This should be good news to green chairmen and superintendents. When it comes to course renovation and restoration projects, too many of today's architects have been more concerned with imposing their own style than with enhancing the virtues of old layouts.

Nowhere has this process been more evident than in the Northeast, where some fine old layouts have been compromised through a combination of carelessness and willful disdain for tradition. A few too many regionally based architects got involved with classical courses even though their own design work did not show the requisite sensitivity.

The Donald Ross Society, based in Bloomfield, Connecticut, has organized to prevent this by educating the golfing public. According to the Society's executive director, Michael Fay, the group's 1,400 dues-paying members have a shared interest in promoting an appreciation of classical courses. The non-profit group also recognizes the importance of traditional designers other than Ross and provides consultation to clubs interested in redoing - the actual buzzword is "restoring" - their courses.

The Society has developed a nationwide network of architecture aficionados. Its membership includes such designers as Ben Crenshaw, Tom Doak, Arthur Hills, Michael Hurdzan, Rees Jones, Dan Maples, Jack Nicklaus and Bobby Weed. North Carolina-based archivist W. Pete Jones has exhaustively documented the courses properly credited to the handiwork of Donald Ross and can track down existing sketches and design plans for various Ross projects. A number of member designers, including Ed Connor, Ron Forse, Stephen Kay and Ron Prichard, have landed prominent design contracts to implement restoration plans.

The Society has also initiated a scholarship fund for university students interested in spending their studies through on-site course recovery projects. In mid-May of each year, the Donald Ross Society holds a rabble-rousing meeting in Pinehurst. On the agenda, besides golf, is an awards dinner where scholarships are announced, honorees acknowledged, and much ice consumed in the process.

The group traces its beginning to 1988, when some members at the circa-1926 Ross-designed Wampanoag CC in West Hartford, Connecticut, decided to go back to the original design of their layout.

Actually, architectural compromises at Wampanoag had begun a half-century earlier, many of them by a nationally regarded golfer (and many-time club champion) with a penchant for hooking the ball. Needless to say, the left sides of many greens were cleared of their bunkers. The latest round of changes, by contrast, had been partially dictated by the need to address agronomic problems. For some members, the resulting alterations proved out of character with the course's basic design. In the late 1980's, when members began seeing other Ross layouts in nearby Massachusetts - like The Orchards in South Hadley, or the 9-hole gem at Whitinsville just south of Worcester - they began to organize themselves as the Donald Ross Touring Society. The name sounded a tad elitist, which was not what the group had in mind. So the group rechristened itself the Donald Ross Society.

There are often good reasons for a club to consider reconstruction and to call upon an architect. First of all, a golf course is an organic composition that naturally undergoes changes. Trees grow in, bunker faces erode, silt builds up in drainage pipes. Modern maintenance techniques also exact a toll: the use of triplex mowers on the greens often leads to a rounding off of playing surfaces, and mechanical bunker rakes wear down the edges of traps where they enter and exit.

Now add some other factors. A green committee, in the interest of laborsaving innovations, decides to take out those old cross-bunkers 130 yards in front of a tee. High-handicappers in search of lower scores decide to cut down the rough that had normally been knee-high.

Other members, impressed by the championship courses they see on television, decide to emulate the "all green" look by (over)watering everything. This softens the course and takes out the ground game, while requiring all shots to be flown to the green rather than bumped and run. Now those bunkers 30 yards short of the green lose their bite. Add in a green chairman all too willing to "make his mark" on the golf course and you've got a pretty standard formula for the loss of design integrity design.

Small wonder that so many traditional courses are considered obsolete today. Sometimes there is a well-intentioned superintendent or green chairman (or finance chairman) who wants to update and modernize (or, heaven forbid, "toughen") the golf course - in part to attract new members, or in the case of Oak Hill's East Course, in order to attract major tournaments.

The shame of it is that few architects take the trouble to educate their clients of the virtues of a classical design. Indeed, all too many designers today are looking for work and are willing to comply when the honest answer to the club would be a resounding "no."

Even when needed work is undertaken, few designers bother to search out old plans. Fewer yet are interested in a master plan for redesign that would essentially restore the course. Not every old golf course is a masterpiece. Nor was every course attributed to Ross is the product of his personal handiwork. Many of the courses overseen by his on-site crew chiefs, Walter Hatch and J.B. McGovern, were not built precisely to Ross' original designs. Nonetheless, there often exist early plans worthy of consultation, if not emulation.

Week after week, the spirit of Donald Ross is reaffirmed. At tournament layouts, private clubs, and daily-fee facilities throughout North America, golfers have a more interesting game to play thanks to the genius and legacy of this pioneering Scotsman.

Bradley S. Klein is the author of the award winning biography: "Discovering Donald Ross"