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Featuring ASGCA Members and their work

Geoffrey Cornish

Mungeam Cornish Golf Design
Amherst, MA

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Biographical Sketch

1. Cornish and his associates, over the years, have created well over 200 new courses including nine hole additions now in play in the United States, Canada, Central America and Europe.

2. They have also planned major changes at many renowned clubs from Coast to Coast.

3. Until 2000, along with Bob Graves, famous West Coast Golf Architect, Cornish conducted a two-day seminar annually for the Harvard Graduate School of Design and similar seminars around the nation, under the auspices of the Golf Course Superintendents Association and the Professional Golfers Association.

4. Since 1986 Cornish has been listed in Who's Who in America.

5. Cornish is a Past President of the American Society of Golf Course Architects and an Honorary Member of the European Institute of Golf Course Architects.

6. Cornish holds a Bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia together with a Master's and Honorary Doctorate from the University of Massachusetts.

7. Cornish is co-author with Ron Whitten of The Golf Course, the only definitive history of golf course design and said to be one of the widest selling books in golf history. After five printings by publisher W.H. Smith, it has been republished by Harper/Collins, in a revised and elaborate form, under the title The Architects of Golf.

In collaboration with Bob Graves, Cornish co-authored Golf Course Design, a college-level textbook published in 1998 by John Wiley and Sons and Classic Golf Hole Design, 2002, aslo published by John Wiley and Sons. In 2002, he edited Eighteen Stakes on a Sunday Afternoon, a chronicle of North American Course Architecture, for the British publisher Grant Books.

8. Brian Silva is less than half the age of Cornish but is rapidly becoming more renowned, as is Mark Mungeam. Their many achievements include Silva's selection for redoing greens and bunkers at Florida's famed Seminole, and Mungeam's for revamping Olympia Fields in Chicago for the 2003 Open. Staff include Timothy D. Gerrish and Brian Johnson, both graduate landscape architects of renown.

9. National Awards: GCSAA Distinguished Service Award (1981), ASGCA's Donald Ross Award (1982), NGF Outstanding Service Award (1984), John Reid Lifetime Achievement Award from the Metropolitan GCSA, New York (1991) together with the Canadian Golf Course Superintendents John Steel Award in 1992. In 1996 he was awarded the Golf Course Builders Association of America's Don A. Rossi Humanitarian Award. In September 1996 he received the Silver Medal at the Silver Jubilee Conference of British Institute of Course Architects and in October 1996 he was inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame.

10. Born: Winnipeg, Canada. August 6, 1914.
Died: Amherst, Massachusetts. February 10, 2012.
Military Service: Canadian Army Overseas, 1940-1945.