William S. Flynn (golf architect)

William Stephen Flynn (* 1890 in Milton , Massachusetts , † 1945 in Philadelphia ) was an American golf architect . He is considered to be one of the main representatives of the golden age of golf architecture .

Life

Merion East, view from Tee 4, 1914.

The son of Irish immigrants, William Flynn grew up near the Wollaston Golf Course in Milton, Massachusetts. His neighbor was the local professional and his sister married Fred Pickering, who later became one of the busiest civil engineers in US golf course construction. He was also known to Francis Ouimet , who was the first amateur to win the US Open in 1913 .

After William Flynn first worked on the construction of a golf course in Heartwellville in 1909, he got his first permanent job in 1911 with Hugh Wilson, who was just putting together a team to build the east course of Merion. This soon became one of the most important redesigns of the early golden age . After the square was opened in 1912, Flynn stayed on as a greenkeeper and Wilson's assistant in the construction of the new West Square until 1916, before he accepted his first external contracts and finally went to war. On his return he teamed up with the civil engineer Howard C. Toomey, as his mentor Wilson was no longer able to work as a golf architect for health reasons. With Toomey he built a number of renowned courses until his death in 1933: Lancaster CC (1919), Kittansett (1922), Atlantic City CC (1923), Cherry Hills (1923), Cascades Course at Homestead (1923), Rolling Green ( 1926), Manufacturers CC (1925), Philadelphia CC (1927), Huntingdon Valley (1927), The Country Club at Brookline (1927, 9 holes added), Lehigh CC (1928), Lancaster CC (1930), Indian Creek ( 1930, on a specially created artificial island in Florida) and, as the culmination of his career, the completely new construction of Shinnecock Hills (1931). In total, Flynn can be attributed a little more than 30 new designs and redesigns each.

What is particularly noticeable about Flynn's holes is that he often led them against the natural contours of the terrain and created particularly difficult to hit fairways and greens with sharp breaks and inclines. For example, he required a certain flight curve (draw or fade) for the shot into the green from a position that actually favored the other shot. He often worked on very difficult terrain, for example he designed the Cascades Course on a site that AW Tillinghast had rejected as unsuitable.

He was extremely methodical when planning his golf courses; his construction drawings are among the most detailed of the golden age. Flynn's bunker design was therefore less shaped by aesthetic considerations, rather the strategic benefit was in the foreground. He renounced everything that did not bring additional options into play, so that his places are occasionally criticized as something simple or too similar to one another. Nevertheless, Shinnecock Hills was selected from many applicants for the 100th US Open in 1995 because the course with its consistent orientation can still hold its own against the world's best players.

literature

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