Dan Marshall does not receive the enormous fees associated with modern-day golf course architecture. Nor do many accolades come his way when a course receives its first players. But without Marshall and his colleagues, the high-powered wizardry with which 1990s course design is accomplished would not exist.

Marshall shapes golf courses for a living, booming from job to job, building greens and tees and fairways, giving life to the designs created by the members of the more celebrated guild of course architects. He's a professional vagabond of sorts, working 10 or 12 or 15 weeks at one location, then moving on to another for a few months, then packing his bags and settling somewhere else. It's a rarity when he's able to spend six months at the same site.

Over his 13-year golf course building career, he's worked in Arizona and New Jersey and almost everywhere in between -- wherever his employer, Colorado-based contractor Neibur Golf, sends him. He has worked in the self-created dust storms of the southwestern desert and tried to maneuver a bulldozer through the soaked, taffy-like clay of Virginia's wettest winter on record. He's shaped courses designed by many prominent and highly regarded architects, but he spends so much time on golf courses that it's the last place he wants to spend his free time.

"When I climb off the 'dozer," he says, "the last thing I think about is playing golf." He figures his work week averages at least 50 hours, but on long summer days he can be on a machine from dawn to dusk.

The marginality of today's sites, as much as anything, has called the shaper into being, just as it has created the extraordinary demand for the contemporary course architect's services. "The true links," wrote Robert Hunter in The Links, "were moulded by divine hands." Wind-whipped sands did mold the dunes on which golf's pioneers played, but the imagination of St. Andrews' original golfers created the Old Course -- clearing gorse and heather, digging bunkers, sanding the closely mown turf. Still, the "look" derived from naturally occuring land forms, establishing a course aesthetic that persists today.

Contemporary courses are built on degraded and reclaimed lands, through and around the kinds of deep canyons and rocky slopes Hunter abhorred. The technology of earthmoving yoked to the imagination of the course architect has generated the great proliferation of courses on terrain for which golf is as naturally suited as a banana plantation is to the Kingdom of Fife.

As a manager for Wadsworth Golf Construction, the country's oldest golf course builder, Tom Shapland has seen the role of shaper change to one of greater prominence. But he still thinks the craftsmen who built Donald Ross' courses had to possess the same kind of knowledge of soils and earth forms, even if they were handling dirt in small wheelbarrow-sized loads or filling little mule-powered earth-scrapers with a couple of cubic yards at a time.

In the end, though, today's shapers are expected to produce something that looks pretty much like what the guys with the wheelbarrows created -- and do it

a whole lot faster.

"Our biggest pressure is produc-tion," Marshall says. "You've got to get your hole a week done. If you have a good rough man, a shaper can blow and go. I can average a hole a week -- a par 5 in four days if I have to."

Apprentice shapers will get their first chance to shape on a tee. If they can make something reasonably flat -- not perfectly flat, because it has to drain, but horizontal enough to feel level -- they'll get to work on cart paths and bunkers. Greens, the final summit, are the most demanding part of course construction, the domain of the "A" shaper.

Most contractors will keep two or three shapers on a job, but sometimes more. A large company like Wadsworth trains its own shapers, moving an operator up the ranks. "The normal progression," says Shapland, "starts with little farm tractors." At the top, a shaper such as Marshall will use a high-powered, high-track D8 Caterpillar, a huge piece of machinery.

Where course sites were once chosen almost exclusively for the quality of the terrain and the suitability of the soils, it's demographics that drive site selection today; courses are built where the people are. Creating the ideal golfing landscape on marginal acreage -- landfills, steep hills, former industrial sites -- requires abundant design intelligence combined with great skill by the builder.

Every project is at some level a collaboration between the architect and the builder. There are two basic approaches to this alliance: the totally designed and engineered version, and the field-created, semi-spontaneous, let's-look-at-it style. (This is not a new dichotomy. In Alister Mackenzie's 1920 classic, Golf Architecture, he describes using plasticine models to show the course builder what he wanted. "Plasticine is useful to teach the green-keeper points in construction he would not otherwise understand," Mackenzie wrote. "It has its disadvantages, however, as a course constructed entirely from models has always had an artificial appearance and can never be done as cheaply as one in which the green-keeper is allowed a comparatively free hand in modeling the undulations.")

In one version, the architect is clearly in charge, and the shapers must carefully follow a set of plans and detailed specifications, just like a contractor building a house works from a set of blueprints.

In the other, the shaper creates and the course architect reacts to what's in place. California architect Ted Robinson, for example, expects the course builder to produce exactly what his plans call for, whereas Pete Dye's reputation is to create as he goes along, though he, too, of necessity, works from plans. (In most cases, it's also impossible to get permits without some basic drawings and engineering.)

Most architects fall somewhere in-between: careful design, particularly of the basic routing and the drainage, accompanied by what Florida architect Mike Dasher calls "the ever popular field adjustment."

"With the grading plan," Dasher says, "we work out the mundane details of the design, like drainage -- get the water picked up and piped away, develop a strategy to hide the damn cart path -- then, when you're in the field, you can concentrate on the subjective forms and shapes and features."

Tom Marzolf, an architect in Tom Fazio's Florida-based firm, follows a similar approach to the overall routing and drainage. But rather than creating detailed directions for building the greens on the drawing board, he custom crafts the hole on site, laying out 10 days or so of work for the shaper, then doubling back to inspect it and discuss any additional refinements. That's why, says Marzolf, a trusting relationship with the shaper is so critical.

"Once the hole's cleared and opened up," Marzolf notes, "we lay out the putting surfaces on the ground. We stake them, shoot the grades over the grid, and spend a lot of time verbally describing what we're trying to build. I'll also do a freehand sketch, a prospective drawing. Whatever it takes to communicate; I'll get down in the dirt and shape a model if that is what it takes to get the point across."

Dasher, too, keeps an open mind in the field. "Some of the best things you see on a golf course," he notes, "are there by accident. Last year, Dan Marshall was shaping our course at Addison Reserve in Florida. Dead flat site. He was following the plan, putting bumps and hollows in where we showed them, but the way he did it was just superb. I got to a hole he'd just been working on, and Neibur's superintendent said, ÔWell, Dan's just worked this briefly. It needs to be touched up.' He'd basically just shoved up some very harsh forms, but I looked at it and said, ÔIt's perfect. Don't do anything. You're done.' "

To Marzolf's way of thinking, the ideal shaper "will park the machine and walk the hole with us, listening, making notes, trying to build what you want. I'd rather work with a guy who understands golf and the idea of manipulating the ball around the golf course, who can appreciate the subtleties of strategy. . . . The ability to work the machine is part of it, but it isn't everything."

Given that the shaper's time is worth about $150 an hour, man and machine, most builders would prefer their shapers spend only the absolutely necessary time with the architect. (The average shaper makes about $70,000 annually and costs the company well over $100,000. They are compensated for their frequent moves, however, and receive a monthly housing allowance.) Still, most architects like to address the shaper directly, and Marshall says he'll always climb off the bulldozer when the architect's inspection team arrives where he's working. "Field notes are fine," Marshall says, "but there's nothing like standing there and getting the word directly."

"You get with a shaper who's really talented," Marzolf says, "and you design the hole together. The shaper might come up with a better idea than you had. I've done a lot of holes that way. You play off each other's strengths."

John LaFoy is a genial South Carolina golf course architect whose year as a Marine combat engineer in Vietnam influenced his work. "One of our primary missions," he explains, "was land-clearing, and we flat learned to clear land. Of course, you don't find booby traps on a golf course." But he also appreciates the opportunities for serendipity building a golf course brings. "Some shapers seem to already know what you want, and sometimes you just get to the point where you say, ÔWell, I gotta tell you, I don't know exactly what to do, so just do something.' And doggone if they don't come up with something better than what you'd have done anyway."

Dasher's experience concurs with LaFoy's. "One day when I was working for Wadsworth," Dasher recalls, "building the Magnolia Course on Skidaway Island, Brent Wadsworth came by. We had water problems, trying to get the fill in on the seventh fairway, and I'd piled some material over a culvert pipe so the scrapers could cross without crushing the pipe. I said to Brent, ÔWe'll get that hump out of there; that's just to cushion the shapers.' And Brent said, ÔNo, that looks perfect. You do your best work by accident.' And I always remember that. You've got to be open to what's there."

Shapers also need a thick skin, however. "A shaper needs to have a lot of self-confidence in the service of a small ego," says Dasher. Shapers rarely get the credit, but they're sure to get the blame if something doesn't look right. A shape one architect finds pleasing may be unsightly to another, and the shaper has to understand the aesthetic guiding the architect whose work he's crafting. A shaper may think his work is a perfect fit, just what the architect has requested, but it's usually someone other than the shaper who has the final say on what goes, what stays, what gets changed.

The operators who shape the modern golf course, like artisans from time immemorial, labor on in obscurity. "I guess we'd just as soon these guys remain in anonymity," Dasher says with a laugh. "I mean, you hear architects quoted about their latest project, but you never hear them say, ÔYeah, it's good 'cause we had a great shaper.' In the very egotistical vein that most of these guys operate in, if people knew how important the builders were, it would detract from their god-like ability to create these great fairways and greens."

LaFoy agrees with that assessment. "The average golfer doesn't know what great design is, anyway," he says. "They might say, ÔThis golf course is in great shape,' or ÔThey treated me like a king in the clubhouse,' but not, ÔThis is a wonderful piece of architecture.' We architects think we're way too important."

Wadsworth, though his company's standing is high among architects, is resigned to the obscurity of the course builder and to the anonymity of the shaper.

"Most of the credit will always go to the designer," he insists. "But just remember, when they're describing what they do, they always say, ÔWe built this course, we built that course . . .' Not designed it -- built it."