The History of the Idea of Fairness in Golf

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Many golfers, especially professionals, expect golf courses to be fair. Where did this idea come from? Was the notion of fairness in golf course design always important to players or did it emerge at a particular time in history? Those are the questions I'm tackling today with the golf historian Bob Crosby. I'm Garrett Morrison, and this is designing golf, so I thought I do an extended introduction here to set up this episode. The topic is the historical roots of the idea of fairness in golf course design. Now this might seem a little bit obscure, but I think it's actually one of the most important things to understand about golf architecture and about the history of golf in general. Where this notion of fairness came from historically. This is sort of a companion piece, I guess to an episode that I did a month ago with my colleague PJ Clark. PJ and I had a golf Architecture one oh one discussion of fairness. I don't think you need to listen to that episode to enjoy this one, but obviously the two of them together add up to something larger. PJ and I talked about a number of different possible definitions of fairness in golf architecture, but the key one, I think, and the most critical one for this episode, is the idea that a fair golf course quote unquote fair should reward good shots and punish bad shots. That's the most basic definition of fairness that we're using here. So what Bob Crosby and I are going to do in this episode is trace this idea back to its initial emergence in golf discourse, which Bob locates around the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties. This is when we first see golfers and golf writers start to explicitly articulate a theory of fairness in golf and start to emphasize the importance of fairness. As you'll hear Bob describe, one of the central figures in this discussion, and really the main proponent of fairness in golf course design, the original fairness police chief, so to speak, was laid Law Purvis, a man named Laidlaw Purvis. He was a big voice in the game in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, kind of an obscure historical figure now People don't talk about Purvis much, but he was a big deal back in this era, and he ended up being the driving force behind the creation of Royal Saint George's Golf Club, which has hosted a number of Open championships, most recently in twenty twenty one. I believe the one that Colin Wrikawa won. In any case, now, on the other side of this debate, opposed to Lailaw Purvis, you have John Lowe, who really rose to prominence in golf in the eighteen nineties. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he became an influential figure in the RNA, and he wrote a book called Concerning Golf in nineteen oh three that ended up having a major influence on the likes of Harry Colt, Tom Simpson, Alistair McKenzie, et cetera, et cetera. Lowe was opposed to this idea that golf and golf courses needed to be fair, and he made a number of eloquent arguments to that end. So that's John Lowe representing the opposite end of the spectrum from Laidlaw Purvis and the Fairness Police. And low by the way, is the subject of a book that my guest Bob Crosby is writing. I can't wait for that book. I think it's going to be one of the best things ever written about golf history and golf course design. So no pressure, Bob. In any case, I just wanted to make sure that this basic duality is clear. Laidlaw Purvis arguing for absolute fairness in golf, John Lowe arguing that fairness should not be the objective either of the rules or of golf architecture, and this philosophical difference ended up informing another duality that we've discussed in this podcast before. Laidlaw Purvis, because of his devotion to fairness, promoted what we now call the penal school of golf architecture, which means, basically, hazard's positioned to catch poorly struck shots. You have cross bunkers that you have to carry, bunkers on the sides that punish hooks and slices and so on. This philosophy produces what Bob Crosby will call a kind of steeple chase golf course obstacles that you have to jump over and otherwise avoid. John Lowe, on the other hand, was perhaps the earliest advocate of what we now refer to as the strategic school of golf architecture. This is where hazards are not meant to merely punish, but also to make the game more interesting and intellectually stimulating. The hazards create risk reward scenarios. If you challenge them, you get a reward, but you can always choose to steer clear of them, play conservatively and not pursue those birdies and eagles. Low believed that this was a more heroic and romantic form of the game, less defensive than the kind of golf that Purvis promoted. So that's the opposition that Bob and I are digging into in this conversation. It's Purvis versus Low, fairness police versus anti fairness police, penal versus strategic. So we will get to Bob Crosby in a minute, but first a word from our sponsor for this episode, the USGA Green Section. Are you dreaming of a career that blends hands on learning with upward mobility. The USGA Greenkeeper Apprenticeship Program or GAP, is a one year tuition free pathway into golf course maintenance apprentices earn while they learn, they get two hundred and forty hours of classroom instruction plus two thousand hours of on the job training at top courses in the Carolinas. This program is backed by a one million dollar investment from the USGA and partners like Pinehurst Resort, Ewing, Outdoor Supply, and the Carolina's Golf Association. Apprentices gain skills in turf gas science, soil and water management, pest control, and leadership. More than half of the graduates of GAP have been promoted to leadership positions after completing the program. Applications are now open for the twenty twenty six cohorts in Pinehurst and Myrtle Beach, so check it out. This is a great way to get into the golf course maintenance industry. You can jumpstart your career in turf management by joining GAP today. Visit www dot USGA dot org slash GAP. That's USGA dot org slash GAP. All right, let's get to my conversation with Bob Crosby. So, Bob Crosby, we are talking about the history of the idea of fairness in golf course design, an intimidatingly huge subject. But I suppose where we could start is where do you think the idea of fairness entered golf course design historically, what year or decade would you go back to first?

00:07:59
Speaker 2: Delighted to be with you again, Yerett, There really isn't much talk about fairness in golf until about eighteen eighty. It doesn't really show up in the rules. There's very little talk at the time anyway about golf architecture. But it does begin to show up in about eighteen eighty with the English golf boom. And the English golf boom was basically a group of middle class Victorian golfers in England who were new to the game, who brought to golf a very Victorian sports ethos. They had, over the prior decades already enacted reforms in other popular sports like football or soccer, rugby, cricket, even tennis, literally every sport, and those reforms had been enormously successful. They had included things like forming a representative slash democratic union to manage the affairs of the sport. They had enacted uniform rules that applied everywhere, the sorts of things that golf in eighteen eighty or so lacked. So they came to golf eager to overlay on golf a system of reforms that had already been enormously successful. The key figure in that movement was laid Law Purvis. His ambitions for golf are breathtaking in eighteen eighty or so, and he viewed the whole ball of wax as being subject to reform, and by whole ball of wax, I mean rules and golf architecture. He did not really separate the two, and Nord should he have. The issues were really very similar. The issue in both was there's a problem with fairness. That there are lots of things we can change with golf, but the core issue for golf, and this is fairly unique to golf, is that the results of a good shot often didn't correspond with the quality of the shot. That was a problem that laid Law Purpose and others thought needed to be fixed, and it needed to be fixed in two ways. One was to amend rules to basically privilege good shots and also to propose a different kind of golf course that would do essentially the same sort of thing. But in the early eighteen eighties Purposes London Course Wimbledon enacts a new set of rules, and those rules reflect his concerns with fairness, equity and justice. Terms that are note to note again rarely appeared in the RNA rules. Second, he designed after some false starts at Felix Stowe and Epsom, he designed Saint George's The Royal came later near Sandwich. Both the rules he proposed and the golf course he designed at Sandwich were pulling. Were supposed to pull on the same ore. They were both supposed to be fair presentations of the game in the sense that they cleared the way for good shots, they would not be impeded in any way and make real trouble for less good shots. The notion here was that there would be a bright line distinction between, and this is Purpos's term, the far ensure shot and the less far ensurre shot, whatever that would be. I would note in passing that the original logo for Golf Magazine, it may have stayed on the logos through its existence till the nineteen thirties, was also far ensure. They were allies. That was, that was Purbos's program. That is, that is not just a matter of somebody's opinion that he threw out there. He had behind him, he had to his back. Were the most by eighteen ninety the most powerful group of golfers in Britain. By eighteen ninety there were more golfers south of the Tweed than north of the to Ead. They had much more money, they had much more clout in media. They actually had very appealing arguments for why golf ought to become more equitable or fair. They put their opponents in the position of having defend a sport as being unfair, and that's not an enviable position to be in the issues that Purvis raised, and I want to get back to the response to that in a minute. But the issues that Purpose raised are still very much alive today and they always have been in the decades since then. I mean today we still argue about whether there ought to be relief from a divot in a fair way. Tom Doak still quotes criticism of his courses as basically turning on the issue of their being unfair. I think it was last year at the Masters Bernhard Langer complained about the unfairness of the fifteenth green. He hit what he called a perfect wedgshot that sucked back off the green and he thought that was unfair. He ended up, i think, apologizing later for that, but it was the issue of fairness in golf has never left it and it was very much still with the game. I think it was the single most important development in golf in the sense that it is it continues to be a core dynamic in the evolution of the game, and that by that I mean proposed changes to the rules, how we think about golf course design, all that. But by eighteen ninety or so, resistance of that begins to organize itself. The first to do so was Walter Simpson. We associate Walter Simpson with his book The Art of Golf, which is sort of a lighthearted frolic through the game, but Simpson had actually a very dire view of the future of golf, primarily because of the initiatives of Purvis and others about changing rules in the different kinds of golf courses, and he was a staunch objector to the whole equity project. Another was another forgotten figure, Benjamin Hall blythe who ended up becoming the first chairman of the RNA Rules Committee, but a very powerful conservative golfer in the late eighteen eighties into the eighteen nineties and at the end of by the early eighteen nineties, my man John Lowe is joining the Fray. I think it was an incredible It was a pivotal moment in the history of the game, in part because the reaction to that and it and the movement and the English golf movement. We call it Victorian today, but at the time it was called English. The reaction to the English golf movement I think basically helps explain the shape of modern golf in the following ways. The threat of English golf reformers was real by the mid eighteen nineties. There were good reasons to think that it would take over the game, that golf courses would be designed along the lines of the original Sandwich course, which is to say, lots of cross bunkers, carry carry, carry, carry hazards and all sorts of things like that.

00:17:02
Speaker 1: Penal architecture basically what we now refer to as penal design.

00:17:07
Speaker 2: What we say, yeah, penal arctorship. But it wasn't just golf courses. It was also the rules would now have as a standard for whether or not a rule should be in the rule book was whether or not it was quote fair. That is not a standard today. And finally, should we regulate balls and golf clubs. I think all of that began to change in the late eighteen nineties in response to the forces being applied to the game by English golfers led by laid law purpose, and by that I mean within about a two year period, the RNA Rules Committee was formed and it promulgated its first rules in late eighteen ninety nine. Those rules were based on the traditional rule rules. While they cleaned up a lot of stuff, they did not give in to any of the suggestions from Purvis and others to make the rules based on fairness. The second, the second aspect of that within within about a year later, was Low articulates the basic principles of golf arket strategic golf architecture, and that basically took off. After that, it changed the face of the game. And finally, about six months after that, the haske ball appears and people want to know how to respond to the golf ball. Low from the very beginning says that we should put limits on balls and clubs. He didn't win that fight until twenty years later when the first rules were regulating balls were put into effect. But the issue was on the table at about the same time as they are Rules Committee, about the same time as a formulation of modern golf architecture, and it was an incredibly important moment, all of which I think was triggered by the desire of English slash Victorian golfers to make the game fair. That issue, the tension caused by that issue lives, I think, at the heart of golf and has ever since.

00:19:28
Speaker 1: It was sort of the center of the debate about what golf should be in the eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties and the first decade of the twentieth century. So it is a really useful lens through which to talk about golf and the way it was thought about during this period. But it's also a huge subject because it relates to pretty much everything that people were discussing at the time, and so it's both a useful top to discuss in a very difficult one to discuss because it's so big. I want to go back on the timeline a little bit here. You talked about fairness kind of entering the discourse around the eighteen eighties, and this happened to be the time that the game was beginning to move to England and was beginning to move Inland. People were starting to build courses. They weren't just laying them out on well suited land. They were starting to have to actually construct golf courses because they were building them on land that was somewhat resistant to golf. It was in England, and the group of people around the game in England was different in character and class and kind of cultural context than the group of people that was driving the game in Scotland previously. So you have this kind of clash of perspectives, this new big force in the game that's coming from a very different place than the original golfers of Scotland came from. So I want to talk a little bit about the original golfers of Scotland and the notion of fairness. It seems to me and what you're saying kind of confirms this that to the extent that we know what early golfers of the Scottish links thought about the game, and we may not know that much, fairness didn't really seem to be part of it. And if we look at the courses that they played, those courses would probably strike twenty first century golfers as extremely unfair. So I wonder if if you have any thoughts about that, if you could give me an idea of what those original courses were like, and how all of that might have related to the idea of fairness or the lack of an idea of fairness that existed at the time.

00:21:54
Speaker 2: Old Tom Morris I bowed back into this this way, Old Tom Morris designed a lot of golf courses. If he had a theory of golf course design, he never wrote it, He never wrote about it, he never told it to anybody. I think he, along with a lot of his other peers in Scotland, basically laid out golf courses on land that seemed suitable to them, that had enough acreage, and that was you know, that would drain reasonably well, presumably, and that seemed to be the end of the questions. I mean, these were professionals for the most part, and there is remarkably little discussion about golf architecture per se in the literature through the eighteen nineties, and so we don't really quite know what they were thinking, if they were thinking anything at all other than just get eighteen holes on this tract of land and collect your fee and move on. There doesn't there doesn't seem to be a theory of golf design that Old Tom or anybody else of his era bought into Purpose changed that. The Purpose's revolution was to say, I'm going to design a golf course on paper, and I'm going to build it to that design. And that's what he did at Sandwich, and the design he wanted for that golf course was specifically directed at creating bright line distinctions between a well hit shot and a not so well hit shot. And that was what the crossbunkers were supposed to do. That's what the difficulties on the edges of the fairways were supposed to do. That's what the flat greens and flat fairways were supposed to do, at least in theory, because the well hit it shot was to be privileged, the badly hit shot was to be hammered. But there was no countervailing philosophy of golf design at the time Sandwich opens. And this is eighteen eighty seven, and that was in part why I think it was so profoundly influential. Every golf course built in England thereafter almost I think, had its set of the steeple case courses. They hit their sets of cross bunkers every as far as I can tell, Garrett, almost every course built in America before nineteen ten or so had its set of crossbunkers. And it is the influence of Sandwich, Saint George's on that was profound. And it's in part because there was no other ideas in the field.

00:24:58
Speaker 1: That was it.

00:25:00
Speaker 2: And if you look at surveys of best holes or favorite holes done in the eighteen nineties, and this is Horace Hutchinson, this is all the pros, all the usual pro names, all those guys. They all recite the formula that purpose first devised to build Sandwich, which is to say holes have to be of a certain link to provide for full shots, that you have to have carry hazards for each shot, to test the good shot versus the bad shot, etcetera, etcetera. All of them recite the mantra. And there was really no competing theory of golf architecture as late as the mid nineteen ninety eighteen nineties. So to get back to your original question, I don't know what the I don't know what the old Tom's were thinking other than get the golf course laid on the land. If he was trying to make it as attractive as possible, I mean, in many cases he did that, But I don't think that was seemed to be a big goal of his. So it purviose lands in a vacuum, and partly because it was a vacuum is why he was so influential. By the way, an interesting footnote on this is that Tom Dunn and the Dun family, who were profligate in building steeplechase golf courses in England and in America, different family members came over here. Tom does spend a lot of time with Purvis, both at Wimbledon and as they were building Royal St. George's, and in a couple places raves about the design and then he carries those ideas to build hundreds of golf courses either here as family hundreds of golf courses. So there is a sort of a linkage between Tom Dunn and other quote Victorian golf architects and laid Law Perbis.

00:27:15
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00:33:01
Speaker 2: That's a big question where to begin. I'll start with the first part of that question about what is the cultural background to courses like will Saint George's and its progeny. We tend to forget that the Victorian mindset. They viewed themselves as progressives. They thought that they were bringing to golf modernity, new ideas. Remember England in eighteen ninety an it was at the height of its empire. It believed, and you can look it up. It believed that their way of organizing politics, society, law, are everything else was superior to anyone else's and.

00:33:58
Speaker 1: Then it would continue to get better. They believed. They were extremely optimistic.

00:34:02
Speaker 2: Well that's the Whig theory of history. That's right, the Wig You've read the Butterfield books. But any rate, and they were going to impart that superior knowledge and understanding of the world to their colonies. They were going to the rationale. A rationale for why they held India as a colony, or why they held Ireland, frankly as a colony, was because only they could impart to those colleagues, and there were many other colonies that under in the British Empire, because they were going to impart to those colleagues better ways of managing their daily lives, the better ways of legal better legal systems, better legislatures, all that sort of stuff. That mindset. They brought that mindset to golf. They were going to take what they viewed as an archaic provincial sport and fix it. The first and lowest fruit to pick was the was this random randomness in golf that you found on so many of the old lengths courses. Uh. They found that sort of randomness a sign of inattention, that that it's something that needs to be rectified by a more systematic kind of design that will limit that. There'll always be randomness because you're playing outdoors and it's going to happen, but to the extent you can minimize randomness in golf was one of their key goals.

00:35:40
Speaker 1: That was nature, and they had science, and they believe that nature could be improved by science and.

00:35:46
Speaker 2: And they and it was important because the only way you can yield to a well hit shot, it's just result, just rewards, was to make sure randomness was minimized. And that was the key, key dynamic in their thinking that they were going to bring to golf the enlightenment that only Englishmen could bring. And golf was way past due for receiving their benefits. Purpose purpose and his allies, and he had many allies, really believed he was doing golf a favor. I'm here to help you out because you've lost your way where you never found your way, And it was it was that sort of moralistic worldview that he wanted to bring to golf to tighten it up. He wanted to He wanted to put structure on golf that it didn't that it didn't have previously. And I think you mentioned to the extent it might make golf more mechanical, more like tennis. It be just target shooting. A lot of tape basically refers to Sandwich is target shooting. I mean, all you do is you hit your drive straight and in the air. And that's the end of the questions. And then the second part of your question is the harder, thicker part, which.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: Is that's getting into what the response was to this philosophy of golf course design and how it came about.

00:37:30
Speaker 2: I think there's a way to summarize the response to that by saying, and here, John Lowe is I think the key is that by the late eighteen nineties there was the conservatives. And I'm using the term only in the sense of golf conservatives.

00:37:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, the conservatives. When you say the conservatives, you're talking about those who responded to this quote unquote modern and progressive form of golf course design that was pioneered by Laidlaw Purvis and others. The reason why conservative might be an appropriate term here is that John Lowe and others were looking to the traditions of the game to inform their new golf architecture.

00:38:15
Speaker 2: They were the defenders of the traditional game, and they were conservative in that sense. I think what happened by the late eighteen nineties is that the conservatives, the defenders of traditional game, were able to reawakened people's appreciation of the virtues of the traditional game. They had basically been sort of under attack for almost two decades at that point from the progressives who wanted to modernize golf, who wanted to bring it into at the time, we've bringing into the nineteenth century, and they were able to reawaken the appeal of the older traditional game. And they did that in a couple of ways. One was that low argued that with regard to both Low argued, low isn't more involved in some respects with the rules than he was with golf architecture, but that his argument is that is that being able to play, for example, Saint George's Well, or being able to play under the rules of Wimbledon, which was a different kind of rules from Saint Andrews, called for a sort of mechanical kind of golf it was as it was a focus on the athletic skills required to hit the ball.

00:39:43
Speaker 1: Well.

00:39:46
Speaker 2: Low's argument was that the traditional game called called upon a much broader range of human attributes. It wasn't just athletic skill that was certainly part of it, but it was also being able to think and analyze work, clough situations, perseverance, the overcoming of adversity, all sorts of various things that he thought only the traditional game forced a golfer to confront. And that was I think at the heart of why he felt it was so important to revive the traditional game in the face of what would have at the time seemed the inevitable triumph of laid law purpose in English golf. And you've read enough history books where history is contingent, it might have turned out differently, and in this case, I can't think of a better case in golf where golf might have taken a very different turn circa eighteen ninety eight or so, if the RNA had not formed the Rules Committee, and they almost didn't, if Lowe hadn't taken the pains to set out and articulate a theory of golf architecture that we now call strategic golf architecture. If that stuff hadn't happened in response, I think in both those cases to the advances of laid law purpose, golf might be a very different game. You would not have been unreasonable to think in eighteen ninety eight that golf was on the cusp of a complete conversion to a different kind of game. It didn't happen, but it wasn't inevitable.

00:41:43
Speaker 1: Well, And part of what made this response to Victorian golf course design successful is all the arguments that John Lowe and others marshaled to the defense of their own philosophy, The arguments that they made in support of strategic golf design, the arguments that they made in support of the retention of randomness and an element of luck in the game. So what were some of those arguments. What were the main arguments that this group of people made that golf courses shouldn't just be these tennis courts, they should be something more than that.

00:42:28
Speaker 2: Start with the rules, Walter Simpson makes some arguments that Lowe really tracks later on, Walter really drops out of the Sir Walter actually really drops out of the mix. By eighteen ninety one ninety two, he has health issues and other things, but three essays he wrote in the late eighteen eighties and early in eighteen nineties, and a couple of letters and some other exchanges. Simpson makes the argument that the idea applying fairness to golf rules is to create is to is to is to is to indulge in what's called a category mistake. You're applying something to golf that doesn't belong to golf, and that is to say fairness. Fairness belongs in judicial systems.

00:43:19
Speaker 1: UH.

00:43:19
Speaker 2: They should be fair because they need the concurrence of the people that over which it has control. It is able to take your personal liberty and property from you. It ought to be fair. It ought to be perceived as fair. Golf is just a sport. If you don't like its rules, find another sport. The rules in golf have only one simple obligations, very humble and modest, and that is to make for an interesting game. It has no aspirations to uh to to being moral, or to be fair or just or you know other synonyms for the word fairness. It is not like a legal system that has various restraints on it. The one example that of the Purvis and other reformers bring up time and time again and AJ Robertson in golf conducts I think two different surveys on the topic trying to tease out support for the idea is the stymy. The steymy was particularly irksome to Purvis and Robertson, Robertson and others because you could be stymied even after a good shot. You were punished. The punishment you incurred had nothing to do with the quality of the shot you hit.

00:44:50
Speaker 1: And it had relatively little to do with the quality of the shot that your opponent hit because it was essentially random, right, and so it.

00:44:59
Speaker 2: Really the elimination of this of the stymy was a buzzword for Purvis Robertson all through the eighteen as eighteen nineties. That it was finally eliminated in I think nineteen fifty two or something like that, that it was finally eliminated would have had John Lowe spinning in his grave. He thought that was an exquisite shot that you needed to learn how to hit.

00:45:30
Speaker 1: That it was.

00:45:31
Speaker 2: It was one of the challenges of playing the game that yes, there was an element of randomness to it, but then there ought to be in golf an element of randomness that luck played a role and get used to it, and you know, so that was that was his hobby horse. In terms of golf architecture, it was much similar sorts of concerns. Which is that, which is that the goal of a course like Royal St. George's at the time is you're right. It's going through several changes since, including the elimination of the uh the maiden hole and other holes, but the whole concept was to minimize randomness by way of a golf course that tested, you know, fairly as objectively as it could the physical ability to hit a golf ball quote far and sure and Purpose goes on to say that in the in the mid when when uh, when Saint When George Saint George's comes under criticisms in it. Finally in the eighteen nineties, he says, look, there's one distinguishing feature for good golf, and that's hitting the ball straight and long, and that's what I want to test. The other stuff is just draws, uh and and my course does that. And that's the idea that again there is he gives a there is a kind of shot that has an independent status for Purpose and that's the good long straight shot. Everything is built around rewarding that shot. The obvious response was from low was well, that might be in some situations the right shot hip, but it might not be in other situations. So at any rate, I could go on.

00:47:26
Speaker 1: But yeah, very familiar to anyone who has heard a current day professional golfer talk about the game and what should be rewarded. Randall Shambly is obsessed with Foreignsure, so these ideas about what should be rewarded and prioritized in golf, through its architecture, through its rule rules, are still very much part of how we discuss the game now. The the counter arguments to that kind of seemingly rationalist position that the main thing about golf is hitting it long and straight. The counter arguments to that can sometimes be a little bit romantic sounding. Golf is like life. Life has an element of luck and randomness. Therefore golf should imitate life and introduce these chaotic factors intentionally, even through golf course design. That is kind of a bit of a romantic argument that might be easy to dismiss. It's like, okay, just go on about that. You know, golf is like life. What people might start rolling their eyes. But I think the maybe more persuasive argument, not necessarily more valid, but maybe more persuasive to a larger amount of people, is that when when you completely rationalize a golf course and consistently reward good shots or or well struck shots in a consistent way, golf just becomes a little bit more boring. Right. The thing that makes golf exciting a lot of times is that element of chance, and without that, the game just loses its interest to a degree. And I think we see this in the holes that people want to watch high level golfers play. The road hole, the fifteenth hole at Augusta National, the postage stamp at Royal Troon. These holes have a big element of luck about them, and that's kind of why we want to watch them. We know that high level players can hit a consistent shot, and a golf course that just rewards them in a a perfectly predictable way is you know, it might be fair, it might identify the best golfer or whatever, but over the long term, it's not going to be particularly interesting to watch. We want to see luck enter the game at some moments, and that's not always fair. So the two different kinds of arguments there, golf is like life, a little bit romantic. Some people might dismiss it. Golf needs to be exciting, and it's only exciting when it's unpredictable. That might be an argument that would gain a little more purchase with more people. Is that is the way I'm thinking about that valid? Do you think?

00:50:46
Speaker 2: Yeah? Love didn't make it argument about golf is like life, but he did make arguments about golf should be this look, should have a factor, should if you play a role, I would come at it slightly differently, and this or low would come at it slightly differently. Los in some respects of snob. So was Alis firm McKenzie or so as Harry Cole. So is a lot of them Bernard Darwin, for one, Lowe is a snob in this sense. And I'm getting at your question. Believe it or not. It wasn't so much that he thought golf ought to be more like life, with all of its ups and downs. It's that golf ought to be a sport that appeals to the educated, sophisticated, Edwardian gentleman. And that means it can't be a unidimensional, a single dimensional kind of sport where do you hit the ball well or not? It ought to have a whole bunch of factors that figure into how you play the game. He says at one point that you know, artisans and middle class people like to just have these simple tests where they go out and they try to hit balls. It is it is the it is the more sophisticated and he uses the word educated gentleman that has a different kind of taste for sport, and that's what he thinks golf ought to be oriented towards. McKenzie in the spirit of Saint Andrews, I think, says something very very similar. By the way, who notes Blow as the father of modern golf architecture I think six times in that book. But that's who he wants to appeal to, and and it's not the touchy feely sort of artsy FARTSI stuff. He wants to appeal to the sophisticated gentlemen. That doesn't fly today. You can't say that today unless you're in an interview with Garrett Morrison. But that is certainly I think part of what is the appeal of people like Doak and Courk Crenshaw and other people is that they're they're they're they're trying to their golf courses require a reasonable amount of sophisticated thought. Some people don't like that, don't want to be bothered, and that's fine, but some people do. And I think the best golf courses do require a certain level of thought, reflection, and analysis. The holes you mentioned are three or four of many that do. So that's what Lowe is trying to recover from the crusades that Purvis was on to change over golf to a more purely athletic sport.

00:54:04
Speaker 1: It's an effort to make a golf course worthy of as much thought and analysis as a work of literature or a painting, right where where there are layers to peel away, where there are elements that are unexpected and sometimes even provocative. The more you make a golf course kind of scientifically laid out and fair, the fewer of those layers it has. It doesn't have those kind of little rough edges to it. It has a kind of predictable and rational form. But if you're if you're somebody that that low was thinking about when he when he talked about the educated person, you're thinking about somebody who studied poetry and whereas an appreciation for artistic things, and people who have that appreciation are kind of of the tendency to appreciate things that are not just smoothed out and rational, that have these little foreigny complexities that make a piece of art interesting to consider. And it's almost as if they were trying to bring golf course architecture into the arts rather than into the sciences.

00:55:30
Speaker 2: I think that's right. In nineteen oh one, Lowe wrote a long response to what was the famous rating golf courses that Golf Illustrated head, and it was just his first real articulation of the basics of strategic golf architecture. What's interesting about the piece is that his last long paragraph in that piece begins with a sentence that says something like the following. When Harry Varden stands on the tee to the seventeenth told at the old Course, He's presented with the problem that requires thought. It isn't just a question of hitting a certain kind of addicted the course dictating a certain kind of shot. He's got several things to consider, and it's the architecture that promotes that sort of response by golfer as good as Harry Varden that we ought to try to emulate. That's where we ought to try to go. Lowe was making an argument, a very appealing argument for us today that seems to be can make you tear up sometimes it's so wonderful. But remember at the time, he was fighting against what he feared was going to be a takeover of golf by a very different set of ideas, and and he feared reasonably, I think that that was on its way to happening. And he was the rear guard. He was trying to recover the holes at the old course. He was trying to rediscover what was in them that made them so appealing to make a case against the Purvises. And it was it was somewhat desperate.

00:57:30
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:57:31
Speaker 2: There were real fears that they were going down with the ship. And it turned out that they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

00:57:42
Speaker 1: But but uh it it uh.

00:57:47
Speaker 2: He had both a he had recovering the the virtues of the road hole was of a piece with beating back the forces of reform coming up from south of the Tweed.

00:58:03
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:58:04
Speaker 2: And that historical context is critically important, I think to understanding the origins of modern golf. Architecture, modern golf period, rules, ball limitations, club limitations.

00:58:18
Speaker 1: All that.

00:58:20
Speaker 2: For low thought, in his heart of hearts, that the appeal to fairness was really a way to avoid the difficulties of the game.

00:58:32
Speaker 1: That that.

00:58:34
Speaker 2: It was. It was basically a way to smooth out golf's rough edges. And that's why he was so adamant in opposing it, because it was those rough edges that mattered at the end of the day. That that the the the movement for a fair game had in its dark little heart a different agenda, which was which is to make golf easier. Lowe believed that the non democratic nature of the RNA Rules Committee was important in that regard. They were not subject to popular opinion, because if you let popular opinion, if you let its nose under the tent, golf will automatically become a lot easier. And that's what Purpose wanted to do. Purpose had advocated since eighteen eighty five or so, up until the very last minute, the formation of a British Golf Union that would be democratic, that would be comprised of representatives from all the significant clubs in Britain, including the RNA, but it would only be one club, among many plans were made for setting up the headquarters in London. It was on its way. That's sort of an organization subject to a popular vote, would have enacted very different rules from the one the RNA was willing to enact, because it would have been subject to popular pressures to make golf quote easier or to smooth at its edges, so that sort of thing, much like as in golf architecture, as in the rules, there was a fight over similar sorts of core issues. You can't write this kind of history, and I'm trying to write it right now without writing a very different kind of golf history. This is not going to be a history that talks about who won what golf tournament, and it's not gonna be a history about who designed what golf course, although it'll be a little bit of that. Those are sort of breaking down golf into some atomistic sort of individual events, and you lose the forest for the trees. I think golf has a long There are long running themes in golf over which people have fought generation after generation, including our generation, and those long running themes really all begin to coalesce at about the same time, roughly eighteen ninety five nineteen hundred and writing about writing that kind of a history of golf is a different sort of enterprise and it's damn hard.

01:01:23
Speaker 1: Well, Bob. I can't wait for your book to come out, no doubt about it, because it's going to contribute exactly this kind of perspective on the history of the game, where we're talking about long running ideas that are still relevant today and fairness is chief among us.

01:01:45
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, no, I absolutely we tend to forget that. And this applies certainly to the voluminous writings on golf architecture that you and I. We've all read those written polemically. They're not writing, they're not written descriptively. They're fighting fight Simpson, mckensey, low Cold, everybody. They're fighting against an enemy, and the enemy.

01:02:13
Speaker 1: There are there are stakes to what they're saying.

01:02:15
Speaker 2: There's stakes to what they're saying, and those polemics track through the history of the game. It was always a fight still is.

01:02:27
Speaker 1: Well. Thank you very much for sitting down with me today, Bob. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. It's been too long since the last time we had one of our discussions, and I'll make sure to have you on again soon.

01:02:38
Speaker 2: Great enjoyed it. Thank you Garrett.

01:02:48
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you Will. If you have been enjoying Designing Golf, then first of all, leave us a rating, and you wherever you happen to be listening to us and check out Frida Egg Golf Club FEGC. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership to see everything that we're offering there. But we're building an awesome community of golf enthusiasts in Friday Golf Club and we would love for you to join us now. One of the most recent benefits of an FEGC membership is the ability to enter a design a Whole contest, which we're running with Andy Staples, the golf architect Andy Staples. Andy is building a par three course called Ace Valley at Breezy Point Resort in Minnesota. One of the holes on this actual, physical, real golf course is going to be a contest hole that is designed by somebody in Frida Egg Golf Club. The hole is going to be based on a template, So some kind of famous green complex or whole from around the world is going to be adapted to the site and the idea dea is going to come from somebody in f e GC. So check out the details of this contest on the Frida egg dot com. We have all the information there, but in order to enter, you need to be a member of f e g C. So if that sounds fun to you, then then join us and let's do a design contest. I think it's going to be pretty awesome. I can't wait to see what our members come up with. All right, that's it, thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.