Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When
Speaker 1: I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 2: And when I find my ball in a bride egg
Speaker 2: Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egg, Frida Egg,
Speaker 2: bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of
Speaker 2: the hump. Welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison,
Speaker 2: and today we're talking about the history of par. That's right,
Speaker 2: the history of par. The idea of par is absolutely
Speaker 2: pervasive in golf. It's how we keep track of scores
Speaker 2: and a golf tournament score to par. It's how we
Speaker 2: judge the quality of a player's performance. It's how we
Speaker 2: categorize holes par three, par four, par five. It's how
Speaker 2: we categorize courses too par seventy and above. That's a
Speaker 2: full regulation course, par sixty nine and below. That's something else.
Speaker 2: It's how we assess the difficulty of a golf course,
Speaker 2: even the worthiness of certain courses to host championships. If
Speaker 2: elite players score too far under par, the course is
Speaker 2: deemed not hard enough. Part dominates our thinking about golfer
Speaker 2: performance in golf course architecture to a degree that we
Speaker 2: don't even notice it most of the time. It's the
Speaker 2: water we swim in. And yet for most of golf history,
Speaker 2: par did not exist, certainly not in its current form,
Speaker 2: where each hole has a designated PAR and birdies and
Speaker 2: bogies are calculated in relation to that number. That idea
Speaker 2: of par in the grand sweep of the game's history
Speaker 2: is relatively new. So on today's episode, we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about where the idea of par came from, when
Speaker 2: and why it emerged, and we'll also talk about the
Speaker 2: effect that the idea of par has had on the game,
Speaker 2: and effect that, in my opinion, has not been super positive.
Speaker 2: My guest is the golf historian Stephen Procter. Stephen is
Speaker 2: the author of the book's Monarch of the Green, a
Speaker 2: biography of young Tom Morris, and The Long Golden Afternoon,
Speaker 2: an account of golf's rise in the decades before World
Speaker 2: War One. He's also the co host of the new podcast,
Speaker 2: The Duffer's Literary Companion. All right, let's get to it.
Speaker 2: After this break, you'll hear from Stephen Proctor on the
Speaker 2: history of par. This episode of the Friday Podcast is
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Speaker 2: All right, back to the episode. Stephen Procter, Welcome back
Speaker 2: to the podcast. How you doing.
Speaker 3: I'm doing great, Garrett, Thank you for having me back.
Speaker 3: Interesting subject today, look forward to talking about it.
Speaker 2: I've been curious about this topic for a while. You're
Speaker 2: the only other person I know who is equally preoccupied
Speaker 2: with it. We've talked about it on a few occasions.
Speaker 2: You certainly have a much better grounding in the actual
Speaker 2: history of the concept of par than I do. But
Speaker 2: I feel like we're sort of out on an island
Speaker 2: with researching this subject because I haven't seen an awful
Speaker 2: lot on it. So why did you get interested in
Speaker 2: the history of par? How did this come about for you?
Speaker 3: It came about for me when I was working on
Speaker 3: my first book about young Tom Morris, because I became
Speaker 3: aware in doing the research on that of an article
Speaker 3: that had been written just before Tommy claims the championship
Speaker 3: belt in eighteen seventy. So he's won two opens in
Speaker 3: a row. He's you know, training hard for the third Open,
Speaker 3: knowing that if he wins it, he's gonna claim the belt.
Speaker 3: And a man named Alexander Doleman, writing for one of
Speaker 3: the golf publications in Scotland, did an article with two
Speaker 3: other golfers, davey Strath, Tommy's best friend in closest rival,
Speaker 3: and Jamie Anderson, a man would go on to win
Speaker 3: three opens and was also quite a good friend to
Speaker 3: Tommy's and caddied for him in a lot of his
Speaker 3: key matches against Davy and other people. He asked Alexander Dolman,
Speaker 3: ask both of them what did they think represented perfect
Speaker 3: golf at twelve hole course at Prestwick where the opens
Speaker 3: were contested in the early years, and they assigned a
Speaker 3: number to each hole. And in the course of trying
Speaker 3: to explain to the readers what he meant, because you
Speaker 3: need to keep in mind, this is the very first
Speaker 3: time this idea of something approaching par had you know,
Speaker 3: had been brought up because of some other history that
Speaker 3: we should go back to in a minute. But in
Speaker 3: any case, he used a term from the stock market
Speaker 3: for the right price for the share of stock, the
Speaker 3: par price for a share of stock. And so that's
Speaker 3: the first time the words gets used in the context
Speaker 3: of what should be scored on any given hole. In
Speaker 3: eighteen seventy, you know, for all the hundreds of years
Speaker 3: of golf before that, golf starts in about fourteen hundred.
Speaker 3: I think it's fair to say because by fourteen fifty
Speaker 3: seven the king has issued an edict banning it. So
Speaker 3: you figure it has to have been played at least
Speaker 3: fifty years to be broad enough to be banned. That's
Speaker 3: a reasonable start, and it might be earlier, but you
Speaker 3: don't have any written evidence before fourteen fifty seven.
Speaker 1: So if you go from fourteen fifty.
Speaker 3: Seven, you know on up to eighteen seventy, well, there
Speaker 3: are a lot of years in there. There are centuries
Speaker 3: in there, and you know, no one ever thought of
Speaker 3: this idea of a whole being a certain score you
Speaker 3: should make, mostly because golf was almost exclusively a match
Speaker 3: play game.
Speaker 1: In that age.
Speaker 3: Pretty much every golfer would play stroke play twice a
Speaker 3: year for the Spring Medal and the Autumn Metal, and
Speaker 3: every other time they would be playing a match and
Speaker 3: so there was no motive to assign a score to
Speaker 3: a whole. It was just you made five, I made six,
Speaker 3: I win. It doesn't It didn't matter, and it was
Speaker 3: not part of the thinking. But you know, when young
Speaker 3: Tommy comes along and he starts putting up scores that
Speaker 3: are absurd scores, you know, then it gets people naturally
Speaker 3: the thinking about the idea of what you should score
Speaker 3: on a hole, or what represents brilliants. You know. I
Speaker 3: think Dolman's attempt in the article was to show how
Speaker 3: incredibly brilliant Tommy was playing, you know, all the years
Speaker 3: that led up to it, because in the previous years
Speaker 3: he'd set records for the twelve holes, and you know,
Speaker 3: the record that he had set at that time, fifty one,
Speaker 3: turned out to be two strokes higher than what they
Speaker 3: thought of his perfect golf, only indicating to you that
Speaker 3: they never had any idea that anybody was going to
Speaker 3: go out and.
Speaker 1: Play perfect golf.
Speaker 3: It was it was a mythical ideal they were discussing.
Speaker 2: All that is so fascinating. You know, first of all,
Speaker 2: we have these hundreds of years that elapse with golf
Speaker 2: being played and par not being a factor. You mentioned
Speaker 2: that One big reason for that is because match play
Speaker 2: is the dominant form.
Speaker 3: Of golf, foursomes was even bigger. So most of the
Speaker 3: time when you were playing a match play, you were
Speaker 3: playing alternate shot with two other men against two other men,
Speaker 3: both of you playing a single ball, so that even
Speaker 3: you can see how that would diminish further this idea
Speaker 3: of a par score because you're not making any score.
Speaker 3: It's you and your partner making some score and the
Speaker 3: only thing that matters is that it be a lower
Speaker 3: one than the person's that you're playing against. And so
Speaker 3: there's just there was no it was not part of
Speaker 3: the thinking about golf. And you know, even when you're
Speaker 3: reading early coverage of metal tournaments, there's not really an
Speaker 3: emphasis on the score per se. I mean, it's written
Speaker 3: down so and so won with this number, but you
Speaker 3: never see somebody comparing it to last year's number, or
Speaker 3: you know, the number of next year. It's only when
Speaker 3: someone does something so extraordinary, like at one point Gilbert
Speaker 3: Mitchell Innis shoots eighty eight in a medal at Saint Andrews,
Speaker 3: when scores were usually in the nineties and so high nineties.
Speaker 3: A lot of the time for gentlemen golfers that age,
Speaker 3: and so that would be noted because it was a
Speaker 3: record no one had ever done it. But most of
Speaker 3: the time the score hardly gets you know, gets mentioned.
Speaker 3: But it's much more important who was attending, which men played,
Speaker 3: which royalty was on hand to watch. All of that
Speaker 3: was vastly more important than what the score anyone posted.
Speaker 2: It was the Parks versus the Morrises, and individual performance
Speaker 2: wasn't necessarily a big subject. But when young Tom Morris
Speaker 2: comes along the idea of individual brilliance and golf starts
Speaker 2: to take on a little more currency, which is maybe
Speaker 2: I think you're implying one of the first steps toward
Speaker 2: an idea of par because if you want to quantify
Speaker 2: individual brilliance, then something like parr is almost necessary to
Speaker 2: think that through. Is that sort of what we're implying.
Speaker 3: That is completely true, Gret, You're exactly right. And the
Speaker 3: other thing that happens is that, you know, people start
Speaker 3: to get more interested in stroke play gradually, and in
Speaker 3: particular the English as soon as golf moved into England,
Speaker 3: and now we're talking the very first what you would
Speaker 3: call truly English course is built in eighteen sixty four
Speaker 3: at Royal North Devon, and in five years after that,
Speaker 3: hoy Lake where we just had the open is built
Speaker 3: and opens up. So the English immediately preferred stroke play
Speaker 3: to match play. And I think it's kind of like
Speaker 3: it's an interesting mindset difference. You know that wou would
Speaker 3: continue and even become more so in America. But early
Speaker 3: in the time when the English are starting to play,
Speaker 3: they they will keep their score in a match. Okay,
Speaker 3: they're playing a match, but they'll put everything out and
Speaker 3: they'll be writing their numbers down on a card, which
Speaker 3: makes Scotsmen lose their minds, like why are you doing this?
Speaker 3: Why are you writing down your score? It's a match,
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter, you know. But the English from the
Speaker 3: very beginning liked stroke play, and it was the English
Speaker 3: who started creating competitions built around the idea of a
Speaker 3: number of strokes rather than a straight up match against
Speaker 3: another human.
Speaker 2: All right, So eighteen seventy this article by Alexander Dolman
Speaker 2: comes out which essentially invents the word par or applies
Speaker 2: the word par to this context, perhaps for the first
Speaker 2: time now in the decades after that, it wasn't as
Speaker 2: though par immediately emerged in its modern form. There were,
Speaker 2: as I understand it, a number of intermediary concepts or
Speaker 2: different types of ways of understanding individual performance in relation
Speaker 2: to a standard. So, you know, could you describe some
Speaker 2: of those for me? What were people talking about when
Speaker 2: they talked about something like par.
Speaker 3: The way people conceived of golf in those days between
Speaker 3: Tommy and let's say the turn of the century was
Speaker 3: with this. There was a notion about level fours because
Speaker 3: you know, people didn't assign strokes to holes until nineteen eleven.
Speaker 1: We'll get to that in a little bit.
Speaker 3: But they had this idea that a hole was a
Speaker 3: one shot or a two shotter or a three shotter.
Speaker 3: How many shots would a reasonable player require to reach
Speaker 3: the green? And then they would just assume two putts
Speaker 3: would be added on by good players. A lot of
Speaker 3: players get three putts, so you know, then they they
Speaker 3: developed because of that.
Speaker 1: Obviously, if you.
Speaker 3: Go around, and they always played in increments of eighteen
Speaker 3: even when they were in eighteen hole courses. So for instance,
Speaker 3: Preswick is a twelve hole course, but if you played
Speaker 3: in a tournament, you played at three times around to
Speaker 3: get thirty six or two eighteens.
Speaker 1: As we think of eighteens.
Speaker 3: Now, so people you know in St Andrew's was eighteen
Speaker 3: holes and that had you know, was evolving into a standard.
Speaker 3: Not many courses were eighteen holes, but they wanted to
Speaker 3: be eighteen holes, and so the mindset was thinking about
Speaker 3: eighteen holes. And if you think about a mix of
Speaker 3: one shotters, two shoters and three shoters over eighteen holes,
Speaker 3: you can see how they would evolve to a concept
Speaker 3: they called level fours. Brilliant golf was to go around
Speaker 3: in level fours. And by brilliant I mean exactly that
Speaker 3: absolutely first class, very rarely achieved golf would be level fours,
Speaker 3: almost mythical. So you know, if you shot level fours
Speaker 3: for eighteen holes, obviously shot seventy two, and that sort
Speaker 3: of is you can see where these concepts are beginning
Speaker 3: to fold into each other. But most of the early
Speaker 3: tournaments they would report and so and show it was
Speaker 3: six over fours, you know, so meaning that they shot
Speaker 3: seventy eight or you know, if it was a par
Speaker 3: seventy two.
Speaker 1: So that was the way they.
Speaker 3: Thought about it, was getting around the course in level fours.
Speaker 2: And then there was a concept of bogie golf as well, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, and this is something that English introduced.
Speaker 3: In eighteen ninety one, a man named Hugh Rothdam invented
Speaker 3: a competition at Coventry Country Club that came to be
Speaker 3: known as the bogie Competition. So the idea was, you know,
Speaker 3: the Scots hated this so much it's hard. It's hard
Speaker 3: to put to extribe how much they hated it. In fact,
Speaker 3: for many, many years, the Royal and ancient refused to
Speaker 3: write any rules for a bogie competition.
Speaker 1: They didn't want any part of this.
Speaker 2: But history repeats itself too. They probably have hated a
Speaker 2: number of innovations out of England and then the US
Speaker 2: later on.
Speaker 1: Yes, no, that is true.
Speaker 3: They have been most interested intending their own garden. But
Speaker 3: in any case, this competition would you everybody is essentially
Speaker 3: playing a match against the course, So you're playing against
Speaker 3: what they called originally the ground score of the course.
Speaker 3: So we assigned a target score to every hole, and
Speaker 3: if you beat the target score, you won the hole.
Speaker 1: If you didn't, you lost the hole.
Speaker 3: So the person who this came to be known as
Speaker 3: the bogie score over time, because there was a very
Speaker 3: popular song. There's always been the notion of the bogey
Speaker 3: man in Scotland and England, and there was a very
Speaker 3: popular song then called Hush Hush, he comes to Bogeyman.
Speaker 3: And so then gradually somebody assigned it a rank and
Speaker 3: it became known as Colonel Boge. So there was this
Speaker 3: big figure. You're playing against Colonel Bogie in a match,
Speaker 3: and the person who beats Colonel Bogee by the most
Speaker 3: holes wins the match.
Speaker 1: That's how they did it, and.
Speaker 3: So you can see that in the necessity of assigning
Speaker 3: a score to the hole, you're now approaching something like
Speaker 3: very like what we think of his par But what's
Speaker 3: interesting to understand, Garrett, is when they were assigning a
Speaker 3: bogie score to a hole, they weren't assigning it as
Speaker 3: what you would think a professional player would make on
Speaker 3: this hole. They were thinking of it as what would
Speaker 3: a good solid club player, like a low handicapped man,
Speaker 3: not necessarily even a scratch person be able to make
Speaker 3: on this hole, or should make. And that became the
Speaker 3: bogie score, what you should make if you're a decent player.
Speaker 3: And obviously a lot of not very decent players played
Speaker 3: golf then as they do now, and so people would
Speaker 3: be way over the bogie score sometimes, and you know,
Speaker 3: really great players might be under it. But so it
Speaker 3: wasn't exactly what we think of as par but it
Speaker 3: was creeping quite close to it, and scores assigned to
Speaker 3: holes obviously is closer.
Speaker 2: Still, it seems to me that there are two big
Speaker 2: innovations here with the bogey competition, one of which you
Speaker 2: just named, which is that individual holes are being assigned
Speaker 2: a certain number that's very different from level fours, right,
Speaker 2: And so now we're getting down to the granular level
Speaker 2: of the hole and saying this hole should be played
Speaker 2: in this number of strokes. And then the other thing
Speaker 2: is not not following the concept of ideal or perfect golf.
Speaker 2: This is more like what a player might be expected
Speaker 2: to shoot, not in this case necessarily a scratch or
Speaker 2: professional or elite player, but a normal player. This is
Speaker 2: not a not an abstract concept of perfect golf that
Speaker 2: we're talking about. This is more grounded. And so that
Speaker 2: those two things strike me as very distinct moves toward
Speaker 2: a modern notion of par no.
Speaker 3: And this is the time, you know, you got to
Speaker 3: keep in mind, in the eighteen nineties golf is absolutely
Speaker 3: exploding in England. You know, you get to periods of
Speaker 3: time in the eighteen ninety four ninety five, where one
Speaker 3: golf course is being built every week in England, and
Speaker 3: so the game's really growing super fast. More and more
Speaker 3: and more players are getting into it, and of course
Speaker 3: women are also starting to take to the game in
Speaker 3: great numbers.
Speaker 1: And it's the women.
Speaker 3: Who actually end up taking the next big step along
Speaker 3: the road to assign pars to individual holes. And I
Speaker 3: think that's one thing that's not quite as well known
Speaker 3: in history as it should be, really the contribution that
Speaker 3: women have made to the organization of the game.
Speaker 2: And what is that contribution in this particular case, how
Speaker 2: did women players contribute to the concept of par.
Speaker 3: In eighteen ninety three, a bunch of women's golf clubs
Speaker 3: got together to form the Ladies Golf Union. You know,
Speaker 3: at this very same time there's a huge argument going
Speaker 3: on in the men's game about.
Speaker 1: Who is in control of this game.
Speaker 3: Certain Englishmen like doctor William Laidlaw Purvis felt like somebody
Speaker 3: in London should take over this game in a way
Speaker 3: that you know, soccer and tennis have been sort of circular,
Speaker 3: you know, focused in London, and of course, but the
Speaker 3: majority of golfers, I think felt that the Royal and
Speaker 3: Ancient should be in charge of the game. But the
Speaker 3: Royal and Ancient really wasn't all that interested in being
Speaker 3: in charge of the game. They had, you know, begun
Speaker 3: to take on some responsibilities, like they had taken on
Speaker 3: responsibility for the Amateur Championship. You could write to them
Speaker 3: and ask for a ruling about a question of the rules,
Speaker 3: but that was not official. That was their opinion. And
Speaker 3: of course most people used what they called the Saint
Speaker 3: Andrews rules. They got them from the Saint Andrews Golf
Speaker 3: who had essentially copied him from the Leath Golf Society,
Speaker 3: and so there wasn't any organizational structure in the men's game.
Speaker 1: Purvis couldn't get anybody.
Speaker 3: Couldn't get any traction in the men's game because he
Speaker 3: was a bit of a difficult man, and you know,
Speaker 3: he mostly turned off all the people whose help he needed,
Speaker 3: to be honest, and I think Bob Crosby would probably back.
Speaker 1: Me up on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love these stories about Leila Purvis. It was
Speaker 2: apparently just a pain in the neck.
Speaker 3: He was a handful in three quarters and if you
Speaker 3: read the Royal Wimbledon history, you know he's one of
Speaker 3: the key movers there, and they have some rather unpleasant
Speaker 3: things to say about him in their own history. But
Speaker 3: you know, he saw an opportunity with the women's game,
Speaker 3: and it was Purvios, Harry Everard, a writer, and a
Speaker 3: few others who helped the helped found the Ladies Golf Union,
Speaker 3: and through the Ladies Golf Union, Purvis set out to
Speaker 3: accomplish many of the things he wanted to accomplish in
Speaker 3: the men's game but could not accomplish, the first one
Speaker 3: being the formation of a union. Ultimately, the Rules Committee
Speaker 3: was formed at Saint Andrews in eighteen ninety seven, and
Speaker 3: all that was sorted out four years down the road.
Speaker 3: But at eighteen ninety three the women that this and
Speaker 3: they had three goals. One is to host a national championship.
Speaker 3: The two is to create a handicapping system, and this
Speaker 3: is the key one that I wanted to talk about.
Speaker 3: And then also to just organize the game for women
Speaker 3: around the nation and promote the game. So they set
Speaker 3: out with Purvis on the creation of a handicapping system,
Speaker 3: and I think it was took three or four years
Speaker 3: for it to be perfected. Got the dates down just yet.
Speaker 3: But let's say by eighteen ninety seven it's perfected. And
Speaker 3: what that involved was the assigning.
Speaker 1: Of a scratch score.
Speaker 3: Now a scratch score being the score a scratch player
Speaker 3: should make, and you know, that evolved into the concept
Speaker 3: of the standard scratch score that you see now on
Speaker 3: all British scorecards. And basically, you can't really have a
Speaker 3: handicapping system if you don't have a means of assigning pars,
Speaker 3: you know, numbers to holes in a more refined way
Speaker 3: than the Bogey competition, because one course needs to relate
Speaker 3: to another course. You know, you need to have a
Speaker 3: handicap needs to be able to travel from live them
Speaker 3: in Saint Anne's to Saint Andrew's or to Royal Saint
Speaker 3: George's to wherever the game was played, and so there
Speaker 3: needed to be more precision in the assigning of the
Speaker 3: score as opposed to a competition at one club where
Speaker 3: you're playing against Colonel Bogey, if you understand what I mean.
Speaker 3: And so this is when things really start to become
Speaker 3: very precise as to the score of holes. And of
Speaker 3: course not right away, but the men, you know, the
Speaker 3: men were very slow and adjusting to the reality of
Speaker 3: this handicapping. The system that the women had put up
Speaker 3: in part, I think just because of the attitude men
Speaker 3: had toward women in that age, you know, very unfortunate,
Speaker 3: and so they were slow and on the uptake. But
Speaker 3: then eventually they came up with the system nearly identical.
Speaker 3: And you know, once the handicapping systems were in place,
Speaker 3: you were really moving toward a tremendous formalization of par
Speaker 3: And there's like one more big step that comes right
Speaker 3: after the turn of the century.
Speaker 2: And let's get to that big step. And if I'm
Speaker 2: if I'm predicting this right, I have a feeling it
Speaker 2: has something to do with the game as it was
Speaker 2: played in the US.
Speaker 3: Yes, you know, the United States Golf Association, you know,
Speaker 3: was formed in eighteen ninety five and you know, became
Speaker 3: the ruling authority in the United States that what was
Speaker 3: and still is the only place in the world that's
Speaker 3: not ruled by the Royal and Ancient.
Speaker 1: And there have been.
Speaker 3: Mostly cooperation between the actually very admirable cooperation in the main,
Speaker 3: but there have been points of tension, points of disagreement,
Speaker 3: points where the US approved things that the Royal and
Speaker 3: Ancient would not approve, steel shafts being one of the
Speaker 3: major examples, but there have been other things, large ball,
Speaker 3: small ball, different other points of But on the rules,
Speaker 3: they've mostly even the STiMi, they've they've varied on the
Speaker 3: rules of times, but they've mostly gone in lockstep. In
Speaker 3: nineteen eleven, the USDA issued what I think of as
Speaker 3: the first one I've seen of a formalization of par
Speaker 3: to a whole. So they were giving out guidelines for
Speaker 3: the creating of golf courses as part of the agronomy
Speaker 3: part that they do and other things they do to
Speaker 3: help the you know, the maintenance and building of golf courses.
Speaker 3: And they were given, you know, up to two hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty five yards would be assigned to par three,
Speaker 3: two hundred and twenty five to four hundred to five
Speaker 3: hundred would be assigned to par of four, five hundred
Speaker 3: are over, up to you know over would be assigned
Speaker 3: to par five, and if it was six hundred or
Speaker 3: over they even note this, it would be a paris.
Speaker 3: So their first list includes and so that shows you
Speaker 3: that it's still evolving, because we've never had a notion
Speaker 3: of a par six, you know, except in weird little
Speaker 3: golf courses that are trying to do something strange by
Speaker 3: making an eight hundred yard hold or whatever, you know.
Speaker 3: But in real golf, there's been never been any such
Speaker 3: thing as a par six. But their first issue listed
Speaker 3: par six. So I just think it's more evident. It's
Speaker 3: how it's been a little bit of a fungible, evolving
Speaker 3: concept over many, many, many years that now seems like
Speaker 3: was brought down from on high by Moses or something.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, you know. So what's striking about this history
Speaker 2: is how undecided it was until it was decided. And
Speaker 2: we all seem to agree that this was par and
Speaker 2: this is the only way that par is. But of course,
Speaker 2: in the process of inventing that concept, there were a
Speaker 2: great deal of detours and and you know, different concepts
Speaker 2: that came about, you know, until this this idea that
Speaker 2: we're all familiar with today finally coalesced.
Speaker 3: Yes, And there was also disagreement about the quality of
Speaker 3: individual holes. I think a lot of people who read
Speaker 3: the article by Alexander Dolman would have disagreed strongly with
Speaker 3: Davey Strath and Jamie Anderson that the first hole at
Speaker 3: Saint Andrew's should be that five would be considered perfect golf.
Speaker 3: On that most people would have thought six because it
Speaker 3: was five hundred and seventy eight yards long, okay, and
Speaker 3: they're playing with hickory clubs and they can't.
Speaker 1: You know, the long.
Speaker 3: Driving contest is being won by one hundred and forty
Speaker 3: yard drive. One hundred and sixty yard drive. You know,
Speaker 3: people cannot hit it very far. If you kill it
Speaker 3: and it rolls, it might go two hundred. So most golfers,
Speaker 3: even really first class golfers, could not reach that green
Speaker 3: in three shots, and so there was a strong contingition
Speaker 3: that people thought, well, wait a minute, you can't get
Speaker 3: there in.
Speaker 1: Three shots, it should be six.
Speaker 3: So you know, my point is that even in the
Speaker 3: age when they were discussing it, not everybody.
Speaker 1: Agreed on what.
Speaker 3: The level of difficulty of any given hole should be.
Speaker 2: Now, obviously, from this point that we've now gotten to
Speaker 2: in the history the early nineteen hundreds, when the modern
Speaker 2: notion of par in a form that we would recognize
Speaker 2: it today finally emerged. From that point, a lot had
Speaker 2: to happen in order for it to become the dominant
Speaker 2: and kind of set in stone idea that it is today.
Speaker 2: So what do you think are some of the main
Speaker 2: factors that caused par to become so entrenched. What are
Speaker 2: some of the general historical trends, not necessarily specific events,
Speaker 2: but just you know, the basically.
Speaker 1: The advent of tele.
Speaker 3: You know, is a big part of it, because you know,
Speaker 3: on television, you know, you need to know how everybody's
Speaker 3: scoring in relationship to everybody else, and a way of
Speaker 3: talking about that would be, you know, focusing on did
Speaker 3: he make a par on this whole or a bogie
Speaker 3: on this whole? And so I think, you know, that
Speaker 3: is a big part of It's the presence of it
Speaker 3: on every score card you ever pick up, you know, uh,
Speaker 3: with you know how many you know, what's the par
Speaker 3: of this course? You know how many par fives, how
Speaker 3: many par threes, you know whatever, and you know you're
Speaker 3: in you know, I think that just the fact that
Speaker 3: every time you stand on a tee you have the
Speaker 3: thought in your mind, I need to make par and
Speaker 3: that's four here or that's five here.
Speaker 1: I just think it became, you know, more.
Speaker 3: More a part of our mindset and our consciousness than
Speaker 3: it had been in the past, when golf was played
Speaker 3: more freely and more you know, as a man on
Speaker 3: man competition, when you didn't need to think so much
Speaker 3: about your individual score, so that but I I would
Speaker 3: say probably television is probably the biggest one. And also
Speaker 3: I'm not sure where along the line it happened, probably
Speaker 3: Robert Trent Jones. But when the USAGA somehow got the
Speaker 3: notion that their mission in life was to defend parr,
Speaker 3: to defend parr on the golf course by making it
Speaker 3: harder and harder and harder, and some of us might
Speaker 3: say more and more ridiculous.
Speaker 1: So I sort of.
Speaker 3: Think that, you know, the idea of the open doctor
Speaker 3: is probably a big contributor, because the point of the
Speaker 3: open doctor coming and attending to the patient was to
Speaker 3: make it impossible to score par.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, breaking par was the disease, and the open
Speaker 2: doctor was there to cure that. For sure. Joe Dye's
Speaker 2: role here is obviously profound. Joe Die was the I
Speaker 2: believe his title was the executive director or something like
Speaker 2: that of the USGA from the nineteen thirties through the
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties when he jumped on with a fledgling PGA tour.
Speaker 2: But his setup philosophy and his basically general philosophy of
Speaker 2: championship golf was that par is sort of the governing concept,
Speaker 2: and that if the winning score was below par, that
Speaker 2: that was not as good as the winning score being
Speaker 2: exactly par or above parr should be a great score
Speaker 2: on a whole. That was his idea, and as far
Speaker 2: as I know, he was the first set up executive
Speaker 2: in golf to start to manufacture scoring in relation to par.
Speaker 2: And by that I don't just mean growing rough and
Speaker 2: narrowing fairways and putting in new bunkers, which he had
Speaker 2: Robert Trent Jones do at a number of American courses
Speaker 2: that hosted the US Open. Obviously those were important things,
Speaker 2: but he even went to the extent of reassigning the
Speaker 2: par of certain holes, turning par fives in to par
Speaker 2: fours without really shortening them that much, and producing a
Speaker 2: course par of seventy as opposed to seventy two, and
Speaker 2: therefore obviously making it harder to score even par at
Speaker 2: a golf course. And so that I think is the
Speaker 2: factor that really shows how important par already was by
Speaker 2: the post World War two era that Joe die was
Speaker 2: in there just reassigning par. The only reason for that
Speaker 2: really is if you're concerned about the score to par
Speaker 2: and think that the legitimacy of the championship rests in
Speaker 2: part on how scoring works out in relation to.
Speaker 1: Par Yes, and you know, and I do think that.
Speaker 3: You know, obviously the English were the very interested in
Speaker 3: stroke play scoring from the beginning, but it went through
Speaker 3: an order of magnitude change when Americans took up the
Speaker 3: game in earnest after the First World War. You know,
Speaker 3: Americans were obsessed still are obsessed with their score. You
Speaker 3: could go to Scotland today and you could play golf
Speaker 3: on one of the greatest championship courses in the world.
Speaker 1: Let's say you went to Royal Dornic and you played.
Speaker 3: There, you game off the golf course into the pub.
Speaker 3: There isn't a single Scotsman who's going to ask you
Speaker 3: would you score? They're going to ask you, how is
Speaker 3: your game? What did you think of the course? You know,
Speaker 3: But Americans, I've never come off an American golf course
Speaker 3: where the first question isn't what did you score? You
Speaker 3: know some of it was Joe Dye was in some
Speaker 3: ways a mirror of his own community, because American players becoming,
Speaker 3: you know, being you know, you know, really good golfers
Speaker 3: are driven people, and you know they're driven to lower
Speaker 3: their score, and so they need something to measure themselves against,
Speaker 3: and of course Parr was that something. And the idea
Speaker 3: of beating Parr, you know is, you know, every single
Speaker 3: person I think that I know that plays golf has thresholds.
Speaker 3: They're trying to get blow. I want to break a hundred,
Speaker 3: I want to break ninety.
Speaker 1: Break eighty.
Speaker 3: You know some you know people get to break seventy,
Speaker 3: but not that many, you know.
Speaker 1: So I do think that some of it was the.
Speaker 3: American mindset, and Dies Dies, you know, was a sort
Speaker 3: of what I would call a taken to the extreme
Speaker 3: reflection of the American mindset that already existed and had
Speaker 3: existed pretty much since the twenties and thirties, when Americans
Speaker 3: were just practiced all the time. British people never practiced,
Speaker 3: you know, the ancient golf facilies that they don't have
Speaker 3: a range, nobody practiced, you know. Americans practiced obsessively and
Speaker 3: all of their golf courses had practice areas.
Speaker 1: Those were unknown in Britain.
Speaker 3: So a lot of this, the sort of americanizing of
Speaker 3: the game is another thing that has created this mindset
Speaker 3: of you know, par Is is the sacro saying thing
Speaker 3: in golf, and that's what you know, what must be
Speaker 3: upheld in the tournament.
Speaker 2: And also, as you've alluded to already, the practice of
Speaker 2: keeping track of a tournament in relation to par is
Speaker 2: mostly an American invention. Now, I don't know the exact
Speaker 2: year that this was introduced. I think I would be
Speaker 2: able to find it if I were to look at
Speaker 2: David Owen's book. I'm not at home right now, so
Speaker 2: I wasn't able to check before we jumped on for
Speaker 2: this podcast. But I know that the legendary CBS producer
Speaker 2: Frank Shirkinyan, who for years ran the Master's Telecast on CBS,
Speaker 2: which introduced a number of innovations that were now very
Speaker 2: used to now on golf telecasts, was the first person
Speaker 2: to realize, you know what, this makes a lot more
Speaker 2: sense if we display scoring in relation to par. Because
Speaker 2: if we display scoring as a cumulative number, then people
Speaker 2: won't really know where players are in relation to each other,
Speaker 2: because some have finished before others have started. And so
Speaker 2: if we can invent a leader board that has score
Speaker 2: to par, and people will be able to keep track
Speaker 2: of the tournament much more effectively. Now, obviously this decision
Speaker 2: made a lot of sense for television golf obviously, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a much superior way to watch television golf. Otherwise
Speaker 2: it gets pretty confusing. But I don't think that he
Speaker 2: could have predicted that Shirkenian could have predicted how profound
Speaker 2: the effect of this decision would be on the way
Speaker 2: that people understand everything about a golf tournament. We just
Speaker 2: saw it at the US Open at LACC, where as
Speaker 2: soon as a few red numbers appear on that leaderboard,
Speaker 2: people start freaking out right.
Speaker 3: You know, it's so fascinating to me here. You know,
Speaker 3: I think you're totally right. And that's a brilliant observation
Speaker 3: about Turkanian. You know, that was sort of like there
Speaker 3: was already a fairly large fire, and that's kind of
Speaker 3: like throwing gas on the fire of focusing on par
Speaker 3: and obviously makes perfect sense for television.
Speaker 1: Its brilliant innovation for television.
Speaker 3: But it did, did, I think, you know, create even
Speaker 3: ratchet up another several degrees the idea that you know,
Speaker 3: once people start to realize that people are way under
Speaker 3: par well, then you know they you know, they don't
Speaker 3: think about it in the way that I would think
Speaker 3: they should think about it as well. Is par too low?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, is do we need to make
Speaker 3: par lower or I mean higher or whatever?
Speaker 1: You know, do we need to change the.
Speaker 3: Number of the par on the whole rather than you know?
Speaker 3: And I think what's happened here lately is that you know,
Speaker 3: La Country Club was just that course was brilliant. It was,
Speaker 3: you know, and I think it played quite brilliantly, and
Speaker 3: it was really.
Speaker 1: Fun golf to watch.
Speaker 3: And I didn't care one wit if somebody was nine
Speaker 3: under or five under or whatever they were. The shots
Speaker 3: that they were required to play called for actual skill
Speaker 3: and so forth and so on.
Speaker 1: So my view of the world is now that.
Speaker 3: We need to be thinking of par in the way
Speaker 3: they might have thought of it earlier, as a more
Speaker 3: of a fungible concept. And I think a lot of
Speaker 3: golf courses that are played, especially the mundane courses they
Speaker 3: tend to play on the PGA Tour, now those should
Speaker 3: be par sixty sixty seven, you know, not par seventy
Speaker 3: or par seventy two.
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, if you can hit the ball three hundred.
Speaker 3: And forty yards in the air, as large percentage of
Speaker 3: tour players now can do Can a three hundred and
Speaker 3: forty fifty yard hole be considered a.
Speaker 1: Par four or not? Is that a par three?
Speaker 3: You know, if you're playing from within seventy yards of
Speaker 3: every par four hole, are they really par fours?
Speaker 1: You know, because if.
Speaker 3: You're within seventy yards, you're gonna be able to hit
Speaker 3: it close enough that maybe you ought to make that putt,
Speaker 3: you know. I do think what we're doing is angstying
Speaker 3: over the low scoring and then destroying the golf course
Speaker 3: to try to create high scoring when what we should
Speaker 3: be doing is thinking of part in the way that
Speaker 3: it's always been thought of as an evolutionary concept. And
Speaker 3: the par on most mind golf courses for a professional
Speaker 3: playing modern equipment really ought not to be higher than
Speaker 3: sixty eight in my opinion, you know, it's just and
Speaker 3: the scoring proves that to be true. Even in places
Speaker 3: where they're tricking it up to the nth degree to
Speaker 3: try to make the scoring high, they still haven't been
Speaker 3: able to keep an open under ten hunder in the
Speaker 3: last few years. Most of them has been minus ten
Speaker 3: or thereabouts for the winner. The ball goes too far,
Speaker 3: the equipment's too strong, the players are too strong, So
Speaker 3: I think what we need to do is just think
Speaker 3: of par differently, not alter the golf course.
Speaker 2: Yeah. If there's anything that we can learn from the
Speaker 2: history that you've taken us through in the late eighteen
Speaker 2: hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, it's that par hasn't always
Speaker 2: been as strictly defined as we think it is now,
Speaker 2: and so certainly it can be I believe you use
Speaker 2: the word fungible before. I think that's a good word.
Speaker 2: It can be a fungible idea rather than a really
Speaker 2: strict one. All right, we're going to take a quick
Speaker 2: break here and soon we'll be back with Stephen Proctor
Speaker 2: to discuss some of the more philosophical matters when it comes.
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Speaker 2: All right, we're back with Stephen Proctor. So Stephen, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the early concepts of par as articulated by
Speaker 2: the USGA in nineteen eleven, is that the length of
Speaker 2: hull has something to do with the par number that
Speaker 2: gets assigned to it. In today's age of increasing distance
Speaker 2: off the tee, you know, ever increasing quality of technology,
Speaker 2: where do you think we should land in defining the
Speaker 2: concept of par when it comes to length of.
Speaker 3: All Well, you know, I sort of feel that in
Speaker 3: an age when a goodly number of golfers can fly
Speaker 3: the ball, that doesn't count running fly the ball three
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty or three hundred and forty yards. Can
Speaker 3: you really think of a three hundred and eighty yard
Speaker 3: par hole is a par four now it's really at
Speaker 3: the most a par three and a half. But you know,
Speaker 3: so I think, you know, it would be wise if
Speaker 3: we are continued to be obsessed with the idea that
Speaker 3: someone shooting eight under par is a crisis, then I
Speaker 3: think we should then adjust the par to the reality
Speaker 3: of the distances players hit the ball on the Men's
Speaker 3: Tour in particular, and you know, just as Joe Died
Speaker 3: lowered it to seventy, lower to sixty eight or sixty seven.
Speaker 3: But you know, I think the main thing is, I
Speaker 3: think it would be healthy for the game people stopped
Speaker 3: obsessing on whether people will over or under par and
Speaker 3: tried to look at the game from what value of shots?
Speaker 3: How difficult are the shots this car calls for, and
Speaker 3: who demonstrates the most skill in executing them, rather than
Speaker 3: you know, a numbers chase.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that thinking about it in this
Speaker 2: way would maybe help. Is the thirteenth hole at Augusta
Speaker 2: easier than some run of the mill par four or
Speaker 2: par five on the PGA too? Are just because players
Speaker 2: average under par on the thirteenth hole at Augusta National,
Speaker 2: we are familiar with the shots that players have to
Speaker 2: hit on that great hole in the Masters. That is
Speaker 2: a difficult hole to reckon with because you're asked to
Speaker 2: do really nerve racking difficult things in order to score well.
Speaker 2: But yes, if you look at the scoring average on
Speaker 2: the hole, it's pretty low. It's consistently under par. Less
Speaker 2: so since they lengthened it. But even before the lengthening,
Speaker 2: that hole was no doubt very very difficult to confront
Speaker 2: on the drive, on the approach into the green, on
Speaker 2: the chip shots, etc. That players had to hit around
Speaker 2: the green. Everything about that hole is challenging. And yet
Speaker 2: the score to par is low. And so what that
Speaker 2: should tell people is that score to par is not
Speaker 2: a very good way of assessing the actual difficulty challenge
Speaker 2: that a whole presents.
Speaker 3: Yes, I completely agree with that, Garrett, and I you know,
Speaker 3: we have reached a level of obsession with that. I
Speaker 3: feel like, you know, it was driving me crazy during
Speaker 3: the Open at the La Country Club because you know,
Speaker 3: so much negativity around the fact that people were shooting
Speaker 3: low scores when in fact, you know, the golf that
Speaker 3: was played there was pretty darn exciting golf as compared
Speaker 3: to a lot of the you know, slog fests that
Speaker 3: you get at a US Open, where it's a twenty
Speaker 3: two yard fair way and you know, everybody's wedging out
Speaker 3: from the rough. So I don't know, I found that
Speaker 3: way more interesting to watch, and I found it kind
Speaker 3: of dispiriting. All the negative commentary about the golf course
Speaker 3: related to the question of par PR has done some
Speaker 3: things that were not so good for us. I feel like,
Speaker 3: you know, and this this quest to have a course
Speaker 3: that where you can't break par I think is going
Speaker 3: one eighty degree opposite of what.
Speaker 1: The game needs.
Speaker 3: You know, the game is under attack in a lot
Speaker 3: of quarters environmentally because obvious reasons. It takes up a
Speaker 3: lot of space, it uses up a lot of water,
Speaker 3: it often uses too many chemicals. And so the answer
Speaker 3: to that problem is not to make eight thousand, five
Speaker 3: hundred yard golf courses, you know. It's to either change
Speaker 3: our equipment or change our concept of what what matters
Speaker 3: scoring wise. And I don't I don't, you know, I
Speaker 3: don't see a great groundswell of interest in the rollback
Speaker 3: except among architecture types. Uh. The average golfer seems to
Speaker 3: have less than zero interest in it. Which has always
Speaker 3: been true, Garrett. You know, when the when we proposed
Speaker 3: to ban the rubber cor ball at the beginning, you know,
Speaker 3: all the you know, the the aficionado crowd was all
Speaker 3: for it, and the regular players were all against it.
Speaker 3: And that's sort of that to my mind, that hasn't
Speaker 3: changed one iota since since nenteen o two, and so,
Speaker 3: you know, I guess I think the healthier route is
Speaker 3: care less about the score per hole and just marvel
Speaker 3: at shots that get made. I'm strongly in favor of
Speaker 3: the rollback. I would love to see a rollback, both
Speaker 3: of equipment and of the ball itself. I personally just
Speaker 3: rolled the game back for myself because I wanted it
Speaker 3: to be rolled back, and I went and played Hickory
Speaker 3: Clubs instead. But so, you know, but I worry that
Speaker 3: that's not going to happen. And then where do we
Speaker 3: go If we keep chasing this concept of create a
Speaker 3: course where they can't shoot under par, that's not going
Speaker 3: to happen.
Speaker 2: Right, And you know, it's also hard to change people's
Speaker 2: mindset about par and to convince people that, you know,
Speaker 2: a course with a par below seventy is a real
Speaker 2: golf course somehow we've gotten it into our heads that
Speaker 2: seventy two, seventy three, seventy one to seventy those are
Speaker 2: real golf courses. But once you get to sixty nine,
Speaker 2: right one under seventy, once you get there, that's not
Speaker 2: a championship golf course. Somehow we've gotten that that idea
Speaker 2: in our heads as well, and it's preventing us from
Speaker 2: doing some things in our you know, conceptualization of championship
Speaker 2: golf courses. That's very limiting and is starting to require
Speaker 2: the lengthening of golf courses rather than a simple, you know,
Speaker 2: mental shift about what the par of a championship course
Speaker 2: can be.
Speaker 3: You know, I agree with what you said there, and
Speaker 3: I think it's more of an American thing than it
Speaker 3: is elsewhere, because when you go to Scotland, there are
Speaker 3: tons and tons of courses in Scotland that are highly popular,
Speaker 3: like Craile that's par sixty nine, different other courses that
Speaker 3: are par in the sixties somewhere, and there's you know,
Speaker 3: they I think they view it as there are championship
Speaker 3: courses like Saint Andrew's and you know, Dornic and those,
Speaker 3: and then there are sporting courses where it's more about
Speaker 3: how many shots do you have in your bag, how
Speaker 3: crafty are you, than it is about how far you
Speaker 3: can hit the ball, And so I think it's it's
Speaker 3: more of an American that's again, I think that's more
Speaker 3: of an American mindset that if it's not par. I
Speaker 3: personally play about two thirds of by golf on a
Speaker 3: course that has par sixty seven, has one par five,
Speaker 3: six par threes, six extremely difficult par threes. And you know,
Speaker 3: I'm happy to take anybody on that wants to bet
Speaker 3: that they can come and shoot their handicap on that
Speaker 3: course the first time they play it, because you naturally
Speaker 3: see the number on the card, you see how many
Speaker 3: yards it is, and you think you're just gonna bomb
Speaker 3: your way around there and bring this course to his knees,
Speaker 3: and that will.
Speaker 1: Not happen, you know.
Speaker 3: And so I just think there's different ways of looking
Speaker 3: at golf, and Americans are a little bit closed mind.
Speaker 3: Do they want a championship course of X number of
Speaker 3: length and they want to play from the back te
Speaker 3: regardless of handicap.
Speaker 2: I'm curious also what the effect of the idea of
Speaker 2: par has been on golf architecture. On the way that
Speaker 2: golf course verses get built. I wonder if you have
Speaker 2: thoughts on that, on whether this idea has kind of
Speaker 2: put all of us into a box when it comes
Speaker 2: to building golf courses.
Speaker 3: I certainly think in terms of arrangement, I mean like
Speaker 3: there's a sameness to you know, when golf architecture began,
Speaker 3: you had a piece of land in front of you
Speaker 3: and you figured out how many good holes fit on it,
Speaker 3: and that's what that's how many holes there would be,
Speaker 3: and they might all be par four. So ELI is
Speaker 3: a classical example of this.
Speaker 1: I think ELI is about sixteen.
Speaker 3: Par fours and you know, just the holes that were there,
Speaker 3: they made. And in a modern age, you know, we
Speaker 3: do get put into the box if it needs two
Speaker 3: par fives on each side, two par threes on each side,
Speaker 3: and so I do think it gets a little scripted,
Speaker 3: and that can't help but influence the nature of the design,
Speaker 3: because where am I fitting in my two par threes,
Speaker 3: you know, as opposed to how does this land want
Speaker 3: to be used to create in a golf holes? And
Speaker 3: I do think, you know, obviously I feel like the
Speaker 3: modern the more modern architects, the gil Hans's and Tom
Speaker 3: Doaks and Bill Core and Crenshaws, those types of architects,
Speaker 3: and the younger group of people that are coming up
Speaker 3: behind them, you know, Jay Blasi and Fry and Strach
Speaker 3: and some of these people. You know, they're being less
Speaker 3: scripted by that sort of thing, and I feel like
Speaker 3: they're creating more interesting and more innovative golf courses. But
Speaker 3: I do think it's sort of hemmed us into the
Speaker 3: idea that we need this many par three is this
Speaker 3: many par fours and this many par fives or it's
Speaker 3: not a real golf course and they need to be this.
Speaker 2: Long, right Yeah. And you know, I just came back
Speaker 2: from Sand Valley, the resort in Wisconsin, and right now
Speaker 2: there's a course being built almost completed called Sedge Valley,
Speaker 2: designed by Tom Doak and Renaissance Golf Design, and it's
Speaker 2: going to be a par sixty eight. There are no
Speaker 2: par fives on the course. It's a bunch of par
Speaker 2: four'st There's one section of the course where you have
Speaker 2: three out of four holes in a row are part threes.
Speaker 2: And so I'm hoping that when people play this course
Speaker 2: and realize that it's a genuine challenge and great golf,
Speaker 2: that something of a shift will emerge.
Speaker 3: And that can be really really important because you know
Speaker 3: that sounds like Elie or Craile or any of the
Speaker 3: or done Averty, where my friend Jim Hartzel loves to play.
Speaker 3: There's you know, a lot of these courses are not long.
Speaker 3: They're just super fun and tough, super tough and challenging
Speaker 3: to play.
Speaker 1: And you know, so I do.
Speaker 3: I think that's wonderful. I knew I had read a
Speaker 3: little bit about Sedge Valley, but I didn't realize, you know,
Speaker 3: the sequencing of three part threes and real that kind
Speaker 3: of thing. I think it was fabulous. That's what That's
Speaker 3: what the ground wanted.
Speaker 1: That's you know.
Speaker 3: So I do feel like we're getting back to an
Speaker 3: older time.
Speaker 1: You know that.
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about old Tom Morris a lot and
Speaker 3: the way that he just discovered holes in the landscape.
Speaker 1: He couldn't move anything, and.
Speaker 3: You know, I sort of feel like we're letting the
Speaker 3: land speak to us a little more in the modern
Speaker 3: age about where the hole should go. And I think
Speaker 3: of that as a very positive step overall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think about what it was like for old
Speaker 2: Tom Morris, to lay out a golf course liberated from
Speaker 2: the idea of par it must have been such a
Speaker 2: different exercise, not just in the sense that you can
Speaker 2: look for holes that fit the land, which is obviously
Speaker 2: very important, but also because with each individual hole, you
Speaker 2: aren't thinking to yourself, are players going to object to
Speaker 2: this because it doesn't fit into a par category? Because
Speaker 2: players often do that. You know, players often are unhappy
Speaker 2: with a par four because they don't think that it's
Speaker 2: a proper par four. They think, I can't make a
Speaker 2: par on this hole, or a birdie is too easy
Speaker 2: on this hole. It has to it has to fit
Speaker 2: that category, and that's so limiting.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Imagine, if you will, what kind of crazy person would
Speaker 3: build a five hundred and seventy eight yard hole in
Speaker 3: eighteen fifty one the opening hole too, no gentle handshake there,
Speaker 3: five hundred and seventy eight hour opener with the swamp
Speaker 3: in the middle of the in the middle of the hole,
Speaker 3: so you know, and a number of you know, if
Speaker 3: you go to Macrahonish, the first hole at Macrahanish you
Speaker 3: have to carry the ocean and you know, to reach
Speaker 3: the fairway. So you know, Tom was perfectly happy to
Speaker 3: challenge you with really dramatic shots, and he didn't have
Speaker 3: any thought in his mind that might cause you.
Speaker 1: To make a six. Well, who cares? You know.
Speaker 3: It just was so different then, and I think you're
Speaker 3: right that, you know, he was much freer to create
Speaker 3: interesting golf holes because his mind was not cluttered up
Speaker 3: with any notion as to number one, how many he required,
Speaker 3: number two, what length they should be?
Speaker 1: You know, just was what His only focus.
Speaker 3: Is, what will be sporting and fun and challenging. And people,
Speaker 3: you know, people judge courses differently than most of the
Speaker 3: reviews you read from the eighteen nineties are like rating
Speaker 3: the course on the quality, the difficulty of its hap hazards,
Speaker 3: how hard are it's hazards to deal with? And nowadays
Speaker 3: you know, any hazard is too hard of a hazard.
Speaker 3: It has to be raped. It can't be any deeper
Speaker 3: than this. I need to be able to see the
Speaker 3: flag at all times. You know, nobody had those ideas
Speaker 3: in their head. Then golf was way more of an
Speaker 3: adventure then. You know, the blind shots, you know, all
Speaker 3: kinds of things that are in anathema today and I
Speaker 3: think have actually.
Speaker 1: Diminished the fun of the game.
Speaker 3: If you go to Scotland, you play a hole like
Speaker 3: the Himalayas at Preswick, which is, you know, a.
Speaker 1: Giant dune that you're hitting over.
Speaker 3: You have no idea where the green is or where
Speaker 3: your ball's going to land, but there's quite a lot
Speaker 3: of fun and hiking up.
Speaker 1: The hill to see what happened.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's sort of a punch bowly green
Speaker 3: on the other side that if you hit it decent,
Speaker 3: helps gather you up and rewards you. So there's just
Speaker 3: a ton of fun in that kind of golf in
Speaker 3: my mind.
Speaker 1: And we've we've.
Speaker 3: Sort of partly because of parr, because everybody wants to
Speaker 3: be able to make parr, the pros in particular, you know,
Speaker 3: we've sort of you know, all those things have been
Speaker 3: wiped out of any off you ever see the PGA
Speaker 3: Tour play and you know, even though Royal and Ancient
Speaker 3: has tamed an awful lot of things over the years
Speaker 3: as a result of complaints that you couldn't really make
Speaker 3: par there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of those. You know, the more rules
Speaker 2: you put on a golf course, the more likely you
Speaker 2: are to get a kind of standardized product, which to
Speaker 2: me is the opposite of what I want out of
Speaker 2: a golf course. I want each golf course to be
Speaker 2: radically unique, because that is the thing that is so
Speaker 2: great about golf is that all of our playing fields
Speaker 2: are different, and the more we try to standardize them,
Speaker 2: the more we're kind of limiting what designers can do.
Speaker 2: And the more we're limiting I think how fun the
Speaker 2: game can be to play. And you know, par is
Speaker 2: one of the big things that is limiting us right now,
Speaker 2: and I just I want people to think about, like,
Speaker 2: what are some of the most exciting holes on the
Speaker 2: professional circuits to watch. Often it's the holes that exist
Speaker 2: uncomfortably between categories of par It's the so called driveable
Speaker 2: par four, or you could consider it a long par three.
Speaker 2: But if it were a long par three, then the
Speaker 2: pros that complained about it because they, you know, a.
Speaker 1: Driving a three most of the time, right.
Speaker 2: Exactly, they'd make more boteguse' And they're okay with a
Speaker 2: drivable par four because they're making birdie a lot of
Speaker 2: the time. But in any case, the lesson is that
Speaker 2: these holes that are in between thirteen at Augusta, fifteen
Speaker 2: at Augusta, the holes that just are the half par
Speaker 2: holes as we've as we've come to call them, tend
Speaker 2: to be the ones that are most compelling, most memorable
Speaker 2: over time.
Speaker 3: Well, and the other thing to me, Garrett, is, you know,
Speaker 3: I feel like if I was asked to name the
Speaker 3: most compelling golf tournament that I've watched in recent years,
Speaker 3: I would name the President's Cup at Royal Melbourne. And
Speaker 3: the other thing that I think we're forgetting, especially on
Speaker 3: this side of the pond here, is that when the
Speaker 3: ball bounces and rolls on predictably, and when the rough
Speaker 3: is of an unpredictable character, then golf gets really really
Speaker 3: exciting and the cream rises to the top. You know,
Speaker 3: watching Tiger Woods out class every player on both sides
Speaker 3: of that President's Cup at Royal Melbourne because he knew
Speaker 3: how to move the ball along the ground and make
Speaker 3: the shots that required is one of the coolest things
Speaker 3: I've ever watched in golf. And you know, I just
Speaker 3: feel like there's a big lesson in that. And you know,
Speaker 3: even at Saint Andrews in the most recent Open, I
Speaker 3: played it a month before the one hundred and fiftieth Open,
Speaker 3: and there was rough everywhere, and I'm like, wait a minute,
Speaker 3: what are they.
Speaker 1: Doing, you know.
Speaker 3: I mean, so, I just feel like we've lost a
Speaker 3: little bit of sight of the idea of the excitement
Speaker 3: of the ball of unpredictability, you know, and some of
Speaker 3: this is brought on by tour players who want everything
Speaker 3: to be predictable. But you know, when the ball runs
Speaker 3: into crazy places, that's when golf is both fun to play,
Speaker 3: maddening at times but fun, and also from the standpoint
Speaker 3: of spectator entertainment, it's millions of times more fun.
Speaker 2: All right, Thank you Steven for discussing this with me.
Speaker 2: That was every bit as interesting as I thought it
Speaker 2: would be. I'm glad that we got a chance to
Speaker 2: do this podcast. Now. One thing I really admire about you,
Speaker 2: Steven is that you're always working on a project or
Speaker 2: two or three and really making headway on them. So
Speaker 2: what are you working on right now? What should people
Speaker 2: know about?
Speaker 3: Well, I've finished one thing, which is I wrote a
Speaker 3: magazine regarding the Old Tom Morris golf Trail, which includes
Speaker 3: a large essay on Old Tom and his approach to
Speaker 3: discovering golf in the natural landscape, as well as essays
Speaker 3: on all the eighteen courses along the Old Tom Morse
Speaker 3: trail that deal with their history, Tom's involvement and the
Speaker 3: actual act of playing them.
Speaker 1: So that comes out next June.
Speaker 3: But the real big thing I'm working on is a
Speaker 3: book about I really want to do something on the
Speaker 3: early history of the women's game. In the course of
Speaker 3: researching The Long Golden Afternoon we were talking about, I
Speaker 3: started to realize the huge impact of the Ladies Golf
Speaker 3: Union and my friend Michael Morrison, I think you've had
Speaker 3: Michael on did a book about the Great English Golf
Speaker 3: Boom that demonstrated that women's golf was actually growing faster
Speaker 3: than men's golf through much of this period, which I
Speaker 3: also find fascinating.
Speaker 1: And then so I'm going to write.
Speaker 3: A book about the early evolution of women's golf, but
Speaker 3: the story will be built around the rivalry between American
Speaker 3: Glenna Collette and Britain's.
Speaker 1: Joyce Weathered, two of the really truly.
Speaker 3: Immortal women golfers, and you know, their rivalry, which spans
Speaker 3: a decade between nineteen twenty five and nineteen thirty five.
Speaker 3: When Joyce comes to play in America, really paves the
Speaker 3: way for the invention, the advent of the Ladies Professional
Speaker 3: Golf Association which happens, like you know, fifteen years later.
Speaker 3: But so that's what I'm working on now, and I'm
Speaker 3: you know, it takes a year or so of intensive
Speaker 3: reading and research to get to the point where you
Speaker 3: can start writing. So I'm hoping to be able to
Speaker 3: start writing in May.
Speaker 2: All right, well, I'm looking forward to that project. Thanks
Speaker 2: for coming on the podcast. Let's do it again soon.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on GIAR you take care.
Speaker 2: This episode of the Frida Egg Podcast was produced and
Speaker 2: edited by Matt Ruschius. Thank you, Matt. There's one thing
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Speaker 3: To s