Interview:

Geoffrey Cornish: the educator

13 October 2010

At 95, Geoffrey Cornish is the world’s oldest living golf architect.

Not as spry as he once was and now a bit frail, he shuffles when he walks and requires hearing aids. Yet he still meets a visitor to his house at the door with a hardy hello and a large smile. The Cornish mind is still sharp and his wit remains.

During lunch at a local restaurant with this writer, he downs two martinis with his meal. Cornish is a living connection to the Golden Age of golf course architecture. He worked for Stanley Thompson at the same time as Robert Trent Jones. Originally hired during the Depression for six weeks of soil testing work, Cornish stayed with Thompson from 1935-1939 before taking a job as a head greenkeeper. Within months he was called to fight for the Canadian Army in World War II. On his return home, he went back to work for Thompson.

Cornish’s intention was not to become an architect after college. “I set out to find a job,” he says, confiding that, had it not been for the economy, he would not have stayed with Thompson. “He was the hardest guy in the world to work for. If jobs hadn’t been hard to get, I don’t think I’d have stuck with him,” Cornish said. He’d try to educate us but in an awful way.”

It was through him that Cornish met people like AW Tillinghast, Donald Ross and Alister MacKenzie. Cornish was also there when the American Society of Golf Course Architects was formed. He is an accomplished writer. With longtime Golf Digest architecture editor Ron Whitten, he co-authored the seminal work The Architects of Golf. The book contains biographies of hundreds of architects, living and dead, from around the world, along with a history of their work. Cornish also wrote and co-wrote a number of other books with fellow architects Robert Muir Graves and Michael Hurdzan.

Starting in the 1950s when he came to the United States from his native western Canada, Cornish influenced countless future superintendents and architects through his agronomic teaching at the University of Massachusetts and the Stockbridge School of Agriculture where he spent five years. Always well-attended were the seminars on the history of golf course design he taught with longtime friend Graves at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America or at dozens of local and regional golf course superintendent gatherings. It was because of Cornish and Graves that so many in the golf industry learned to appreciate the Golden Age designers of the early 1900s and their creations.

A number of architects cite Cornish as an influence. Some like Bill Robinson, Brian Silva, Mark Mungeam, Tim Gerrish and Brad Booth were given their first design jobs by him. Others, such as Tom Doak, fell in love with the game while playing one of his designs. Still others reached out to him for guidance on how to become an architect and in Cornish found a kind, encouraging gentleman.

His letter-writing prowess is legendary. For most of his life, his wife Carol typed up and mailed his correspondence, but since she passed away a few years ago, he hand writes all communications. The subject might be golf but he still finds a way to inject the words people like Seneca and Alfred, Lord Tennyson into the correspondences.

The Cornish design portfolio is immense. His original creations number somewhere just past 200 and his renovation amount to at least that many, perhaps even double. In Massachusetts, where he’s lived since the 1950s, he has designed close to 50 courses, and Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut abound with his work. There are also a number of his layouts in Pennsylvania, and New York. Overseas, he worked in Italy, Greece and Guatemala.

Many of Cornish’s golf courses were designed more cheaply than any of his competitors. His modus operandi was to do whatever was necessary to make sure a client could afford to build a course. In some cases, that meant a layout opened with only a few bunkers, with the intent that the others would be built when the club had the money. Sometimes the sand hazards would be constructed, but without sand: that, too, could come later. In other cases, the design would be built nine holes at a time, in many instances years apart.

There is absolutely no doubt that Cornish’s willingness to cut his fee so a course would come to fruition was a monumental contribution to the game. Cheaply built layouts resulted in affordable green fees and that meant large segments of the population could take up the pastime. Architect Brian Silva, who partnered with Cornish from 1983-2006, said the broad influence Cornish had is often unrealised, not just for those who play golf, but also for those who work in the industry. “The part that I think can often get overlooked in this era of 100 greatest this courses and 100 greatest that courses is that it is difficult to think of anyone else who ‘grew’ the game in the Northeast more than Geoff,” says Silva. “Dozens and dozens of courses that would not have come into existence if it weren’t for Geoff figuring out how to get them done for little money; courses on which folks took up the game and superintendents and golf professionals were employed. Some would suggest that these more functional courses are the lifeblood of the game.”

Cornish’s most famous redesign was probably The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, prior to the 1963 US Open that was won by Julius Boros. For that event, he rebuilt every bunker as well as the first, fourth and seventeenth greens. But in 1982 The Country Club hosted the US Amateur, as a precursor to the club being awarded the 1988 US Open. To meet the requirements of the USGA, Rees Jones was hired to renovate the course, which ultimately led to his long career as the ‘Open Doctor’. Jones’ work at The Country Club entailed undoing virtually everything Cornish had done. Jones redid the bunkers and rebuilt three greens, the exact same ones Cornish had constructed 20 years before.

“I tried to respect the old guys. It was, you know a funny thing, that it was from Trent that I learned the value of respecting the old people,” Cornish says, adding that whenever he went about modifying a classic course he would ‘think of the old timers.’ When it is pointed out to Cornish that his work sometimes contradicts these assertions, he blames it on the time period. “In the 60s and 70s they just rebuilt courses,” he says. “I guess it’s what the people wanted.”

Asked if there is such thing as a ‘Cornish style,’ he gives a cryptic answer. “No, I’m afraid I was just a student of the profession,” he says in a tone that is equal parts apologetic and deferential. When pushed further on the original query, he modifies his response. “There may have been for a while.” Why, though, did it disappear? “I suppose pressure. I yielded to it,” he says.

If Cornish is to be believed, the justification for the fact he never developed his own characteristics is that he did what his clients wanted, even if that meant eviscerating a classic era golf course or building one that, in many cases, had barely any strategic qualities.

Cornish maintains that he followed the work of others and tried to emulate their styles, including a surprising revelation. “Of course, I’ve always been a great admirer of Pete Dye and I’d watch what he was doing and try to imitate it,” he told me. “People started to want a links style. Really Pete’s style is a links style with a North American flair to it.” It’s an odd admission because there seems to be very little if any of Dye in Cornish’s work.

According to Cornish, before Dye it was his first employer that influenced his early creations. “They were Stanley Thompson,” Cornish says of his courses. “Well, they all had tight landing areas, yawning bunkers, and large greens, many of them compartmentalised. You really had to figure out from the tee how you were playing to that compartment.”

According to his co-author Whitten, Cornish places architects in three classifications: functional, accomplished and virtuoso. For Whitten and most others, Cornish fits perfectly into the ‘functional’ category. Trained in agronomy and soils, Cornish seemed to care more about that end of the work than the designing. He never drew up plans, that part was always left to his partners or associates. He was always more interested in the depth of the green mix than in the design of the green.

The fact is, however, that the legacy of Geoffrey Cornish will be that he had a monumental influence on the game. Asked how it feels to know literally hundreds of thousand of people have played on his golf courses and learned the game on his designs, his reply is ‘Exalted.’

If he had the chance to live his life all over again, would he still be a golf course architect? He thinks for a moment. “Of course I always claim I’ve never done a day’s work in my life since I got out of the Army in 1945,” he said. “I guess teaching is the noblest calling of them all.”

Cornish is still thinking. Glancing at my notepad and pen he says: “I even contemplated your work at one time.” If he did fancy one day becoming a writer, there are countless golfers over generations that are glad he chose the path he did.

This article appeared in GCA issue 21, published July 2010.