Historian An Expert On Macdonald Design Philosophy

By David Shefter, USGA



Charles B. Macdonald was instrumental in helping form the USGA. (USGA Photo Archives)


Far Hills, N.J. - Most fires bring about an unfortunate ending, especially when the destruction involves a building of sentimental value. When the clubhouse at The Knoll in Parsippany went up in flames in the mid-1980s, a number of valuable items were lost.

That disaster actually turned into a blessing for the members and fans of architects Charles Blair Macdonald, Seth Raynor and Charles Banks.

More important, it sparked a whole new career for George Bahto. Up until that point, Bahto had spent nearly his entire adult life following in the footsteps of his father, a Turkish immigrant, in the dry-cleaning business.

As a youth, Bahto was a good enough shortstop to play baseball briefly in the Philadelphia Athletics' minor-league system. But the Korean War ended any hopes of a big-league career. That's when Bahto turned to golf, a game he first picked up while caddieing for his father as a child. Following the war, Bahto, who is now 73, played at two public New Jersey courses: Hendricks Field in Belleville and Essex County West in West Orange before settling in at The Knoll, which originally was a private facility built by 30 millionaires before going public in the 1970s. What Bahto didn't realize before the fire was that all three courses were connected by the same figure - Charles Banks. Banks was a protégé of Seth Raynor who acquired his design philosophies from Charles Blair Macdonald, known better as the "Father of American Golf Architecture."

The board members at The Knoll - Bahto was on the board - decided they wanted to rebuild the clubhouse and recapture some of the things lost in the fire. They turned to Bahto, who had no previous experience in such endeavors but decided to take on the project of writing a club history. He visited the USGA's headquarters in Far Hills and started digging through the archives looking for any valuable information. He discovered that Banks was the man responsible for The Knoll as well as the other area courses he had played. What he found he put into the club history.

"The book was OK," said Bahto. "I had some of my drawings in it. But I discovered that Raynor was the real story. So I figured I'd write a Seth Raynor book as a follow-up."

Bahto's initial problem was the apparent lack of information. Raynor rarely wrote anything down because he was so busy designing courses. At the time of his death in 1926, he still had numerous unfinished projects. And when Bahto started contacting golf courses that were built by Raynor - most are ultra-private -- the response was one of overwhelming skepticism.

"Everybody asked, 'What kind of scam do you got going? You just want to play our golf course,'" said Bahto, who to that point had not developed any reputation as a golf historian. "Once I got past the confidence of National (Golf Links in Southampton, N.Y.) and Fishers Island (N.Y.)," he said, "then everyone's door started opening up."

It was Bahto's passion and ambition that drove the Raynor project toward completion. Yet, the more research Bahto conducted, the more he realized that this first book would have to be about Macdonald. Several years of research went into "The Evangelist of Golf: The Story of Charles Blair Macdonald." In fact, Bahto had so much material that he had to leave a lot of the information gathered about Raynor out of the book; he's saving it for when he eventually does publish a book on Macdonald's protégé.

Charles Blair Macdonald owns a special place in American golf history. He was instrumental in forming the USGA in 1894 and became, in 1895, the first U.S. Amateur champion. But it's his design of The National Golf Links of America on eastern Long Island that secured his highest acclaim. It took him four years to build it, but Bahto said Macdonald spent some 25 years tinkering with and tweaking the layout. And it was here where Macdonald first met and hired Raynor, initially as a surveyor of the property and then as an assistant with the design. The two forged an everlasting relationship that soon led to other projects.

Although most of Bahto's book is devoted to Macdonald's strategic design philosophies such as those found in the famous Redan, Short, and Biarritz holes, he does spend some time discussing many of the courses Macdonald helped design, including Piping Rock (Long Island), St. Louis Country Club, Sleepy Hollow (Westchester County, N.Y.) and White Sulphur Springs (West Virginia).

"Nobody had thought about this before," Bahto said of Macdonald's principle of incorporating some of the strategic architecture found in the British Isles. "They just built natural holes in the ground. Macdonald wanted these strategies to work and if they weren't there (naturally), he built them. Remember this was 1910. He was moving dirt with a scoop and a horse. It's just amazing."

Bahto, who spoke to a group of architectural buffs recently at the USGA about his book and the Macdonald/Raynor/Banks lineage, has become such an expert on the designs of this triumvirate that he formed his own consulting company (he has been called in to restore specific holes at some courses). Bahto claims to be able to walk out on any course designed by one of these great architects and instantly tell if the hole is an original or if it has been altered.

He recently designed his own course on Long Island (Stoneridge) that is devoted entirely to Raynor's style.

"The thrill of my life was doing this course," Bahto said of Stoneridge, a public facility that opened in 2001. "Here I had this thing come out of the ground the way I envisioned it."


David Shefter is a staff writer for the USGA. Contact him with questions or comments at dshefter@usga.org .