The great architects

Among the hundreds of architects who have designed the golf courses of the world, a few stand out. They were innovative and inspired and created layouts of genius.

Alan Robertson, who died in,1859, was the first known course designer. As the greatest player of his time, it was natural that he was asked to pay visits from his native St Andrews to give his opinions on the layouts of new courses. Almost no building would have been involved - he simply picked out good places for greens and a route for play.

Probably nothing remains of his work except an occasional site for a green. The exception is the Old Course at St Andrews where revolutionary changes, such as the huge double greens, came while Robertson was the resident expert.

Morris traveler
Old Tom Morris was the greatest name in golf following the death of Robertson and his own son, Young Tom. Where Robertson had worked only locally, Old Tom traveled the land, marking out courses for fees of up to £10.

There is a problem with Old Tom's credits however. In the records for the 1922 Open Championship for example, he is said to have designed Muirfield back in 1891. So he did: but by 1922 almost no trace of his work remained.

Even the famous idea of taking both 9th and 18th back to the clubhouse - the double loop, for which he has long been credited - was actually the work of Harry Colt in the 1920s.

Yet this doesn't in the least mean Old Tom wasn't a good designer. His layouts were originally much admired because of the skill with which he made use of naturally existing features.

However, the introduction of the wound ball at the turn of the century meant layouts had to be stretched. Many courses were radically altered to accommodate the new balls. Very few courses today should be credited to Old Tom because of this stretching.

The growth of golf after the 1880s and the availability of mechanized grass cutters combined to revolutionize ideas about what kind of land could be used for golf.

On linksland with fine seaside fescues growing sideways rather than upwards, only occasional scything was needed. Inland golf had been possible only out of the grass-growing season. With demand and modest technology however, courses were built on land of all kinds, especially on under used common land.

In Britain Willie Park came quickly to the fore. Twice Open champion and with a thriving clubmaking business as well, his name was well known.

Park was in a different golf design business than earlier figures. They had simply made use of existing features already present on linksland to create greens that were not available on heath, park, moor and meadowland.

Park on the other hand had to design and build most of his greens. When producing his most famous achievement, Sunningdale Old, on rolling heathland, he used to journey back to his native Musselburgh to look again at features of greens to inspire his masterpiece.

After creating a host of courses in Britain, Park spent most of his time in North America from 1916 until his death in 1925. There his Scottish accent did him no harm at all, at a time when Scotland was the fount of all things golfing. He can truly be called the first great golf architect.

Dream course
In Britain, Harry Colt was the first amateur golfer - rather than professional -to earn a reputation as an architect. Some say he is still the greatest of them all.

His list of credits is impressive. The most famous include Muirfield, Hoylake, Portrush, Sunningdale Old (updated after Park), Lytham and St Anne's and Wentworth. He was also active around the world and especially in the USA, sometimes in partnership with either Hugh Alison or Alister Mackenzie. Pine Valley is his best known collaboration, where he helped owner George Crump create his dream course.

Colt was best known for daring to carve golf courses out of the heather and pines of central England. Swinley Forest, one of the first courses ever routed through a thick forest of trees, was among his best designs.

Equally busy over the same period in Britain was the great professional James Braid, helped by his enormous reputation as a five times Open champion.

Great players have always found it easy to secure golf architecture commissions. It is often mistakenly assumed that they will automatically be talented architects as well. Braid was the exception however, in contrast to his fellow members of the Great Triumvirate. Harry Vardon tried but never excelled in original course design and JH Taylor worked mainly as a consultant.

Braid's best works are usually considered to be the King's and Queen's courses at Gleneagles Hotel. He was very prolific and had a hand in the development of hundreds of courses in Britain and Ireland. However, being a miserable traveler he did very little work elsewhere.

Minimal disturbance
Among British architects, Fred Hawtree is the most prominent name since World War II. It is a sign of changing attitudes that he has been asked to do little or no work in the USA where his designs would probably have been unfashionable.

No believer in slashing millions of cubic feet of soil from the landscape, he instead tried to suit his courses to the site with as little disturbance as possible. His revision of Birkdale with JH Taylor is one of his most memorable achievements.

With the dominance of American golfers after World War I, the country's architects also came much to the fore worldwide.

Some, like Jack Neville (Pebble Beach) and Hugh Wilson (Merion) produced solitary masterpieces. Others made careers of golf architecture.

Perhaps the most remarkable was the coiner of the term 'birdie', AW Tillinghast. Many a US Open has been played over his courses including Fresh Meadow, Winged Foot, Baltusrol and Inverness.

His contemporary, Donald Ross from Dornoch in Scotland, was far more prolific. Based at Pinehurst in North Carolina, where the Number 2 course was his special pride, he was involved with almost 500 courses from the early 20th century until his death in 1948. Like Hawtree, Ross believed in fitting the course to the landscape he found.

This was less true of his great successor, Robert Trent Jones, the most influential architect after 1945.

He first came to national prominence in the USA when Ben Hogan, having won the 1951 US Open at Oakland Hills which Jones had toughened up, announced at the victory ceremony: 'I am glad I have brought this monster to its knees'.

Jones had simply moved the fairway bunkering so that the pros could no longer fly them with the greatest of ease. He also became renowned for his dramatic use of water hazards and contouring of greens.

However he knew how to leave well enough alone, producing a superb natural links course at Ballybunion.

Moving mountains
The two most fashionable modern architects are Jack Nicklaus and Pete Dye. They started out together and have both come to symbolize the trend towards totally man-made courses where mountains can almost be moved to produce the perfect golf hole.

In the USA Nicklaus'flagship is Muirfield Village, used annually for his Memorial Tournament, only a notch below major championship status and venue for the 1987 Ryder Cup.

In Britain his first course was St Mellion in Cornwall, built ingeniously on a site at first unsuitable for a golf course.

One of his most demanding projects has been to build a new course at Gleneagles, probably to replace the King's as the venue for big events. Jack himself describes his design as a'playable monster', harking back to Ben Hogan's famous remark in 1951.

Architects are usually fairly anonymous but Dye is the high profile exception, even more so after the enthralling events at Kiawah Island's Ocean Course during the 1991 Ryder Cup.

Dye, a very good amateur golfer, came into golf design having made a modest fortune selling insurance and making changes to his home course.

After doing low budget designs in the USA, he was much inspired by a visit to Scotland in the mid 1960s and thereafter incorporated traditional ideas such as pot bunkers and railway sleepers into his designs.