2022 Mid-Am at Erin Hills: The U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship is limited to amateur golfers aged 25 and older who have a Handicap Index not higher than 3.4. The 2022 championship was played September 10 – 17 at Erin Hills and, just as with the 2011 U.S. Amateur, Blue Mound Golf & Country Club co-hosted the stroke-play portion of the championship.
Golf Course Architect: Seth Raynor
“In the realm of early American golf architects, Seth Raynor stands apart from virtually all his contemporaries by what he was not or what he didn’t do as much as what he created.
Raynor was not Scottish. He didn’t play golf as a young man nor did earnestly take up the sport later in life. He played his first round after assisting in the construction of four courses but never became an avid golfer.
While everyone from his mentor, Charles Blair Macdonald, to the likes of Harry Colt, AW Tillinghast, Devereux Emmet and Walter Travis talked and wrote about the world of golf course design, Raynor was all but silent. There are only a few short lines of quotes that have ever been uncovered and none in golf magazines such as Golf Illustrated.
All Raynor left behind for us to judge him and understand his theories of architecture were the golf courses that he designed, expanded or renovated. The number, now in excess of 100, continues to grow. This year, alone, two more courses he designed were rediscovered.
What makes Raynor’s career all that more remarkable is its brevity. His first solo design did not come until 1914, when he was already 38, and he died, from pneumonia, aged only 51, in January 1926 in a hotel in West Palm Beach, Florida, his wife with him, both there to attend the opening of a course.
What Raynor did share with fellow architects was the understanding that virtually all great golf holes have within them multiple strategies and options giving players with varying degrees of acumen and length more than one way to get from tee to green. Raynor sought to reveal the best player by creating some golf holes that required left-to-right ball flights off the tee or on the approach and others that insist on right-to-left trajectory for the best path to be uncovered.
His designs invariably included holes where length was rewarded. His short par fours pay off to the accurate player, while his large greens, some as big as 15,000 square feet, meant putting is at a premium. The well-defined edges of greens and the accompanying swales can direct even slightly misplayed shots into bunkers. To score on a Raynor course, adeptness with the sand wedge is a must.
Ask golfers who are only slightly familiar with Raynor’s work and they’ll tell you about square greens, deep bunkers and the massive amounts of earth moved to create courses and his redundant hole styles.
Raynor learned his craft from Charles Blair Macdonald, the first great golf course architect in the United States and the creator of the National Golf Links of America, as well as the winner of the first ‘official’ US Amateur in 1895. Macdonald had studied at St Andrews University, played the Old Course and nearly every other great layout in the British Isles and met Old Tom Morris. He believed there were about 25 hole designs in the entire world and that the best versions of each should be used as guides when constructing a course.
On the works of Macdonald and Raynor, you will invariably find versions of the Road Hole, the Redan, Eden and others. There was nearly always a Punchbowl green. Macdonald and Raynor did not duplicate the originals, but adapted them to fit the specific site. So in some cases, for instance, what is their version of Road might have a tee shot that reminds of the original but the green is angled in the opposite direction.”
Anthony Pioppi is a golf journalist based in Connecticut, USA.
This article appeared in issue 22 of Golf Course Architecture, published October 2010