Seth Raynor

Seth Raynor (* 1874 in New York ; † January 23, 1926 in Palm Beach ) was an American golf architect . He is considered to be one of the main representatives of the golden age of golf architecture .

life and work

Seth Raynor's first encounter with golf was at the age of 17 when he helped his father survey the site for the construction of what would later become the famous Shinnecock Hills Golf Club . However, this experience initially had no influence on Raynor, who subsequently lost sight of golf for almost two decades. He first studied civil engineering and geodesy at Princeton before settling in Southampton as a land surveyor and civil engineer and starting a family.

In 1906, Charles Blair Macdonald came to Long Island in search of a plot of land for his planned National Golf Links of America . Two years later he had decided on an area near Shinnecock Hills and hired Seth Raynor to survey it. He quickly proved to be the ideal assistant, as his modest but confident demeanor and his balancing character were a good complement to the quick-tempered and authoritarian Macdonald. He soon discovered Raynor's diverse engineering talents and promoted him to construction manager for the National Golf Links of America. After the great success of this project, Raynor even rose to become a full partner in 1914. Together, Macdonald and Raynor realized Piping Rock (1913), Sleepy Hollow (1914), The Greenbrier (1915) and the Lido Course (1919). Despite the somewhat tense relationship between the members of the National Golf Links and Shinnecock, in 1916 they also worked on the course of the neighboring club, which wanted to regain its position as the most prestigious club in the region.

Macdonald was an enthusiastic and good golfer, his main motivation was always to be able to play on the course to be built himself and to optimize it over the years if necessary. Seth Raynor, on the other hand, was a poor and less motivated golfer, he was more enthusiastic about the creative design work and the engineering challenges involved in transforming the site. So it happened that Macdonald withdrew more and more often from the projects and left the field to his partner.

One of Raynor's first own projects was the course on Fishers Island in 1917 , further important courses followed with Camargo (1921), Shoreacres (1921) and Yeaman's Hall (1925). Also of note are his redesigns of the Chicago Golf Club (1923) and Augusta Country Club (1926). Since business was going very well, he hired two assistants in 1921, Ralph Barton and Charles Banks. Nevertheless, his workload remained high and he continued to hurry from building site to building site, also driven by the overwhelming Macdonald. In 1926, he died of pneumonia in Palm Beach, having just returned home from a project in Hawaii and from there immediately drove on to Florida. Charles Banks completed the projects that were running at the time and subsequently designed a number of places on his own before he died in 1931. Charles Blair Macdonald not only had a lasting influence on the style of his students, he also outlived them all.

Stylistically, Seth Raynor took the “template design” to extremes by sometimes combining several templates in one hole. The 4th hole on Fishers Island, for example, is of the Alps type and also has a punchbowl green (a green that is shaped like a funnel so that the ball always rolls into the middle). Another example is the Creek Club's 6th hole, a combination of an inverted redan and a punchbowl green. Overall, however, Raynor maintained a somewhat more moderate style than his mentor, in particular he was able to combine the templates with natural landforms over and over again. He worked on around 50 layouts, almost all of them new designs.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles Blair Macdonald: Scotland's Gift: How America Discovered Golf . Tatra Press, Suffern 2003. ISBN 0966184769

literature

• Geoffrey S. Cornish , Ronald E. Whitten: The Architects of Golf . HarperCollins, New York 1993. ISBN 0062700820

Web links

• The Seth Raynor Society