In 1907 Charles Blair Macdonald hired Seth Raynor to assist with the construction of the audacious National Golf Links of America, Macdonald’s effort to build the best golf course in the United States. No one, not even the two men themselves, could have predicted the consequences of this seemingly innocuous hire. Macdonald the mentor and Raynor, the 19 years younger student would go on to have profound effect on golf architecture in the United States, their influence felt to this day – more than a hundred years after they met.

Raynor, a civil engineer, was well-known and popular in the town of Southampton, NY, on the southern fork of eastern Long Island near the National. He came from an upper middle class family, earned a degree in engineering from Princeton University and knew nothing of golf.

Macdonald, a successful New York stockbroker, was moneyed and hobnobbed with some of the most powerful American families. From Chicago, he fell in love with golf while attending St Andrews University. One of America’s best golfers, he was a bombastic tyrant who, as the story goes, wrote his nephew out of his will after he won a bet against him by driving the first green at National.

The reserved Raynor was Macdonald’s complete opposite. The writer who conducted the only known interview with Raynor described him as “a man so reserved that like a person with a passion for shut-in life he seemed deliberately concealing the best part of himself lest I might get something out of him.”

Raynor knew nothing of golf when he came to work for Macdonald. Born and raised in Southampton, he was a street commissioner and served on the draft board during the First World War. He married a local woman, Mary Hallock, in 1903 when he was 28. They had no children. His biography from a Princeton publication commemorating the 25th anniversary of his class reads: “For a number of years he engaged in Engineering Work in Connection with roads, sewers, drainage, water works, etc. He then became interested in Golf Course Designing and Building of Golf Courses.”

It is a monumental understatement to say that Raynor ‘became interested’ in golf course architecture. It would have been more accurate to write that beginning with his work at the National, golf design came to dominate the rest of his life. As partner to Macdonald, he oversaw the construction of some of America’s greatest courses before going out on his own to craft layouts that rivalled his mentor’s work. What makes his success all the more amazing is that Raynor did not pick up a golf club until he was in his early forties and had worked on at least four Macdonald designs before doing so. His creations, such as the Golf Course at Yale, Fishers Island Club and Camargo are some of the most acclaimed in the US.

Raynor’s design career lasted only 19 years; he died of pneumonia in 1926 at the age of 51, succumbing in a West Palm Beach hotel with his wife at his side. He was in Florida for the opening of one of his layouts: the majority of his work can be found up and down the Atlantic seaboard, though his portfolio extends to California, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. He built in Tennessee, Illinois, and Missouri, visiting each site at least once, which meant a hectic travel schedule in the days when the mode of long-distance travel was by train and steamship. As is well known, at National, Macdonald conceived the idea of creating America’s first world-class golf course with holes based on the best found on the links of the British Isles (and in one case France). Many of the hole designs at National made up the core of templates for all his future golf courses and the courses of Raynor, as well.

These were not mere copies slapped down at each site, but rather variations on the originals where the strategy was adapted to the land. For instance, the Redan par three at National (based on the original at North Berwick), with its green that tilts from the back right hand corner to the front left, became a Reverse Redan that tilts from back left to front right on courses such as Raynor’s Dedham Country and Polo Club in Massachusetts.

When no template fit a location, Macdonald and Raynor did not hesitate in coming up with their own designs. In Macdonald’s book, Scotland’s Gift – Golf, he quotes a 1910 Metropolitan Magazine article written by Horace Hutchinson: “…several of the best and most victorious holes on the other side are here seen reproduced with a faithfulness which is a testimony to the scientific care, the labour, the money which have been lavished on it…but the larger number, and possibly the best in character, have been planned out of the designer’s brain with such suggestions as his experience, gathered in Europe, and the natural trend of the ground he had to deal with, supplied to it.”

Raynor’s grasp of Macdonald’s ideas is remarkable, given that he had never played golf or worked on a golf course; he is possibly the only heralded American golf designer to not at least have a modicum of golfing talent and play the game regularly. Macdonald wrote: “He scarcely knew a golf ball from a tennis ball when we first met, and although he never became much of an expert at playing golf, yet the facility with which he absorbed the feeling which animates old and enthusiastic golfers to the manner born was truly amazing, eventually qualifying him to discriminate between a really fine hole and an indifferent one.”

The phrase, “he absorbed the feeling which animates old and enthusiastic golfers,” is key. He was as much an artist as he was an engineer and knew designing golf holes was not akin to laying out roads. The angles on his Redan greens in relationship to the tee may be extremely similar from course to course but the pitch and the undulations of the putting surfaces are not.

In an article on Raynor in the March 1918 edition of The Olympian, the house magazine of the Olympic Club in San Francisco, the author, Theodore F. Bonnet, describes Raynor discussing his plans for the Lake Side course: “The holes he sees precisely as a musician sees the notes as they are written in the sheet of music though there is no sheet before him.” It is Raynor’s only known interview and the only insight into the man other than Macdonald’s words in Scotland’s Gift.

Macdonald essentially gave up golf architecture in 1917, according to his book, occasionally venturing back for a handful of projects, some his own and some Raynor’s, on which he acted as consultant. These included the long gone nine hole Ocean Links that bordered Newport (Rhode Island) Country Club and the Golf Course at Yale. One Long Island newspaper story from 1922 reported that Macdonald and Raynor teamed with Devereux Emmet on the design of the Women’s National Golf and Tennis Club, which no longer exists.

There is no official tally of how many courses Raynor laid out or worked on. Macdonald has about 17, while in The Olympian, Raynor said he had built 60 courses. At that point, he still had eight more years of work ahead of him, including all his most acclaimed work. Even 60 is an amazing number considering Raynor’s first solo work came in 1914 and he was dead by January of 1926. The total does not include projects on which his designs were rejected or not built. Ironically, at the Olympic Club, he submitted a complete renovation drawing for the Lake Side course, but another designer was chosen.

The list of known Raynor courses seemingly grows yearly. In 2014, it was discovered that he drew up the nine hole plan for the Taft School in northwestern Connecticut, though he was not present for construction. He visited Taft while working on the Yale course and building a nine-hole layout for the Hotchkiss School, a Taft rival. Only a couple of greens remain from the Taft design, located on a practice range of Watertown Country Club.

A typical Raynor design is Wanumetonomy Country Club in Rhode Island, barely touched in nearly a hundred years. Wanumetonomy came about while Raynor was building the nearby Ocean Links for the extremely wealthy T. Suffern Tailer. At the same time Raynor was contracted to design 18 holes for Wanumetonomy, a more blue-collar clientele with a smaller budget. The design is not Raynor’s best but by no means is it a course to be skipped. It has a handful of wonderful holes including an Eden par three with a massive green and an outrageous Maiden green at the end of a par four. Interestingly, there is neither a Redan nor Biarritz par three the only Raynor course that lacks both.

Along with sticking to the templates and Macdonald’s lessons, another reason Raynor never produced a dud is that he excelled at routing a golf course. Whether it was on a flat piece of ground like at Country Club of Charleston or on a site with a sharply rising ridge on one end of the property such as Somerset Country Club in Minnesota, he made 18 fine holes.

With little elevation on such layouts as Charleston or Southampton Country Club, he weaves through the property, with consecutive holes rarely playing in the exact same direction. There are doglegs and straight corridors, but never a feeling of redundancy.

In Scotland’s Gift, Macdonald explained how to get the best out of such a property. Of Ocean Links he wrote it “was built upon flat pastureland but by building up the greens and bunkering them after classical models the course is most interesting.”

Conversely, on sites with significant elevation changes, such as Lookout Mountain and the original Somerset routing golfers never find themselves fighting the contours as they travel the course.

Even at Yale, considered by many his best design, Raynor takes golfers up and down a number of inclines on the testing site but one never has the feeling of are mountaineering instead of golfing. (OK, except for maybe the up and over route on 18th hole, but that’s a story for another day.)

Architect Brian Silva has renovated and restored a number of Raynor layouts including Fox Chapel, Mountain Lake, Lookout Mountain, Southampton and Charleston. He says both Raynor and Macdonald made sure “to get the skeleton and route plan correct.” By skeleton, Silva mean the bones of the golf course, tees, greens and bunkers, all combining to form the strategy. Silva surmises that Raynor thought least about the skin, the aesthetics of the course, the opposite of many modern architects. Walk off any Raynor layout and you’ll not find yourself talking about the look of the bunkers, but how far below the greens the bunker floors were, sometimes close to 30 feet, and where they were placed to affect shots. While the floor of a Raynor bunker might be well below the green, the bunkers themselves are easy to walk in and out of and maintain.

The lines of Raynor’s bunkers are clean and simple but not geometric. There are only a few known examples of ragged edge bunkers, and no instances of bunkers with the capes and bays that are the earmarks of an Alister MacKenzie course. “He wasn’t overly-possessed with the look,” Silva says.

After playing a Raynor course, besides the bunkers, you will also converse about the massive greens that switch between audacious and subtle. The more adept golfer will also discuss shot options and the multiple routes provided for each hole, exactly what Macdonald and Raynor thought most important.

Raynor grasped Macdonald’s genius: he was famously quoted as saying he wished he had ‘the ears of a donkey or an ass’ so he could hear everything Macdonald said.

“To my mind every aspirant who wishes to excel in golf architecture should learn by heart and endeavour to absorb the spirit of the following lines, copied from ‘The Art of Landscape Architecture,’ written by the great Humphry Repton in 1797,” wrote Macdonald. “‘I can only plead that true taste in every art, consists more of adapting tried expedients to peculiar circumstances than in the inordinate thirst after novelty, the characteristic of uncultivated minds, which from the facility of inventing wild theories, without experience, are apt to suppose that taste is displayed by novelty, genius by innovation, and that ever change must necessarily tend to improvement.’”

Raynor never tried to reinvent the wheel on his own work. He knew – no matter what any modern architects espouse – that there are no new golf holes. When he did venture away from templates, Raynor created holes that called for thought on the part of the golfer and rewarded the well-played effort while fairly punishing the miscue. Frequently the fine effort required for a good score came in the form of a testing green.

When faced with a unique site that lent itself to his own designs, Raynor took full advantage. For instance, at Shoreacres on Lake Michigan, Raynor adeptly incorporates a stream and ravine that runs through the property into the architecture. There is no Macdonald layout to which Shoreacres corresponds.

If there is a misinterpretation of Raynor, and Macdonald, it is that they moved heaven and much earth when building a course. They moved dirt to build tees and greens, but in general should be considered minimalists. Yes, much of Lido and parts of Fishers Island were built with tons of sand pumped in from the nearby ocean floor, but that is not how they usually worked. The majority of the fairways at Fishers, or Charleston or Camargo or Midland Hills remain much the same as when Raynor first saw the sites. Like his contemporaries, Raynor used the land he found, adding bunkers where appropriate or massaging small sections of ground to create landing areas. As Silva points out, on a 140-acre golf course, Raynor typically moved about four acres of earth.

An often overlooked quality of the Macdonald/Raynor design philosophy is that they never dumb downed their work for high handicappers. They always incorporated alternate routes, and in some cases constructed forward tees to eliminate long forced carries, for the less talented player, but their courses are unceasing in their challenges to those looking to make a good score.

This philosophy was first implemented at the National, a point English golf writer Bernard Darwin recognised after playing it “If there is one feature of the course that strikes one more than another, it is the constant strain to which the player is subjected; he is perpetually on the rack, always having to play for the flag itself, never able to say to himself that ‘anywhere over the bunker will do’,” he wrote.

This is not to say that Raynor only created difficult holes; he did not. The majority of his greens are open in front, allowing for the bump-and-run. When they aren’t open, the carry to the putting surface is often manageable for most classes of golfer. The par thee Short normally has an elevated green surrounded by sand, but it usually plays about 140 yards from the original tee. The putting surface is commonly more than 8,000 square feet.

So what is Raynor’s greatest design? None are in their original state. There are those who immediately answer “Fishers Island” because of its stunning beauty. Many holes come right to the sea’s edge, all 18 have views of Long Island Sound. Others point to Yale, the boldest of Raynor’s designs.

Maybe Raynor would have thought otherwise: we’ll probably never know. What is known, however, is that by following sound design theories, adhering to concepts that worked, and focusing more on how his courses played than how they looked, Seth Raynor created a legacy that 100 years later serves as a template for the modern day architect striving to create, and modern day golfers yearning to play, interesting and challenging golf courses.

Anthony Pioppi is a golf journalist, and is also executive director of the Seth Raynor Society

This article first appeared in Golf Course Architecture - Issue 40