I know this is long. Too long! Hey, we're busy men here! But please bear with me -- and I'll try not to disappoint you. (Thank you.)
I speak from experience here (for once) -- as a person who created (and still edits, 12 years later) a 365-days-a-year newspaper column written primarily by its readers (most of them known by name to me, but anonymous to the other readers).
My column (if you don't mind my calling it mine) is not unlike this Discussion Group, except for two things: (1) The discussion is very, very rarely about golf (and even more rarely about Golf Course Architecture); and (2) I edit it; I decide what gets into the column and what does not -- and what does not get into print goes, sooner or later, to the wastebasket, unread except by me. (Oops. Make that three things. Tom Paul has not written even one item for me!) (Or four: Neither has Pat Mucci.) (Five! I don't allow the readers to get nasty with one another. [The commands "Get a life" and "Lighten up" are Officially Verboten.])
This is the most valuable thing I have to say about the subject under discussion in this thread -- and you can decide, individually, if it's at all valuable, or quite worthless (and now that I think about it, this just MAY have some application to Golf Course Architecture
-- though, of course, you may disagree, and as nastily as you like!):
Sometimes the thing you create changes into something very different from the thing you had in mind when you created it.
And sometimes that change, as Martha (Stewart, not Burk) would say, is a Good Thing.
Witness my column: What I had in mind was entertainment. Nothing more, and nothing less. The column was to be a diversion from all of the serious (and, often, seriously depressing) news in the rest of the paper. It was to be FUNNY -- goofily funny, or bitingly funny, or darkly funny, but FUNNY first, last and always.
And so it went for the first couple of years. People submitted their (allegedly) hilarious or wry or sly or silly observations, and I printed them -- sometimes with comment, sometimes without.
And then, strangely and without provocation, the readers started telling me not just stuff designed to make people laugh, but SERIOUS stories about their lives -- about their marriages, and their parents, and their children, and their jobs, and their hobbies, and their passions ... about Life, and about Death, in all of its manifestations (politics excluded; politicians, amateur or professional, are not, and never have been, and never will be welcome to pollute my column). Sometimes it was tragic, heartbreaking stuff they sent me; sometimes it was sentimental; sometimes it was curious; sometimes it was gentle; sometimes it was contemptuous; sometimes it was angry. But whatever its mood, it was real, honest-to-goodness stuff from real, honest-to-goodness Midwesterners -- many of them the sort of people who, without a trace of irony or self-consciousness, use expressions like "honest-to-goodness." They really do!
When those softer-edged stories started arriving, I'll never forget thinking: But THAT'S not what I had in mind! I wanted something biting and witty and sharp. I wanted a smart-aleck's paradise. Some of this gooey stuff sounded like what you could read in some little weekly in some backwater hick-town!
And then I got smart. I listened to what the readers wanted to say. And I let them say it, in print -- the result being, all these years later, that what had been (and had been meant to be) nothing more than a trifle, ever, became, for me and for many of the readers, a very rich, profoundly educational mix of stories about Life As We Know It, about the human condition from the ridiculous to the sublime. (I don't know how to say that without sounding horribly pretentious. Sorry. If I do say so myself: It's an extraordinary column, primarily because of its extraordinary contributors; all I need to do is pay attention and choose well.)
My point, after all that, is: Same goes for GolfClubAtlas! I believe that gca.com has hugely benefitted (and will continue to benefit) from (1) the contributions of many posters (including, just coincidentally, me
) who have not yet played many of the World's Great Courses, and who have no proven or proveable expertise in Golf Course Architecture; and (2) golfish discussions that have little or nothing to do with Golf Course Architecture, narrowly defined.
Check my signature quotation, below, from Mr. TE ("Tom I") Paul. What he says goes for me.
I came here because I love golf (more than is good for me), and because, though I love to play the game and to watch the game being played, I care particularly intensely about the courses where the game is played. Some of the very best days of my life have been spent on golf courses -- most memorably at Sand Hills, Highlands Links, Pebble Beach, Lahinch, North Berwick, the Old Course at St. Andrews, but also at Little Traverse Bay in Northern Michigan, and at Black Butte Ranch in Oregon, and at Kebo Valley in Maine, and at Lawsonia in Wisconsin, and at Hazeltine and Woodhill and North Oaks and Somerset and Northland and Giants Ridge here in Minnesota, and even at the humble but intermittenly lovable Oak Glen, where Rick Shefchik and I keep our cards, and where, later this month, we will play, as we always do, an end-of-the-season, dawn-to-dusk, 72-hole marathon (yes, with carts); those were some of the very best days of my life not because of the company (though that's part of it), and not because of the golf itself (though that's part of it), and not at all because of how well I played that golf (I shudder to think of how poorly I played Sand Hills the one chance I got!), but because when the weather is nice and the wind is blowing and the sun is rising or setting, those PLACES THEMSELVES (including, but not limited to, the golf holes) can be transcendent. They can take me where I want to be -- to a state of contentment I have rarely experienced in the rest of what passes for life.
I want more of that! And that's why I came here: to learn where others had found such transcendence, and where I might someday look for it.
I came here after I stumbled upon a newspaper story (Philly Inquirer, I think) about the new bunkers at Merion ... a story that happened to mention that a bunch of nut-cases at
www.golfclubatlas.com were arguing about it at insane length -- and I stayed here because, after I checked out that discussion and read a couple of hundred posts about the (alleged) desecration of the old White Faces, and after I checked out a few dozen other threads and a few course profiles and a couple of "My Home Courses"s and an "In My Opinion" or two, I felt as though (even though I'd never played Merion, or NGLA, or Pine Valley, or Cypress Point, and maybe never will) I'd finally found ... MY NUT-CASES!
You know who you are!
What is here at this Web site today, and what will be here tomorrow, may not be precisely what the Morrissetts had in mind. But to my mind -- and, I hope, to theirs -- that is at least potentially a Good Thing.
Here's my vote:
The more, the better.
The more wide-ranging, the better.
The more civil, the better.
The more welcoming, the better.
The more flexible, the better.
The more educational, the better.
The more tolerant of the friendly, entertainingly non-educational, the better.
Oh, and one more thing:
The more concise, the better.
