GLEANINGS FROM THE WAYSIDE

A.W. Tillinghast ("Tillie") designed and constructed golf courses throughout North America. He did so in a time before interstate highways and air transportation. From the early teens through the late nineteen-thirties, Tillie traveled the continent, primarily by automobile, designing and redesigning golf courses. Although his documented design record credits him with around 70 original designs and an equal number of redesign assignments, this book reveals that he accomplished a lot more. In fact, late in his life Tillie was quoted as saying, "I have been intimately in touch with the construction of holes of my design on more than a thousand golf courses in every part of the land."

In this third volume of essays, Tillie recollects many of his travels and humorous tales. He also recalls in detail his design principals and opinions on modern golf course architecture. Tillie was a "road warrior." He lived to travel and traveled to lived. From Jacksonville to San Antonio, from Way out West in California to Way down South in Old Mexico, and from out Tulsa Way and back to his stomping grounds in the East, Tillinghast provides his unique insights and fine points of good golf course design. As Tillie notes, "During forty years I have probably trod as many golf holes as any man in the world, many of my own creation and many, many more designed by others. I know a good hole when I see one and I think I know a bad one, too."

The titles to Tillie’s essays themselves capture the Tillinghast flair — The Gimie Guys, The Ugly Duckling of the Course, A Hole is as Long as it Plays, An Exception to Rule, The Tiny Tims of Golf, Sans Sand Pits, Old Ananias Par and many more. The essays include Tillie’s analysis of some of his greatest designs, Winged Foot, Five Farms and others. Tillie also analyzes a couple of masterwoorks by his good friend Donald Ross — Pinehurst Number 2 and Oakland Hills. The insight or genius of Tillie on golf course design can be seen in the following passage:

"Often there is the danger of trespassing into the freakish when the planning of a thoroughly original hole is attempted, but so long as the shots called for are sound, and fit well together, there need be no great reluctance to depart from the conventional types. Indeed, it is safe to assert that far more interesting golf would be the result if conventions were not followed so slavishly… … Any course to be successful must be popular, and the architect who might persist in sticking stubbornly to features of his own personal fancy, even though they had proved not popular by test, would be foolish indeed."

In this book, Geoffrey Cornish sets the stage with the foreword, and the editors have penned a bonus — an informative afterword that recounts Tillie’s travels as a consultant for the P.G.A. of America in the days of the Great Depression, a period in his life that has hitherto proved elusive to scholars of course design.

As with the prior two volumes of Tillie’s essays, The Course Beautiful and Reminiscences of the Links, this book is loaded with vintage photographs and sketches that harmonize with each essay. Collectively, these books make it possible for designers and the public to comprehend Tillinghast’s philosophy, as he added new dimensions to the art of golf course design.

This book is available for a $39.95 each plus $6.00 shipping and handling per book. To order by credit card, call (908) 781-6121, or mail a check payable to TreeWolf Productions, 9 Coleridge Road, Short Hills, NJ 07078.