thought were great versus the ones that were boring.  The ones I liked had multiple paths to the pin and offered some sort of risk/reward. While in high school I tried to persuade several course to change their layout in order to make some holes more interesting.
My dad had an 120 acre 'farm' in SW Michigan that was part hilly, part flat, part wooded and 100% sand.  I laid out a course and wanted my Dad to build it but he told me grass wouldn't grow on sand!   He said that his Dad and he tried for years to grow anything and all the land was good for was potatoes.  And even then you had to plant them with slices of onions so the eyes would water.  Now, 55 years later, it's a golf course.  Of course.

The only top course I played until my 60's was Pebble Beach in 1969 when I was 20.   I expected beauty, and found it, but was disappointed by the poor maintenance (seemingly to me).  My memory is of the waste area on 8 that required 175 yd drive to clear, and lots of weeds and bare sand.   Yes, I was naïve.  My opinion then was 1/3 incredible "WOW" holes, 1/3 okay-very good holes, and 1/3 boring holes.

In my 30's I made models of the courses that intrigued me at the time, at a scale of 1mm = 1 yard.
Merion, TOC, Seminole, NLGA and Oakland Hills were the ones that impressed me, although I never laid eyes on any of them. 

Finally, at 63 I went to Scotland and I cannot find words to describe my feelings.  Joyous rapture?  I remember walking for hours with a huge grin on my face.  Golfing heaven.  And that prompted me to get interested in GCA again.

Apologies to all for getting carried away.

[Steve_Lovett]

My first top golf course was Pebble Beach - with my grandfather. I think it was $55 for juniors ($75 for him) or something like that.


I loved to draw everything I saw. Everyplace I went. I'd make maps of shopping centers, museums, parks, neighbor's houses, schools I attennded, ballparks, airports I went to, and........ golf courses became some of my favorites.

[Joe Bausch]

In my 30s playing in the late 90s at Rolling Green and Aronimink.


As an early teen I was designing putt-putt golf holes with friends in our backyards.

[WilliamN]

25 or 26 - Yale.  Had been hacking around prior to that in my early 20’s ~5 times per year.  Got to play a bunch that summer (maybe 15 rounds) and a grad school classmate brought a bunch of us to Yale that fall.  It was just “different” than the usual stuff I had the opportunity to play.  Man, I still remember the feeling on some of those holes!


Sadly, I’ve not been back since.  This thread makes me realize I need to rectify that

[Pete Lavallee]

Started golfing at the night lighted Pitch & Putt at age 19. Moved to the local muni the next year; we had unlimited play for $200/year. A college classmate who had been an assistant Pro in the western part of Mass. was able to get us on Kittansett at age 21; everyone realized it was the top course in SE Mass. My local Dr. also to me out to CC of New Bedford, not top 100 but half Ross half Park Jr.


Took my parents up the 101 when I moved to Ca. at age 26 and played Spyglass.



The next Top 100 wasn’t untill I was 28 when I took the wife to play Pebble but was more impressed with Pasatiempo which certainly only had hidden gem status back then!


At 29 I got my handicap through American Golf because I knew they had a tournament each year at Riviera.


Got married at 30 and made the wife consent to a golfing honeymoon in Scotland, we played Kings & Queens, TOC, Dornoch and Turnbury.

[Stewart Abramson]

I am an outlier. I never held a golf club until I was 40. I was immediately hooked on the game the first time I hit a golf ball at the local baseball field. On my second golf trip to Myrtle Beach when I could barely break 100, I played True Blue, Caledonia The Dunes  and the Legends Heathland, Moorland and Parkland. I was struck by how six courses in such close proximity could be so different, especially True Blue and Caledonia being across the street from each other and having been designed by the same guy. I wasn't good enough or smart enough to understand anything substantive about the architecture or strategy, but really wanted to know about the "art" or style that the architects were trying to put into the courses. I also wanted to know what heathland, parkland and moorland meant. When I got home I bought one of those early "design your own golf course" apps for my Apple 2 computer, but never successfully designed a single hole.


A couple years later I visited Arizona and played a bunch of desert courses (We-Ko-Pa, Troon North and others) and then visited Colorado Springs and played the three Broadmoor courses (my first Ross) and was again struck by the diversity of the courses and trying to get my arms around the similarities and differences between golf courses in such different settings as the desert, the mountains and the beach, but still no grasp of strategy or even thinking much about what the architect had in mind other than what the architect wanted the course to look or feel like.


I think it wasn't until I'd been playing for at least ten years and was able to score in the 80's and visited Surrey and Ayrshire that I  got a real interest in the architecture. In Surrey I played Sunningdale, St Georeges Hill, Woking, Worplesdon, New Zealand and others and it was a real awakeneing. In Ayr I played my first links: Glasgow Gailes, Prestwick, Turnberry and others. Those links and Heathland courses were so different from what I was accustomed to playing. As soon as I got home I started a mini GCA library and found this site.

[Scott Warren]

It's funny, so many in the 12-15 range (which was my entry age as well), but a number of the contributors whose posts I most enjoy and insights I most value have been in the 25-40 age bracket when they played their first. Maybe that's just a coincidence, but I wonder if there's value in not going behind the curtain until you're old enough to really comprehend it and with a adolescence and early adulthood of playing average courses in your kit bag.

[Lukas Michel]

Spot on with the 13-14 age range for me.


Mike Clayton was involved with the redesign on my home club (Lake Karrinyup) when I was 12-13 and I still remember obsessing over the documents they provided the members (artist's impressions, plans, hole descriptions) and going on course walks while it was in the grow-in phase.


A bit of a lull in my interest until I was 17 or 18 when I moved to Melbourne and the rest is history.

[Matthew Mollica]

Started playing golf in my early teens, and I’m certain I went a decade at least before I played a World Top 100 course. Kingston Heath and Royal Melbourne in my mid twenties were the first two.

[Jud_T]

Interesting.  While I went to the driving range a bit in high school, I didn't really start playing until my early 30's.  First Top 100 course was Whistling Straights at age 38. Oddly, I don't hold it in particularly high regard now.  Glad I didn't play it at 13! 

[John Foley]

I like the Architecturally significant definition:


First course to fit that bill was Bristol Harbour on Canandaigua Lake where I grew up. First played it when I was 19. At the time the only course I was playing was at the local VA hospital. $2 a day because my Mom was a nurse there. Once I saw this place I knew that the venue meant so much more to the game than I knew.

[Jeff Schley]

Shoreacres when I was 27 and really didn't appreciate golf course architecture until my early 30's. 

[Rick Shefchik]

Age 18. Played a morning round at Hazeltine a week or two after the 1970 U.S. Open, and then played Minikahda in the afternoon.
 I'd played junior golf since I was 8 or 9, but the bug really got me in the summer of 1970, just as I was heading off to college. Though I grew up playing at Northland, my parents' club, I started playing with buddies at the local muni that summer and discovered how much fun the game could be, regardless of the course. Spent the summer of '71 doing the same thing (Northland junior membership was gone by then), then drifted away from golf until after college. After moving to the Twin Cities in 1980, my interest in great courses really began -- to the point where I eventually wrote a book about Minnesota's best courses.

[Anthony Gholz]

age 15 I played Oakland Hills South in the Detroit Junior District
I was introduced to the game by my father at age 13

[Ben Malach]

I started playing golf at 11 but the bug never really bit till I was like 14 and I joined my high school team. After that for 2 years it was about making scores and not letting the team down (I was 100% the weak link). When I was 18 I took a 4 day trip to Hilton Head and saw a bunch of golf courses including a walk around Harbour Town. It was during this trip that I started to think about golf differently. But I don't think anything GCA wise clicked. Until I took a gap year from school and moved to St. Andrews as it was there I started to read and study it.     

[Matt Kardash]

About 18 or 19.
Cape Breton Highlands

[Bill Gayne]

I was 24 when I took the game up and what got me interested in golf course architecture was attending the Masters 1989 through 1991. Played most of my early golf at North Fulton and learned that there were good golf holes and lesser golf holes.  Additionally, the 1989 Walker Cup at Peachtree helped me realize that not all golf was equal. I'm going to guess my first round at a top 100 course was probably the Ocean Course around 1990.