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Fall 2001

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GOLF PROFILE: THE CORNISH GAME

by Allen Woods '80




	NO ONE HAS DONE MORE: Geoffrey Cornish '50G at the Hickory Ridge Country Club, a course he designed. Photo by Ben Barnhart.

GEOFFREY CORNISH '50 SAYS THAT "as designers, we establish the cornerstone of the game,” and the same metaphor could be applied to his personal achievement. Cornish is one of the most celebrated golf course architects in the world. With over 50 years of research, writing, and teaching on the art of golf course design to his credit, and some 250 courses around the world credited to his Uxbridge firm, Cornish, at 87, is one of the cornerstones on which much of today’s golf world has been built.

“No one has done more over the years to promote golf in New England than Geoff,” says one of his partners, Brian Silva ’73, 76’G. (Silva is a designer with multiple national honors of his own, among them Golf World magazine’s Architect of the Year for 1993). “And no one has done more for the game nationally and internationally with as little recognition.”

Cornish has a tendency to deflect praise, but the length and prominence of his career give him a perspective few can match. A native of Manitoba whose undergraduate education was at the University of British Columbia, he spent his apprenticeship years in Vancouver and Winnepeg in the ’30s and ’40s. He sees the popularity of golf as being closely tied to economics, not only on a personal level – “Everyone wants to play golf but not everyone can afford to” – but on a societal one. In the mid-20th century golf course design “almost became a lost art,” says Cornish, due to a combination of the Great Depression and “the fact that during World War II building a course or even playing golf was considered a bit unpatriotic.”

It was after the war, and after he earned his master’s in agronomy at UMass in 1950, that Cornish began designing courses in earnest. He credits the work of faculty pioneer Lawrence Dickinson and others in “changing turf grass management from an art into a science,” reshaping the work of golf course designers and superintendents around the world. Cornish himself taught at UMass’s Stockbridge School and served as faculty resident at the Butterfield dormitory from 1947-52, while his wife, Carol, served as women’s placement officer for the campus. “We have many connections with UMass and we are proud of all of them,” Cornish says.

THE YEARS SINCE 1953, WHEN his first courses opened in Brewster and Groton, have been packed with accomplishment: some 80 designs and redesigns in Massachusetts, hundreds more nationally and internationally, and authorship, with Ron Whitten, of what has been called “the bible of course design studies.” (The Golf Course, 1981, revised, expanded, and republished in 1993 as Architects of Golf .)

His Golf Course Design, based on workshops he began giving at Harvard with Robert Muir Graves in 1985, was published in 1998 as the definitive college text on the subject. (At a less rarified level, a recent visit to Amazon.com reveals that it’s still possible to find copies of Your Guide to a Greener Lawn, illustrated by Carol Cornish and published in Boston in 1953.) Today, while Silva keeps the Uxbridge office humming, Cornish still works a 50-60 hour week from his home in Amherst. “We are considered one of the more active firms,” he concedes.

In the late 1950s and ’60s, when golf investment money was ebbing rather than flowing, Cornish devised a strategy of “work-in-progress” courses which particularly suited the New England economy. “We would design the course and build some of the holes and sign up members before everything was complete,” he says. “In some cases, I don’t think the members knew that there was work still to be done!” This “piecemeal” approach resulted in such courses as Spring Valley and Nashawtuc in Massachusetts, both commonly used in professional events.

Golf course design is “a fascinating profession that requires technical and scientific knowledge combined with creativity and vision,” says Cornish. “Today it’s quite lucrative and hard to get into. We have many talented young people offer to work for our firm free of charge just to get into the field.”

For his part, says Cornish. “It’s the land, what God put there, that always inspires me.” He can hardly walk on any piece of land “without looking at a spot and saying ‘There should be a golf hole there.’” And when he walks land destined to be a golf course, “I see 100 holes out there. I just have to settle on 18 of them.”

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