There is a version of American golf history where the Golden Age never happens — where the great courses of the Northeast remain competent but forgettable, and the strategic vocabulary never develops past what was available in Boston and New York at the turn of the century.
That version doesn't exist because of Charles Blair Macdonald. Before him, American golf was a colonial outpost — well-meaning copies of British originals. After him, it had a language, a set of repeatable strategic ideas, and a lineage that produced Seth Raynor, Charles Banks, and ultimately every architect who has ever studied a green complex and asked: what problem is this asking me to solve?
He did it with templates. And if you play golf in America, you have almost certainly stood on one of them.
The American Who Studied Abroad
Macdonald was born in Chicago in 1855 and sent to St. Andrews at sixteen. It was supposed to be an education. It became an obsession. He walked the links of Scotland's east coast — North Berwick, Prestwick, Carnoustie — cataloguing not the aesthetics, but the strategy. The angle. The way a slope defended par more cleverly than a bunker ever could.
When he returned, he found a country trying to play golf in a borrowed language — gentle holes, decorative hazards. No one had figured out that the ground was the point. So Macdonald did something audacious: he built an ideal course — National Golf Links of America, completed in 1911 on Long Island — composed of the best holes he had ever seen, translated into American soil. He didn't copy them. He translated them.
Macdonald's protégé Seth Raynor — a civil engineer with no golf background — became one of the most prolific architects of the Golden Age. Charles Banks followed. Together they built over 100 courses with the template vocabulary. When you play a Macdonald, a Raynor, or a Banks course, you are playing the same ideas that Macdonald first sketched at National Golf Links.
The Redan
Origin: The 15th at North Berwick, Scotland
The Redan is the most copied par-3 in golf. A hole that cannot be overpowered — only solved with shape and judgment.
The original at North Berwick sits on a shelf of land tilted from front-right to back-left, a deep bunker guarding the left approach. The green slopes away at forty-five degrees. Hit it straight and the slope feeds your ball into the bunker or off the left edge. The only play: land short-right and let the contour do the work — a high, soft draw that falls onto the shoulder and feeds left toward the hole.
Macdonald's instructions for his builders were characteristically blunt: "Take a narrow tableland, tilt it a little from right to left, dig a deep bunker on the front side, approach it diagonally, and you have a Redan."
Where to find it: The 8th at Greenbrier Old White. Macdonald built the Old White in 1913 — his first full routing in West Virginia. The 8th is a Redan, and the mountain setting makes the diagonal tilt read even more dramatically than by the sea. You step off the 8th green understanding something about architecture that no yardage book can teach.
The Biarritz
Origin: The Chasm Hole at Biarritz Golf Club, France
The Biarritz is the most dramatic template — a long par-3 with a massive green split by a deep central swale. The front portion is a fairway-like approach; the back sits elevated. Usually north of 200 yards, the gap between front pin and back pin can be three clubs. The original at Biarritz Golf Club in France was built by Willie Dunn Jr. overlooking the Bay of Biscay. Early critics called it "Macdonald's Folly." History calls it one of the most influential par-3 designs ever conceived.
Where to find it: The 9th at Yale. 235 yards, a 65-yard green, and the deepest swale of any Biarritz Macdonald or Raynor ever built. It plays over water. Charles Banks in 1925: "This hole has its original on the Biarritz course at the famous watering hole in France… There is a 163 yard carry from the back tee. The green proper is behind a deep trench in the approach." The swale here doesn't suggest a choice between front and back tier — it demands one. It is, by any measure, the most intimidating Biarritz in existence.
The Alps
Origin: The 17th at Prestwick, Scotland
The Alps is a blind approach hole — typically a par-4 — where a ridge crosses the fairway and blocks the view of the green. The original at Prestwick's 17th sends the approach over a massive dune to a hidden punchbowl green. Playing it requires faith and the discipline to commit to a line you cannot verify.
Where to find it: The 13th at Greenbrier Old White. Macdonald placed the Alps alongside the Redan and Eden. The crest blocks the view; the green sits in a natural bowl beyond. You finish the hole walking up to see whether your ball has found the surface, and that moment — the reveal — is what the template was designed to deliver. No other hole type rewards trust quite like this.
The Eden
Origin: The 11th (High Hole) at St. Andrews Old Course
The Eden is the shortest template — typically 140 to 170 yards — but extracts a disproportionate price for error. A plateau green with severe back-to-front slope. A deep bunker short-left, positioned exactly where the bail-out should be. The original at St. Andrews features the Strath bunker. Miss short-right and you're safe; miss short-left and you can't see the flag. The margin is narrow. The consequences are final.
Where to find it: The 15th at Greenbrier Old White. Macdonald placed the Eden at the closing stretch of the Old White as a quiet but lethal test. The slope and the bunker are enough. That is the template's genius: the architecture supplies the difficulty. The golfer supplies the nerve.
Mid Ocean: The Masterpiece in the Atlantic
No discussion of Macdonald's work is complete without Mid Ocean Club in Bermuda.
If National Golf Links was Macdonald's proof of concept — the laboratory where he demonstrated that the template idea could work on American soil — then Mid Ocean was his victory lap. Built in 1921 on a peninsula jutting into the Atlantic, Mid Ocean takes every strategic principle Macdonald developed and sets it against a backdrop so dramatic that even he struggled to describe it without superlatives.
His own words: "A more fascinating, more picturesque course than the Mid Ocean, will not be found in a pilgrimage around the world; there is nothing commonplace about it."
Macdonald was not a modest man. But on Mid Ocean, he wasn't wrong. The course is routed along the coastline with holes that play over ocean inlets and across terrain that feels constructed by a more ambitious god. The templates are there — you will find the Redan, the Cape, the Short — but they are integrated so naturally into the landscape that you stop looking for the architectural references and start just playing the golf course.
That is the ultimate test of a template: whether it disappears into the land. At Mid Ocean, they disappear completely.
Why This Matters Now
It is easy to think of template holes as historical artifacts — museum pieces preserved on old-money clubs where the greens fee requires a member's signature. But the template idea is more alive than ever.
Tom Doak's Old Macdonald course at Bandon Dunes, completed in 2010, is a full-course reinterpretation of Macdonald's templates built on genuine dunesland. The Lido, recently rebuilt at Sand Valley in Wisconsin, is a faithful reconstruction of Macdonald's lost Long Island masterpiece. At Ballyshear in Thailand, Gil Hanse built a Biarritz that rivals any Golden Age original.
The templates endure because they encode something permanent about golf: that strategy beats strength, that angles matter more than yardage, and that a well-designed hole is a question, not a statement. Macdonald didn't invent these ideas — he recognized them in the best holes in Scotland and France and created a system for reproducing them. The system turned out to be one of the most important contributions any single person has made to the game.