45 What do you think is the most critical skill for a golf course architect? Routing, perhaps? Being able to read a topographic map and understand immediately what the ground represented there looks like? Perhaps drawing, whether freehand or on a CAD system? In actual fact, useful though all those skills are, the most fundamental, basic skill of the golf architect is selling. If you can convince someone to let you build, or work on, their golf course, you are a golf architect. If you can’t, you aren’t. It’s really that simple. Selling requires building relationships, whether with a developer or a golf club committee. If a course that you’re bidding to work on is one that you know well from playing there for some time, perhaps even being a member of the club, it’s pretty likely that you will already have relationships with a lot of the other key people at that club. Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that quite a few golf architects have ended up working at clubs of which they have been a member, or courses where they have played a lot. The relationshipbuilding part of the sell is already worked out. But changes to well-loved golf courses are rarely without their critics. With a normal client relationship, the golf architect has a degree of separation from this: they might have to face up to the critics before and during the project, but after it, once the work is done and his fee is collected, it’s rarely their problem. That isn’t necessarily the case at a course you know well. If you’re still a member, there’s the possibility of bumping into a critic every time you go Red Rocks Country Club in Denver, where architect Kevin Atkinson both lives and works Photo: Kevin Atkinson
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