1 WELCOME ADAM LAWRENCE Strength in numbers Golf design has, for a long time, been perceived in the public eye as a profession followed by lone geniuses. The golf industry’s marketing model is largely to blame here: as far back as Robert Trent Jones Sr’s ads suggesting that developers should give their course a signature, course architects have tried to market their names as a guarantee that a course will be something special. Even before that, when the media talked about a new course, it was the lead architect who they named. Occasionally when Bernard Darwin was writing about a new course by his friend Harry Colt, he might mention Hugh Alison or John Morrison, or even Claude Harris, their regular contractor. But mostly it was Colt, Colt, Colt. And who, until recently, had heard of Walter Hatch or JB McGovern; the name that sold was that of Donald Ross. Even when he had only a small involvement in a project. But the truth is that it takes a village, and quite a large one at that, to build a golf course. Behind the ‘name’ is usually a team of associates, specialists and general helpers; all play a vital role in bringing the project to fruition. And increasingly, some architects are choosing to collaborate with people from other design firms on projects: nobody has a monopoly on wisdom, and at times a fresh pair of eyes sees something that the first pair has not. Is golf design going to come to be regarded as a primarily collaborative profession? Probably not: the boom in interest in the subject in recent years remains principally focused on ‘lead names’. But as our main feature in this issue of GCA demonstrates, teamwork is more often than not an essential element in the formula for great golf courses.
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