"My brilliant idea is for a golf course built by committee"

Let's hope Larry Olmsted's solution to the Olympic Golf Course design commission puzzle is not adopted. Then again, it would make a fantastic documentary and study of clashing egos!

Two or three like Nicklaus could be appointed as a committee to roughly route the course, but then – check this idea out – the eighteen holes would be pulled out of a hat, ensuring that the committee does not make the routing to give themselves the best land, and puts pressure on them to make the entire course good from the get go. A designer cannot do the master plan and then complain the hole he drew was inferior. You could have 18 architects, or 9 doing two holes each.

The reason this has never really been done is because the result would theoretically lack continuity, but the reality is that most single designer courses, even those by the top architects, lack continuity. On the average Nicklaus, Dye or Fazio course, the layout of the third hole has little to do with your experience on fifteen, and when the course does build to a crescendo of some sort, or feature sections that are thematically different, this is dictated by the natural site, such as an oceanfront finish.