Editor's Note: Below is Fairways + Greens contributor Katharine Dyson's award-winning profile of renowned, Canadian-born golf course architect Geoffrey Cornish, who died Feb. 10 at age 97 in Amherst, Mass. This interview was conducted in 2010.

Fiddlers Green in South Amherst, Mass., is the kind of leafy village square found on New England postcards. Facing it, a modest white Cape Cod house has been the home and workplace of Geoffrey S. Cornish, one our country’s most respected and prolific golf architects. It’s a place he shared for more than 50 years with his wife and partner, Carol, until she died in 2003.

I arrive a bit early for our 9 a.m. appointment to find Mr. Cornish returning from his daily walk. Until that moment, I had never met him in person although I’d interviewed him by phone more than 15 years ago. Later that morning he would recall that phone conversation and remind me about what we had talked about, quite remarkable for anyone but especially for a man entering the latter half of his 90s.

Geoffrey Cornish is old enough to have known Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln; old enough to have been friends with golf course legends Donald Ross and A.W. Tillinghast; and old enough to remember the days when a contract could be sealed with a handshake.

He gives lectures, without notes, and speaks about innumerable architects and courses around the world, has a photographic memory and can remember just about every mound and bunker he ever built.

Spanning the days of Ross and Stanley Thompson in the 1930s to the present, his astonishing career has been long enough for his work to swing from solidly popular to legendary and back to highly relevant. By 1980, he had designed or renovated more than 240 courses, more than any architect in history — the majority in the Northeast with others in West Virginia, Canada, Greece and Mexico.

If you’ve played in these parts, you’ve quite likely teed up on one or more of his courses, perhaps Stratton Mountain, Mt. Snow or Quechee Lake (one of his personal favorites) in Vermont; Wentworth-by-the-Sea in New Hampshire, Highland Park in New York or the sweet par-3 Blue Rock on Cape Cod. And although The Pines at International Golf Course in Bolton, Mass. (built in 1959 and updated by Robert Trent Jones 1969) is the world’s longest golf course, playing almost 8,400 yards from the legendary back tees — consistently ranked as the toughest course in the continental United States — his courses are consistently considered a pleasure to play.

Greens can be small, fairways narrow, bunkers and mounds strategically placed, but you won’t encounter blind shots, steep climbs, sharp drop-offs or quirky natural problems. Like Hickory Ridge near his home, Cornish courses are designed for everyone, and they’re easy to walk.

In his book The Architects of Golf, Cornish wrote, “A great course is one that’s worthy of hosting an Open tournament yet comfortable for the average golfer.”

A huge advocate for walking, Cornish says, “Golf carts have attracted more people to golf, but it’s much better if you walk. Only about 7 percent walk as far as I can make out. Even high school kids take carts. Isn’t it incredible? They go for workouts and all that, but they won’t walk the golf course.”

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Cornish studied agronomy at the University of British Columbia in the 1930s. His move into golf course design was jump-started when Canadian architect Stanley Thompson hired him to help with the soil at Capilano Golf Club, a course Thompson was building in Vancouver.

“I had just graduated from University of British Columbia in soil science,” he recalls. “Jobs were hard to find in the Depression, and Stanley told me all he could give me was five weeks of work at the most.” But Cornish would stay with Thompson for several years with time out to serve as greenskeeper at St. Charles Country Club in Winnipeg and a stint in the Canadian Army in World War II.

These were the days when Thompson kept mighty busy in the 1920s and early ’30s, completing more than 145 courses between 1920 and 1953, including his masterpieces at Banff Springs and Jasper Park in Alberta. Robert Trent Jones had joined him in 1930 as a partner while Donald Ross was charging up and down the rail lines building classic tracks from Florida and North Carolina to Nova Scotia and A.W. Tillinghast (“Tilly the Terror”) was cutting his own swath in the business.

As for Ross, Cornish remembers the designer to be a “wonderful person” but also that he and Thompson were bitter competitors: “Both Scots, they took their work very seriously and were not always on the most friendly terms even though they were very similar.”

But it was Thompson who helped move Cornish’s career from soil toward design, latter offering him an opportunity to come east for $75 a month. In 1940, the University of Massachusetts hired him to teach turf grass management, one of the smartest moves of his life. It was at the university where he met Carol Burr Gawthrop, who became not only a life partner when they married in 1951 but a business partner as well when Cornish opened his own golf design business with the woman he always called “my bride.”

Carol took most of the photographs, made clay models showing course contours and assisted her husband in artwork and drafting. Photos of her are prominently displayed in his home and a garden out back was her creation.

Though the couple loved to play golf themselves, “I played very little once I got into the business,” Cornish says. “I was surprised by how busy I got.”

It was a good time to get into the industry. After the slowdown caused by WWII, more than 100 courses were opening each year by the 1950s, with that number swelling to 400 a year in the ’60s thanks to favorable financing and the move from hand laborers using shovels, rakes, wheelbarrows and picks to modern earth-moving equipment.

The 1970s brought skyrocketing costs and inflation along with a shift to building on less desirable sites rather than prime land that had become more valuable for real estate development. Yet with the use of heavy-duty equipment, such ugly duckling sites as landfills and rock-strewn terrain emerged as swans under the hands of talented designers like Cornish, Jones, the Fazios and Pete Dye.

One of the biggest challenges Cornish faced was building the Connecticut Golf Club in Easton, a male-only club. “When I first looked at the site, which was solid rock, I told Larry Wein, owner of the Empire State Building and real estate magnate who was financing the project, that it would be impossible to build a course there.

“Wein told me to never mind, that every one was always telling him that. Then he told me he needed the course in two years and to get going. ‘Don’t you even want to know what I charge?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘They say you’re honest.’ It was really a tough one, but I had unlimited funds to work with.”

Cornish’s work habits required getting a good day’s worth by rising at 3 a.m. He often took early morning walks and liked to explore course sites on foot, putting the location of each tree, stone and brook into his memory bank. He likes to quote Ross: “God created golf holes. It’s the duty of the architect to discover them.”

Cornish’s “Bible” and inspiration were the fine Scottish links, including one of his favorites, The Old Course at St. Andrews. “I told my students they needed to get over there. If they didn’t, they were like divinity students who had never read the Bible.” It’s not surprising he is not very keen on artificial features like man-made waterfalls.

During Harvard’s Golf Course Design course, a two-day seminar he gave annually for 25 years along with Robert Muir Graves, among his suggestions to students were keeping away from starting the front or back nine with a par 3 or short par 4 — it would clog up play — and not routing holes into early morning or late afternoon glare.

Cornish doesn’t mind the trend to toughen up courses, but he believes in providing options. “You can add bunkers to catch stray shots of big hitters, but they should be placed so higher handicappers won’t reach them,” he notes.

Asked about the future of golf and course architecture, Cornish says, “We’re not going in the right direction. Ten years ago there were 35 million golfers in the country, now there are only 25 million.

After the war, Cornish recalls, “We had worse debt as compared to today’s dollars than we have now, but people felt it was a cardinal sin to pass on this debt to another generation. People were willing to pay high taxes and work it out and they did. That didn’t leave much money for golf. A lot of people wanted to play golf but didn’t have the money.

“With my bride, I got the idea for ‘work in progress’ courses. Everyone wanted the best courses but couldn’t necessarily afford them, so we started designing courses to be built in stages. When they first opened, they would be very playable with great greens, mostly roll-up, but things like bunkers were designed to be added later. Many courses in the Boston area — like Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord, for instance — got started this way.

“Over the years features were added as money became available and the system worked pretty well. Sometimes a club would decide to add bunkers over the winter and when the members got back in spring there might be an outburst of horror. Ironically, it usually came from lower handicappers who had been complaining the course wasn’t tough enough.”

Cornish says the folks at Foxborough Country Club in Massachusetts and Ithaca Country Club in New York were pretty typical of how the memberships took pride in their golf courses.

“In those days we didn’t have mechanical stone pickers so members would come out on weekends and pick all the stones out of the landscape. My bride and I tried to turn up at these stone picking parties, and we had a heck of a good time. Of course there was always a keg of beer that was opened at the start of things.”

It was a far cry from the lack of sacrifice demonstrated in recent times.
“Up to a couple of years ago there seemed to be unlimited funds — everyone wanted the best and they got it,” Cornish says. “Today’s architects are the most talented in the entire history of our profession. They’ve created the greatest landscape features we’ve ever seen, but much of the money has gone into high-end courses which have crowded out the beginner and guy or gal who doesn’t have $100 for green fees every week. You don’t get much of a course for less than $50 today, do you?”

Although Cornish respects some of the golfing stars getting into the field, he says, “What we really need are dedicated new young people to come along who are interested in growing the profession.”

He admits that if he were starting out today, his work and business plan would be much different.

“When I started, much of the land I was working with looked like a golf course before we’d placed the first stake. Today much of this quality land is not available. But today’s earth-moving equipment can mold the terrain to fit our designs.”

Over the years, Cornish has partnered with Bill Robinson, Brian Silva, Mark Mungeam and Timothy D. Gerrish.

On Cape Cod, Cornish designed Cranberry Valley with Robinson, and with Silva he designed Bayberry Hills, Captains Golf courses in Brewster, and Ocean Edge (since redesigned by Jack Nicklaus). The hilly, holly-planted Olde Barnstable Fairgrounds, he says, “Was Mark’s (Mungeam’s) creation.
Very recently, Mungeam and Gerrish went out on their own, a move that Cornish says, makes him “a bit sad.”

But he says generously, “I always wanted to hold back on things. They wanted the right of way.”

A curious sidelight to his career are the 50 or so floodlit pitch ‘n’ putt courses he built more than 50 years ago across New England. Shorter than 3-pars but immensely popular at the time, few remain today. “I’m not sure pitch ‘n’ putt would go over well today,” he says, “but it sure promoted the construction of regulation courses. It got golf into their blood.”

And although he says, “I’m afraid I live in the past,” his actions belie that. He may not be designing any new courses nor writing new books, but he spends a lot of time on the phone talking to those seeking information on golf course design.

One of his newest passions delves into the “Evolved Response Hypothesis” and how it promotes golf, a topic his friend and neighbor, William Zimmerman, is working with. It suggests golf courses are miniature savannahs, as in Africa, with trees, ponds and safe areas that give you a sense of well-being when you’re playing.

Geoffrey Cornish remains an indefatigable walker, although these days he admits to a nap after lunch. Another thing: He has already hand cut, with a buzz saw, a three-year supply of firewood. It’s all stacked neatly in his back yard.

Before I left Amherst, I walked with him across the narrow road onto Fiddlers Green to a sturdy young tree. He likes to stop there. At the base is a plaque in his bride’s memory.