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| Hugh I. Wilson spent years developing and improving Merion East into its own unique style. (Courtesy of Merion Golf Club) |
By Tom Paul
In the winter of 1911, as Hugh I. Wilson and his four-man Merion Cricket Club (MCC) member committee began to plan and design Merion East, golf in America was little more than a decade beyond being considered something of an odd novelty. In a time-span comparison to the 2009 Walker Cup it was as if golf had begun in America around 1994.
Despite the incipiency of American golf, by the early teens the game was experiencing a virtual explosion in popularity on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. When Merion was in the process of moving its golf course from Haverford to Ardmore there were more golf courses in America than in Scotland, England and Ireland combined. However, the quality of the vast majority of American courses created in the last decade of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th centuries was a distinct disappointment to some involved in the game in America.
Charles Blair (C.B.) Macdonald, often referred to as the “Father of American golf architecture,” while considering what he felt was the abysmal quality of American golf courses compared to the best abroad would proclaim “the very soul of golf shrieks.” Despite his severe criticism of American courses, Macdonald did allow in 1904 there were perhaps three courses in America that were close in quality to the best of Great Britain: Myopia Hunt Club (Boston, Mass.), Garden City Golf Club (Long Island, New York) and Chicago Golf Club (Wheaton, Ill.). Who were the men responsible for the designs of those three courses considered to be the best in America? They were all what can be described as amateur/sportsmen architects.
This article will analyze some of the commonalities of a few of those amateur/sportsmen architects and their special golf courses that are still considered some of the finest golf architecture ever created. It will try to determine if those commonalities were responsible for architectural excellence, particularly compared to the alternative men and methods available in that early era. In chronological order of the beginning of their special projects, those amateur/sportsmen architects were Herbert C. Leeds (Myopia Hunt Club, 1896); Devereaux Emmet and Walter Travis (Garden City Golf Club, 1900); H.C. and W.C. Fownes (Oakmont Golf Club, 1903); C.B. Macdonald (National Golf Links of America, 1906); Hugh I. Wilson (Merion East, 1911); and George A. Crump (Pine Valley Golf Club, 1913).
Each was a member of the club and a few were club founders. None of them accepted money for their efforts on those special projects that in each case extended to many years and sometimes decades. Each was well educated, well traveled and all were considered to be excellent amateur championship golfers in their time; the term used in those days to describe their golfing ability was “expert,” a designation that most golfers and clubs in that era seemed to believe would translate into golf architectural talent as well.
But what was the alternative to the architectural methods of those amateur/sportsmen of that era from approximately the middle of the 1890s until the mid-1910s? We must appreciate that before the beginning of the 1890s, there were few American golfers, practically no American golf courses to speak of, no America golf balls or golf equipment and no American professional golf architects. All had to be imported, generally from Scotland and England.
Macdonald referred to the decades between the early 1870s and the 1890s as his “Dark Age” of golf because there was nowhere in America to play the game he had fallen in love with during his college years at the University of St. Andrews (1870-1872). As golf in America first caught on in the early-to-mid 1890s and then exploded in popularity in the next decade, there was a significant increase of Scottish and English professional golfers immigrating to America. To a man they tended to be multi-taskers for various American clubs as golf teachers, club-makers, greenkeepers and often part-time golf architects. Almost without exception their architectural efforts were quickly completed, inexpensive and rudimentary. Their work in architecture became known as “Eighteen stakes on a Sunday Afternoon” or “stick routings” for which they were generally paid between $25 and $50 before they caught the next train back to their home clubs and regular day jobs.
Over time the proliferation of this quick, inexpensive and rudimentary style, described alternately as “geometric” or “steeplechase” clearly took its toll, leading Macdonald to his criticisms of the state of golf architecture in America. However, by 1906, Macdonald was not content to simply play the part of the critic; he intended to very publicly show American golf a new model for architectural excellence. This would be Macdonald’s National Golf Links of America (NGLA). In the initial phase of its planning he apparently even conceived of it being the USGA’s permanent championship venue; that idea was quickly nixed by the USGA even though Macdonald served on the USGA Executive Committee at the time (he had been a USGA vice president from 1894 to 1899).
Macdonald’s new idea for architectural excellence required 18-hole courses that contained no weak holes, something he claimed even the best courses abroad did not possess. But more startling was Macdonald’s requirement that excellent golf holes must be “classical” – either actual copies of famous time-tested holes abroad or replications in various combinations and arrangements of their individual architectural principles. A number of his holes would even retain their names from those famous holes abroad (Redan, Eden, Road, Bottle, Alps, Long, Biarritz, etc). Macdonald’s new model for architectural excellence using famous template holes from abroad would be met with a combination of confusion, high expectation and eventually some controversy within the developing fraternity of American golf course architects.
To accomplish the task of designing NGLA, Macdonald put in place a committee of expert amateur/sportsmen golfers that included a few founding members one could only describe as “Captains of Business and Industry.” In anticipation of the work of this amateur/sportsmen committee, Macdonald penned the following in an article in 1897 while living in Chicago: “The ideal first-class golf links has yet to be selected and the course laid out in America.... a first-class course can only be made in time. It must develop. The proper distance between the holes, the shrewd placing of bunkers and other hazards, the perfecting of putting greens, all must evolve by a process of growth and it requires study and patience.
Devoting extended periods of time to the development of their special projects appears to be the common denominator among this group of American amateur/sportsmen architects whose courses have long been considered to be some of the best in the world. It appears to be the sine qua non for the architectural excellence of Myopia, Garden City, Oakmont, NLGA, Merion East and Pine Valley. Leeds, beginning in 1896, worked on the design of Myopia for over 20 years. Emmet, alternating over the years with Travis, took decades with Garden City. H.C. Fownes, together with and then succeeded by his son W.C. (the 1910 U.S. Amateur champion) took more than 40 years with Oakmont. Macdonald worked on altering and improving NGLA for 30 years. Crump took six years and the remainder of his short life with Pine Valley (he died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of 45) and Wilson took 14 years and the remainder of his life (he also died suddenly at 45) with Merion’s East Course.
Their patience, extended time and effort, and luxury and willingness to travel and study is in stark contrast to the method of the early immigrant journeyman Scottish and English professionals who were generally hired for a day or two to produce a basic “stick” routing scheme or staked tees, landing zones and green sites. Preexisting features such as stone walls, roads and ditches as architectural hazards were often used. If those types of features did not exist on various sites, bunkers and berms tended to replicate the geometric pits and berms of steeplechase courses.
The immigrant, part-time professional architects of this early era may have been treated unfairly both in their own time and by history for failing to design memorable courses. If the immigrant, part-time professional architects had the same time and resources of those amateur/sportsmen architects, would they have produced courses of the architectural quality of Myopia, Garden City, Oakmont, NGLA, Merion East and Pine Valley? If those amateur/sportsmen architects had as little time and opportunity as the immigrant professionals had could they have done a better job than the professionals did in a day or two? We will never have answers to those questions because their methods were so different in this early era.
During the search in 1909-1910 for land for a new golf course for Merion Cricket Club, a few sites were considered. A well-known real estate developer offering the current site on Ardmore Ave. for the course threw in a stick-routing free of charge from H.H. Barker, Garden City’s club professional and part-time golf architect. Barker wrote the developer that the Ardmore site had the potential to rival Myopia as a golf course and that he could complete it within a year. Merion noted Barker’s and the developer’s suggestion and immediately turned for advice to their friend Macdonald, who at the time was in the process of creating the highly anticipated NGLA with his own amateur/sportsmen committee.
Macdonald’s advice was offered to Merion and Wilson and his four-man member committee in three meetings over 10 months. It obviously involved some tutelage in the principles of classic golf architecture and apparently the suggestion of the use of a few of the same classical template holes from abroad Macdonald had used at NGLA.
On a few of East Course’s holes, Wilson and his member committee dabbled with Macdonald’s classic template-hole concept in the beginning: the third was referred to as a Redan, the 10th an Alps and the 15th an Eden. Following his own architectural study trip abroad (a pilgrimage taken by most of his fellow amateur/sportsmen architects), Wilson and his first greenkeeper, William Flynn (who would go on to his own brilliant architectural career), spent the next dozen years developing and improving Merion East into its own unique style. That unique architectural style would include Merion’s bunkers, the famous “White Faces of Merion,” bunkers that well-known restoration architect Ron Prichard believes were the prototype for the basic American bunker style. Following Wilson’s early death in 1925, Flynn would continue to develop the architecture of the course until its completion around 1934.
By the early to mid teens the era of the amateur/sportsman architect seems to have come to a fairly abrupt end. No other project of the type of Myopia, Garden City, Oakmont, NGLA, Merion and Pine Valley would be begun. Perhaps, by that point, perceptions that there was a lack of architectural quality in American courses had been rectified. By the mid to late teens, the original multi-tasking Scottish and English professionals and other up-and-coming American-born professionals had begun to devote themselves solely to golf-course architecture, and it showed in the quality of architecture they began to produce. The age of those remarkable amateur/sportsmen architects who devoted so much time to his special project simply for the love of it was over. But what a legacy of golf architecture excellence they left us with Myopia, Garden City, Oakmont, NGLA, Pine Valley and East Course at Merion.
For the hosts, the USGA, Merion G.C., USA Team Captain and Merion member Buddy Marucci and his 2009 American Walker Cup players, Merion’s East Course represents a pinnacle of classic golf course architecture in the United States. Merion has now hosted more USGA championships than any other American club. For the R&A and the GB&I 2009 Walker Cup players and guests, Merion East might remind them of a little slice of home, particularly the best classical inland courses of their home land. That’s the way and his few fellow amateur/sportsmen architects of that fascinating early era foresaw it. That’s they way they studied, planned and created their courses, and that’s the way they still are for all of us to consider and enjoy.
