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.
Speaker 3: In a bright egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg,
Speaker 3: Friday fridagg brid.
Speaker 2: Egg, Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the course.
Speaker 4: Welcome back to the Friday Golf Podcast. I am your host,
Speaker 4: Andy Johnson, and UH, I'm excited. I'm back from Scotland. Uh,
Speaker 4: back from the Masters. UH wrapped up a ton of
Speaker 4: crazy travel and UH wanted to unpack a little from
Speaker 4: our trip from Scotland.
Speaker 1: So we've got a couple of things for you.
Speaker 4: In today's episode, we have our live podcast with Scott McPherson,
Speaker 4: the great author, historian, golf course architect who wrote The
Speaker 4: Evolution of the Old Course, a exhaustive history on all
Speaker 4: the changes and you know kind of how the Old
Speaker 4: Course came to be as we know it. But first
Speaker 4: I'm going to unpack Scotland a little bit with one
Speaker 4: of my colleagues, Matt Rushis, who joined the trip, and
Speaker 4: we're going to talk a little bit about golf in Scotland,
Speaker 4: the Old Course, Old Course Reverse, and then we'll kick
Speaker 4: it over to our live podcast that was held at
Speaker 4: the Buyer Theater in Saint Andrew's really organized and put
Speaker 4: together by the Links Trust. Big thanks to both of
Speaker 4: them for doing that. It was kind of part of
Speaker 4: their programming for Old Course Reverse. A great event that
Speaker 4: I would suggest everybody enter the lottery for. I know
Speaker 4: that lotteries can be frustrating that if you don't get it,
Speaker 4: but you know, enter enter for the rest of your
Speaker 4: life and may you'll get it once, maybe you'll get
Speaker 4: it twice. I met somebody who had won it twice
Speaker 4: in the short you know, a couple of years since
Speaker 4: they restarted doing the big lottery for it. So it
Speaker 4: was really fun, really great event, and in Scott was
Speaker 4: a wonderful guest.
Speaker 1: So we'll do that.
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Speaker 4: Big thanks to our friends at perfect Practice. All right,
Speaker 4: let's welcome in our colleague, Matt Rush's Matt, you're back
Speaker 4: from Scotland. I got to ask you, was that I
Speaker 4: think this was your first trip to Scotland.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, very first time. I made it to Ireland. First,
Speaker 3: was my first overseas trip the England last fall, and
Speaker 3: now I've completed the trifecta and made it to Scotland.
Speaker 4: Wonderful, wonderful. I asked you to do a little prep
Speaker 4: for this. Matt obviously does a ton of writing for
Speaker 4: US and Friday Golf Club about golf courses. He makes
Speaker 4: a lot of videos also about golf courses.
Speaker 1: He was kind of.
Speaker 4: The solo dolo on our recent YouTube video about Crooked
Speaker 4: Stick mascot a lot of bona fides in terms of
Speaker 4: his golf architecture, understanding and education through the years of
Speaker 4: either working on construction sites, working on turf teams, and
Speaker 4: now working with us. What was your favorite thing about
Speaker 4: the old course? It was the first time you'd been
Speaker 4: out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was tough. I was going back and thinking
Speaker 3: about it, and the trip was really a sprint. We
Speaker 3: were shooting four different videos across a seven day period,
Speaker 3: so it was a lot of jumping around and I
Speaker 3: didn't get I would say, as much time to sort
Speaker 3: of digest and consume the old course itself. I mean
Speaker 3: I was walking around it basically every day, and like,
Speaker 3: I think, my biggest takeaway and something that has even
Speaker 3: piqued my interest more in the old course. It's pretty cliche,
Speaker 3: but just how complex it is. Like I walked it
Speaker 3: forwards one day shooting a video, and then the very
Speaker 3: next day, like twelve hours later, walked it in reverse
Speaker 3: shooting another video for the reverse routing, and that just
Speaker 3: like completely threw my mind for a loop. Seeing the
Speaker 3: old course for the very first time walking it forwards
Speaker 3: and then going backwards, it like got me so disoriented
Speaker 3: and like really illuminated how complex the golf course is.
Speaker 3: There's so much going on. There's so many little intricate
Speaker 3: little things in the ground contours, and so many different
Speaker 3: ways to play the holes, and they changed so much
Speaker 3: based on the pin position. So even though I spent
Speaker 3: like four probably full days walking in and around the
Speaker 3: old course, I still feel like I barely know it.
Speaker 3: And I've watched tournaments, I've like consumed so much of
Speaker 3: the old course, yet it still feels almost like this
Speaker 3: foreign thing that I can't yet fully like wrap my
Speaker 3: head around.
Speaker 4: Yeah, having been there, I don't know a ton now.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: I spent eight days during the Open in twenty two
Speaker 4: walking around, you know, went out there last year and
Speaker 4: then this year. I would say, the only thing I
Speaker 4: understand about the old course, like to a very you
Speaker 4: know two deep understanding of the holes are one, nine
Speaker 4: and uh and ten are the ones I really I
Speaker 4: in eight, eight and nine ten because they're like the
Speaker 4: simple ones.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: One it's like, Okay, I get how this works and
Speaker 4: it's dead flat and it's kind of you know, you
Speaker 4: got to burn and you understand how that works.
Speaker 1: But then you know the yah, the holes in the middle.
Speaker 1: I think like.
Speaker 4: And I think there's a lesson here about about golf.
Speaker 4: It's like it is the most entransing place to play
Speaker 4: because of the sophistication and that it's not the sophistication
Speaker 4: in the architecture, Like it wasn't built to be sophisticated.
Speaker 1: It's just what the natural.
Speaker 4: Contours do to you know, where like there's so many
Speaker 4: ways to play every hole and you don't necessarily know
Speaker 4: what's right and in because the greens are so large.
Speaker 4: In the double green aspect of of all the greens,
Speaker 4: there's so many combinations of everything that can happen in
Speaker 4: a way, in a nutshell, the Old Course represents. Like
Speaker 4: what I think is so amazing about golf is that
Speaker 4: you never hit the same shot twice in your lifetime.
Speaker 4: And at the Old Course, between the wind, the contours
Speaker 4: in the ground throughout it, and these giant greens, it's
Speaker 4: unlikely that you'll ever play one of the holes and
Speaker 4: have it feel remotely similar to the day to another
Speaker 4: day that you played the holes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another thing that sort of kind of illuminated to me
Speaker 3: is how one of one the old courses, Like we
Speaker 3: probably saw almost ten golf courses on the short trip
Speaker 3: jumping around, and they're all Scottish Linkslan golf courses, and
Speaker 3: none of them feel like remotely even close to the
Speaker 3: Old Course and the amount of complexity and just the
Speaker 3: way that the golf course plays and the land that
Speaker 3: it plays over, Like, Yeah, the courses right next door
Speaker 3: in the New Course and the Eden on either side
Speaker 3: have very similar landforms and the contours can be similar,
Speaker 3: but they're not presented in the same way with the
Speaker 3: old courses, with just like so much plain ground and
Speaker 3: such wide corridors for the holes that you have all
Speaker 3: these other contours that I would presume are on the
Speaker 3: New Course and Eden and all the other courses at
Speaker 3: Saint Andrews, but maybe there's a gorse bush over the
Speaker 3: top of them, So you're not quite like getting as
Speaker 3: much of that complexity in the visual part when you're
Speaker 3: playing those other courses. So there's really just it's just
Speaker 3: an endless like fascination with the course of like you
Speaker 3: can just keep diving in, learning more, finding new things.
Speaker 3: And that was something like playing with Scott, Like every
Speaker 3: time I had a question or thought about something, I
Speaker 3: just asked him and he had the answer for it
Speaker 3: because he's such a wealth of knowledge.
Speaker 4: It's incredible, Like any anything you could remotely think about
Speaker 4: with the old course, you asked Scott and he's like, well,
Speaker 4: let me tell you about how that came to be.
Speaker 4: It's it's honestly incredible. The uh I think like it.
Speaker 4: So it's funny. I you do a lot of our
Speaker 4: drone videography, photography, uh I used to do, you know,
Speaker 4: all of it. I still jump on uh and do
Speaker 4: some of it, and I feel like I learn a
Speaker 4: lot about golf courses when I shoot them. I don't
Speaker 4: remember golf courses as well if I don't do drone
Speaker 4: photography and videography like it, it helps me like think
Speaker 4: about see things differently. One of the things I find
Speaker 4: very like, having now flown a drone at the Old
Speaker 4: Course of a few times now, is that it's also
Speaker 4: like the hardest place to do that because there's so
Speaker 4: many things, so many Like you know, when you fly
Speaker 4: a drone and this is just an anecdote, like you
Speaker 4: you find these and out features and you you kind
Speaker 4: of get I feel like you get fixated on like
Speaker 4: certain places. And if you think about it in the
Speaker 4: lens of like a famous course that everybody would know.
Speaker 1: If you're flying a drone.
Speaker 4: At Pacific Dunes, you get fixated on those holes on
Speaker 4: the coast, yeah, right.
Speaker 3: Because it's een. They're just pulling you over there because
Speaker 3: they're so epic.
Speaker 4: At the Old Course, I find that like I just
Speaker 4: get lost and it's like, wait, did I just like
Speaker 4: spend thirty minutes on two holes that just share a corridor?
Speaker 4: And I'm just because there's so many things that like
Speaker 4: pop and it just is a it's it's it's a
Speaker 4: testament to what we're talking about of like just the
Speaker 4: sheer like number of like little features that are there
Speaker 4: is unlike any other golf course.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And something that like sort of was illuminating to
Speaker 3: me when we were flying the drones and taking photos
Speaker 3: of the course is like the greens and the bunkers
Speaker 3: are really like they make up like ninety five percent,
Speaker 3: maybe even ninety nine percent of the golf course. So yeah,
Speaker 3: there's all the other contours and everything in the fairways
Speaker 3: and whatnot, but it just feels like the greens are
Speaker 3: such a key component to everything on each hole, the
Speaker 3: strategy on how you plane it, where the pin is,
Speaker 3: and there's so much that gets derived from that that
Speaker 3: I feel like it's even more so than most golf courses.
Speaker 3: Like there's the famous CB McDonald quote where he said
Speaker 3: the greens are like the face to a painting, and
Speaker 3: it's it's it's never more true than any other course
Speaker 3: than the old course.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, it's it's an amazing place. Obviously, they're the
Speaker 4: hosts of next year's Open. We'll have a ton of
Speaker 4: coverage for that coming. You know in the coming months.
Speaker 4: Talking a little bit more broadly, I asked you to
Speaker 4: compile three big takeaways from your first trip to Scotland.
Speaker 4: What's your first big takeaway.
Speaker 3: I'll start a little bit broader, and then maybe we
Speaker 3: can work into some more minute takeaways. But the biggest
Speaker 3: takeaway that I started to realize is just like the
Speaker 3: baseline of quality and golf in Scotland is just like
Speaker 3: almost exponentially greater than America. Like I was kind of
Speaker 3: hashing it out in my head, and it's like every
Speaker 3: course in Scotland that's on Linksland is bound to have
Speaker 3: like one, two, three, maybe even four like really stand
Speaker 3: out world class holes because the land just lends itself
Speaker 3: to really interesting and unique things. And then part and
Speaker 3: parcel with that is like the sandy the sandy soil
Speaker 3: and the fine fescu turfs make the plane and like
Speaker 3: the playability of the golf courses like such a drastically
Speaker 3: higher level than America. So it's like you have these
Speaker 3: inherent qualities in Scotland, in the land that just makes
Speaker 3: the level of golf so high, and it almost like
Speaker 3: makes each course like destined to be like really good
Speaker 3: in some form or fashion. So when you're like trying
Speaker 3: to rate them or like assign some sort of grade
Speaker 3: to them, like we're talking about kind of our egg
Speaker 3: riting system and the courses, it makes it so much
Speaker 3: more difficult because it's like, oh, well, it inherently is
Speaker 3: going to play really really well and allow you to
Speaker 3: play very creatively and either fly the ball or use
Speaker 3: the ground and play your game how you want to
Speaker 3: play it. And then also like the land itself is
Speaker 3: going to generate some really spectacular golf holes in themselves.
Speaker 3: So it's almost like every course in Scotland is worth
Speaker 3: going to venture and see because there's there's there's bound
Speaker 3: to be a few really cool holes playing over some
Speaker 3: really unique landforms because it's just inherent from the natural environment.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think like the the turf, uh is the turf
Speaker 4: and the soil and then the wind also. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: the combination of those three you know allows actually like
Speaker 4: very simple architecture to to wow you where you know,
Speaker 4: like a lot of simple architecture is great architecture, but
Speaker 4: where the if it's really you know, windy and as
Speaker 4: firm and as fast turf, you're able to like put
Speaker 4: a bunker ten yards in front of a green and
Speaker 4: if it plays down wind a lot, that bunker all
Speaker 4: suddens like right where you want it to be.
Speaker 1: And that if you did that in America, it wouldn't matter.
Speaker 4: Because you just fly it over it and you land
Speaker 4: on the green and you know whatever, Like everything has
Speaker 4: to be pushed up and you know, pushed up into
Speaker 4: the green and you know, if you're you know talking
Speaker 4: about like especially say golf architecture in Saint Louis or Washington, DC,
Speaker 4: like everything has to be.
Speaker 1: Geared towards ariel.
Speaker 4: And I think the benefit of Scotland's you know situation,
Speaker 4: and I think it is similar with Ireland, is that
Speaker 4: you have aerial and ground game where in certain situations
Speaker 4: even the most aerial player a Rory McElroy or a
Speaker 4: Scottie Scheffler have to land the ball short of the green.
Speaker 4: And that makes just more golf architecture come alive, whether
Speaker 4: it's contouring, whether it's bunkers, like that changes the whole
Speaker 4: dynamic of like what a golf course could be. And
Speaker 4: just that turf, the turf and the wind and the
Speaker 4: natural elements allow rudimentary architecture to play better than really
Speaker 4: sophisticated architecture in America without elements.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And one thing that kind of adds to that
Speaker 3: is like with those elements, you can simply have like
Speaker 3: one singular feature kind of like the fourth hole on
Speaker 3: the old course, there's just a singular like bump right
Speaker 3: in front of the green, and it causes so much
Speaker 3: like thought anxiety of how am I going to get
Speaker 3: around this, thinking about where do I need to land
Speaker 3: it to properly use it and not have it kind
Speaker 3: of hurt your shot. So that's another thing, is what
Speaker 3: you're saying, and how you can just it can be
Speaker 3: so simple yet so captivating. I feel like we often
Speaker 3: found ourselves amiring such a small like detail on certain
Speaker 3: holes and being like just wowed by it because of
Speaker 3: how much impact it had on how you played that
Speaker 3: golf hole.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it and it's I think there's also something about
Speaker 4: Scotland where, you know, the way we experience it is
Speaker 4: like you're kind of going out there and you're, you know,
Speaker 4: it feels like you don't know a lot sometimes about
Speaker 4: some of the courses you're going to, and you're just
Speaker 4: looking for something, and if you discover a couple things
Speaker 4: that you like about it, you feel this like gratifying
Speaker 4: feeling of like, yeah, it was awesome playing out here.
Speaker 4: And I think part of some of that it always
Speaker 4: goes back to like the turf. Like the turf being
Speaker 4: the way it is and allowing you to hit all
Speaker 4: these different shots absolutely lends itself to you having a
Speaker 4: better experience out there.
Speaker 3: Definitely.
Speaker 1: So what's what's the next on your list?
Speaker 3: The next one, which might not come to a surprise,
Speaker 3: is that Saint Andrew's Links as a whole is even
Speaker 3: more incredible of a golfing facility as I imagined. I mean,
Speaker 3: I didn't really know a ton about the other golf
Speaker 3: courses going in. I just knew that there is so many,
Speaker 3: and I didn't even realize, like you have the Streft,
Speaker 3: Tirem and Bowgrove courses, which I had no idea even about,
Speaker 3: And it's really cool the way that it works. One
Speaker 3: of the caddies was telling us about how you kind
Speaker 3: of start on the Bowgrove course or the Himalaya's putting
Speaker 3: course and you kind of work your way up because
Speaker 3: there's like kind of this like tier system of courses
Speaker 3: and the difficulty, the length and all that. So like
Speaker 3: as you progress as a child and get better at
Speaker 3: the game of golf, you get to progress up the
Speaker 3: golf courses. So it starts with the putting course, the
Speaker 3: Ladies Himalaya Putting Course, and then you move on to
Speaker 3: the bow Grove Course, which is like a Paul par thirty,
Speaker 3: like fifteen hundred yards, and then you have the strath
Speaker 3: Tim Course, which I believe is a par sixty nine
Speaker 3: and it's probably like only fifty five hundred yards. And
Speaker 3: then kind of the three other main ones, like the Jubilee,
Speaker 3: the New and the Eden kind of sit in their
Speaker 3: own class, and then kind of the penultimate one of
Speaker 3: the Old Course, and I didn't really think too much
Speaker 3: about them, And then the more I got to get
Speaker 3: to know each of these courses, you really start to
Speaker 3: realize how different they are and how they all have
Speaker 3: like kind of these different landforms and just styles of
Speaker 3: golf holes, where like the New Course and the Jubilee,
Speaker 3: a lot of the holes sit more on the ground
Speaker 3: and feel like kind of more of those natural links courses.
Speaker 3: And then the Eating Course has just like these incredible
Speaker 3: green complexes built by Harry Colet, and it just feels
Speaker 3: so different that it's like pretty fascinating that there are
Speaker 3: only a few hundred yards from each other, and each
Speaker 3: of the courses when you're playing them just feel so different.
Speaker 3: And the landforms and the way that they look visually
Speaker 3: from the tea and when you're playing them is so different.
Speaker 3: And it honestly was like kind of reminding me of
Speaker 3: band and Dooms, where like it's all kind of the
Speaker 3: same area. It's all all the courses are on top
Speaker 3: of each other, but they each have such a strong
Speaker 3: identity that makes them all like so worth visiting each
Speaker 3: one and getting to know each one and play each one.
Speaker 3: So that was a big takeaway that I wasn't really
Speaker 3: thinking about going in about the other courses. Obviously, if
Speaker 3: you're going to Saint Andrews, you're gonna be pretty focused
Speaker 3: on trying to play the old course and get on
Speaker 3: that ballot if you don't have a tea time secured.
Speaker 3: But there's so many other good good times to be
Speaker 3: had on the golf courses that are right next to
Speaker 3: the old course.
Speaker 4: I I will contend that the most underrated golf trip
Speaker 4: is just you pick a weekend, especially for anybody on
Speaker 4: the East Coast, You fly into Edinburgh, you get it.
Speaker 4: You get a taxi that picks you up and just
Speaker 4: drops you at St. Andrew's and then you just go play,
Speaker 4: just go play the Links Truss courses and you don't
Speaker 4: have to do anything. You don't ever have to get
Speaker 4: in a car. You just carry your bag and there's
Speaker 4: there's restaurants, all sorts of stuff to do, and you
Speaker 4: just enter the enter the ballot every day for the
Speaker 4: old course. But if you don't win, you go to
Speaker 4: the new course, you go to the Eden Course, you
Speaker 4: go to the Jubilee. Like that's a wonderful trip you play.
Speaker 4: You know, it could be like a you play one
Speaker 4: round of golf a day and hang out in town
Speaker 4: the rest of the day. Like I would be perfectly
Speaker 4: content doing that. I would love to do that more often.
Speaker 4: Is just go and hang out, Like yeah, there's all
Speaker 4: these other great locales and people become enamored with like
Speaker 4: checking boxes. But there is something wonderful about just it's like, oh,
Speaker 4: I just went for three or four days and I'm
Speaker 4: I'm done. And there are so many other great golf
Speaker 4: courses in the area that you know, we went to
Speaker 4: We went to Krale, We played the thirty six holes there.
Speaker 4: I was actually I hadn't played the Craighead Course, the
Speaker 4: gill Hands Course, I loved it. Done Barney and and
Speaker 4: and King's Barns. Get all the love is the new
Speaker 4: golf courses in that area. The thing I liked about
Speaker 4: Gills course was actually felt like it was old, like
Speaker 4: if you had told me that it was, you know,
Speaker 4: it felt more like there were a couple of greens
Speaker 4: where you're like, okay, like this is a gil Hans
Speaker 4: green and I can see it like it's a new green.
Speaker 4: But for the most part the golf course felt like
Speaker 4: I was playing another Scottish Links golf course, you know,
Speaker 4: at King's at dun Barney. I think people have great times,
Speaker 4: they deliver awesome experiences, but to me, like one of
Speaker 4: the things is it's just, you know, it's a little
Speaker 4: bit of American American eyes and it's not like why
Speaker 4: I'm going to Scotland. That's not the type of golf
Speaker 4: I'm going to Scotland to play. But but to me
Speaker 4: that that Links. You know, there's so many good golf
Speaker 4: courses in the area that you can obviously just arrange
Speaker 4: a taxi the night before to go play, but the
Speaker 4: but just playing the Links trust courses, you leave very happy.
Speaker 4: The Eden, the New and the Jubilee are all very
Speaker 4: well worth playing, and I haven't played the Castle yet.
Speaker 4: Hand up. The castles also look absolutely and so insane
Speaker 4: that I kind of want to play it.
Speaker 3: I mean, and it's on like prime real estate. Like
Speaker 3: I didn't I didn't personally go up there, but I
Speaker 3: saw some of the photos you guys took and it's
Speaker 3: like such a spectacular site overlooking the entire Saint Andrew's city.
Speaker 3: So it's I mean, yeah, there's there's no shortage of
Speaker 3: options and kind of, like you said, my personal preference
Speaker 3: is if I'm going to Scotland to play, you know,
Speaker 3: golf courses that are hundreds of years old, those are
Speaker 3: the ones that I want to seek out and go see.
Speaker 3: It's just really hard to build a modern golf course
Speaker 3: with modern equipment and make it feel like a golf
Speaker 3: course that's been sitting there for two hundred years and
Speaker 3: was basically kind of forged by nature.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh, look at you using the open slogan too.
Speaker 4: That's that's one of the big bingo board. All right,
Speaker 4: what's your final big takeaway?
Speaker 3: My final takeaway is kind of centered around the reverse
Speaker 3: course or the left hand routing, as some locals we'll
Speaker 3: call it. I was a bit skeptical going into it.
Speaker 3: I just thought like it was going to be a
Speaker 3: little bit more contrived and forced to like make thatt
Speaker 3: like going around the opposite way work. I know kind
Speaker 3: of all the history around it and how they would
Speaker 3: alternate basically weekly long ago, but I just wasn't really
Speaker 3: sure how it was going to be and if it
Speaker 3: was just going to feel kind of gimmicky. But it
Speaker 3: turns out that there's like a blethora of really awesome
Speaker 3: golf holes, and a lot of things really illuminate themselves.
Speaker 3: Like one thing that I think people can kind of
Speaker 3: this paints the picture well for him is when you're
Speaker 3: playing the sixteenth hole on the the clockwise or the
Speaker 3: correct routing, there's all these really cool rumples and contours
Speaker 3: right in front of the tee box on the sixteenth
Speaker 3: hole that you're basically just hitting your drive over and
Speaker 3: walking over, and you don't even think about them when
Speaker 3: you're playing it the normal way. But then once you
Speaker 3: reverse it and you're playing what is that the third
Speaker 3: hole then out to that fifteenth green, it's like amazing
Speaker 3: how much these little contours come into play in your
Speaker 3: approach shot, and it just completely flips the script on you,
Speaker 3: and it really does present like this completely different golf
Speaker 3: course that it's just like it's almost like this eerie
Speaker 3: feeling because it's like, you know these greens in the
Speaker 3: forward direction, you've become familiar with them and you know
Speaker 3: their identity. But then the second you turn around and
Speaker 3: play it in the opposite direction, it changes the entire
Speaker 3: dynamic of the golf holes. And there was just so
Speaker 3: many of them, especially on that kind of outward nine.
Speaker 3: Playing the back nine in reverse essentially that works so well,
Speaker 3: and like some of those holes even feel like maybe
Speaker 3: they're even meant to be played in that direction and
Speaker 3: the green because the normal way you're coming in, the
Speaker 3: greens pitch away from you, and then when you play
Speaker 3: it in reverse, it's kind of a more typical back
Speaker 3: to front slope. So it was really just fascinating and
Speaker 3: it kind of shocked me of how well it work.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's obviously a lot of things that don't
Speaker 3: work super well, like the loop at the end gets
Speaker 3: pretty wild on the reverse course and there's kind of
Speaker 3: balls flying everywhere, but.
Speaker 4: The crossing nature of the reverse course you cross over
Speaker 4: three times, so there's definitely some shooting out, like you
Speaker 4: got to have your head on a squivel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then when you're like, there's some holes where
Speaker 3: you step up to the tee and you're just like wait, wait, what,
Speaker 3: like we're playing over there? That makes no sense? Like
Speaker 3: it's just pretty wild. But but all in all, like
Speaker 3: it was. It was more so like it worked better
Speaker 3: than I than I anticipated and thought it would, which
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say I had the strongest desire to play
Speaker 3: it in reverse when I was going, just because I
Speaker 3: haven't played it the normal way yet. But now after
Speaker 3: walking it and seeing it like I do, I do
Speaker 3: have a pretty a strong interest in trying to play
Speaker 3: it both ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I I was also shocked at how well uh some
Speaker 4: of the holes, as you said, the back nine on
Speaker 4: the regular course, on the on the course you know it,
Speaker 4: I thought it might actually be better going reverse. I
Speaker 4: think the ninth holes better going reverse, for sure. But
Speaker 4: but there's there's I think if you if you mode
Speaker 4: it out completely, Like one of the tricky things is
Speaker 4: they just you know, because they play it the other
Speaker 4: the regular way all year round, some of the approaches
Speaker 4: aren't mowned if you mode that out, I I think
Speaker 4: it's a really good golf course. Like I think, like
Speaker 4: the biggest issue with some of the holes, like on
Speaker 4: the on the front nine, get where it gets like
Speaker 4: the regular course is front nine, so the back nine
Speaker 4: of the of the reverse course it gets a little weird.
Speaker 4: But I think that's mostly because of the mowing situation.
Speaker 4: But you know, it makes you It definitely makes me
Speaker 4: appreciate the loop and what Tom Doak did more there
Speaker 4: Having done this, it also makes me realize like how
Speaker 4: freaking good the old course would be if it was
Speaker 4: fully mode fully presented going both ways. You know, it
Speaker 4: would make It makes me want to have more reversible
Speaker 4: golf courses in golf. I think that's one of the
Speaker 4: big takeaways, Like, yeah, maybe one way is more famous,
Speaker 4: but it's really fun to play the other way. I
Speaker 4: I'll say, you know that I played with Scott had
Speaker 4: an extra set of Hickorys that I played the reverse
Speaker 4: course with, and it was amazing some of the shots
Speaker 4: and the way you have to bounce shots in and
Speaker 4: the way bunkers. I think that's something that's been lost
Speaker 4: in a point that Scott makes and I think he
Speaker 4: makes it in this live podcast. If he didn't, he
Speaker 4: made it a lot with us on camera playing. But
Speaker 4: the the old course used to be known for its hazards,
Speaker 4: not as greens, and now it's known, as you said earlier,
Speaker 4: it's known for its greens, not necessarily its hazards. But
Speaker 4: when you're playing with the Hickory's God, the hazards are terrifying,
Speaker 4: like and you have to do things that you don't
Speaker 4: want to do in order to avoid hazards, more so
Speaker 4: than like with the aerial approach to the game now,
Speaker 4: where you have to get to certain sides of the
Speaker 4: fairway to to play in because you just can't stop
Speaker 4: a Hickory Club the way you can stop a modern
Speaker 4: sand wedge. So I yeah, I thought the reverse the
Speaker 4: reverse exceeded my expectations. I thought it was going to
Speaker 4: be kind of like, you know, I hate to use
Speaker 4: this term, a little mickey mouse, but I it was awesome.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was certainly shocking. Do you think your experience
Speaker 3: would have been maybe hindered or less enjoyable and nervous
Speaker 3: with modern Do you think, yeah.
Speaker 4: I would have just hit because it was it was
Speaker 4: set up at like six thousand yards.
Speaker 1: I would have just hit so many little flip ledges.
Speaker 4: Yeah, what's uh, let's get you out of here with
Speaker 4: a couple rapid fires here.
Speaker 1: What was your favorite course that you played?
Speaker 3: So I didn't play the old course or it reversed,
Speaker 3: so that kind of changes things a lot. But I
Speaker 3: think my favorite course was the Eden. I was I
Speaker 3: was just like, I kind of fell in love with
Speaker 3: the greens there. The first eleven holes are just simply amazing,
Speaker 3: really really cool. You play out to the estuary, the
Speaker 3: fourth hole place right along the Eden estuary, and then
Speaker 3: you kind of do this like mini loop and play
Speaker 3: another short part four along yestuary, and they's just the
Speaker 3: greens are really cool. They definitely feel a lot different
Speaker 3: than kind of the the other courses where they're more
Speaker 3: kind of laying on the ground, and like these found
Speaker 3: greens that are kind of placed among really cool contours
Speaker 3: have a different feel, feeling like more modern, even though
Speaker 3: I believe it was built in the nineteen teens, if
Speaker 3: that makes any sense. But the Eden is for me
Speaker 3: at least a must play course if you're going to St. Andrews.
Speaker 4: Yeah, some of the most amazing greens that I've ever seen,
Speaker 4: So cool, I would say there's like ten greens, ten
Speaker 4: greens that are like if you were a golf architect,
Speaker 4: I would say that there's like ten greens out there
Speaker 4: that every golf architect or aspiring golf architect should go see.
Speaker 1: It's also cheap.
Speaker 4: It's also like the cheapest course, one of the cheapest
Speaker 4: courses to play in the area.
Speaker 1: So that's that's another reason to love it. I would be.
Speaker 4: I would be very happy playing there every day, despite
Speaker 4: it having maybe the two worst holes I've seen in Scotland.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was gonna say, you just mentioned there's probably
Speaker 3: ten greens that you have to go see if you're
Speaker 3: an architect. There's also two holes that you have to
Speaker 3: go see on the back nine, so you can learn
Speaker 3: not what not to do when trying to add add
Speaker 3: new holes to an old Scottish links course.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Donald Steele renovated four holes, I believe, in order.
Speaker 1: To held the triming range the hole.
Speaker 4: So there's it's it's a design disaster. Hard stop. It's bad.
Speaker 4: So it feels like you've kind of like been transported.
Speaker 4: Me and you were both from Illinois, like a mediocre
Speaker 4: public facility in Illinois that's dead flat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with some.
Speaker 4: Kind of crazy. I can't believe they have to fix that.
Speaker 4: I mean it would be that hard to get an
Speaker 4: architect in there to build like a couple of cool
Speaker 4: greens and get rid of the ponds. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 4: And then last question before we get you out of here,
Speaker 4: what was your best What's the best non golf thing
Speaker 4: you did?
Speaker 3: I think overall it was just like being in Saint Andrew's.
Speaker 3: We stayed in the house right and downtown and just
Speaker 3: being immersed in that college town and being able to
Speaker 3: walk around it and like, oh, we have a tea time,
Speaker 3: let's just grab our bags and walk to the links,
Speaker 3: with such an amazing kind of ability with how small
Speaker 3: the town is and how intertwined it is with all
Speaker 3: the golf that it was like, at least the thing
Speaker 3: that I enjoyed the most a couple quick shoutouts the
Speaker 3: I believe it's Jeanette's Gelato or Gelateria was an incredible
Speaker 3: ice cream stop that we had on one of our
Speaker 3: last nights that was very enjoyable. Cameron and I went
Speaker 3: there after we were out shooting on the old course,
Speaker 3: so a little late night treat was really good and
Speaker 3: just like an overwhelming list of ice cream. There was
Speaker 3: probably six or seven different ones that I wanted to pick,
Speaker 3: so that's a quick shout out. And then lastly, the
Speaker 3: pasta I had at this restaurant called Dune that we
Speaker 3: went to. It's a seafood place. I'm not a huge
Speaker 3: seafood guy, so I picked out the only pasta dish
Speaker 3: on the menu and there was fresh morell mushrooms in
Speaker 3: there and just really really fresh ingredients, and that was
Speaker 3: a delicious pasta I had.
Speaker 4: Awesome, awesome. Well, Matt, thanks for all your hard work
Speaker 4: during the trip and coming on and chatting about your
Speaker 4: time in Scotland. Let's get over to Scott McPherson. But
Speaker 4: first let's talk about our friends over at Cobalt. I
Speaker 4: was out, you know, I was carrying my bag in
Speaker 4: most of these places and or pushing, did a little
Speaker 4: pushing too. And one of my handy dandy friends that
Speaker 4: helped me get around these golf courses was the Cobalt
Speaker 4: QZ six rangefinder.
Speaker 1: What made it extra delightful.
Speaker 4: Sometimes in Scotland they don't have like the little things
Speaker 4: on pins that help your rangefinder pick it out. That
Speaker 4: wasn't a problem for me because They have the six
Speaker 4: acts to twelve x optical zoom which lets you zoom
Speaker 4: in real tight on pins. Also really easy to you know,
Speaker 4: zoom in and get yardages on bunkers, and it avoids
Speaker 4: any issues maybe over clubbing where you shoot the trees
Speaker 4: in the and and end up with a bad number.
Speaker 4: This is a rangefinder company. They make rangefinders, and you
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Speaker 4: it really easy to use. It's really easy to turn
Speaker 4: on and off slope, it's really easy to you know,
Speaker 4: change your settings on how bright you want it.
Speaker 1: It is a awesome, awesome product.
Speaker 4: So it is super durable, it's got clear optics, and
Speaker 4: it's designed for consistent and reliable yardage yardages, and it's
Speaker 4: backed by a lifetime warranty. And it's only sold direct
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Speaker 4: All right, let's get to our conversation with Scott McPherson.
Speaker 4: Huge thanks to Scott for his time and coming out,
Speaker 4: coming up to Saint Andrews for a couple of days
Speaker 4: to spend with us. Also huge thanks to the Links
Speaker 4: Trust in the Buyer Theater and I hope you guys
Speaker 4: enjoyed this conversation Scott. I you know, we had this
Speaker 4: whole intro planned out. We're gonna bring it on stage.
Speaker 4: We talked about this, this is what the this is
Speaker 4: what the mic check time was for. Anyways, it is
Speaker 4: great to be here. Thank you to everybody that came out.
Speaker 4: Since the Old Course has started doing the Reversed Day,
Speaker 4: It's been at the top of my list of things
Speaker 4: that I've wanted to do and very very honored that
Speaker 4: the Links Trust suggested us doing. I believe this is
Speaker 4: the first ever live podcast in St. Andrews, So doing
Speaker 4: that and getting to you know, come out and experience this,
Speaker 4: I think we're all in for two spectacular, unforgettable days
Speaker 4: of golf. When we started talking about doing a podcast
Speaker 4: about the Old Course and the Reversed Old Course, my
Speaker 4: brain all went to one person to talk and talk
Speaker 4: to and have come up here and be the expert
Speaker 4: on the Old Course. Our guest is Scott McPherson. He
Speaker 4: is a golf course architect who found himself in St
Speaker 4: Andrews spending a lot of time researching Saint Andrews while
Speaker 4: he was building a golf course nearby, which led him
Speaker 4: eventually to producing kind of I would say, a declarative
Speaker 4: book on the history of Saint Andrews. It's it's incredibly
Speaker 4: well researched and incredibly well laid out. The book is
Speaker 4: called Saint Andrews The Evolution of the Old Course. So
Speaker 4: immediately when I was asked if we'd want to do
Speaker 4: a live podcast from here, immediately I was like, well,
Speaker 4: we've got to get Scott involved because he knows everything
Speaker 4: about the Old Course there is to know that. You know,
Speaker 4: there are probably some other great historians too, but that
Speaker 4: I've come across. So I'm honored to be joined by
Speaker 4: Scott tonight and get to do this podcast.
Speaker 5: Thanks Andy, It's great to be here and I really
Speaker 5: appreciate the invite that what the Links Trust have put
Speaker 5: on here in the biotheater is fantastic and opportunity to
Speaker 5: talk about the Old Course with you is great. I
Speaker 5: just know how passionate you guys are the fried Egg
Speaker 5: about history and about golf, and so this is a
Speaker 5: feels like a fitting place to talk about it.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, let's get into it. Can you bring us
Speaker 4: back to your first visit to the old course?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I'm New Zealander by birth, hence the accent, but
Speaker 5: I've my grandparents are Scottish and they emigrated to New
Speaker 5: Zealand where my father was born, and we came back,
Speaker 5: you know, during the eighties we still had family here.
Speaker 5: But I'd been working for one point, Peter Thompson in Melbourne,
Speaker 5: the great Peter Thompson, five times Open champion. And this
Speaker 5: is in the in the mid nineteen nineties, towards towards
Speaker 5: the end, and things had slowed down in the design side.
Speaker 5: There was quite a lot of work in Philippines in Asia,
Speaker 5: and they slowed down, and so Peter said, look, you know,
Speaker 5: what do you want to do? And there was an
Speaker 5: opportunity to stay with the company, but I really wanted
Speaker 5: to do a bit more travel. I felt as a
Speaker 5: designer I hadn't seen enough. And so while I'd been
Speaker 5: to St. Andrews previously in the eighties. At that point,
Speaker 5: I wasn't really a golfer. I didn't come from a
Speaker 5: golfing family, and I wanted to come back and learn
Speaker 5: more about it. So I had a lot of knowledge
Speaker 5: from reading, from talking with Peter, and from reading the
Speaker 5: incredible library that it was Thompson Wolvag Parrot was the
Speaker 5: name of the company in those days. And so when
Speaker 5: I came, I thought, great, this is this is a
Speaker 5: wonderful place to be. And Peter had written a really
Speaker 5: nice letter, an introduction letter to Michael Banellick at the time,
Speaker 5: and so I called up the RNA and said, look,
Speaker 5: you know, I've got this letter and it'd be you know,
Speaker 5: if there's a chance to meet mister Banellick, I'd be
Speaker 5: really appreciate it. So I got invited into the trophy
Speaker 5: room and sat down with Michael and he said, Scott,
Speaker 5: what do you want to do? And I said, I'd
Speaker 5: like to stay with a golf course design and he said, oh, well,
Speaker 5: actually there's a new resort.
Speaker 2: Planned for s Andrews.
Speaker 5: And this is in August of nineteen ninety eight and
Speaker 5: the new resort is now Fairmont s Andrews with s
Speaker 5: Andrew's Bay at that time, but they didn't have planning permission.
Speaker 2: But I was invited to a meeting.
Speaker 5: One of the great things about that meeting, which was
Speaker 5: in Younger Hall, I'm sure in the audience audience here
Speaker 5: with no Younger Hall, the great Jene Saracen was there.
Speaker 2: You know. He had been flowing over.
Speaker 5: With the developer A, a guy in pharmaceuticals called Don
Speaker 5: Panos made his money inventing the nicotine patch, so he'd
Speaker 5: flown Gene Sarason over and they had a resort in
Speaker 5: Atlanta called Chateau Land.
Speaker 2: So I had a bit of a heads up.
Speaker 5: Michael had said, by the way, I think that the
Speaker 5: man who invented the sand wedge is going to be
Speaker 5: at this meeting. So I rushed down to a bookshop
Speaker 5: called Quarto no longer exists. It was on Golf Place,
Speaker 5: and there was Margaret in there, and I said, Margaret,
Speaker 5: do you have Gene Sarason's autobiography Thirty Years of Championship Golf?
Speaker 5: Maybe have a look, And it was a fact similarly
Speaker 5: like a reprint. That's all I need. Rushed off of
Speaker 5: this meeting and got Gene Sarason's You know, I can't
Speaker 5: remember how old. He was in his nineties at that point,
Speaker 5: and I still was one of the prize books of
Speaker 5: my collection and a great read, by the way, So
Speaker 5: that led to me.
Speaker 4: Your early golf life. I'm working for Peter Thompson and
Speaker 4: then you stumble across a meeting with Jeene Sarazon. It's
Speaker 4: like two of the greatest major champions of all time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And in fact, if you line them up, you
Speaker 5: could see over Jean Saracen's head to Peter Thompson's head.
Speaker 5: Jean Sarason was so short. I couldn't believe how tiny
Speaker 5: he was. And actually when we was going a bit
Speaker 5: off piece here, but eventually we built the golf courses
Speaker 5: out at St. Andrews Bay, and one of the holes there,
Speaker 5: which was originally the third hole, is quite a long
Speaker 5: downhill part three. And remember Jeene Sarason saying, Scott, the
Speaker 5: one thing this hole needs to do is if you're
Speaker 5: in the wrong half of the green.
Speaker 2: It's a really tough three part. So there's a ridge
Speaker 2: that runs through it.
Speaker 5: And I haven't played there for a couple of years,
Speaker 5: so I remember last time I was up there and
Speaker 5: I looked back and I thought, gee, I still got
Speaker 5: Jeen Sarason's words ringing in my ears.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and they're incredible.
Speaker 5: We're lucky with the game of golf that we've had
Speaker 5: all these incredible men who have paved the way. You know,
Speaker 5: you and I come along, you know, sort of down
Speaker 5: the back of the bus, do our best. But you know,
Speaker 5: we're very fortunate with golf and what it's given us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, it's amazing. There's a feeling I think because
Speaker 4: they've shared passion. People give back and give back their
Speaker 4: time and lend advice. I certainly have been the lucky
Speaker 4: recipient of some great advice from people that have achieved
Speaker 4: so much in the game. What were your big kind
Speaker 4: of things that stood out to you about the old
Speaker 4: course having spent so much time originally, like if you
Speaker 4: can think back to when you were younger.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So while we were waiting to build s Andrews Bay,
Speaker 5: I had a year and a friend of mine was
Speaker 5: New Zealand guy I was doing his pH d at
Speaker 5: the university, and he said, well, I was like really
Speaker 5: a bit of a loose end. Despite having met Jean,
Speaker 5: we weren't sure havings would go and all my parents
Speaker 5: have said, I don't know what to do, and they.
Speaker 2: Said, well what do you just stay so soon? What
Speaker 2: am I going to do?
Speaker 5: You know, it's quite We didn't actually know it was
Speaker 5: going to be a year at that point, but it was.
Speaker 5: So I ended up caddying and my friend was university,
Speaker 5: that's what they did in the summer. So I thought, great,
Speaker 5: I've done a little bit on the Australasian Tour, so
Speaker 5: I can carry a bag. And so I went down
Speaker 5: to the caddy master was a guy called Rick Mackenzie.
Speaker 5: Anybody remember Rick Mackenzie, gruff old character. Looked at me
Speaker 5: up and down. He said, you don't look like you'd be.
Speaker 2: Much of a caddy.
Speaker 4: Sounds like a good caddy master.
Speaker 5: He was probably right, actually bindsight, and I said, I'm
Speaker 5: not sure how good i'd be, Rick, to be honest
Speaker 5: with you, but I like the game. And he said, well,
Speaker 5: what have you been doing with yourself? And I said,
Speaker 5: I've been working for Peter Thompson. Peter Thompson, you're in.
Speaker 5: So that led to caddying for a year. I think
Speaker 5: we did about three hundred rounds, two hundred and twenty
Speaker 5: of them or something on the old course and it
Speaker 5: was a great experience. I mean to learn the old
Speaker 5: course and go round and round with these older guys mainly,
Speaker 5: and I started at the bottom as a bad carrier.
Speaker 5: You know, you didn't say very much, you definitely kept
Speaker 5: up and you know, I saw parts of the course
Speaker 5: that I had never seen before. And it really just
Speaker 5: in having spent the time with Peter and knowing what
Speaker 5: I thought I knew, and then hearing from the caddies
Speaker 5: all the bunkers were made by sheep, and you know,
Speaker 5: the railway station was built and make up a year,
Speaker 5: particularly as they're coming towards the end of around and
Speaker 5: wanting a bigger gratuity, a bigger tip, make up anything.
Speaker 5: And I was like, well, there has to be some data,
Speaker 5: some information, and I couldn't. So that's what really started
Speaker 5: me on. You know, what became the book eventually just
Speaker 5: a personal research project.
Speaker 4: You know, at this point, you you want to be
Speaker 4: a golf architect. You're in the field. Caddying is I
Speaker 4: think an amazing thing from you know, a perspective of
Speaker 4: golf architecture because you're you're exercising strategy, You're you're carrying
Speaker 4: a bag and oftentimes so you're you know, carry carr
Speaker 4: for somebody who needs help getting around the golf course
Speaker 4: and you're guiding them on ideal lines of charm. Were
Speaker 4: there holes in particular that you thought, wow, like I
Speaker 4: can really save someone because they think they should go
Speaker 4: over here, but we should go over here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think certainly. Probably.
Speaker 5: It takes about twenty rounds, would be my feeling before
Speaker 5: you really start to understand the strategy of the old course.
Speaker 5: And my experience was that started to build up almost
Speaker 5: an aerial view, so what you were seeing off the
Speaker 5: ground and you know, sort of that point, sort of
Speaker 5: seven of the first nine holes were blind off the tee.
Speaker 5: So for a first time, it's very discombobulating and not
Speaker 5: really not sure where you're going. It's double greens and
Speaker 5: where do I take my bag? And so yeah, I
Speaker 5: think from a caddy perspective, pretty early on in the round,
Speaker 5: usually by halfway down the first hole, if not the second,
Speaker 5: you've figured out the level of ability that you've got
Speaker 5: and the idea. You know, in those days, Rick mackenzie
Speaker 5: was like, right, Scott, you've got to make your own
Speaker 5: yardage book. Can you imagine that? You know, now we've
Speaker 5: got lasers, you buy everything there was no yardage books.
Speaker 5: There was no distances on sprinkler heads, so you know,
Speaker 5: it's literally like a homework project. Fortunately I could draw
Speaker 5: and I'd done it, you know, done a bit of it,
Speaker 5: so my handiwork was decent enough to get the seal
Speaker 5: of approval from mister mackenzie.
Speaker 4: But it was every caddy had to make their own yardish.
Speaker 2: But that's right, you didn't get a job until you
Speaker 2: had your own book.
Speaker 5: I've still got mine, I've framed on the wall at
Speaker 5: home actually, along with my little caddy badge. But it
Speaker 5: was and there was a bit of swapping of books
Speaker 5: going on. It'say, okay, you know, Jim going to borrow
Speaker 5: your book just to check there was up.
Speaker 2: These were right.
Speaker 5: But it's really hard to explain to people now that
Speaker 5: the art of caddying has probably changed a little bit lately.
Speaker 2: Lately everybody's got their own yardage guy.
Speaker 5: But at that point we were really trying to figure
Speaker 5: out how far a person would hit their five.
Speaker 2: Iron, three would whatever club.
Speaker 5: And then it was a case of not saying it's
Speaker 5: one hundred and seventy five yards or whatever it might
Speaker 5: have been. It was literally giving them the seven I
Speaker 5: and five iron three would whatever they might have been.
Speaker 5: So yeah, I felt there was an art involved at
Speaker 5: that point.
Speaker 4: What I used to caddy, I would figure out the
Speaker 4: yardages and then just adjust the numbers to fit whatever
Speaker 4: the golfer thought the yardages were.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that happened too, Definitely, there's some ego stroking that
Speaker 5: takes place along the way. The women were a lot
Speaker 5: better than men, was my takeaway from much of my
Speaker 5: caddying was it was they tended to take direction a lot,
Speaker 5: a lot better. So read into that whatever you wish to.
Speaker 4: What is there a particular hole from your caddy experience
Speaker 4: that you thought was you know, really beguiling of like
Speaker 4: a novice on the old course as to the way
Speaker 4: that you should play it versus the way you you know,
Speaker 4: your intuition would take you to play it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean the classic is always fourteen. I mean
Speaker 5: it's Alistair Mackenzie obviously did that famous plan which led
Speaker 5: him into golf course design, and even now I just
Speaker 5: think fourteen is such a clever hole. It's chained based
Speaker 5: on equipment through the years. You know, what they would
Speaker 5: have been doing with the Hickory clubs and what we're
Speaker 5: doing now with modern balls and modern clubs, it's very different.
Speaker 5: But certainly the amateur player who doesn't have the distance
Speaker 5: off the tea is still trying to figure out do
Speaker 5: I take on the beardies? Okay, now I've got past them.
Speaker 5: Do I go short of Hell? Do I go overheld bunker?
Speaker 5: Do I play down the fifth fairway? And so that
Speaker 5: whole idea of strategy is I think still alive for
Speaker 5: the amateur golfer through that. I mean, it's just still
Speaker 5: everyone talks about seventeen, and rightly so it's a great hole.
Speaker 5: But I think I think from a design perspective and
Speaker 5: from a playing experience, fourteen is still a really fantastic hole.
Speaker 4: I mean, and that green is just unbelievable green. You know,
Speaker 4: it's it's like a contrary I think. You know, I
Speaker 4: spend twenty twenty two the Open all day every day
Speaker 4: out there watching and walking, and you know, it's just
Speaker 4: a counterintuitive green. Where to me that Rory McElroy lost
Speaker 4: that major by knocketing that his second shot passed the
Speaker 4: hole and having to contend with that severe false front,
Speaker 4: it's like, if you can get it passed, which is
Speaker 4: still counterintuitive, you know, most golf holes you just learn
Speaker 4: long as dad, and it's like you push a path,
Speaker 4: then you're chipping road back up the hill, you know,
Speaker 4: and it's actually much easier. You don't have to contend
Speaker 4: with that false front, that's right.
Speaker 5: So and we were almost leading ourselves into a conversation
Speaker 5: around the reverse course as well, right, so I would.
Speaker 4: So you've been cadding, you know, and we'll get we'll
Speaker 4: get into the reverse in a second. But what led
Speaker 4: you from there to start? You know, what became this
Speaker 4: exhaustive book project, Well.
Speaker 2: That I liked.
Speaker 5: I like to know why something might have happened, so,
Speaker 5: you know, once I put together within the book for
Speaker 5: those who have it towards the back, there's a double
Speaker 5: page fold out and it shows the length of all.
Speaker 2: The holes for all the Open championships held in St. Andrews.
Speaker 5: And that was for me, my into trying to figure
Speaker 5: out when the old course had changed, which led to
Speaker 5: a y. So it became very little data from early on.
Speaker 5: So the first Open was at s Andrews in eighteen
Speaker 5: seventy three and then it's sort of been played reasonably
Speaker 5: regularly ever since. But there's not a lot of early
Speaker 5: early data until really the late eighteen hundreds, eighteen ninety
Speaker 5: eighteen ninety five and then and then it's very good
Speaker 5: data from then on, and I started to see really
Speaker 5: quite significant changes to the length of the old course,
Speaker 5: and particularly around nineteen hundred was the first big one
Speaker 5: which we can track with accuracy, and there was a
Speaker 5: moment so why would that be? And at the same
Speaker 5: time I was tracking length, I was starting to look
Speaker 5: at technology as well, and it was quite clear that
Speaker 5: if we follow the ball in particular, golf has been
Speaker 5: played in s Andrews in the fourteen hundreds, and then
Speaker 5: the feathery golf ball came in in sixteen eighteen, and
Speaker 5: we went for about two hundred and twenty years until
Speaker 5: the gull a Perture, which everyone will know had a
Speaker 5: big impact on Old Tom and his relationship with Alan Robertson,
Speaker 5: and we ran with that ball for quite a long time,
Speaker 5: and then an eighteen forty eight came the Gutter Perchure,
Speaker 5: and then we moved into the has School, which was
Speaker 5: nineteen oh one. So he's starting to have this alignment
Speaker 5: now between changes to length of the old course and technology.
Speaker 5: And they added between those two opens nineteen hundred and
Speaker 5: nineteen oh five exactly two hundred yards, most of it
Speaker 5: to the front nine, and you can correlate it exactly
Speaker 5: back to the introduction of the Haskel ball. That so
Speaker 5: for me that was, oh, that's quite interesting. And then
Speaker 5: as you track that information through as the ball changes
Speaker 5: and we get different versions of the gutter perchase, the
Speaker 5: gutter perchure, and then moving into the hash school with
Speaker 5: the rubber corl ball and more recently the pro v one,
Speaker 5: there is this returning theme of improvement and equipment, primarily
Speaker 5: the ball also you know shafts obviously, and then into
Speaker 5: clubhead a bitsize the face of the thing. So they
Speaker 5: all work together. People debate about is it the ball
Speaker 5: is the face, it's everything together. But from the old
Speaker 5: course point of view, you can see for the first time.
Speaker 5: So that's why, you know, it's really important to understand
Speaker 5: that golf course design never leads the way. It's always
Speaker 5: been a response and it remains a response today.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean in a way, it's really the only
Speaker 4: course that has been around and evolved with technology, correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's its importance.
Speaker 5: You know, it's our only touchstone to be able to
Speaker 5: prove in a linear way that as this has been
Speaker 5: an open venue right through all those changes, and other
Speaker 5: venues weren't. Some have come and gone, whether it's press
Speaker 5: work or whether it was Muscle Brough, which were early venues.
Speaker 5: This is the only venue which has stayed relevant through
Speaker 5: all those periods. And we can look at data. We
Speaker 5: can say, well, in eighteen ninety five the old course
Speaker 5: was six thousand, three hundred and twenty three from memory
Speaker 5: yards long, and we go that to the last Open
Speaker 5: Championship in twenty two and it was seven thousand, three
Speaker 5: hundred and thirteen. So there's almost exactly one thousand yards
Speaker 5: different between one hundred and thirty years. And what's happened
Speaker 5: to scoring in that time? Well, in eighteen ninety five
Speaker 5: from memory, the score was I think three hundred and
Speaker 5: twelve and when cam Smith won it was two hundred
Speaker 5: and sixty eight in all time low.
Speaker 2: So we've had fifty four strokes less in one thousand
Speaker 2: yards more. You know, what do you think about that? Right?
Speaker 2: It's crazy?
Speaker 4: I find myself laughing. There's a club in the States,
Speaker 4: Biopia Hunt Club, that hosted a number of US opens
Speaker 4: in the in the eighteen hundreds, and they loved to
Speaker 4: talk in the early nineteen hundreds, they'll have to you know,
Speaker 4: we have the highest scoring us self is like, well,
Speaker 4: you know, the equipment's changed quite a bit, you know,
Speaker 4: it has.
Speaker 5: But this idea that length will will solve you know,
Speaker 5: say it's going to defend parts of hypothetical number. So
Speaker 5: it's a rather tenuous conversation, but we can now track
Speaker 5: that one thousand yards longer over one hundred and thirty
Speaker 5: years has not at all slowed down scoring. It's you know,
Speaker 5: because and you can say why. There's lots of reasons why,
Speaker 5: but you know, there's it's multifactorial about how we get
Speaker 5: But that's the value of the old courses that the
Speaker 5: guys and I think we've got now the RNA and
Speaker 5: the USGA really great custodians who are very serious about
Speaker 5: the impact of the ball on playing experience. Because what's
Speaker 5: happened in one hundred years is the game's got slower,
Speaker 5: more expensive, and has it got more fun?
Speaker 2: Debatable?
Speaker 4: Batable?
Speaker 2: You know, So it depends on who you ask, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it depends.
Speaker 5: So it's a you know, as the courses get longer,
Speaker 5: and this is from it, this is my day job, really,
Speaker 5: so as the golf courses get longer because the ball
Speaker 5: and clubs are going further at a new developers question
Speaker 5: might be how much land do I.
Speaker 2: Need to buy?
Speaker 5: Well, it's more than ten years ago or twenty years
Speaker 5: or fifty years ago, right, so we need to buy
Speaker 5: more land. The golf course needs to be longer, it
Speaker 5: needs to be wider because of the ball sort of
Speaker 5: safety issues and ball strike incidents. And then it's obviously
Speaker 5: they haven't got to be maintained. So there's a lot
Speaker 5: it's more expensive to buy, it's more expensive to build,
Speaker 5: it's more expensive to maintain.
Speaker 2: So those costs are all passed on. And who are they
Speaker 2: passed on to?
Speaker 4: Consumer?
Speaker 2: Consumer?
Speaker 5: You know, the member, the green fee player who so
Speaker 5: so not only has our game got longer and slower, it's.
Speaker 2: Got more expensive as well.
Speaker 5: And you know, we can talk, we can move into
Speaker 5: a conversation about the role this rollbacks. Not a rollback,
Speaker 5: it's more of a line in the sand. You know,
Speaker 5: I would love to have seen them go further back.
Speaker 5: Now there's a lot of pushback from manufacturers and this
Speaker 5: is ground which probably is slightly more shaky. But my
Speaker 5: view is that it would have been better a while
Speaker 5: ago to try and slow the ball down.
Speaker 2: I think it would have helped a lot more.
Speaker 5: But we are where we are now, so I'm reassured
Speaker 5: by I think the stewardship that we've had within the
Speaker 5: RNA and the USGA, that they're fully aligned. I'm not
Speaker 5: sure there's other sectors of the industry which are.
Speaker 4: It's a basic conversation. Had a lot of those conversations
Speaker 4: last week at the Masters, and I think there's a
Speaker 4: lot of different opinions out there, you know. I think
Speaker 4: the Old Course is like the perfect example of what happens.
Speaker 4: I always use this as a Chicago and from the States.
Speaker 4: But you know, if baseball hadn't regulated the bats, you
Speaker 4: know what would what would we say if it was like,
Speaker 4: you know what, it's too small, too small of a field,
Speaker 4: we can't play in regular anymore or funway, people would
Speaker 4: be outraged and and it's it's kind of you know,
Speaker 4: we're getting to that point with with a lot of
Speaker 4: our venues, you know, and you know, I definitely regulation,
Speaker 4: and as your book illustrates, you know, distance and the
Speaker 4: changes to the Old Course are heavily correlated. And then
Speaker 4: the scoring reduction. If you could take us to the
Speaker 4: early days of golf at the old course. What did
Speaker 4: it look like? And what did the golf course look like?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this is this is I mean, it's it's
Speaker 2: been an incredible change.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: Imagine golf being played here in the fourteen hundreds and
Speaker 5: how wild that would have been with a with a
Speaker 5: wooden ball, probably a hardwood, not a soft wood. But
Speaker 5: you know there's there's no mos right, it's a concept
Speaker 5: of mowing grass. So you know it was a target
Speaker 5: cross country adventure from one patch of being asked rescue
Speaker 5: grass to the next. And you know, there was no
Speaker 5: sense of how many holes we're going to play. It
Speaker 5: was wild out there. You know, there was long, there
Speaker 5: was winds, and there's gorse. So the same things would be.
Speaker 4: It would it be if you look at the beach
Speaker 4: when you see the dunes, right, would it be almost
Speaker 4: imagining looking at that and there'd be just you'd pick
Speaker 4: a point in the distance and play there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think that's you know, that's almost the point you've
Speaker 5: got to get to in your imagination is almost imagining
Speaker 5: a place, a beachside location with no golf on it
Speaker 5: and figuring out if you could And you know, this
Speaker 5: is this early period because you know, they talk now
Speaker 5: that there was a period there in seventeen sixty four
Speaker 5: where the course became eighteen holes, and up to that
Speaker 5: point it'd be twenty two. And I try to think
Speaker 5: back to what was it in fifteen hundreds, Well, it
Speaker 5: might have been three or seven, or there was no number.
Speaker 5: It was a you know, you played from point to
Speaker 5: point and then at some point you decided to come back.
Speaker 5: So fortunately what we have in eighteen twenty one is
Speaker 5: the first play.
Speaker 4: I'd like to be down in a match and decide,
Speaker 4: get to decide when I come back.
Speaker 2: It's right, yeah, now we got.
Speaker 4: To keep going.
Speaker 5: Game over. I won three up with Nundergo. It's kind
Speaker 5: of like that, but it was. And so so what
Speaker 5: do we know?
Speaker 2: Right? If we don't know that, when do we start
Speaker 2: to know stuff.
Speaker 5: So there's a guy who I think will go down
Speaker 5: in history very favorably called James Cheap Strathiram. Strathiram State
Speaker 5: still exists, and there'd been a crazy period in the
Speaker 5: late seventeen hundreds where the town had gone bankrupt and
Speaker 5: that sold the old course. I think to a guy
Speaker 5: called Thomas Erskin from memory, and he had decided to
Speaker 5: farm rabbits. Over the next twenty odd years, there was
Speaker 5: a lot of rabbits out there doing a lot of
Speaker 5: damage to this golf course where people were still.
Speaker 2: Trying to play.
Speaker 5: So along came Aimes Cheap and he bought the course
Speaker 5: and he made a map of it, and that map
Speaker 5: still exists in the RNA, have it. And in order
Speaker 5: to define what the golfing ground was, he put in
Speaker 5: the ground boundary markers. Boundary markers are now known as
Speaker 5: march stones, and they still exist. There's one in the
Speaker 5: middle of the fifth fairway and they're dotted around the place.
Speaker 4: There is a ball headed in the last open. I
Speaker 4: remember a drive. Yeah, it could have will have happened
Speaker 4: like Rick Across.
Speaker 5: I've seen it happen when I certainly when I was caddying.
Speaker 5: They're now covered instead of artificial shields to try and
Speaker 5: protect them.
Speaker 2: But that sort of defined the other thing. So I am.
Speaker 5: Thinking, right, okay, great, we've got to plan eighteen twenty one,
Speaker 5: and the parameters are kind of defined. And at that
Speaker 5: point there is eighteen holes, right, eighteen holes, but actually
Speaker 5: there's only ten holes, so it's an eighteen hole course.
Speaker 2: But if you think.
Speaker 5: About it, they dig a hole for the one, they
Speaker 5: dig a hole for two, three, all the way up
Speaker 5: to nine, so with nine holes in the ground, and
Speaker 5: then they have to play back, so there are at
Speaker 5: nine and then they play back to the eighth hole,
Speaker 5: black to the seventh hole, back to the sixth, and
Speaker 5: then they have to have one home hole. So there's
Speaker 5: actually only ten physical holes in the ground, even though.
Speaker 4: In the holes at this point they aren't like what
Speaker 4: we think of a horse.
Speaker 5: No, So at that point the hole cutter hadn't been invented,
Speaker 5: and there's great conversations around that it was a drain
Speaker 5: pipe and it was old Tom and I think there
Speaker 5: was still a little bit myth around there, but certainly
Speaker 5: in eighteen twenty one there was not a hole cutter,
Speaker 5: and we did some found some material when the book
Speaker 5: was updated, and it was it was a story about
Speaker 5: how the caddies would go out, the first caddies of
Speaker 5: the day would go out and cut the holes. So
Speaker 5: you can imagine it's still pretty wild out there. They
Speaker 5: find a lovely bit of a rescue ground the right
Speaker 5: we're going to cut the hole. He had literally have
Speaker 5: a hand trail and dig a hole in the ground,
Speaker 5: right like you're in a garden, yes, and there's no flax, right,
Speaker 5: So now they have to caddy has to stand near
Speaker 5: that hole as the other golfers and the other caddies
Speaker 5: come up and play to it, and then they go
Speaker 5: to the next one dig the hole.
Speaker 2: The first group out has to do the digging.
Speaker 5: And because at the end of the day they're all
Speaker 5: filled back in. And we've got this written down in tech.
Speaker 5: So there's no flags and there's no holes, and they're
Speaker 5: kind of made up as you go, and I mean
Speaker 5: it's a different game, right.
Speaker 4: They have the first caddy utst up born. I didn't
Speaker 4: wake up on the wrong side of the bad too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. Well, this is also like to tee
Speaker 5: it up. They were taking sand out of the hole.
Speaker 5: Then for them to tee up the ball tea up
Speaker 5: put it on amount of sand to play off the
Speaker 5: next one.
Speaker 4: So the hole would actually get bigger as the day.
Speaker 5: Won't potentially and all the ground around it would become
Speaker 5: rougher because there's all these little piles of.
Speaker 2: Sand that are coming along. So we know that that
Speaker 2: was happening.
Speaker 5: That's all been documented, and we also know through the
Speaker 5: rules of the game that in order to compensate the
Speaker 5: rules where we had to be one club length from
Speaker 5: the hole and then laid on it was two, then four,
Speaker 5: then eight and twelve and eighteen eighty eight they's actually
Speaker 5: scrapped that rule. So from eighteen eighty eight for the
Speaker 5: first time we actually you know, it's separate teas for
Speaker 5: the tea in grounds. It's terminology is tyfinically talk about tea.
Speaker 5: Is that the peg or is at the ground. Okay,
Speaker 5: so we're talking now talking about the tea and ground
Speaker 5: could be separate a non specified distance from the cup
Speaker 5: the whole and again, cups at that point didn't really exist.
Speaker 2: That was old tom.
Speaker 5: So the first cup was in the eleventh hole on
Speaker 5: the old course because it kept caving in. So again
Speaker 5: the terminology keeps changing. Is that the game keeps changing.
Speaker 5: But yeah, the holes were were so now we now
Speaker 5: we kind of have unpicked how will that happened?
Speaker 2: It must have been an incredible time, yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean wild time. Yeah. When when did it become
Speaker 4: an eighteen hole course? And when when was it this
Speaker 4: reversible course or what was the terminology then of this course?
Speaker 4: When did that come to be?
Speaker 5: So this is so we try to talk through these
Speaker 5: this sort of period from the eighteen hundred, so we
Speaker 5: know that from eighteen twenty one that was the first
Speaker 5: plan of the golf course and this was starting to
Speaker 5: be a really dynamic period. The sort of mid eighteen
Speaker 5: hundreds were where in the you know, the RNA it was,
Speaker 5: you know, the Society of s Andrew's Golfers that started
Speaker 5: in seventeen fifty four and they renamed themselves in eighteen
Speaker 5: thirty four. There's another club in Perth which became Royal
Speaker 5: Perth Golfing Society, and so the RNA thought, hang on,
Speaker 5: we're more senior, far more royal, we will claim that title.
Speaker 5: So they went to the King at the time and
Speaker 5: renamed themselves. At that point they weren't in the current
Speaker 5: clubhouse that was built. I think eighteen fifty four was
Speaker 5: you know, the railway opened in eighteen fifty two and
Speaker 5: two years later the current RNA Clubhouse as we know
Speaker 5: it was built. And at that point try to imagine
Speaker 5: this that the current first fairway didn't exist, that there was.
Speaker 5: If you could imagine a line from the left hand
Speaker 5: side the town side of the RNA Clubhouse all the
Speaker 5: way down to the left side of the current first
Speaker 5: green that was Beach and it was really from eighteen
Speaker 5: fifty four up until the bruce embankment was finished in
Speaker 5: eighteen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: That was when that.
Speaker 5: Started to get wider. So there was a really dynamic period.
Speaker 5: And that point Old Tom Morris had gone to Prestwick.
Speaker 5: He had come back in eighteen sixty four and then
Speaker 5: we had a ten year period where lots changed. The
Speaker 5: eighteenth Green was built and opened in eighteen sixty nine.
Speaker 5: Within a couple of years the first green, which has
Speaker 5: been another mystery, I think we've solved that now.
Speaker 2: It never existed. It sort of emerged as the hole.
Speaker 5: Remember at this point the seventeenth Green was a double green,
Speaker 5: so had two holes cut in it and the one
Speaker 5: closest to the burn as you play the the old
Speaker 5: course and reverse one you play to That started to
Speaker 5: move towards the sea because there washerwomen there and they
Speaker 5: were trampling down the grasses and the game had become
Speaker 5: a lot more popular. People were coming off the train.
Speaker 5: The cost of golf had come down because the gut
Speaker 5: of Perchy was a lot cheaper than a feathery ball,
Speaker 5: so all these people were coming and now there's lots
Speaker 5: of golfers and they needed a wider sort of course
Speaker 5: in which to play and old tom so that was
Speaker 5: an incredibly dynamic period in the evolution of the old course.
Speaker 4: An amazing trivia item would be what are the newest
Speaker 4: halls on the old course? Most people wouldn't ever think
Speaker 4: it'd be one in eighteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, you know.
Speaker 5: And of course at that point, so there was a
Speaker 5: period where there was one double green, so we had
Speaker 5: no double greens, and then there was some safety issues.
Speaker 5: So the first double green in the eighteen thirties was
Speaker 5: eighteen thirty four, I think for a memory was five
Speaker 5: and thirteen, and then within twenty five years or so,
Speaker 5: the RNA said, well, the game's still growing, we've got
Speaker 5: safety issues out there. All all the greens are now
Speaker 5: going to be double greens. Course, the two that weren't
Speaker 5: were nine and eighteen. As you came back, and then
Speaker 5: we had this split between eighteen seventy and eighteen seventy two,
Speaker 5: just prior to the first Open in eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 5: we had this evolution of the first green kind of
Speaker 5: moving towards the sea.
Speaker 2: And we know.
Speaker 5: It because there was a court case which happened in
Speaker 5: eighteen eighty five, and it was to do with trespassing
Speaker 5: of all things on the Himalayas the ladies putting course,
Speaker 5: and there was a guy called James Denham who was
Speaker 5: accused of trespassing, and his point was, well, hang on,
Speaker 5: I can play wherever I want. And at that point
Speaker 5: there had been that section of ground which is the
Speaker 5: lady's putting course, was privately rented for the purpose of
Speaker 5: the lady's putting course, and Old Tom was told to
Speaker 5: usher this chap off the course and he said, well,
Speaker 5: I've got the right to play wherever I want. So
Speaker 5: it became a court case, and it could have gone
Speaker 5: either way. As it turned out, this guy lost. But
Speaker 5: what became interesting during the two days it was held
Speaker 5: and the Cooper Court were all the great and good
Speaker 5: of s Andrew's, including Old Tom, Stuart Grace, who was
Speaker 5: the honorary Secretary of the RNA, a number of other players,
Speaker 5: you know, well known players who competed in the open
Speaker 5: all turned up and they gave their view, and so
Speaker 5: it started to paint this picture of what the washerwomen
Speaker 5: were doing. And Old Tom's sister was a washerwoman, so
Speaker 5: she was part of the court case and they were saying, well,
Speaker 5: you know, they would go down there and they would
Speaker 5: light fires under these big bowls and take water out
Speaker 5: of this fulk and burn, take down their sheets and
Speaker 5: blankets and dip them in and put them on the
Speaker 5: gorse to dry. And that was just knocking down all
Speaker 5: this grass. So when the popularity of the game was
Speaker 5: going old Tom took the opportunity to slowly cut this
Speaker 5: hole closer and closer, and that's how we ended up
Speaker 5: with what is now known as the First Green.
Speaker 4: Unbelievable. It's like all the societal influences that led to
Speaker 4: golf in the Hall built at this point, is is
Speaker 4: it a reversible course or what? Where you know? And
Speaker 4: how did it work? How did they go about, you know,
Speaker 4: changing which direction you played at.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so obviously if we go back to that eighteen
Speaker 5: twenty one plan, we know at that point it's a
Speaker 5: very narrow course and it's linear, and but there's not
Speaker 5: many people playing, right, so occasionally be people going out
Speaker 5: and they're coming back. They probably all know each other,
Speaker 5: they're probably members of the at that point, but it
Speaker 5: still would have been the St. Andrew's side of Andrew's
Speaker 5: Golfers hadn't become the RNA at that point, so they
Speaker 5: would have been familiarity. And then there's more people coming.
Speaker 5: People who don't know each other probably don't know the
Speaker 5: golf course. So there's this build up, the courses getting
Speaker 5: wider and busier, and there's this need to try and
Speaker 5: have some degree of separation between the two courses. So
Speaker 5: from a really around the eighteen seventies up until sort
Speaker 5: of just after the Open eighteen seventy three, up until
Speaker 5: about nineteen oh five, there was the left and right
Speaker 5: hand course which was the terminology of the day, and
Speaker 5: it alternated week on week, and the idea was that
Speaker 5: there was the competition course was always the right hand course,
Speaker 5: and that stood except for one time.
Speaker 4: And that's the course they play today, the right hand course, correct.
Speaker 5: Correct, So we now play the right hand course. And
Speaker 5: so the question was, well, why did they choose to
Speaker 5: lengthen the right hand course, And the answer really is
Speaker 5: safety related in terms.
Speaker 2: Of the reverse course.
Speaker 5: Or the left hand course has three crossovers, it's possible
Speaker 5: to do it two crossovers, but at the moment really
Speaker 5: it's always been three three crossovers. So you have one
Speaker 5: in eighteen and then you've got sort of seven and eleven,
Speaker 5: which we kind of have, and then there's nine to ten,
Speaker 5: and so that's a less safe course than what the
Speaker 5: right hand course is with just the single crossover at
Speaker 5: seven and eleven.
Speaker 4: So effectively, you know, because you know everybody, most people
Speaker 4: here will experience this because you're playing and you're going
Speaker 4: to have t shirts going in opposite directions while people
Speaker 4: are playing whole that's how they decided the right hand
Speaker 4: course had to win out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was as simple as that.
Speaker 5: It was literally a safety related And of course then
Speaker 5: once they start, so we've got this time eighteen eighty
Speaker 5: eight when individual separateees can be built right around the
Speaker 5: same time. So there's this correlation between the rules changing,
Speaker 5: equipment changing, old course changing. That led to a series
Speaker 5: of decisions that we now see, you know, the old
Speaker 5: course through a modern prism, just through. But it was like, well,
Speaker 5: how did we get to where we are? So once
Speaker 5: they started lengthening the right hand course, which is the
Speaker 5: course we know right and play today, mostly you've got
Speaker 5: to kind of keep going at that point and probably
Speaker 5: the one way, the one hole that we can see
Speaker 5: what's happened, which is teas come right and they go back.
Speaker 5: Is is the fourteenth hole again? Because I think we've
Speaker 5: got just to the right of the bunker which sits
Speaker 5: to the right of the thirteenth green, there's a pop
Speaker 5: punker there just next to it, within ten yards or so,
Speaker 5: there's this small rectangular, flat bit of ground. It's my
Speaker 5: view that that was possibly the first individual tea built
Speaker 5: once the rules change in eighteen eighty eight, so with
Speaker 5: old time, and then from there there's very clear aerial
Speaker 5: photography now which shows that continuation of the tea moving
Speaker 5: right and further back.
Speaker 4: With a reversible course. And you know, were there benefits
Speaker 4: to having people play different ways? And how did that work?
Speaker 4: Did you did they switch it every day? How did
Speaker 4: the logistics of deciding which way people played every day occur?
Speaker 5: We know from documentation that it changed every week. So
Speaker 5: there was a thirty year period there between eighteen seventy
Speaker 5: three ish seventy four through to about nineteen oh five
Speaker 5: it would literally alternate. And the reason given was really
Speaker 5: around wear and tear is that when you play the
Speaker 5: course the opposite way, obviously balls will end up in
Speaker 5: a different place. One thing's quite interesting about when you
Speaker 5: think about that, and you go, okay, let me see
Speaker 5: if you look at the whole, we know it's sixteen
Speaker 5: if you don't right hand course, but it's three if
Speaker 5: you're playing in reverse and you draw a line between
Speaker 5: the middle of the sixteenth green. I'm going to use
Speaker 5: modern numbers here because it's easier if you draw a
Speaker 5: line between the sort of sixteenth green and the fifteenth
Speaker 5: green and you try to find midpoint between those two points.
Speaker 2: Guess where it is.
Speaker 4: Midpoint between the fifteenth and sixteenth green would be three
Speaker 4: fair away.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, kind of, but it lines up almost perfectly
Speaker 5: with principal's nose, a hole which is one hundred and
Speaker 5: eighty five yards so literally one hundred and eighty five
Speaker 5: yards on as the princip's own when you're playing the
Speaker 5: other way, So perfect position for bunker right, and you've
Speaker 5: got to imagine the course is narrow. A three fairway
Speaker 5: didn't really exist at that point, so no matter which
Speaker 5: way you're playing, Principal's nose was in play. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: so you know, now we fly over it both ways
Speaker 5: when you're playing it and and you're playing out, So
Speaker 5: there's all these little things that have changed. You know,
Speaker 5: whether you attribute a reason to that or not, but
Speaker 5: it goes to show that not only has the old
Speaker 5: course change in length, that's changed in width, and along
Speaker 5: with that has has been strategic change in the way
Speaker 5: the course is played.
Speaker 4: What do you think are some of the standout halls
Speaker 4: on the left hand or reversible course.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I mean it starts off with a cracker.
Speaker 5: I mean I think one in reverse is and you know,
Speaker 5: playing to seventeen green from that way actually is a
Speaker 5: really great hole. You know, do I play left? You know,
Speaker 5: do I play closer to the road and try to
Speaker 5: come in that way, or do you go why and
Speaker 5: try to come in and avoid the road bunker.
Speaker 4: It feels like you should just tell people to play
Speaker 4: to one green and then they'll end up left, yeah,
Speaker 4: because they'll avoid right. Yeah, that's right, and then you'll
Speaker 4: be in the perfect spot to play seven to seventeen green.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well it's fun too because at that point that's little
Speaker 5: section of seventeen green slopes back towards you, so it's
Speaker 5: actually quite receptive. Go long you're on the road, and
Speaker 5: go the other long right side you're in the bunker.
Speaker 5: So that's a really terrific hole. Seventeen and reverse is
Speaker 5: one of the hot hardest holes I think I've ever
Speaker 5: played in my life. You know, it's hard to imagine
Speaker 5: sort of holes on the PGA tour that can be
Speaker 5: more tricky than what it is. It's a long drive
Speaker 5: and the pinch point there is where the track kind
Speaker 5: of comes around the Old Course Hotel and you've got
Speaker 5: cheap spunker on one side and you're trying to get
Speaker 5: as far up as you can, and particularly if you're playing,
Speaker 5: say with Heckory clubs, because you've then got to come
Speaker 5: across a bunker right in front of the green, and
Speaker 5: most of that green then slopes away away from you,
Speaker 5: so you're struck and initially straight off, you know, off
Speaker 5: the bat with this really tough start. So I really
Speaker 5: enjoy the Old Course in reverse, and there's certainly a
Speaker 5: series that you talked earlier about the fourteenth green. That
Speaker 5: hole makes a lot more sense when you play edit reverse,
Speaker 5: as does twelve in reverse. People come over and I
Speaker 5: remember caddying and people say where am I meant to
Speaker 5: hit this ball? We say, well, hit it over in
Speaker 5: the rough on the right hand side. Why would I
Speaker 5: hit it in the rouff? It's like, well, there's bunkers
Speaker 5: that you can't see. Why can't I see the bunkers?
Speaker 5: But when you're playing reverse, of course, you can see
Speaker 5: all the bunkers, right, So you go, okay, this one,
Speaker 5: I get it now, I now get it.
Speaker 2: Why this course was so engaging both ways?
Speaker 4: Is there a hole that's famous on the right hand
Speaker 4: course that you don't think works as well? Because everybody's
Speaker 4: always said that, like twelve doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaker 4: It's actually like you stand on the T box. Every
Speaker 4: time I've a T box, I'm just like, this makes
Speaker 4: no sense whatsoever. But then when you play the other way,
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, this makes sense. Is there a hole
Speaker 4: on the right course you feel that way after you've
Speaker 4: seen it play reverse? That makes less sense, you know,
Speaker 4: in the inal routing, And.
Speaker 5: It's probably not. I mean maybe i've maybe I haven't
Speaker 5: thought about. That's a really good question. Leave it with me.
Speaker 5: Nothing jumps off my bat. I think they're pretty logical
Speaker 5: because they've been adjusted so much through time, you know,
Speaker 5: I think was when I look back at you know,
Speaker 5: this continued expansion with wise, what does become clear is
Speaker 5: that the central that the old course really its identity
Speaker 5: is around the central hazards more than the peripheral and
Speaker 5: of course as the course got wider, decisions were made
Speaker 5: to try and punish offline shots, so pop bunkers were
Speaker 5: added down the sides of the golf course. But I
Speaker 5: keep reminding myself that actually this course was very narrow
Speaker 5: and the hazards, the most important hazards are still the
Speaker 5: central ones. And we've gone through this interesting change where
Speaker 5: back in those days the hazards were king right, you know,
Speaker 5: if you could talk.
Speaker 4: About done, if you go into like hell Banker.
Speaker 5: Also as a member of here, or Preswick or Raws
Speaker 5: and George's where we you know, people would talk about
Speaker 5: the Cardinal or the Alps or hell Bunker and they
Speaker 5: were proud, you know, how difficult their course was and
Speaker 5: how many shots it took to escape from these god
Speaker 5: forsaken places. Now that's changed, you know, now people go,
Speaker 5: oh my god, have you seen the green over it?
Speaker 5: You know, fifteen or whatever hold, you know, whatever course
Speaker 5: you're talking about. So we compare courses differently now than
Speaker 5: we did, well they did in those days. And if
Speaker 5: you go into the RNA, if you have that opportunity,
Speaker 5: the bunkers are not they're planned and they're and they're named,
Speaker 5: and they're measured, and now.
Speaker 2: We do that with greens.
Speaker 5: So I think from a design perspective, I was quite
Speaker 5: captivated by how there's been a shift and how we
Speaker 5: identify our and rate to a degree our golf courses.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the thing about the old courses. The
Speaker 4: greens are amazing. I was going to ask you about,
Speaker 4: you know, the double greens. How did they almost allow
Speaker 4: a reversible concept to exist? The actual green complexes themselves?
Speaker 2: How did they exist? How did the.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like, what role did the greens play in this
Speaker 4: course being able to be reversible?
Speaker 5: Well, probably because they're central, So because everything was fairly central,
Speaker 5: and I guess in my mind, I'm still thinking about
Speaker 5: that concept of eighteen twenty one plan eighteen holes but
Speaker 5: only ten cups cut and then this growing popularity of
Speaker 5: the sport and then the safety related aspects. So the
Speaker 5: RNA is saying the committee meeting, right, chaps, you know,
Speaker 5: we've had some issues here. Bob got hit last week.
Speaker 5: You know, maybe we should bring in at another hole.
Speaker 5: I suspect there was a fairly logical conversation which led
Speaker 5: to a practical solution.
Speaker 2: Is that answering your question.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it makes sense. So they all started, you know,
Speaker 4: visually central and if you said their safety from people
Speaker 4: playing back to the natural idea would be go like
Speaker 4: this right, it was very functional you think about it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and that's what makes the whole thing work. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Correct.
Speaker 5: So then so then we talk about when did mo's
Speaker 5: come in? Like what you know what Hang on a second,
Speaker 5: what's happened here with technology?
Speaker 2: Not so.
Speaker 5: We've talked about club and ball, but there's a whole
Speaker 5: nother level of sort of agronomy taking place as well.
Speaker 5: So what happened with you know, in the eighteen eighties
Speaker 5: eighteen nineties MOA's became important. Great, well, where now we
Speaker 5: can expand these putting areas, these green types areas. And
Speaker 5: I remember talking with talking with Peter Thompson and Melbourne
Speaker 5: and he would say, Scott, do you do you know
Speaker 5: what was do you know why we had practice rounds?
Speaker 5: I think I knew why Peter and he would say, well,
Speaker 5: it was to learn the speed of the green So
Speaker 5: here we are in the fifties and sixties where you know,
Speaker 5: the stimp meter was not really invented, it wasn't important,
Speaker 5: and you know he went out and they all went
Speaker 5: out to try and figure out that the fifth green
Speaker 5: was slightly slower than the seventh, which was faster than
Speaker 5: the twelfth, which was slower than the thirteenth or whatever.
Speaker 5: Made notes you know that they didn't care, Peter said,
Speaker 5: they didn't care about the color of the grass, didn't
Speaker 5: care about the speed of the green, just as.
Speaker 2: Long as it was smooth. That was the art of putting.
Speaker 5: So now it's changed again, right, Yeah, you know every green,
Speaker 5: you know, you see the RNA and all the tournaments,
Speaker 5: and they're like, well today the stimp is ten point
Speaker 5: eight or twelve point two or.
Speaker 4: In the hater cud whatever it might be.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So well, I hang on, this is a change.
Speaker 5: This was never important before, but it is now.
Speaker 2: Is it right? Is it wrong?
Speaker 5: You know, people will have different views on that. I
Speaker 5: wonder if something's been lost. I think Peter probably wondered
Speaker 5: if something had been lost as well. I don't from
Speaker 5: a design perspective, div when we saw a few years
Speaker 5: ago twenty eleven, twenty twelve, there was a small change
Speaker 5: on the eleventh green where they tried to regain a
Speaker 5: historic pin position, because once you're running really above ten
Speaker 5: on the stimp meter, particularly with any type of breeze,
Speaker 5: there's no way to really stop a golf ball. So
Speaker 5: we have this sort of thing with design where you're
Speaker 5: really trying to get that about a one percent somewhere
Speaker 5: maybe between half a percent one and a half percent
Speaker 5: around those puddable areas. So I know it was controversial
Speaker 5: at the time, I actually liked it. I thought getting
Speaker 5: that pin position close to hill bunker, which is one
Speaker 5: of the really iconic bunkers if you know the story
Speaker 5: of Bobby Jones getting stuck in that bunker. So this
Speaker 5: idea that we're speeding up greens but we're losing pinnable area,
Speaker 5: and particularly classic pinnable area, is a touch point for discussion.
Speaker 5: And you know, so you run, say forward to the
Speaker 5: open in twenty twelve, at twenty fifteen, and then twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two, and you look at what the RNA we're
Speaker 5: trying to do, this whole idea of maybe defending par again,
Speaker 5: and it comes down to pin positions. You know, how
Speaker 5: close can they be tup to mounds or on the
Speaker 5: first green, how close could it be over the swilkn burn.
Speaker 5: So we have really great data now, so they release
Speaker 5: all the pinnable information. We know in twenty twenty fifteen
Speaker 5: there was four pin positions over the four days, round one, two, three, four,
Speaker 5: And on three of those days it was really tight
Speaker 5: to the burn. Round one two it was twelve and
Speaker 5: thirteen yards. Round three it went thirty yards to the
Speaker 5: back of the green. This is measurements from the front.
Speaker 5: And on round four it came back and it was
Speaker 5: twelve yards from the burn. And you jump forward to
Speaker 5: the next open and you know, again technology has improved,
Speaker 5: RNA is still looking to you know, protect par and
Speaker 5: provide other you know, and provide other challenges. Right, And
Speaker 5: the greens of the pin positions for that year were
Speaker 5: identical almost to the previous year, except they were closer.
Speaker 2: To the burn.
Speaker 5: So now round one six yards, Round two seven yards,
Speaker 5: Round three thirty one yards, Round four back.
Speaker 2: To sort of six yards.
Speaker 5: So we've halved the difference between in seven years. We've
Speaker 5: gone from twelve being quite close to the burn to six,
Speaker 5: six or seven yards.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting thing.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, I think the undertones of all this
Speaker 4: discussion is like you and it's kind of the fascinating
Speaker 4: thing about the old courses, the evolution from the fourteen
Speaker 4: hundred's where it's this is wild. You're playing on the
Speaker 4: beach effectively through dunes on you know, uncapt unmown grass
Speaker 4: with wooden sticks to you know today where you have
Speaker 4: you know, track bands and you know clubs that the
Speaker 4: bill to fit your clubs, to optimize your spin rates,
Speaker 4: to get the perfect the ideal launch for your your game,
Speaker 4: to the maintenance practices getting to be moan it's it's
Speaker 4: effectively becoming a less and less kind of wild battle
Speaker 4: against nature game that that you started with. And and
Speaker 4: you know, and this is the historical you know canvas
Speaker 4: that's undertaken.
Speaker 5: This whole change, so we can agree it's changed, right,
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, And so then you move into and it's
Speaker 5: not it's not good language to use, but there is
Speaker 5: one better, you know what is better?
Speaker 2: Mean?
Speaker 4: Right, depends on the person you ask. And that that's
Speaker 4: the whole box of rocks if you get into that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really is. So you know, we we.
Speaker 5: Competitive golf gives us an opportunity to compare things. Particularly
Speaker 5: the data coming out now is we're drowning and data
Speaker 5: more than we've ever had. But what's a good golf experience?
Speaker 5: You know, what does that mean to somebody, I mean ultimately,
Speaker 5: actually a good golf experience is just playing with nice
Speaker 5: people and having a good social time.
Speaker 2: But if we're trying to find the.
Speaker 5: Best golfers, then there's certain tests that need to be faced,
Speaker 5: they need to be presented, and then then the golfers
Speaker 5: need to try and do them. So what how does
Speaker 5: that play out in the setup of a golf course?
Speaker 5: And we've seen we can now see how that plays
Speaker 5: out from agronomy point of view, we can see that
Speaker 5: how a length point of view, and then we can
Speaker 5: see that in a scoring point of view. You know,
Speaker 5: was the twenty twenty two Open better than the twenty fifteen,
Speaker 5: better than two thousand, better than nineteen sixty four or
Speaker 5: Jack's when you know, there's so many factors that go into.
Speaker 2: That, it's very hard to say, well that was the best.
Speaker 5: But certainly people have is saying well, actually, if we're
Speaker 5: trying to align the score, you know, the winning score
Speaker 5: with par with length, actually you go back to the
Speaker 5: nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties where everything kind of align before
Speaker 5: everything took off again. Now we're well below PA. So
Speaker 5: it's a great debate. It's I'm not sure as a
Speaker 5: clear answer.
Speaker 4: No, there isn't. It's you know, like many things, it's
Speaker 4: up to everybody's individual interpretations. Last question before we dive
Speaker 4: into some opens of yesteryear with Brendan and Kevin, for
Speaker 4: just you know, somebody's playing the next two days. What
Speaker 4: are what's like a couple things they can do to
Speaker 4: get the most out of it from like understanding the
Speaker 4: architectural and reverse aspect of the golf course.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a tricky, but I think it's a saying
Speaker 5: earlier if it's your first time, I mean, just relax.
Speaker 5: You know, know that every famous golfer who's ever walked
Speaker 5: the planet has played on this course with one exception.
Speaker 2: Anybody know who was that? Correct?
Speaker 5: The only part I would say that's that he the
Speaker 5: only famous golfer we know never played in s Andrew's course.
Speaker 5: He won the Open at conny Sea, but everybody else has.
Speaker 5: So I think when people come to s Andrew's and
Speaker 5: play the old course, just know that you're among the
Speaker 5: greats because it takes a while to try and really
Speaker 5: figure out what the angles are in order to you know,
Speaker 5: and depending on your ability, what's really fantastic. I think
Speaker 5: about the Old Course is how the experience builds. You know,
Speaker 5: people actually sometimes by the time they've got back, they've
Speaker 5: forgotten there was even a burn on the first hole.
Speaker 5: I've so overtaken with emotion. But as you play all
Speaker 5: the way out and you start to turn and come
Speaker 5: back in and you have that townscape of St. Andrew's
Speaker 5: skyline and the towers and the just the colored color,
Speaker 5: you know, Hamilton Hall, Hamilton Grande is now that red
Speaker 5: stone stones, sandstone. I just think it's the most amazing
Speaker 5: place to come back to. So, you know, get you
Speaker 5: can talk about individual bunkers and individual greens, but I
Speaker 5: think it's the overall experience is just unmatched.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I always say, you know, the I think the greatest
Speaker 4: golf courses in the world you have like this. I
Speaker 4: personally have this like sadness that comes about me when
Speaker 4: I know it's almost done. And I think one of
Speaker 4: the unique things about the Old Course is like you
Speaker 4: just the buildings start getting closer and closer, and it
Speaker 4: almost like you know, you're just it's a bittersweet feeling
Speaker 4: of like I'm playing one of the best courses of
Speaker 4: the world, but I know it's almost over. Yeah, And
Speaker 4: the buildings just get closer and closer to remind you
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 5: And you see some golfers and they've headed a long
Speaker 5: day and I can see it's dusk is sort of
Speaker 5: coming towards them, and they're halfway down the thirteenth fairway
Speaker 5: and they're like, am I going to get back and
Speaker 5: I'm going to get my photo on the sulk and
Speaker 5: burn bridge. I know some of some of the caddies
Speaker 5: have been saying, well, you know, we a better hurry
Speaker 5: up because the Links Trust take away the Sulk boom
Speaker 5: bridge at sunset. What do you mean is that you
Speaker 5: try to get the players to hurry up? Of course,
Speaker 5: it's just made of stone, that's nonsense. But you know
Speaker 5: that it's such as so many great touch points that
Speaker 5: happen as you're coming back in from sixteen to seventeen
Speaker 5: to eighteen, and then you walk off and up those
Speaker 5: steps and back past the RNA, and you know, for
Speaker 5: so many people, and certainly when I was caidding, this
Speaker 5: was like a one time deal, right, This is the
Speaker 5: pilgrimage to the home of golf. And you can almost
Speaker 5: sort of see the body. You know, the golf is
Speaker 5: totally irrelevant, you know, so I just maybe I'm with
Speaker 5: my dad or my mom or the while for the
Speaker 5: family or the son or who it might be, and
Speaker 5: it's like they live off that for the rest of
Speaker 5: their lives. I almost felt like, you know, sharing this
Speaker 5: experience was really special for me actually as well. And
Speaker 5: you start to realize that there's some places on the
Speaker 5: planet that just touch you in a really sort of
Speaker 5: right in your heart.
Speaker 2: It's a really special place to be, all right.
Speaker 4: Thank you for listening to another edition of the Friday
Speaker 4: Golf Podcast. A big thanks to our A plus producer
Speaker 4: p J Clark. We'll be back next week and I
Speaker 4: hope you guys enjoyed this chat about the Old course
Speaker 4: in Scotland.