Just back from a couple of whirlwind visits, to the Westin Stonebriar in Frisco, Texas, and to La Costa. More to follow. First, an excerpt from a recent conversation from
Dr. Michael Hurdzan, recipient this year of the Donald Ross Award from the American Society of Golf Course Architects.
We were talking about a theory I heard Mike, a former past president of the ASGCA espouse, that golf had suffered a devastating loss from the First World War. He believed that a valuable link had been severed, including many of those who had, in fact, known
Old Tom Morris, the grand old man of golf. It would take time, even generations to recover, to reconnect with the bedrock traditions of the game that had served golf for so long and so well.
He thought that same had occured with respect to the U.S.
Certainly, when we went from the Great Depression in 1929 and then right into WWII when this country was just hoping to survive for 15 – 16 years, we actually lost a number of golf courses and we lost all those skillful designers. And it has taken a couple of generations of people learning from other people to be better designers. I would suggest now that we’re moving into a time when the golf courses that are being produced will be as timeless as those golf courses produced in the 1920s before the Great Depression. As an example of that I would certainly use the Bandon Dunes development, a project we did in Medora, North Dakota, Bully Pulpit, but all over designers have been so sophisticated that we’ve been able to recapture that Golden Age of Architecture.
http://www.hurdzanfry.com
http://www.medora.com/attractions/golf/index.html
