Why should we be surprised golf course construction is in the dumps? It's happened before

Here we go again.

Everybody seems to be crying about the sad sorry plight of the golf industry. Golf courses are closing, architectural staffs are being reduced, Tom Fazio is said to be spending more time on the course playing the game rather then plotting new holes (and reportedly enjoying it), rounds are down and the number of golfers is declining.

Stop whining. We have been here before.

There has been more than one “Gilded Age,” heady times when there was land, money, prosperity and people with time to play: the 20s, the late 50s and 60s, the 80s. These were the days when talented course designers like Canadian Stanley “the Toronto Terror” Thompson, Donald Ross, H.S. Colt, Alister Mackenzie, James Braid and RT Jones followed by Geoffrey Cornish, Pete Dye, George and Tom Fazio were busy as hell building new tracks.

There have been slumps too when money dried up, people were out of work and energies and free time were consumed by fighting wars, finding jobs and keeping peanut butter on the table.

Take the early 30s to the early 50s during and following World War II and the 70s when higher costs and raging inflation curtailed the golf business and just about everything else. Golf courses built then tended to be hooks to sell real estate or year-round resorts like Stratton Mountain in Vermont.

We have been here before. Anything different now? Anything we should pay attention to?

In the 30s WPA (Work Projects Program) kicked in to make work for the unemployed allowing municipalities to hire architects to design public courses, courses built by hand laborers using shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes and picks. Several tracks were staked out and the ordinary man or woman could pay for very little. The golf base grew.

Then powerful earth-moving equipment came along just in time as prime land had became way more valuable for commercial development. Crappy pieces of land, dumps, slag heaps and rocky-bedded sites, became the new canvases for clever architects like Dye, Tom Doak and Jack Nicklaus.

Fancier, hugely expensive courses including high-end tracks designed for spectator viewing like Pete Dye’s TPC Sawgrass Stadium course were on a fast track, courses with big initiation fees and big budgets.

And guess what happened to the guys who lived on a budget? They took up hiking, coaching their kids’ soccer games and helping out at home. Golf for many had become just too expensive, too time consuming.

Can we learn from the past? Perhaps it is time to take a page out of Geoffrey Cornish’s book and go back to building more modest courses similar to the ones he and his late wife, Carol, pioneered and called “Work in Progress” courses.

After the war, Cornish says a lot of people wanted to play golf but didn’t have the money. That’s when he says, “My bride and I got the idea for “work in progress” courses. Everyone wanted the best courses, but couldn’t necessarily afford them, so we started designing courses to be built in stages.

“When they first opened, they would be very playable with great greens, mostly roll-up, but features like bunkers and other hazards could be added later. A lot of courses in the Boston area like Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord got started this way.

“Over the years as money became available, features were added and the system worked pretty well. Sometimes here in New England, they would decide to create some bunkers over the winter. When the golfers returned in the spring there might be an outburst of horror, ironically doing the most complaining were lower handicappers who had been complaining the course wasn’t tough enough.

“You know we had a worse debt as compared to today’s dollars than we have now but people felt is was a cardinal sin to pass on this debt to another generation. People were willing to pay high taxes and work it out and they did. That didn’t leave much money for golf.”

“In those days we didn’t have mechanical stone pickers as we have today so members would come out on weekends and pick all the stones out of the landscape. My bride and I tried to turn up at these stone picking parties and we had a heck of a good time. Of course there was always a keg of beer that was opened at the start of things.”

A curious sidelight to Cornish’s career are his 50 or so floodlit pitch n’ putt courses which he built more than 50 years ago all over New England. Shorter than par 3s and requiring little time commitment, these were immensely popular and encouraged newcomers to play the game. Sadly few remain.

“I’m not sure Pitch n’ Putt would go over well today,” says Cornish, “but it sure promoted the construction of regulation courses. It got golf into their blood.”

Humm. Stone pickers? Nah, that might be pushing it.

But “Work in Progress” munis? Shorter, less expensive courses? Six-hole loops? Pitch n’ Putts?

Busy dads, even women would have time to get out there and learn the game.