worth reading Past Imperfect

"If phone engineers thought like golf architects," Ron Whitten writes in November's Golf Digest, "our cell phones would still be attached to the wall."

Actually, that's one of the nicer things Whitten has to say about today's golf course architects, a group that, he contends, offers "plenty of artistry, but almost no innovation." His sour summation of contemporary course design adds a super-size helping of insult to the economic injuries that architects have taken of late, as their commissions have slowly disappeared.

The article is called "Why the Lack of Innovation?" Here's Whitten's major complaint:

Every architect worships the past -- the 1920s or teens or even earlier -- and molds designs to those ancient templates. Nobody has an original thought. As Pete Dye says, every hole's a copy of some other hole. There is no hip-hop, rap, or even jazz in golf architecture; it's all Stephen Foster and John Philip Sousa. Which means modern-day courses are gussied-up reproductions, with strategies conjured up by Old Tom Morris or Old MacDonald, bunkers styled after Alister Mackenzie or George Thomas, and greens patterned on relics like the Redan, Biarritz, and Eden.

A paragraph like that stings, particularly when it comes from golf's most influential design critic. But the most sobering part of the article is Whitten's conclusion about what a lack of innovation means to the future of golf architecture.

"The profession of golf design," he argues, "is in danger of going the way of slide-film developers, TV repairmen, and travel agents."

That's not good.

"Architects need to reinvent their product," he says, and restore "the relevance of the profession of golf architecture."

To be sure, at times Whitten lays it on a little thick. But he's delivered an earful. No doubt, "Why the Lack of Innovation?" is going to provoke distress and probably some resentment among architects, who must be wondering exactly how their professional lives can possibly get any worse.