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<\/a>Geoffrey Cornish. A Great Gentleman and an Influential Presence for Seventy Years in Golf Course Design<\/p><\/div>\n
Geoff\u2019s curiosity about the history of golf course design led to a long collaboration with Ron Whitten, the architecture editor of Golf Digest<\/em>, which resulted in their 1981 encyclopedic treatise on golf architecture, \u201cThe Golf Course,\u201d which would be updated in an edition published by HarperCollins in 1993 and re-titled \u201cThe Architects of Golf.\u201d\u00a0 About a third of the book consists of mini-bios of almost anyone who had a hand in designing a golf course in the 20th<\/sup> century. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Geoff always treated everyone in the profession with great respect, in keeping with his graceful personality and generous spirit, and these profiles illuminate his magnanimous character.<\/p>\n With his close friend Robert Muir Graves, Geoff taught a seminar every year at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for aspiring golf course architects and land planners.\u00a0\u00a0 I took the course in 1988 and have the certificate hanging on the wall behind me as I write this. \u00a0 (Jan Beljan, a long-time associate of Tom Fazio and one of the few prominent women in golf course design, was one of my classmates.) \u00a0 Geoff and Bob did a fabulous job with the course, and summoned all of the wisdom from their many years of designing courses and teaching when they collaborated on a textbook called \u201cGolf Course Design.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Along with Mike Hurdzan\u2019s \u201cGolf Course Architecture,\u201d it\u2019s the classic treatment of an arcane subject.<\/p>\n Geoff had a professorial air, but he was also witty and tough.\u00a0\u00a0 He had landed on the beaches of Normandy as an officer in the Canadian Army Overseas, which he joined, as I recall, in 1939, when war first broke out in Europe.\u00a0\u00a0 He was then already 25 years old.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Born in Manitoba, he had started his career in golf in British Columbia, working both in agronomy and design. \u00a0 His professional training was in agronomy, and he learned golf design on the job. \u00a0 He revered Trent Jones, and regarded him as the fountainhead of modern design, but he also had an irreverent streak, and enjoyed remembering how difficult it was for Jones, a city boy, to learn how to move dirt behind a mule and a shaping pan when they were building courses together for Thompson. \u00a0Hard work was easy for a boy from Canada’s western plains.<\/p>\n Geoff was a kind of Johnny Appleseed of golf in New England, and his influence spread to the west through his colleague, Bill Robinson, who moved to Oregon in the 1970s and continued the Cornish tradition of designing solid, easy to maintain, uncomplicated golf courses that the average golfer enjoyed playing.\u00a0\u00a0 Another Cornish prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Brian Silva, has also gone on to have a distinguished career.\u00a0\u00a0 Geoff continued to work with Mark Mungeam in Cornish Mungeam Design, staying active well into his 90s.<\/p>\n During the go-go years in golf architecture of the 1990s and beyond, when Trumped up golf courses with waterfalls and ostentatious \u201cdesign features\u201d seemed to push golf into unsustainable realms, the modest approach of Geoff Cornish seemed quaint and outmoded.\u00a0 But in the melt-down of the post-recession era, Geoff\u2019s approach suddenly \u00a0seemed sensible and responsible again, just like the man.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"