Scottish Design Masters 2017

US New England Division Best in State Rankings 2016 Six States in the Northeast Region are re-ranked in our ninth and final US divisional update We conclude our biennial Best in State re-ranking exercise for the United States of America with new listings for courses in the New England division. This article, the ninth one to accompany our review of courses in the US, concentrates on the northeast states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont. Our coverage of the US has increased significantly over the last four months, with almost every state featuring a newly expanded ranking list. For instance, in this new England division, we’ve added an extra sixty courses, up from the previous total of eighty-five. Nationwide, the total number of courses listed in our state charts has now reached 1,650, an increase of more than 40%. Massachusetts The top seven positions in our Bay State chart are all nationally ranked, which gives some indication of the high quality of courses found at the upper end of the state listings. Also, such is the architectural strength in depth within Massachusetts, we’ve decided to expand the number of courses that we feature for the state, adding a further twenty layouts to form a new Top 50. The top three spots in the state chart remain the same, which means the Clyde and Squirrel nines at The Country Club in Brookline holds onto the number one slot. One of five founder members of the American Golf Association (later named the USGA), the club is best known by many for hosting the US Open that Francis Ouimet famously won in 1913, though the notorious Ryder Cup matches in 1999 might be a little fresher in the minds of contemporary golfers. A couple of courses make noteworthy upward moves in the new standings: Essex County Club in Manchester (up two to number 4) is where Donald Ross rebuilt the 18-hole layout during his seven-year tenure as club professional in the 1920s and Eastward Ho! in Chatham (up five to number 5) is another fine Golden Age design from the same decade, one of only a handful of American courses designed by English architect Herbert Fowler. Another two Donald Ross designs make significant strides up the chart. The first of these is Hyannisport Club, a short Alex Findlay track re-designed by Ross in 1936 (rising six places to number 12) which was described last year by one reviewer as having “old New England charm, outstanding design variety, moving terrain [and] the best conditioned greens in the region.” The other high flying Ross course is Whitinsville in Blackstone Valley (up twelve spots to number 17), a track that many seasoned commentators regard as one of the finest 9-holers in the country. The three highest newcomers in our revised listings are all classic Golden Age designs from the 1920s: Tedesco Country Club (new at number 24) was laid out by Skip Wogan (former assistant pro under Donald Ross at Essex CC) with two contrasting nines, Plymouth Country Club (new at number 27) was built in two 9-hole stages by Donald Ross during the 1920s, and Dedham Country & Polo Club (new at number 29), where Seth Raynor redesigned the layout for a grateful membership during the same era. Rank/ Click this link to see full details of our 2016 Massachusetts Best in State rankings Connecticut We’ve doubled the number of courses in the Constitution State from fifteen to thirty. The top four places remain as they were when we last re-ranked, so Yale is still the state number 1, a position it has held since we first established our US state lists in 2012. A recent reviewer wrote in glowing terms about his visit to this classic Seth Raynor/C.B. Macdonald design: “you’re at a historic and special layout which has lasted almost 100 years… [where] the architects created a fabulous routing with outstanding template holes known all over the world.” Another two Golden Age courses rise two places up the Top 10. The first of these is Round Hill Club in Greenwich (at number 5), where long-term greenkeeper Emilio Strazzo assisted Walter Travis with the course construction in 1922. The other climber is Tamarack Country Club (at number 6), which Charles Banks built in 1929, fashioning his usual requisite quota of replica par three holes, including an Eden at the 3rd, a Redan at the 7th and a Short at the 15th. The highest new entry arrives at number 7 and it’s Woodway Country Club, a near 100 year-old Willie Park track that had a new par three 9th hole added (and the other holes re-sequenced) when the clubhouse was replaced in the late 1990s. Architect Mark Mungeam has consulted at the club in recent years, carrying out major restorations of both the bunkers and tee boxes. Click this link to see full details of our 2016 Connecticut Best in State rankings New Hampshire Having just added another ten New Hampshire courses, we now have a Top 20 for the Granite State, where a new number 1 heads the chart. The Golf Club of New England in Stratham is a new millennium Arnold Palmer course that’s generally regarded as one of The King’s stronger designs. Measuring more than 7,500 yards from the back tees and with a rating/slope of 77.0/149, there’s no denying this par 72 layout is a championship test for serious golfers. Also climbing one place to the runner-up position, the course at Lake Winnipesaukee Golf Club is a rare American design from Englishman Clive Clark, where the former Walker Cup and Ryder Cup player set out the fairways of this White Mountain track across a beautiful canvas of wetlands and woodlands two miles to the east of Lake Winnipesaukee in 1990. The highest new entry in the updated New Hampshire table is Atkinson Resort & Country Club at number 9, a mid-1990s public access course from Phil Wogan that’s complemented by a fantastic practice facility and a super little 9-hole par three layout. One place behind at number 10, Concord Country Club is another newcomer on our chart which has been faithfully serving its members since 1930. Click this link to see full details of our 2016 New Hampshire Best in State rankings Maine The chart for the Pine Tree State has been expanded to a Top 15, with Portland Country Club fending off all comers to retain the number 1 position. The club was formed in 1895 but moved to its present coastal location twenty-five years later, engaging Donald Ross to lay out a relatively short, though thoroughly engaging, course overlooking the harbour and city of Portland. Three courses make upward moves in the new state listings: Belgrade Lakes Golf Club (up two to number 2) was Clive Clark’s first US design in the late 1990s, Woodlands Club (up two to number 6) is a late 1980s layout from George and Jim Fazio, and Ledges Golf Club (up one to number 8), which was architect Brad Booth’s first solo design in 1999. Click this link to see full details of our 2016 Maine Best in State rankings Rhode Island The course at Newport Country Club remains the top track in the Ocean State. It’s an important historical layout as it hosted both the first US Open and US Amateur in 1895, though it was subsequently redesigned by A. W. Tillinghast in 1924. A reviewer said this about it last year: “Yes, there are ocean views. Yes, there’s a links feel… augmented by the fact there’s no fairway irrigation. Yes, there are some fine holes… and yes, the clubhouse is one of the world’s finest.” Donald Ross’s 1914 design at Wannamoisett Country Club drops down one spot, swapping places with Shelter Harbor, which rises one place to the runner-up position. A modern layout designed by Dr Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry, Shelter Harbor’s most widely acclaimed feature is the bunker work carried out by Jeff Bradley, who constructed similar sand traps for Coore and Crenshaw at places like Friar’s Head and Bandon Trails. Two of the five new entries on the state chart make their mark within the Top 10 and they’re both located on the shores of Narragansett Bay, having been constructed within two years of each other in the 1920s. At number 8, the course at Warwick Country Club is a delightful Donald Ross layout with a commendable caddie program firmly in place for the members and at number 9, Seth Raynor’s 18-hole design at Wanumetonomy Golf & Country Club – where most of the original greens are still in play – is still basking in the glory of a new millennium makeover from Ron Pritchard, when he added new tees and fairway bunkers. Click this link to see full details of our 2016 Rhode Island Best in State rankings Vermont The charming old layout at Ekwanok Country Club sits at the top of the Green Mountain State listings. A Walter Travis layout which was constructed in collaboration with Scottish professional John Dunn at the start of the last century, it’s a course that has benefited from a 1960s upgrade by Geoff Cornish and from work carried out in more recent times by Bruce Hepner when he was working with Renaissance Design. Making a sizable leap up the new chart (soaring four places to number 5), the course at Vermont National Country Club is a Jack Nicklaus/Jack Jnr co-design that first opened for play in 1998. Almost twenty years after it made its debut, it’s still Nicklaus Design’s only project within the state. A little further down the listings, the Robert Trent Jones Snr design at Sugarbush Resort Golf Club is the highest new entry at number 10. Something of a trendsetting layout in its day, it provoked other ski resort operators in the state into building courses that would bring in visitors during the skiing off season. Click this link to see full details of our 2016 Vermont Best in State rankings As ever, we welcome your comments – both good and bad – when we conduct these re-ranking exercises so let us know what you think about our six revised US Best in State charts. Whether you feel we’ve got things just about right or maybe you’ve noticed a glaring error or two, please click the “Respond to this article” link at the top or at the bottom of this page to let us know your views. Jim McCann Editor Top 100 Golf Courses

From Furyk to Bryson: Mungeam's defense of Olympia Fields When the PGA Tour returns to Olympia Fields Country Club this week for the BMW Championship, penultimate stage of the Fedex Cup Playoffs (Aug. 27-30), the most interested observer will be Mark A. Mungeam, the architect who spent nearly a quarter century renovating, then restoring, but always defending this historic Willie Park Jr. design from muscle-bound, technologically enhanced assaults on par. Mungeam, owner of Massachusetts-based Mungeam Golf Design, first reckoned with the competitive resilience of the North Course at Olympia Fields in 1992. That master-planning process led to his direction of renovations prior to the in U.S. Senior Open, in 1997, then more prior to the 2003 U.S. Open, won by Jim Furyk. Thereafter, when the club opted for a full-on restoration — after discovering key period photography — Mungeam directed that refurbishment, as well. His prep efforts continued prior to the 2015 U.S. Amateur Championship, at Olympia Fields, claimed by a young, svelte Bryson DeChambeau. In 2017, Danielle Kang won the KMPG Women’s PGA Championship there. But it is DeChambeau who has emerged post lockdown bigger and longer — the new embodiment of golf’s uncomfortable relationship with length. He and his PGA Tour colleagues would appear ever more indifferent to the scoring safeguards Mungeam created over the course of 20 years. Olympia Fields North course 3rd hole photo by Gary Kellner “You can’t take it personally — I certainly don’t,” said Mungeam, ASGCA, whose more recent tournament prep involved rehabilitating a pair of Donald Ross-designed, City of Boston classics — George Wright GC in Hyde Park and Franklin Park GC in Dorchester — for the 2019 Massachusetts Amateur. “I can remember adding a bunker on the left side of what plays during championships as the par-4 18th hole at Olympia Fields, what the members play as no. 9,” the architect says. “It was 310 yards from the tee in 1999. Back then, we thought of it as an aiming bunker! Today they’ll be flying it, or trying to. They were doing that in 2015, during the Amateur. “There is a randomness to the bunkering in places like Scotland that keeps those hazards relevant through changes in technology and length, but it’s not enough to deter professionals today. The fairway bunkers at 18 on the North Course are deep enough that they are plenty penal. But the rough, should they miss the fairway, is ever more punishing. It has to be. At Olympia Fields and elsewhere, it has become a risk/reward situation from the tee, the sort of dynamic we associate with severe U.S. Open-style conditions. Is that better? Well, it’s better than it could have been, had we done nothing.” Located just outside of Chicago, the North Course at Olympia Fields opened in 1923. Two years later, Walter Hagen won the PGA Championship there. In 1928, Johnny Farrell captured the U.S. Open title on the North Course, besting Bobby Jones in a playoff. The club would host another PGA in 1961. The Western Open — considered alongside golf’s major tournaments into the 1960s (the BMW Championship is its 21st century incarnation) — was played here five times. In preparation for the 1997 Senior Open (won by Graham Marsh), the club engaged Mungeam to effectively renovate the North Course for 21st century tournament use. The USGA needed a championship venue in Chicago, the nation’s second biggest population center and television market. This was the first of several distinct renovation phases, Mungeam says. “That second renovation in 1999 was complicated — we were preparing for a U.S. Open Championship in 2003, for goodness sake — but it was a renovation. We didn’t have any period photography or plans from Park Jr. detailed enough to allow for restoration. That all changed in 2013 when someone found a program from the 1928 Open, with pictures of every single hole! That document was a goldmine. It became the practical basis for our sympathetic restoration work prior to the 2015 Amateur — the basis for the course we’ll see this week. “Without those photos, we would not have those magnificent cross-bunkers on the 5th, 8th and 17th holes, for example. The old photos were also crucial to full expansion several green surfaces. And, of course, they helped guide some tree removal.” Mungeam’s interaction with the North Course during all these tournament engagements has run the gamut. In 2003, he became the first architect who prepared a U.S. Open site to ever work the same course as part of the grounds crew: Mungeam raked bunkers, filled divots and fluffed rough for then superintendent Dave Ward, starting at 4 a.m. — before watching championship play from the maintenance shed. “I had been working alongside that crew for nearly 10 years by then. They were my friends,” Mungeam explains. At the Amateur in 2015, the architect observed DeChambeau up close, walking the course from what then passed for a responsible distance. After 24 years, Mungeam’s association with the club ended in 2018. He will watch this week’s tournament from the sofa inside his 1850s farmhouse in central Massachusetts. “This winter I ran into the current Olympia Fields superintendent, Sam MacKenzie, and he confirmed that nothing much has changed since 2017,” Mungeam says, noting the layout still maxes out at 7,343 yards (Par-70), up from the 7,180 yards it played for the 2003 Open. “All the same, I’ll be interested to see where they maintain the fairway edges. We modified them — to narrow things down beyond those fairway bunkers. And I’ll be interested to see how long and thick they keep the rough in those areas, where there won’t be galleries trampling the rough down. “The only real deterrents to Bryson and the Bombers these days are the roughs and the wonderfully sloped Willie Park Jr. putting surfaces, which many of these guys haven’t see before (though Bryson has). In the end, the greens make this course what it is. I’m sure Sam will have them rolling pretty quick.” Jim Furyk, never a long hitter, shot a then-record 8-under par to win the 2003 U.S. Open. “If the BMW winner doesn’t double that,” the architect says, “I’ll consider it a moral victory.”

Book review – Divine Fury of James Braid: Professional Golf Standard Bearer We publish golf book reviews occasionally and this time we’re bringing to your attention a rather weighty tome from George E. Payne, an international Senior Amateur player from Scotland who’s married to a great-granddaughter of James Braid. It’s a meticulous chronicle of Braid the man, the professional golfer and the golf course architect whose legacy lives on today with the hundreds of golf courses that he designed and remodelled during his lifetime. The book is spread over three A4-sized volumes, totalling 1395 pages which are embellished with more than a thousand illustrations comprising photographs, anecdotes, snippets and old golf-related adverts. If you’re into records, statistics and golfing minutiae then this Braid opus is one you’ll not want to miss, even if it does come with a hefty price tag. Divine Fury was how writer Horace Hutchinson described the Braid golf swing back in the day and this book examines in great detail every little facet of the man behind it. The author spent more than 20 years researching the information for this book, cross-referencing the facts and figures contained in Braid’s Ledger Book with book quotations, newspaper clippings and supporting material from a myriad of other publications. It’s as comprehensive an account as anybody could ever wish to read about one man’s unique contribution to the game of golf and its development during the first half of the 20th century. Volume 1 The life of James Braid is closely scrutinised in Volume 1, starting out in the humble surroundings of Earlsferry, Fife in 1870 and ending eighty years later in a London nursing home when he sadly failed to recover from a routine appendix operation performed three weeks earlier. Along the way, we learn of his family background, his progression to work in London then his various exploits as a golf professional around the British Isles up until the start of World War II. The author describes Braid as “reserved to the point of shyness” but “his opinion, if he could be persuaded to give it, carried immense weight and his wisdom and judgement were universally recognised”. Fond of the odd glass of port and partial to a pinch of snuff in later life, we discover he was “a grand gallery player and crowd pleaser” who didn’t travel well, hence his lack of overseas play on the other side of the Atlantic. As an example of the many interesting anecdotes spread across the book, the author writes of Braid taking part in a fund-raising cricket match at Lord’s in 1903 when a team of Cricketing Golfers played a team of Golfing Cricketers. He managed to score seven runs during the match but his real moment of glory arrived when he was asked to bowl and he proceeded to take a wicket with his first ball bowled – underhand, full toss and at head height! Along with his close friend J.H. Taylor, Braid was instrumental in establishing The Professional Golfers’ Association in 1901, when both men were elected Joint Treasurers, and the following year he participated in the first edition of international matches between the Scottish and English members. In 1921 he played in an International tournament played at Gleneagles between professionals from Great Britain and the United States, which many consider as the precursor of the Ryder Cup matches which got under way six years later. Braid’s surname does not live on as he had no grandsons but his golfing legacy certainly endures and modern professional golf has a lot to thank him for. Volume 2 Who’d have known that James Braid would play in matches with a Prime Minister (Arthur Balfour at Kilspindie in 1904); female aristocracy (the Countess of Wemyss at Craigielaw in 1906); a famous contemporary architect (Harry Colt at Stoke Poges in 1911); and with golfing great Bobby Jones at Walton Heath in 1926 and 1930? Volume 2, running to 465 pages, provides the details for all of these games and the many hundreds of others that Braid played between 1891 at Braid Hills and 1940 at Sundridge Park (when he withdrew from an event for the only time in his playing career). The overall statistics for these matches is truly astonishing: playing more than eighteen hundred 18-hole rounds in matches, tournaments and qualifying events in various formats (singles, foursomes, four-ball better ball and stroke play) and setting the course record at 115 of the courses he played along the way. Braid qualified for twenty-eight of the thirty-nine Opens he entered between 1894 and 1938 (winning the championship five times) and he played in thirty-two consecutive News of the World match play tournaments, starting in 1903, winning what was at the time a very big event on the calendar four times. And his playing record against his big rivals Harry Vardon and J.H. Taylor – the other two members of the Great Triumvirate – was also impressive (55 wins, 12 draws and 49 losses against the former and 41 wins, 11 draws and 36 defeats against the latter). Volume 3 Volume 3 extends to 661 pages so it’s by far the biggest of the three, with information on more than 550 course design projects that James Braid was involved in over 55 years, starting at his first club Romford in 1896. Over 130 golfing venues are listed for new 18-hole designs and another 80 are mentioned in relation to designing a 9-hole course or extending nine holes to an 18-hole layout. The remainder of Braid’s commissions were made up of course appraisals, modifications, re-modelling assignments and offering general advice. Unfortunately, some of Braid’s designs never got as far as construction, while others were eventually abandoned. All too sadly, a lot of work carried out has either disappeared over time or been much altered. Prominence is given to Braid’s best works at Gleneagles (1913-1924), Royal Aberdeen (1925-1935) and Carnoustie (1926 & 1930) in Scotland. South of the border, early designs are examined at the likes of Henley (in 1907) and Pennard (in 1908) then there’s coverage of later engagements at places such as Langland Bay in 1926 and Royal Blackheath the following year. Across the Irish Sea, Braid redesigned Bangor and reworked Mullingar among others in the mid-1930s. This might be the most interesting section of the book for students of golf course architecture, with painstakingly researched summaries of club histories and extensive newspaper and magazine accounts – from publications such as Golf Illustrated and Nisbet Golf Year Book – bringing the provenance of all these courses to life. Postscript If you’ve read and liked recent golf books like Derek Markham’s A Matter of Course: The life of Herbert Fowler 1856-1941 and Keith Cutten’s The Evolution of Golf Course Design then you’ll love this one too. You will have to dig a little deeper in your pocket to enjoy it – as the book costs £250.00 plus postage, which is not an inconsiderable amount of money– but we think it’s absolutely worth paying the price for such an important contribution to golf literature. Just a thought… if the purchase price is maybe a little beyond your means then you might consider asking your golf club to buy a copy – especially if its course is a Braid design – for general perusal of the membership. The James Braid story certainly deserves to be known by as many committed golfers as possible and it would be a real pity if the cost of acquiring this colossal undertaking hindered the telling of the tale to as wide an audience as possible. The book is available from YPD Books. Click this link to go to the order page. Jim McCann Editor Top 100 Golf Courses