Golf Architecture 101: The Golden Age

00:00:00
Speaker 1: What is the so called Golden age of golf architecture? For me, it's the result of three major innovations made toward the beginning of the twentieth century. That's what I'm talking about today with my colleague PJ. Clark in this latest installment of our Golf Architecture one oh one series. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is Designing Golf. PJ. Clark. Are you ready to talk about the Golden Age of golf architecture?

00:00:35
Speaker 2: I think so. You pointed me in the direction of a wonderful thread on golf course at golf club at List, golf club at Lists, gal Club at List, Welcome to golf club Aatlists, and it seems like people have takes on this matter, so I'm ready to get into it.

00:00:50
Speaker 1: It has been long debated on golf club at Lists in particular, it goes back at least twenty five years the discussion of this kind And so how do you do just a little bit of reading to not not to bring you completely up to date on it, but but just to get a taste of it, just to get just to get a little sense of of what the ideas are are about. And I hope it did that for you.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: I certainly did that. I mean, people are very uh it's something I've noticed through our little journey through golf architecture. What I want here is that people are very passionate about these subjects, like to get some takes off, which is good. I appreciate that.

00:01:29
Speaker 1: So there's nothing that gets people worked up like an extremely niche interest exactly golf architecture. So that's that's sort of the nature of it. So I want you to, you know, take yourself to a place. Before you read this thread and and got a little sense for it, you had probably heard the term golden age of golf architecture thrown around in a lot of podcasts, right, So what what had you already picked up about what golden age meant?

00:02:01
Speaker 2: Feels like it was a long time ago. I want to call it, like, you know, nineteen tens ish, maybe World.

00:02:10
Speaker 1: War One sort of area in the middle of it.

00:02:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, that's if you told me to give you a decade, I would have said nineteen ten. I have a feeling the name like Donald Ross probably going to come up in this at some level, maybe CB McDonald, those types of guys. Yeah, it's probably, it's probably what I have for you. I would have just guessed this was around World War One and gone with it.

00:02:31
Speaker 1: That's perfect. Yeah, well, I mean world War one is definitely in it. I think probably the decade most associated with the American Golden Age, at the very least is the is the nineteen TWENTIESKA and if we're talking about the British Golden Age, that's often more concentrated. The discussion of it is concentrated around things that happened in the nineteen hundreds, the first decade of the twentieth century up until the outbreak of World War One, so that is the dineral time period. You're right that CB MacDonald and Donald Ross are two significant Golden Age architects, but I'm glad that you didn't know much more about it, because we can kind of build up from there, so you know, in basic terms, the Golden Age of golf architecture occurred in what I would call the first few decades of the twentieth century, so from about nineteen hundred to about nineteen thirty with the onset of the Great Depression, or some people would argue nineteen thirty nine or forty with the outbreak of World War Two, but first few decades of the nineteen hundreds is how I usually think of it, and it was during this period that a lot of the best regarded golf courses of all time were built or renovated and turned into their permanent forms. A lot of this action was concentrated around Great Britain and North America, but there was plenty happening in continental Europe as well, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, so definitely a global phenomenon here. The most famous architects of the Golden Age include not only C. B. MacDonald and Donald Ross, whom you already mentioned, but also Harry Colt, Herbert Fowler, James Braid, Tom Simpson, Charles Hugh Allison, Alistair McKenzie when we've touched on with his k Yeah, Seth Rayner, aw Telling Hast, George Thomas, William Flynn, Perry Maxwell. You know, basically all the big boys, and then you know the courses. If you just go down any top one hundred list, Golden Age courses are most of the top portion of the list. So we're talking about Pine Valley, Cyprus Point, the William Flynn design at Shinnecock Hills, National Golf Links, Augusta National, Marion, Chicago Golf Club, Pinehurst Number Two. You know, overseas, Royal County, Down, Royal Port, Russian Mirfield all date back to the eighteen hundreds but are probably best under stood as nineteen twenties or thirties Harry Coult designs. You have Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath. In Australia, you have Sunningdale and Saint George's Hill. In England you have Herono and Kawana and Japan, there really is an overwhelming dominance by the Golden Age in that set of golf courses considered to be the best in the world. So I think it's really important to understand as you're learning about golf architecture what the Golden Age is. It's a term that people toss around a lot, Oh Golden Age, this Golden Age, that, oh, it's a Golden Age gem. What does that mean? Sometimes I think people who say it may not completely know what they mean by it, but just kind of have the vibe of it, which is okay, I'm not insulting that approach to the term, but what does the term really mean? What is this era, What made it so great? What made it special? What were the main innovations of that time, and why have the courses stood the test of time and continued to be massive, massive in influences on current golf architects, Like the influence of the Golden Age has been so overwhelming on current golf architects that a lot of them feel that there's basically no way to escape it. There's no way to surpass it. We might as well just give in to it. That's how large the era looms right now. So that's what we're getting into today. Does that sound good?

00:06:22
Speaker 2: That sounds great. It feels like there were a lot of names there that I had obviously heard of, a lot of golf courses that have obviously heard of. So this is good. I'm happy. I'm happy to dive into this. It feels this feels like feels a little all encompassing here. It feels like if there's one thing to really know, this might this might be the episode.

00:06:40
Speaker 1: Now, it's a big subject. It's ambitious for this episode to tackle this. I have ways of kind of narrowing it down and maybe clarifying some things, of like focusing on certain things that I think are useful, but there's no doubt that we're tackling it.

00:06:54
Speaker 2: They want today, Let's do it all right.

00:06:56
Speaker 1: So before we get into how the Golden Age began, what these innovations were that I've referred to a couple of times, let's talk about our sponsor for this episode, Club Champion. Every Club Champion built club comes with a perfect fit guarantee that ensures what you saw in the fitting bay is what you'll see on the course. On average, Club Champions customer see twenty one plus additional yards off the tee, sixteen yards better dispersion with irons, measurably more fairways and greens in regulation, and fewer three puts. Club Champion has five thousand plus five star reviews, and the last third party study found that seven out of eight golfers lowered their handicap by an average of five strokes after just one season with their fitted clubs. So significant impact here. Now, if you get your clubs, take them out on the course and don't get the results that you saw when you were being fit to them, you can take them back to a Club Champion, the Club Champion location where you got fit within ninety days and they will make it right. So here's the deal for designing golf listeners. You can get a free driver or iron fitting with a club purchase using code Frida Egg at club champion dot com slash Frida Egg. So again, free driver or iron fitting with a club purchase code Frida Egg Club Champion dot Com slash Frida Egg. All right, So to prepare for this episode, PJ. As you mentioned before, you read a recent thread on the messageboard golf club at list. This thread was started by the architect Tom Doak, and he was asking what is a Golden Age? His answer, which I found very interesting, was people developing golf courses on interesting land. Basically, dok is arguing that what made the Golden Age different from other eras was that architects had an unusual number of great and distinctive properties to work with. And by the way, he's also indicating that this is what connects the First Golden Age with the current era of golf architecture. You know, sometimes people call the current era the second Golden Age, right, Architects like Corn Crenshaw, Gil Hanson, obviously Tom Doak himself have started to work on really exciting land again, so that was his argument, and then he opened it up for discussion, and some form members chimed in with it with their own takes. What did you make of all this? Were there any ideas that appealed to you in this any ideas that seemed confusing? How did you process it?

00:09:32
Speaker 2: My main takeaway. And I don't remember the member who said this, but I like the point is that I feel like somebody alluded to him just going to paraphrase that we are only considering these courses golden age because they've stood the test of time for one hundred plus years now. In some cases that it's hard to really judge what is a current golden age until we're further away to see if these plays are still relevant in fifty sixty one hundred years. That I think is my main takeaway.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: Absolutely, hindsight is twenty twenty on this stuff. People living through the first few decades of the twentieth century did not say we're in a golden age of golf architecture. That term was applied back to the era starting maybe thirty years ago. I've tried to figure out exactly who's responsible for the coinage of the term the golden age of golf architecture. My impression is that it was kind of in common discussion by the late nineties, and then Jeff Shackelford wrote a book called The Golden Age of Golf Design. The exact wording of the title I'm not sure of, but it was a book about the Golden Age that kind of surveyed the different architects and courses that were relevant, and I think that had a big role to play in popularizing the term. But this sense that there was a golden age towards the beginning of the twenty century, and golf course design was really information in the eighties and nineties, but but not so much before that. So it's only retrospectively that that this stuff becomes clear or starts to take on certain labels. And obviously we're prisoners of our own time. We label eras how we feel like labeling eras. We call the Renaissance the Renaissance, right, But you know, William Shakespeare didn't say, I'm this is the Renaissance.

00:11:28
Speaker 2: No, No, you have to the future generations get the the benefit of knowing what already happened and can use that to however they want to shape things. I guess.

00:11:39
Speaker 1: So you know, I'm a big Bob Crosby guy. Yep, he's been. He's been on the podcast a few times. He's he's extraordinarily intelligent in his u in his uh it takes on golf architecture. So he contributed to the thread, and I particularly loved what he said. He said that a golden age is a time when people are working through the ramifications of a new idea, and I think there's a lot of truth to that, right. It's an insight that goes across art forms as well. So I mentioned the Renaissance. You could say that the European Renaissance was a time when people were working through the ramifications of a new idea, and that new idea, or at least one of them, was humanism, right, an interest in the individual, a willingness to put individual humans at the center of plays and paintings and other forms of art. That was a massive, massive idea of the Renaissance, and the excitement of that idea that the possibilities of it gave the art of that era a lot of vitality and staying power. You know, there are other reasons that we call the Renaissance and restaurant. There was also an economic renaissance and people were becoming wealthier, and that's part of the reason why they were able to make art and have fun and you know, do cool stuff.

00:12:53
Speaker 2: Yes, but.

00:12:55
Speaker 1: Certainly part of it is working through the ramifications of a new idea. So I think when you pair Bob's insight with Tom's, you have something close to the answer that I like for the Golden Age of golf architecture. The Golden Age was a time when golf architects were working through the ramifications of a new set of ideas and they got to apply those ideas to really good pieces of land. So let's dig into what the new ideas were, or what I think they were. This is kind of my interpretation and processing of all this, and I've boiled it down to three big ones. One the idea of spending a lot of money on the construction of a golf course. Two the idea of strategic design, which you're familiar with from past lessons, so to speak. Three the idea of building artificial features that appear natural. Again, a concept that we've touched on before, maybe haven't dug into super deeply yet. So basically, money strategy and naturalism. Those are the three ideas that we're going to cover. Now. It's obviously pretty hard to nail down the time and place when any given new idea begins. Ideas are always sort of in the process of development. So you know, we could trace this back to ancient Rome if we wanted, I'm sure, right, But in the case of the Golden Age of golf architecture, I think nineteen oh one in the suburbs southwest of London is a really good starting point. It's very specific, right, and that's because three big things happened in that year in that place. First, Sunningdale Golf Club opened. Second, nearby at Woking Golf Club, a pair of members named Stuart Payton and John Lowe started to make changes to the course. And later in nineteen oh one, back at Sunningdale, Harry Colt became the first secretary of the club. And these three events kind of launched these ideas of money, strategy and naturalism, which in turn I think powered the Golden Age of golf architecture. Okay, so I've set up a framework, right, three events, three ideas. It's important to note, by the way, you know, since we're talking about land as well ideas being applied to good land. Sunningdale and Woking both occupy a particular type of terrain called heathland, right, and we don't won't get too deep into the geology here. I think it's interesting, but it would take us down at you know, different road. But essentially heathland is pretty well suited to golf because one, the soils are sandy and drain well. A lot of inland sites don't do that. Right, Heavy clay soils are not as good for golf. Heathland soils are unusually good for inland golf. The best terrain tends to be seaside linksland, which is sandy. Heathland at least has a little bit the sandiness to it. Right. Two, they're covered by these this low scrubby vegetation called heather, which is a decent natural hazard. You can find your ball in it, but it's it's hard to play out of it. And three, heathland generally alternates between open and wooded, which makes for some nice variety in a golf course. But even though heathland is a good landscape for golf, it's not Lynksland. Right. And in order to make the terrain golfable. You usually have to do quite a bit in heathland. At the very least, you have to remove some trees and take out a bunch of heather to make way for the fairways and greens. On Lynksland, often you could just kind of play golf right heathland. There there would be some engineering required, like many inland sits, and and that's a that's an important factor here. Okay, all right, so the opening. The first event is the opening of the old course at Sunningdale Golf Club. Sunningdale was architecturally speaking, really the first modern golf course, and that is that's a big claim. But I think a major reason for it is that it was the first golf course project to have a large amount of money behind it. Now, in order to understand why that was so important, I think you have to know a little bit about how golf courses were created before Sunningdale. So in the eighteen hundreds and before, courses tended to be laid out very quickly. If a designer was involved, he would spend a day or two walking around the site and making recommendations. Sometimes these recommendations would be really excellent. I don't want to discount you know the expertise that goes into routing a golf course, But the reality is it would happen very quickly, no offense to old Tom Morris, basically is what I'm saying. And then the club members would usually complete the course, they would build it and very little earth moving would be done. So the quality of a given course really depended on the quality of the routing and most importantly the land. Where the land was good for golf, the courses turned out well. Like Scottish Linksland. This is where the game was invented, so the land was obviously perfect for it, and many very old Scottish links courses are still with us today and treasured today. But something important happened in the late eighteen hundreds, eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, the late Victorian era, and that was that golf got popular in England. The historian Michael Morrison no relation calls it the great English golf boom. So English people start establishing a lot of new courses very quickly, and often these courses are not on Linksland. For the first time in golf history, new courses were by and large being created Inland, and it's hard to express how big of a change. This was golf was moving away from the land that inspired the game to be played in the first place. Golf was a way of using linksland. The game and the land were very intertwined, right, So when English people started trying to move the game inland in the eighteen eighties and nineties, they kind of had to reinvent what a golf course was. Now. At first, the attempts at creating inland courses were pretty rudimentary. Basically, the same method was used that had always been used. A golf professional would visit for a day or two, tell the members what to do, et cetera. Courses were built very cheaply, partly because no one knew whether the enthusiasm for golf would last. Right, if this fad goes away tomorrow, I don't want to be stuck holding a bunch of debt.

00:19:56
Speaker 2: Yes, right, understandable.

00:20:00
Speaker 1: Now, again, this wasn't a bad method for laying out a links course, but what English people found is that it wasn't as good for laying out an inland course. Early inland courses in England were pretty poor for the most part because they were often muddy. You know, once you move away from Lynksland, it's much harder to find naturally occurring close cropped turf. They weren't as interesting to play as links courses because the land usually didn't have the natural undulation and the natural hazards of links and you know, so as obvious why they weren't as good. But they were golf courses and people enjoyed them, and the game kept growing in England. The fad did not go away. So nineteen oh one rolls around. The game is in a secure place. It's starting to be taken more seriously as a permanent feature of British life. And two brothers Ta and Ga Roberts. Don't ask me what Ta and Ga stand for. I think probably Tom and George. But you know, who.

00:21:05
Speaker 2: Knows, could be Harry Potter fans who knows.

00:21:10
Speaker 1: They decided to found. They decided to found Sunningdale Golf Club. They hire Willie Park Junior to design the course. Park was a well established golf professional and course designer, two time winner of the Open. So Park designed the course and helped to oversee construction starting in the year nineteen hundred and This was a kind of golf course construction project that had never been seen before. The course took a year and a half to build. At one point there were seventy men, thirty horses and ten plows on site. In total, it cost four thousand pounds. This obviously seems like a miniscule, minuscule amount now, and not just just because of inflation, right, people just spend more relatively even on on golf course projects now, but at the time absolutely massive. It was way way more money than had ever been spent on building a golf course, way more time, way more effort. So, for example, to my knowledge, Sunningdale was the first course ever to be seeded all the way through. Before Sunningdale, courses would mostly just use natural turf and sort of encourage it to spread and be be good. Right at Sunningdale they actually planted turf grass on all the teas, fairways and greens and that was just revolutionary. So how did they do all this? How did they have all this money to spend on a golf course project. First, Sunningdale was located in a region where wealthy people lived, and it was built by and for these people. So the developers of the course, the Roberts Brothers, felt comfortable that they could earn back the relatively big investment that they made on the construction of the course. Secondly, and relatedly, Sunningdale was basically a land speculation scheme. So the Roberts brothers were going to build the course and then they were going to sell the surrounding lots to wealthy London suburbanites to build houses. So this gave them some confidence that they could they could make that initial heavy investment.

00:23:22
Speaker 2: It's always a land speculation scheme. At the end of the day, everything everything is a lance speculation scheme.

00:23:28
Speaker 1: Behind everything is real estate, right and so it obviously, you know, this became an important model for golf course development in the Golden Age and beyond. You know, something that people discount a little bit. People sometimes act as though real estate golf was invented in nineteen sixty, but no, it was there right at the beginning of modern golf architecture. Now, I think maybe the most important reason that so much money went into Sunningdale is that the people building the course were trying to solve the problems of inland golf. They had seen enough inland English courses over the past two decades to know that these courses just weren't as good as Scottish links and so they made a bigger commitment at Sunningdale and tried to create a course that could stand toe to toe with a real links course. They put effort, time and money into engineering this piece of land for golf. This was it was really what turned golf course design into golf course architecture. Right, does that distinction make sense?

00:24:38
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:24:39
Speaker 1: So you know, Sunningdale was a professionally constructed environment. Now, by our standards today, it's an extremely natural golf course, right, But in its time it stood out as a work of architecture rather than just a piece of land adapted to golf. And this is the key I think, like the idea of spending a lot of money on golf course construction essentially created a new discipline called golf course architecture. Now the obvious next step what is golf course architecture? And that, to me is the huge question that the Golden Age was addressing and working out the ramifications of if we're architects now for calling ourselves architects and we're doing architecture, what should we be building and why? Right? Suddenly this was a hot topic of discussion in the golf world, and it led I think to the first properly worked out theory of golf course design. Right, Okay, that's something opening, all right, any any reflections or questions on that so far?

00:25:45
Speaker 2: I don't know. This feels like kind of the Pandora's Box moment of this. This whole thing is that when you start putting money into something for the first time and getting maybe not even necessarily profit out of it, but getting returned and out of it, people are inevitably going to copy that at some level.

00:26:04
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's a virus, right, and you know it's not an entirely it's not always a bad virus. It's usually a bad virus, money being the root of all evil, et cetera. But look like it was a Pandora's Box moment. I think that's a great way of putting it. Once you invent this new financial technology of building a golf course with a lot of money, then it just tends to kind of spiral, right.

00:26:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:26:33
Speaker 1: It's like with anything, you know, the more money you put into it, the more money you put into.

00:26:38
Speaker 2: It, yeah, and the more money everybody else puts into it. So this is that that makes sense? I do uh. I think the acknowledgment at some level that it was kind of a real estate play is also funny too, because especially as you've seen land values kind of grow everywhere recently. I know, land is a is like a big thing when people talking about the new golf courses being built. So I think the acknowledgment that at its very basic, first ever level, that this was also in some sense of real estate play, to me is very funny because you know, the more things change, the more they stay.

00:27:16
Speaker 1: Is say, you know, if people say that core golf facilities, right, golf facilities that are not connected to any other kind of economic activity like real estate, that that's a legacy of the Golden Age, I think that's incorrect.

00:27:29
Speaker 2: Mm h.

00:27:30
Speaker 1: It's just not like links golf courses from the eighteen hundreds were core golf facilities, but they also weren't really you know, economic propositions where they were more or less open land, most of them free to play. They weren't they weren't really part of the economy for the most part. I mean, that's some of that's there are some nuances there. Saint Andrew's obviously has always the town has obviously always benefited from from it's the tourism that the golf attracts, and that goes back a long way. But but it's it's different. The Old Age invented the real estate golf course. Now, these golf courses were not the type where you had houses, cookie cutter houses lining both sides of the fairway. That's not where we're talking about. But Cyprus Point was a real estate play. Pebble Beach was a real estate play. You know, pas tiempo real estate. There are some exceptions. There are plenty of exceptions to this from the Golden Age. I would venture to say that most of the golf courses were core golf course facilities. But if we're talking about innovation and innovation of the Golden Age was the real estate golf course. Now, Sunningdale doesn't feel that way when you play it because the property has integrity, it's not crowded with houses. But along all the boundaries there's a neighborhood that's the Sunningdale neighborhood.

00:28:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, not a coincidence, I'm sure.

00:28:52
Speaker 1: So that brings us to Woking Golf Club in nineteen oh one, one of my favorite golf course names because it just bothers people that it's woke, you know, and that was I mean, it was basically invented here woke golf architecture at Woking Golf Club. This kind of delights me so so two particularly woke members of Woking named Stuart Payton and John Lowe started to make some alterations to the golf course around nineteen oh one. They were thoughtful guys, both members of the Oxford Cambridge Golfing Society.

00:29:32
Speaker 2: Just kind of the this it sounds sounds intense.

00:29:36
Speaker 1: This is the secret society. I mean, to this day, to this day, if you want to if you want to locate the power source of global golf, then look look no further than the Oxford Cambridge.

00:29:48
Speaker 2: Golf getting into like the assassin's cretification of golf. Here this is who are the Knights templar? Really, I mean we're at the or at the end of the table here.

00:29:57
Speaker 1: That's exactly where we are. We're at the center of the maze. Low was he was an RNA member and a writer who wrote about golf topics prolifically. And Peyton actually lived in a house on the club property. So you know, envision low and Peyton talking after dinner while drinking some brandy in Peyton's house and then maybe they'd sneak out onto the golf course with some shovels and start digging. That's kind of the vibe. I don't know if that actually happened, but I kind of think it did.

00:30:30
Speaker 2: Sure, why not just walk out the back door. It's fine, it's right.

00:30:33
Speaker 1: There now, Yeah, it's right there. We were liquored up and we've been talking about golf architecture. Let's go, let's do it. Put some things into practice here. So the reason they were making changes to the course at Woking was that they thought it was bad. Woking had been built in eighteen ninety three. It's actually thought to be the first course established in the English heathlands. It was designed by a Scottish professional named Tom and Done was the leading golf course designer of that great English golf boom period. He designed a number of courses in England, a remarkable number of courses in England in the eighteen eighties and nineties, and like all golf course designers of that period, he worked very quickly. He walked a site for a day or two, made his recommendations and left. And he also followed what was the prevailing philosophy of design, which was that hazards should be positioned to penalize poor shots. We've discussed this before as the penal school of design. Do you remember this.

00:31:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think that's a bad take. I think I think he's making some good point. I think if you had a bad shot, that's when you should get penalized. I'm kind of like the way this guy picks.

00:31:49
Speaker 1: The distinction here.

00:31:50
Speaker 2: That makes me though, right, yeah, because if the work guys thought that was bad, then you know, that's it's a whole other issue. So the no spin zone you can accept. Yeah, you can set me straight.

00:32:03
Speaker 1: You're a common sense guy. There is a certain common sense appeal to this philosophy penalized bad shots. But I think you know, the nuance here that we have to keep in mind is that these hazards were positioned to punish poor shots by poor players, not just to punish bad shots, but to punish really bad shots. Right, and so's that's I think an important point. But yeah, and so, yeah, like penal courses weren't necessarily hard, they were just designed with the intention of punishing those poor strikes by poor players. So you'd have those linear cross bunkers in front of tees to catch top drives. You'd have similar cross bunkers in front of greens to catch topped approaches, and ideally you'd have rough and additional bunkers along the sides of the fairway to penalize hooks and slices. Some people now call this the steeple chase style, and yeah, steeplechase the golfers of the horses, Yeah we're jumping out over jumping over cross bunkers. And that was the kind of design that Tom Dunn originally implemented at Woking. For the most part, I think that he did some things that were like a little more interesting there. And if his routing is I think mostly intact, and it's a really good routing. I played the course a couple of months ago and loved it. But it has been changed a lot over the years, especially by John low and Stuart Payton. So by nineteen oh one, we know that John Lowe in particular had had it with this stuff. Right. We know this because John low wrote a lot about it, right Peyton. Peyton, to my knowledge, didn't do much writing, so we're not sure of his perspective, but John low did. He had noticed and many others had as well, that it simply didn't produce interesting inland golf courses to design them in this steeplechase style, especially for good players if you hit it reliably long and straight. These steeplechase designs were not challenging or compelling. They were too easy and above all just thoughtless. Right. You didn't need to strategize. You just had to find the fairway, find the green rinse, repeat. And yes, if you were playing a match against a poor player, you would win, and that would be great, that would be fair, right, But the game you want a little bit more of a challenge. Sure, it's understandable, more challenge, more interest. You know, these courses just just war thin after a while, was the argument that John Lowe was making. You were free to like them. PJ. Now, Okay. Furthermore, another point here is that low had picked up on the fact that the old Scottish links like Saint Andrew's were strategically complex and interesting, and this was This was a key insight because the conventional wisdom was that Scottish links courses didn't have any design content. They were just natural, right, random, and many English gol Rather, many English golfers felt that they could do better if they just applied their Victorian intellects to the task of golf course design. Here are these natural wild courses, and hey, if we just think about it a little bit, we can design better ones. Well, Lowe was saying, no, no, we're not doing better. Maybe we should take another look at these old wild courses which are so fun to play, and consider whether they do actually have design characteristics worth emulating. Eventually, through his study of Scottish links, Lowe came up with a brand new theory of hazard placement. He said, we shouldn't be placing hazards to punish poor strikes by poor players. We should be placing them to punish almost great strikes by good players. This was an intuitive idea, he was saying. One of the main things that makes Saint Andrews so interesting is that the bunkers are exactly where a good golfer might want to play. Yeah, and this generates what low called a contest of risks. In order to earn the greatest advantage the best position in the fairway, you don't just have to hit the ball well. You also need to take a risk by playing near a hazard without going into it. And you can certainly decline the risk and play away from the hazard, but you won't earn the greatest advantage on the whole for your next shot. So here's how Low put it. He said, the true hazard should draw play towards. It should invite the golfer to come as near as he dare to the fire without burning his fingers. Good sentence, Johnny Low. Good writing there. So this was the foundation of what we now call the strategic school of golf course design. Big idea number two that set off the Golden Age. Does that all feel pretty familiar to you at this point?

00:37:07
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I mean we talked about that at length, and it makes sense providing rewards for taking on risk. Again, pretty logical, like this book line of thought we have going on here.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: Speaking of which, back to Woking, the fourth hole at that course was originally a pretty simple straight par four with a railroad on the right. There was a wide fairway, no bunkers, some rough on the left, maybe some trees. Then there was a classic Victorian cross bunker in front of the green. So this was essentially an embodiment of the penal school. The hazards were there to capture poor shots, hooks, slices tops. So in nineteen oh two, Stuart Payton makes a couple of alterations to the hole. One he builds a pair of bunkers right in the middle of the goddamn fairway. His inspiration here is the Principal's nose bunker complex on the sixteenth hole at Saint Andrew's. Okay, So basically what he's doing is recreating the strategic geometry of that par four at the old course. Now, the center line bunkers are obviously a controversial change for the members. They say, why in the world would you put a hazard right where I want to play my ball? But for Peyton and Low, that was exactly the point, right. So other key change that Peyton makes to this fourth hole is redesigning the green complex. He takes out that fronting cross bunker and he puts in one bunker smaller at the left front corner of the green. That bunker gets in the way of approaches from the left side of the fairway. That's the safe side of the fairway, right, Okay, Yeah, Because you have the Principal's nose in the middle of the fairway and then you have the railroad out of bounce on the right. So you have two main options. You can try to thread your drive between the Principal's nose and the railroad, or you can bail out to the left, to the left of the Principal's nose, where you don't have to contend with the bunker and the railroad right now, Furthermore, the green tilts from back to front and a little bit left to right, so if you're hitting from that left side of the fairway, you not only have to carry the new bunker at the front left corner of the green, but you're also dealing with a green that runs away from you. It's much preferable to be able to land your approach short and let it run onto the green. But you can only do that if you play between the Principal's nose and the railroad.

00:40:00
Speaker 2: I'm sure, I'm sure the people who had never experienced this before just loved this. I'm sure the general public were huge fans of what was going on here. I can't imagine.

00:40:12
Speaker 1: People were in and uproar.

00:40:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I riots even pitchforks fire all of those medieval times things.

00:40:22
Speaker 1: There were many things written about how pissed off. Woking Golf club members were about this change to the whole.

00:40:29
Speaker 2: That's great, get the people going, it's provocative.

00:40:33
Speaker 1: But ultimately, somehow the changes did remain. I don't know why, but they stayed and they're still there today.

00:40:42
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:40:43
Speaker 1: In the meantime, this kind of you know, hullabaloo found its way around the English golf world. A guy named Tom Simpson visited Woking and was actually inspired to become a golf architect by seeing the hole for the first time, and he went on to become a significant golf architect in his own right and a golf architecture writer. Amazing.

00:41:06
Speaker 2: Sure, you know, take inspiration for anywhere. I can just imagine these newspapers getting passed around all of South London being like, can you believe this? Can you believe what's going on over here? I could just yeah, this sounds fantastic.

00:41:26
Speaker 1: So this is It turned out to be a major moment in history, right, a clear instance of something changing in the zeitgeist.

00:41:33
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:41:34
Speaker 1: Now, not all Golden Edge courses from that point forward were strategic, but I think it's fair to say that all the significant ones were influenced by this new tension between strategic and penal. Okay, and architects had to make a choice, Now what am I about? Am I about strategic golf or am I about penal golf? Or am I saying that we have a mixture of both?

00:41:58
Speaker 2: So was that kind of like a sweeping kind of move across everything or was that more gradual, Like did everybody just adopt this new line of thinking immediately or did it kind of creep up on people?

00:42:14
Speaker 1: It crept up on people, But I think by the nineteen twenties, the strategic school of design had won.

00:42:24
Speaker 2: Okay, Like if you were to put a percentage on it, like by nineteen twenty it was like eighty twenty.

00:42:30
Speaker 1: I'm not sure you could put a percentage on it. I think if we're talking about the significant golf courses, what people considered the really good golf courses, the ones that were made by the top architects, then a majority, for sure, sure you could say we're strategic school golf courses. But it's not always that simple. Like I don't think Donald Ross, for instance, is consistently strategic at all. In some cases, it's clear that he understood how to make a strategic hole, but he didn't always do it. The same with Seth Rayner. Right, A lot of the templates are not strategic. Some of them clearly are, but others don't seem to be, and so you know, these things are always a little bit chaotic. But I would say that the introduction of this idea kind of changed everything. It didn't mean that everybody immediately adopted it, but it meant that there was now an understanding and a discussion about how to strategically arrange golf court, golf golf holes and golf courses.

00:43:38
Speaker 2: Makes sense.

00:43:39
Speaker 1: I think that's a big deal, and that tension really ended up helping to define the entire era. Okay, so the third and final moment of nineteen oh one that we're going to talk about is Harry Colt arriving at Sunningdale Golf Club and beginning his job as secretary. So, like so many of the characters that we've talked about so far, Colt was educated at Cambridge University. He was an intellectual kind of guy, very in touch with the latest ideas in English golf. Now, as a reminder, the old course at Sunningdale had just been built by Willie Park Jr. It was by far the most expensive and ambitious golf course construction project to that point in history. You could even say it was the first true work of golf course architecture. But over the next several years Harry Colt made a lot of changes to Sunningdale. For one thing, he did follow John Lowe's new philosophy of hazard placement, so he removed some cross bunkers and replaced them with more strategically positioned bunkers. And as he rebuilt these features he did something new and very interesting. He intentionally shaped them to appear natural. He gave them a low profile right so that they blended in with the lay of the land. They didn't stand up out of the terrain. They were set into the land, and he gave them an irregular, ragged esthetic that mimicked the natural sandy wastes in the surrounding heathland. This idea of making artificial features appear natural was again new right at inland courses built in the eighteen eighties and nineties. Bunkers and other manufactured hazards were what you might call functional in appearance. They weren't shaped for any particular effect. You know, if you built a bunker, you would just dig out some dirt in a straight line and stack it up on one edge. This was more or less the process followed initially at Sunningdale in Willie Park's design, though to my eye he did make at least some effort toward a pleasing esthetic. But Cole clearly brought a more specific attitude about shaping to Sunningdale. He was pursuing naturalism. Now, we don't have a lot of information about why Coult in particular turned toward naturalism in golf architecture. Certainly we know that he was one of the first to practice it, maybe the first to become completely proficient at it, skillful at it, and certainly the most influential exponent of it. We know that cult had a direct influence on Charles Hugh Allison and Alistair Mackenzie because he worked with them, he later brought them into his architecture firm, and then Allison and Mackenzie exported those ideas across the world, right to the US, to Australia, Japan, etc. Mackenzie was especially enthusiastic about all this. He compared naturalism in golf architecture to battlefield camouflage, which proved to be a very influential formulation of this idea, you know, the idea being that military fortifications would be blended into the landscape so that the enemy couldn't see them. Mackenzie thought about bringing this to golf architecture that enemy, I guess, being the.

00:47:12
Speaker 2: Player, that is quite a way of thinking.

00:47:16
Speaker 1: It's interesting, isn't it. And and Mackenzie did some of this work in the in the in wars, in the in the Boer War in particular, which is a semi obscure war these days. But but he he helped to conceptualize battlefield fortifications that blended into the landscape. If you think about it, that's kind of what naturalists golf architects are trying to do. At golf architects are trying to create artificial features that aren't noticeable as artificial.

00:47:44
Speaker 2: Everything I learned about Alistair Mackenzie just goes further and further down a rabbit hole that I never expected to actually go down. This guy's out here doing augusta national but at the same time going like, oh, I'm going to go win a war too.

00:48:00
Speaker 1: Well.

00:48:00
Speaker 2: He did the war thing well first, but yeah, like same guy.

00:48:04
Speaker 1: Same guy, Yeah, same guy. He had quite a life.

00:48:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, clearly.

00:48:10
Speaker 1: I mean, just imagine traveling as he did from England to Australia. Yeah, I mean that's before planes.

00:48:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's already too much for me. So he had a lot of time on on boats, I guess to think about his war strategies and also golf courses. Yep, A true renaissance man. We talked about Renaissance a lot already in this podcast. I mean, I don't, I don't know how you could get better than that.

00:48:35
Speaker 1: He's a fascinating figure. You know, he starts in England, he ends up in you know, Santa Cruz, California, living in a house at Pasa Tiempo.

00:48:45
Speaker 2: I don't, I don't know. I think that might need to maybe run the Masters next year. Golf Architecture one O one. Just the biography.

00:48:53
Speaker 1: McKenzie, Yeah, we've already we've already given you too many tantalizing details about him.

00:48:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know it's left, but I want to find out.

00:49:02
Speaker 1: Oh. Fascinating guy, Yeah, endlessly fascinating to me. So all right, naturalism comes into golf architecture through Harry Cult. Now, as with strategic design, it would be wrong to say that all the courses from that point on were naturalists. You could say, though, that all the serious courses had some relationship to naturalism, either embracing it or resisting it. But you know, I think the bigger and more interesting question here is where this idea of naturalism in golf architecture came from. Aside from Harry Colt's brain, what.

00:49:42
Speaker 2: Was besides one day to do it? Like? What prompted it? Yeah?

00:49:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not how humans behave. They don't just come up with a brand new idea completely on their own and use it to revolutionize everything. No, there is there is a source for this, So you know, I have and a couple of others have had some theories on this one. This is another example of links golf informing inland golf architecture in the Golden Age. Part of what makes links golf so compelling is that it's natural. Right, It feels like you're contending with Mother Nature rather than an artificial construct. Okay, and that's pleasing and satisfying. Right that you feel like you're a you're a burly man out in nature or a burly woman out of nature.

00:50:33
Speaker 2: Sure.

00:50:34
Speaker 1: I don't know if women often like to think of themselves as burly. But let's just go with it. You're an adventurous person out there, and you're contending with nature as opposed to some little contrivance that an architecture architect has come up with, and that can be fun. Right. So when you go to inland courses, though, you have a problem because they can't be as natural as links courses, because the land needs to be altered to be playable and to be interestingly playable. Right, the links naturally suits itself to golf. You don't have to change much, and so you know, links courses can be natural. Inland courses have to be engineered in some way. But with some artistry and effort in construction, we can at least make inland courses appear natural. And that was the insight and the goal of Golden age architects, Harry Colt in particular.

00:51:33
Speaker 2: Is just to get the feeling of the links land, like as the player like what, I don't know.

00:51:41
Speaker 1: I think it's just to get the feeling of mother nature, okaycts some architects we're trying to imitate the look of the links land, right. Sometimes they do try to do that specifically, but I think it's more like trying to adapt the artificial features to the surrounding landscape in a convincing way. So engineering the golf course to be playable, to have turf at the very least, right, Yeah, and that's important. Yeah, and to have some interesting undulations and stuff, but also to be skillful enough when you're building this stuff to make it appear as though it was always there.

00:52:15
Speaker 2: I've never been to Scotland. Obviously it's great and all that is that, Like, I don't know in your personal opinion. Personal opinions are hot these days in golf, and your personal opinion, like, is that mandatory? Is that important to have some level of naturalism?

00:52:35
Speaker 1: No? I don't think so. Okay, it is my personal preference. It's not mandatory though, and many people disagree with me about that personal preference. Many people say it is okay for a golf course to be overtly manufactured.

00:52:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:52:50
Speaker 1: And you know, if you look at a lot of McDonald and Rainer courses, if you look at Langford and Moreau courses like Lasonia Links, they don't look natural, really, the features don't look natural, and yet they're very pleasing to play. And so that would be the counter argument, but it was the belief of Harry Colt and especially how Alistair McKenzie and Tom Simpson and others, that the goal was to fool the player, essentially deceive the player into believing that the features of the golf course were natural. All right, So what's another source of naturalism in golf architecture aside from links golf? I think that this was very much part of the general naturalist movement in English culture at the time, even in global culture. Right in the US, there was a naturalist movement that I used to teach my students about in literature class with with Emerson and Threaux and all those sorts of people. Right, this is about the appreciation of nature, the esthetic beauty of the wilderness in its untouched state, the physical health benefits of being in nature. These weren't new ideas, obviously, but they were very much gaining cultural power through the nineteenth century, especially as industrialization and urbanization we're speeding up in England more than anywhere else in the world, aside from to an extent, certain places in the US. Right, England was the epicenter of global industrialization. As this was happening, there was a strong sense among writers and artists and philosophers and wokesters that human beings needed to get back to nature. And the catch all term for this is the romantic movement Romanticism, but I think that might be a little bit too broad. Naturalism, I think is the best word for it now in building architecture, right, so we're getting closer to golf architecture now. In building architecture. Naturalism found expression in what's called the Arts and Craft's movement, And this was a style of art and architecture in the late eighteen hundreds that emphasized sense of place. It emphasized natural, organic shapes and materials. Basically, it was a reaction against the perceived over mechanization of artistic products. And I'll give credit to the historian Tom mic Wood for documenting the connections between the Arts and Crafts movement and naturalist golf architecture. There are many many connections, right, These all these guys were friends with each other, you know, around London. The people who were spearheading these movements naturalism and golf architecture, Arts and crafts and building architecture, they were all part of the same social circle and reading each other's stuff. So that is a big deal there, right, the general surge of romanticism and naturalism as a reaction to industrialization and urbanization that came out in the first decade of the twentieth century in golf architecture.

00:56:04
Speaker 2: Okay, I never I never thought about it that way. I had no reason to think about it that way. But now that you lay it out there, it makes sense. I get it that. You know, people are tired of the industrial revolution at this point.

00:56:16
Speaker 1: Sure, did you learn about this much in school? The romantic movement, the naturalist movement is this is this registering for you? Is a framework? Yes you already have.

00:56:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is unlocking things that I haven't thought about in a long time. So yeah, I definitely my brain. You can probably see the wheels shirting in my brain right now. But yeah, I'm bringing with some images of notebooks, you know.

00:56:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm with them during during final exams. Yeah exactly, sure, Yeah, well, yeah, I hope it doesn't bring back too much trauma. But but yes, this is a key connection to make right. Golf architecture and golf are not isolated from history. They are part of broader history. They're part of culture, and they react to those influences from history and from culture, and so when anything changes in golf architecture, we have to consider what else is happening around it, because we're all members of the same world and inevitably influenced by what we're seeing in other domains of life, even if we're not really conscious of being influenced in that way. Right. But I do think that the broader underlying factor here is that golf architecture in the early twentieth century suddenly took on the status of an art. There was more money behind it. It had become a higher status pursuit. It was being practiced not just by working class Scottish professional golfers, it was being practiced by middle and upper class, often snobby Oxford and Cambridge educated Englishmen. Not to stereotype too much, but this is what was happening, and they were bringing their tastes into the discipline. Naturalism. This this this desire for the complexity of strategy, right beyond just fairness. This this idea that that you could engineer a landscape and then make it appear natural afterwards. All of these were, you know, strike me as very typical lines of thinking among this class of people in this location in the world, and that, more than anything is I think what's set off the Golden Age of golf architecture. New people with a new perspective were taking the craft seriously, and that is that is a complex legacy. Just because it's called the Golden Age doesn't mean that we can't criticize some aspects of it. One indisputable legacy of the Golden Age, which we made glancing reference to toward toward the beginning of this episode, is that golf became more expensive to play. The best new courses became the domain of wealth people and to an extent, you know early Scottish golf, if you looked at who was playing golf at Saint Andrew's in the late seventeen hundreds, there was a mix of people, but a lot of the most most frequent players on the links were wealthy Scottish guys, Scottish aristocrats. That kind of changed in the middle of the eighteen hundreds with the introduction of the gut of percha ball, which was much cheaper and it democratized the game. But the fact is that until basically the twentieth century, almost all golf courses in Scotland on the links were free to play. They were essentially just public land open. You didn't pay a green fee, you didn't go to a pro shop. You just you know, you might. I don't know. I'm not sure if it was like the if it was like the surf breaks in Hawaii where if you went out there you might get your ass beaten by old Tom Morris or something, if you had to like follow code. I'd love to know more about the dynamics of that. But there there wasn't a green fee here, right, Yeah. That changes memberships and green fees got to be much higher. And not just because it's not all the fault of Harry cult or whatever, but that is I think that's undoubtedly a legacy of the Golden Age, that expectations were raised for what a golf course would be, and in order to meet those expectations you had to spend money. And if you're going to spend money, you had to get it back.

01:00:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So I like pinning that all on one guy, Harry Cole, sticking him to the board, being like this all came back to you. I like the idea of doing that. No, I mean that makes sense if you are like, like I said before, if you're putting money into it, you have to inherently get money out of it, unless you're just like this giant philanthropist, which I feel like probably not if you were a giant philanthropist in nineteen oh one, I feel like building a golf course was probably not your way of doing it. So that all tracks makes sense. And then you think about where at least, like you know, the great golf courses are on Long Island for the most part, it is all in the Hampton's Like that is not a coincidence. I'm sure.

01:01:17
Speaker 1: Well, listen, you know, you know who really explored the outer limits of how much you could spend on a golf course.

01:01:26
Speaker 2: C B.

01:01:26
Speaker 1: McDonald at National Golf Links. He raised I believe the number is seventy thousand dollars.

01:01:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a lot of money.

01:01:35
Speaker 1: To build National Golf Links. He he was a member of all these clubs in New York. He knew all the rich guys and he got like seventy of them to each pay a thousand dollars, an unbelievable sum of money to spend on a golf course, just completely breaking through all previous barriers for how much you would spend on a golf course and in the US are probably even Britain England. Yeah, I don't think anybody had done anything like that before. And that is part of c me McDonald's legacy. He figured out how to finance a super ambitious golf course project. And it was not easy to build the national Like they didn't have turf for a while. They had to they had to like invent new forms of agronomy to make that golf course happen. And what do you need to do that You need money? Yeah, and what's the result of that. You can't walk up to National Golf Links and play it.

01:02:29
Speaker 2: No, no, you can't. So I as a whole would you say this was all a good thing? I assume, Well.

01:02:37
Speaker 1: I want to know your perspective on that for me, and just to put my cards on the table here, I think every single historical legacy of every phenomenon ever is complex. Yes, but I think if there's one thing that I would insist on, it's that just because we call it the Golden Age doesn't mean we have to say that it's perfect.

01:03:02
Speaker 2: That makes sense.

01:03:04
Speaker 1: That's my perspective on it. But how are you feeling at this point, I don't know.

01:03:08
Speaker 2: I mean it feels like in order to hashek grow the game, this had to happen, right Like the sport would not be in the place that it is today, would not be in the place that it was in the eighties. Any of this would not have happened if this time period and this development of pay for play, pay for building becoming more of an art however you want to phrase it occurred.

01:03:36
Speaker 1: Absolutely correct, and plus we can't just reduce the whole thing to money. Now, there was a lot of brilliance that went into this as well, those ideas that we talked about, strategic design, naturalism.

01:03:48
Speaker 2: I would like to be very clear, I do not mean to offend the Knight's templar of golf. Take me off of your list, Oxford Society. I'm not call back the stuff I'm scared of. I am scared of you. I'm good like It's not what I'm trying to do here. However, However, I definitely think there is an aspect to losing the I don't want to call it like the ideals of the game, but from the origin of just like having it be public land and anybody can like losing any time. And this goes for probably anything to some extent. As you said, anytime you infuse a boltload of money into anything, I think you're losing part of the soul of anything at the end of the day, and that has clearly happened here.

01:04:48
Speaker 1: Very well said. I do think that that spirit of links golf, which can be fetishized and romanticized, I would agree there were problems with it, and you know, not everything was hunky dory all the time. But listen, the Golden Age is understood generally as a recovery of the ideals of links golf. Okay, and in the sense that it brought strategic golf design and naturalism into architecture, that's absolutely valid. Yeah, But in another sense, the Golden Age was a complete betrayal of the ideals of links golf in that it made it private, It took it out of public land. In fact, it took public land in the heathlands what it used to be public land, yes, and privatized it. People now listen, if you go to the English heathlands now people are kind of walking around it and it feels very communal. It's not like it's not like private golf clubs in the States. So I don't want to overstate that, but it's so interesting to me how the Golden Age is both of those things at the same time. It is a recovery of the early spirit of links golf and and it is an abandonment at the same time. And it is it is something entirely new, a new model. Now, was there any other way to create excellent inland golf. Maybe not, right those there wasn't.

01:06:29
Speaker 2: Somebody would have figured it out a different way, right. It's one of those like life finds away kind of things. If there was another way to do this, inevitably it would have happened. Then it didn't se this was the answer at the end of the day.

01:06:40
Speaker 1: This was the This was our you know, our universe and the multiverse. This is this is what happened. But it probably would have gone this direction because because capitalism, right, this is is kind of how how things how things work. But but yes, I think this is I think this is the big takeaway is that, you know, when people toss around the term Golden Age, it kind of has a rosy hue to it. Everything Golden Age is great, but that's not necessarily the case, and one of the legacies of the Golden Age that we can build beyond is this sense that in order to make something really excellent, you have to throw more money at it. Now, I don't think it was unreasonable for them to do that at the time, And in fact, the amounts of money that they were spending on golf courses in the Golden Age pales in comparison to the thirty million that were that has now become conventional for golf course projects. But if we're thinking about how we understand the Golden Age and react to it, and how we bring its ideals into our own time, maybe we can borrow some architectural concepts, We can borrow some of the theory of design, while at the same time acknowledging that there's some reversing of course to be to you done here, and that the that the idea of of lands on which you play the game that aren't perfect and aren't overly engineered, that that idea can live somewhere in golf. There's a place for that.

01:08:14
Speaker 2: Do you are there? I don't. I don't know the way to phrase this question. But as you went down the list before, and you're talking about all of these great iconic golf courses built within this area, Like are there just are they're bad Golden Age golf courses that like are not relevant in any way, shape or form, Like as you said, we look back on rosy colored glasses and all of these iconic places, and that are they're just like was there like a lot of wasted time and opportunity through this too?

01:08:47
Speaker 1: That's such a good question. And you know, I generally haven't I haven't really met many Golden Age courses that I haven't loved. But that's part partly because there's a selection bias inevitably, right the courses that have survived have generally been well taken care of and were pretty good in the first place. Yeah, but there were some bad courses built in the nineteen hundreds, tens, twenties and thirties in the US, in Britain and elsewhere. You just don't hear much about them right there. And so there's there's always a selection bias at play here in what we discuss, what we're exposed to and what has managed to survive the times. But there's no doubt that the quality that the hit rate right as they're saying, cricket, the batting average was high. Okay, I don't know if it's hit rate. Maybe it's strike rate in cricket, I don't know cricket. Cricket is the sport that I know the least about.

01:09:46
Speaker 2: I can't help you there either.

01:09:49
Speaker 1: And you're in. You're like a sports savant. Yeah, you know everything about everything, but bad cricket.

01:09:53
Speaker 2: I have nothing on cricket, So don't look at me on that.

01:09:57
Speaker 1: The batting average was very high among the best architects of the Golden Age, partly because again to bring this idea back, that the land was really good, the properties were really good, Land prices were fairly low. Things hadn't been over developed. Stuff was available near major metros. You could find a piece of land like the ones just outside of San Francisco where a San Francisco golf club and Lake Merced are just wonderful rolling pieces of land right abutting a major metro area. That stuff doesn't exist right now. It's not available for golf development. And so in order to find great land, current golf architects have gone very far afield, have gone to remote places to find the undulating sandy soils that they like and that that has totally changed the nature of golf course development, and it's one way in which the original gold Golden Age has has a huge advantage over every era since.

01:11:01
Speaker 2: Okay, I mean that makes sense that that there was more opportunity. I was just wondering if everything, you know, seems like everything was going well. It seems like there are a lot of famous people that came out of this. Everybody had a lot of great ideas. Everybody who's having such a great time that length.

01:11:19
Speaker 1: There are a lot of really good courses. Yeah, there were also very active debates about what made a good golf course. You know. I've I've you know, talked about the ideas that I think are the most important and the ones that ended up becoming the most influential. But there were other ideas that other people had. There were there were people who were arguing to their dying day that penal architecture was the way to go, and that was a big mistake to go the route that we did. There were there was a lot of discussion, and in fact, I think that that actually is an important characteristic of the Golden Age as well. Was just the volume and quality of discushion that people had about it. An unbelievable amount was written about golf architecture in these decades, in newspapers, in magazines, in books that were published. People were and you know, that doesn't even account for the verbal conversations that we had, I'm sure relentlessly at golf courses. But just if you're looking at the print legacy, the literary legacy, it's enormous. And that kind of stopped more or less in the forties, fifties, sixties. It has been revived recently. The Internet has had a big, big role to play there where discussion has come back. But I think that the existence of that conversation is also a big reason that the quality of work during the Golden Age was generally so high. Whether that work followed the most popular ideas or not, the work was engaged with the conversation that was happening, and that gave it a complexity and a you know, an integrity. You know, I'm searching for the right word here, but it gave it something that made it feel live, even if it wasn't all strategic and naturalists, et cetera.

01:13:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, people were engaging with the work. I mean that that makes that makes sense that there's anytime there's a feedback loop, it's never a bad thing. Again, like if it gets people talking at the end of the day, that's that's what you want, right.

01:13:31
Speaker 1: That's right. You often say, you know, it's good to have a take. You want to listen to people who have takes. They had takes, everybody, Everybody who is designing a significant golf course in this period how to take. And I think that's true today as well, which is something that makes the current era that we're living in pretty exciting.

01:13:48
Speaker 2: All right, So I have one more question here. So you focused a lot on on the London aspect of kind of the genesis of this. Yeah, did anything like different happened once it came to America or even Australia or Japan or any of the other places that you mentioned.

01:14:06
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And this is part of the oversimplification that I've had to do in order to make this topic manageable for an episode of the podcast. But you could have a whole discussion about the American Golden Age and how that came about the particular features of that. I think that you know the story that I would have told you if I had engaged with that subject. Would be the building of national golf links. We've already kind of covered that in our Ideal Holes episode, our Template Holes episode. But C. B. McDonald was a North American who went over to Scotland, got educated there and experienced links golf and brought those ideas to the States, but put his own completely different spin on it. This this idea of ideal holes was a new one, and he'd did pick up on the financial technology of spending a ton of money and constructing a golfers and having those big ambitions and those big expectations for what it would be. But it was different. For sure. It was the same kinds of ideas and trends, but just kind of reflected back in a funhouse mirror, and so yes, it was different. But in other respects. Listen, who were the architects who were building a lot of the best courses in the Golden Age in the US during the nineteen twenties. We're talking about Alistair McKenzie. We're talking about, you know, earlier on Willie Park who designed Sunningdale, designed quite a few courses in the States. Harry Colt came over a couple of times, Allison came over a couple of times we were importing some of the same architects while developing some homegrown talents like C. B. MacDonald, like George Thomas. You know, there were definitely Americans who who became engaged in this, but they were you know, they could read London newspapers and stuff like that, so a lot of the same ideas were circulating. Now. One factor here is that the English Golden Age is generally concentrated earlier than the American Golden Age. The English Golden Age was really from about nineteen oh one to the outbreak of World War Two, and I believe nineteen fourteen that was where most of the action of the English Golden Age happened. In the United States. The beginning point you could really kind of fix at nineteen eleven when National Golf Links opened, But most of the stuff happened in the nineteen twenties. It was the Roaring twenties. There was plenty of there were plenty of people who were willing to fund golf course projects, and that's a big reason why they happened. And these ideas came over from Great Britain to influence what happened in the twenties. But it was generally happening later. The same thing didn't really go down in England in the nineteen twenties because England was more affected by World War One. Yeah, and so you know that's the reason why you know, you're Alistair McKenzie's probably ended up setting up shop in the US because there was just more to do here. There weren't as many projects happening in England.

01:17:24
Speaker 2: That makes sense. That's putting it in the context of the times again that like you said.

01:17:29
Speaker 1: Before, it's all every place is a little bit different. Australia is different again. You know, I've told the story before on different podcasts about Alistair McKenzie going to Royal Melbourne and then you know, kind of spreading seeds through throughout Australia that eventually grew into an impressive flowering of Golden Age architecture there. But that happened in the late twenties, right, that was later again, so different. Japan is a whole subject that I haven't I've been too intimidated to take on myself. But Charles Elison and went over there and did some interesting stuff and and so yeah, every every little place is different. And you know, we if we were doing a proper survey of the Golden Age. We would also talk maybe about the ending point of it, what affects the Great Depression had, what affects the the Second World War had, But if we dug into all that stuff, we'd be here for another few hours. So I think a good starting point is these three ideas of money, strategic design and uh and and naturalism. I think those are That's a good starting point for us.

01:18:30
Speaker 2: This is great. I'm just I'm happy that we found Harry Cole is the one guy to pin this wole on and put him up on the board, circle him in red, and then the branches can go out from there.

01:18:40
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. He he deserves it.

01:18:43
Speaker 2: Maybe God blame somebody, God blame somebody.

01:18:46
Speaker 1: We but yeah, it's fine with me that we blame Harry Colt. You know, he's been dead for a long time, so what's he gonna do? Genuinely, seems like he was probably a pretty nice guy. But I'm but I'm still I'm still willing to pin it on him.

01:19:02
Speaker 2: It's okay. Everybody needs a fall guy.

01:19:04
Speaker 1: All right. PJ, thank you so much for joining me.

01:19:06
Speaker 2: This is thanks thanks for having me.

01:19:14
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you Will. If you're looking for a wonderful holiday gift, consider giving the gift of Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership and see what it's all about. We have a new discussion for him in Friday Golf Club that has been a lot of fun for me personally. I've I've been all over it. I've I've become like a message board rat on there, and I've probably annoying people at this point. But the conversations we're having there have been really positive. People have been nice and also they've been saying interesting things. So I'm digging that right now. That's a new feature of Friday Golf Club. We're constantly trying to introduce new things to our me experience. There are events that are exclusive to members that you can participate in if you want. There's a great deal of exclusive content, course profiles, design notebook, as we call it, chocolate drops, all all that kind of stuff that members know about. So come join us at Frida Egg Golf Club. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.