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Ron Whitten on Shinnecock

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TEPaul:
Tom MacWood:

It's sort of early and so I'm not sure I'm following your post #8.

The present #6 hole was the 10th hole on Flynn's new 12 hole course (the Flynn original holes that when opened were considered a separate 12 hole course). Once you played those holes you could switch over to six of the old Macdonald/Raynor holes that were below the clubhouse to the south. For about a year 1930-1931 this was a "temporary" course (I have the card here). The final six holes on that temporary course were listed as;

13-Old 4th-356yd par 4-Eastward Ho
14-Old 5th-381yd par 4-Shinnecock
15-Old 6th-200yd par 3-Biarritz
16-old 7th-461yd par 5-Emabankment
17-old 10th-380 par 4-Lowlands
18-11th (Eden) tee to 2nd (Montauk) green-196yd par 3

This temporary course (routing) was obviously being used because at that time Flynn was redesigning present holes #1,2,3,7,8,9 from the old Macdonald/Raynor course (#1,12,13,14,15,18).

T_MacWood:
TE
That makes perfect sense....allowing for the tweeking of the 6 Raynor/Macd holes without interupting play.

TEPaul:
Tom MacWood;

1930-1931 must have been an interesting year for golfers at Shinnecock. Some were still playing the old Macdonald/Raynor course in its original configuration while other golfers coming off Flynn's new 12 hole course were stepping into those six Macdonald/Raynor holes used to make up the "Temporary" course. There were temporary club rules that anyone playing the "temporary" course had to give way to anyone playing the original Macdonad/Raynor configuration.

When you start to think about this you can begin to see that in that year 1930-1931 when Flynn was redesigning those six Macdonald/Raynor holes (he began in the fall of 1930) there was no necessary reason for him to leave them as they were unless he thought they worked well for his new Shinnecock course. This very much brings into question the way the redan is today. Did he leave that green as it was or did he redesign and rebuild it? It's sort of hard to say at this point (although we think we can figure it out)  but if the contour lines on the original topos Flynn was using (that might have included the elevations on the original MacD/Raynor redan) it sort of looks to us like he redesigned and rebuilt that green as the elevations on it today look higher than that original topo seem to show (with the Macd/Raynor redan)!

At this point it looks to me like the hole that may be the most retained in design was #3 (although it was rebunkered, reteed and the green was possibly worked with some). The same for present #9--the old #18. These whole course routing and design topo maps we have are really fascinating but what we don't have is Flynn's usual hole by hole drawings. If we had those (as we do with so many of his other courses) with the detailed "construction instructions" on them answering all this about what exactly was retained and what exactly was redesigned in detail would be a piece of cake!

Jeff_Lewis:
Tom M and Tom P, thank you for this great thread. GCA.com lives up to its potential when the posts contribute this kind of insight. Fascinating stuff.

Matt Frey, PGA:
I just read this for the first time...very good, although it's an old post, I thought it would be good to share again.

I haven't played Shinnecock myself, but very much enjoy playing Raynor designs and Flynn designs (who doesn't?) and found this very interesting.

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