Speaker 1: What is the so called Golden age of golf architecture?
Speaker 1: For me, it's the result of three major innovations made
Speaker 1: toward the beginning of the twentieth century. That's what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about today with my colleague PJ. Clark in this
Speaker 1: latest installment of our Golf Architecture one oh one series.
Speaker 1: I'm Garrett Morrison and this is Designing Golf. PJ. Clark.
Speaker 1: Are you ready to talk about the Golden Age of
Speaker 1: golf architecture?
Speaker 2: I think so. You pointed me in the direction of
Speaker 2: a wonderful thread on golf course at golf club at List,
Speaker 2: golf club at Lists, gal Club at List, Welcome to
Speaker 2: golf club Aatlists, and it seems like people have takes
Speaker 2: on this matter, so I'm ready to get into it.
Speaker 1: It has been long debated on golf club at Lists
Speaker 1: in particular, it goes back at least twenty five years
Speaker 1: the discussion of this kind And so how do you
Speaker 1: do just a little bit of reading to not not
Speaker 1: to bring you completely up to date on it, but
Speaker 1: but just to get a taste of it, just to
Speaker 1: get just to get a little sense of of what
Speaker 1: the ideas are are about. And I hope it did
Speaker 1: that for you.
Speaker 2: I certainly did that. I mean, people are very uh
Speaker 2: it's something I've noticed through our little journey through golf architecture.
Speaker 2: What I want here is that people are very passionate
Speaker 2: about these subjects, like to get some takes off, which
Speaker 2: is good. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: So there's nothing that gets people worked up like an
Speaker 1: extremely niche interest exactly golf architecture. So that's that's sort
Speaker 1: of the nature of it. So I want you to,
Speaker 1: you know, take yourself to a place. Before you read
Speaker 1: this thread and and got a little sense for it,
Speaker 1: you had probably heard the term golden age of golf
Speaker 1: architecture thrown around in a lot of podcasts, right, So
Speaker 1: what what had you already picked up about what golden
Speaker 1: age meant?
Speaker 2: Feels like it was a long time ago. I want
Speaker 2: to call it, like, you know, nineteen tens ish, maybe World.
Speaker 1: War One sort of area in the middle of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, that's if you told me to give you
Speaker 2: a decade, I would have said nineteen ten. I have
Speaker 2: a feeling the name like Donald Ross probably going to
Speaker 2: come up in this at some level, maybe CB McDonald,
Speaker 2: those types of guys. Yeah, it's probably, it's probably what
Speaker 2: I have for you. I would have just guessed this
Speaker 2: was around World War One and gone with it.
Speaker 1: That's perfect. Yeah, well, I mean world War one is
Speaker 1: definitely in it. I think probably the decade most associated
Speaker 1: with the American Golden Age, at the very least is
Speaker 1: the is the nineteen TWENTIESKA and if we're talking about
Speaker 1: the British Golden Age, that's often more concentrated. The discussion
Speaker 1: of it is concentrated around things that happened in the
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds, the first decade of the twentieth century up
Speaker 1: until the outbreak of World War One, so that is
Speaker 1: the dineral time period. You're right that CB MacDonald and
Speaker 1: Donald Ross are two significant Golden Age architects, but I'm
Speaker 1: glad that you didn't know much more about it, because
Speaker 1: we can kind of build up from there, so you know,
Speaker 1: in basic terms, the Golden Age of golf architecture occurred
Speaker 1: in what I would call the first few decades of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, so from about nineteen hundred to about
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty with the onset of the Great Depression, or
Speaker 1: some people would argue nineteen thirty nine or forty with
Speaker 1: the outbreak of World War Two, but first few decades
Speaker 1: of the nineteen hundreds is how I usually think of it,
Speaker 1: and it was during this period that a lot of
Speaker 1: the best regarded golf courses of all time were built
Speaker 1: or renovated and turned into their permanent forms. A lot
Speaker 1: of this action was concentrated around Great Britain and North America,
Speaker 1: but there was plenty happening in continental Europe as well,
Speaker 1: Australia and New Zealand, Japan, South Africa, so definitely a
Speaker 1: global phenomenon here. The most famous architects of the Golden
Speaker 1: Age include not only C. B. MacDonald and Donald Ross,
Speaker 1: whom you already mentioned, but also Harry Colt, Herbert Fowler,
Speaker 1: James Braid, Tom Simpson, Charles Hugh Allison, Alistair McKenzie when
Speaker 1: we've touched on with his k Yeah, Seth Rayner, aw
Speaker 1: Telling Hast, George Thomas, William Flynn, Perry Maxwell. You know,
Speaker 1: basically all the big boys, and then you know the courses.
Speaker 1: If you just go down any top one hundred list,
Speaker 1: Golden Age courses are most of the top portion of
Speaker 1: the list. So we're talking about Pine Valley, Cyprus Point,
Speaker 1: the William Flynn design at Shinnecock Hills, National Golf Links,
Speaker 1: Augusta National, Marion, Chicago Golf Club, Pinehurst Number Two. You know, overseas,
Speaker 1: Royal County, Down, Royal Port, Russian Mirfield all date back
Speaker 1: to the eighteen hundreds but are probably best under stood
Speaker 1: as nineteen twenties or thirties Harry Coult designs. You have
Speaker 1: Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath. In Australia, you have Sunningdale
Speaker 1: and Saint George's Hill. In England you have Herono and
Speaker 1: Kawana and Japan, there really is an overwhelming dominance by
Speaker 1: the Golden Age in that set of golf courses considered
Speaker 1: to be the best in the world. So I think
Speaker 1: it's really important to understand as you're learning about golf
Speaker 1: architecture what the Golden Age is. It's a term that
Speaker 1: people toss around a lot, Oh Golden Age, this Golden Age, that, oh,
Speaker 1: it's a Golden Age gem. What does that mean? Sometimes
Speaker 1: I think people who say it may not completely know
Speaker 1: what they mean by it, but just kind of have
Speaker 1: the vibe of it, which is okay, I'm not insulting
Speaker 1: that approach to the term, but what does the term
Speaker 1: really mean? What is this era, What made it so great?
Speaker 1: What made it special? What were the main innovations of
Speaker 1: that time, and why have the courses stood the test
Speaker 1: of time and continued to be massive, massive in influences
Speaker 1: on current golf architects, Like the influence of the Golden
Speaker 1: Age has been so overwhelming on current golf architects that
Speaker 1: a lot of them feel that there's basically no way
Speaker 1: to escape it. There's no way to surpass it. We
Speaker 1: might as well just give in to it. That's how
Speaker 1: large the era looms right now. So that's what we're
Speaker 1: getting into today. Does that sound good?
Speaker 2: That sounds great. It feels like there were a lot
Speaker 2: of names there that I had obviously heard of, a
Speaker 2: lot of golf courses that have obviously heard of. So
Speaker 2: this is good. I'm happy. I'm happy to dive into this.
Speaker 2: It feels this feels like feels a little all encompassing here.
Speaker 2: It feels like if there's one thing to really know,
Speaker 2: this might this might be the episode.
Speaker 1: Now, it's a big subject. It's ambitious for this episode
Speaker 1: to tackle this. I have ways of kind of narrowing
Speaker 1: it down and maybe clarifying some things, of like focusing
Speaker 1: on certain things that I think are useful, but there's
Speaker 1: no doubt that we're tackling it.
Speaker 2: They want today, Let's do it all right.
Speaker 1: So before we get into how the Golden Age began,
Speaker 1: what these innovations were that I've referred to a couple
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Speaker 1: So to prepare for this episode, PJ. As you mentioned before,
Speaker 1: you read a recent thread on the messageboard golf club
Speaker 1: at list. This thread was started by the architect Tom Doak,
Speaker 1: and he was asking what is a Golden Age? His answer,
Speaker 1: which I found very interesting, was people developing golf courses
Speaker 1: on interesting land. Basically, dok is arguing that what made
Speaker 1: the Golden Age different from other eras was that architects
Speaker 1: had an unusual number of great and distinctive properties to
Speaker 1: work with. And by the way, he's also indicating that
Speaker 1: this is what connects the First Golden Age with the
Speaker 1: current era of golf architecture. You know, sometimes people call
Speaker 1: the current era the second Golden Age, right, Architects like
Speaker 1: Corn Crenshaw, Gil Hanson, obviously Tom Doak himself have started
Speaker 1: to work on really exciting land again, so that was
Speaker 1: his argument, and then he opened it up for discussion,
Speaker 1: and some form members chimed in with it with their
Speaker 1: own takes. What did you make of all this? Were
Speaker 1: there any ideas that appealed to you in this any
Speaker 1: ideas that seemed confusing? How did you process it?
Speaker 2: My main takeaway. And I don't remember the member who
Speaker 2: said this, but I like the point is that I
Speaker 2: feel like somebody alluded to him just going to paraphrase
Speaker 2: that we are only considering these courses golden age because
Speaker 2: they've stood the test of time for one hundred plus
Speaker 2: years now. In some cases that it's hard to really
Speaker 2: judge what is a current golden age until we're further
Speaker 2: away to see if these plays are still relevant in
Speaker 2: fifty sixty one hundred years. That I think is my
Speaker 2: main takeaway.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, hindsight is twenty twenty on this stuff. People living
Speaker 1: through the first few decades of the twentieth century did
Speaker 1: not say we're in a golden age of golf architecture.
Speaker 1: That term was applied back to the era starting maybe
Speaker 1: thirty years ago. I've tried to figure out exactly who's
Speaker 1: responsible for the coinage of the term the golden age
Speaker 1: of golf architecture. My impression is that it was kind
Speaker 1: of in common discussion by the late nineties, and then
Speaker 1: Jeff Shackelford wrote a book called The Golden Age of
Speaker 1: Golf Design. The exact wording of the title I'm not
Speaker 1: sure of, but it was a book about the Golden
Speaker 1: Age that kind of surveyed the different architects and courses
Speaker 1: that were relevant, and I think that had a big
Speaker 1: role to play in popularizing the term. But this sense
Speaker 1: that there was a golden age towards the beginning of
Speaker 1: the twenty century, and golf course design was really information
Speaker 1: in the eighties and nineties, but but not so much
Speaker 1: before that. So it's only retrospectively that that this stuff
Speaker 1: becomes clear or starts to take on certain labels. And
Speaker 1: obviously we're prisoners of our own time. We label eras
Speaker 1: how we feel like labeling eras. We call the Renaissance
Speaker 1: the Renaissance, right, But you know, William Shakespeare didn't say,
Speaker 1: I'm this is the Renaissance.
Speaker 2: No, No, you have to the future generations get the
Speaker 2: the benefit of knowing what already happened and can use
Speaker 2: that to however they want to shape things. I guess.
Speaker 1: So you know, I'm a big Bob Crosby guy. Yep,
Speaker 1: he's been. He's been on the podcast a few times.
Speaker 1: He's he's extraordinarily intelligent in his u in his uh
Speaker 1: it takes on golf architecture. So he contributed to the thread,
Speaker 1: and I particularly loved what he said. He said that
Speaker 1: a golden age is a time when people are working
Speaker 1: through the ramifications of a new idea, and I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of truth to that, right. It's an
Speaker 1: insight that goes across art forms as well. So I
Speaker 1: mentioned the Renaissance. You could say that the European Renaissance
Speaker 1: was a time when people were working through the ramifications
Speaker 1: of a new idea, and that new idea, or at
Speaker 1: least one of them, was humanism, right, an interest in
Speaker 1: the individual, a willingness to put individual humans at the
Speaker 1: center of plays and paintings and other forms of art.
Speaker 1: That was a massive, massive idea of the Renaissance, and
Speaker 1: the excitement of that idea that the possibilities of it
Speaker 1: gave the art of that era a lot of vitality
Speaker 1: and staying power. You know, there are other reasons that
Speaker 1: we call the Renaissance and restaurant. There was also an
Speaker 1: economic renaissance and people were becoming wealthier, and that's part
Speaker 1: of the reason why they were able to make art
Speaker 1: and have fun and you know, do cool stuff.
Speaker 2: Yes, but.
Speaker 1: Certainly part of it is working through the ramifications of
Speaker 1: a new idea. So I think when you pair Bob's
Speaker 1: insight with Tom's, you have something close to the answer
Speaker 1: that I like for the Golden Age of golf architecture.
Speaker 1: The Golden Age was a time when golf architects were
Speaker 1: working through the ramifications of a new set of ideas
Speaker 1: and they got to apply those ideas to really good
Speaker 1: pieces of land. So let's dig into what the new
Speaker 1: ideas were, or what I think they were. This is
Speaker 1: kind of my interpretation and processing of all this, and
Speaker 1: I've boiled it down to three big ones. One the
Speaker 1: idea of spending a lot of money on the construction
Speaker 1: of a golf course. Two the idea of strategic design,
Speaker 1: which you're familiar with from past lessons, so to speak.
Speaker 1: Three the idea of building artificial features that appear natural. Again,
Speaker 1: a concept that we've touched on before, maybe haven't dug
Speaker 1: into super deeply yet. So basically, money strategy and naturalism.
Speaker 1: Those are the three ideas that we're going to cover. Now.
Speaker 1: It's obviously pretty hard to nail down the time and
Speaker 1: place when any given new idea begins. Ideas are always
Speaker 1: sort of in the process of development. So you know,
Speaker 1: we could trace this back to ancient Rome if we wanted,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, right, But in the case of the Golden
Speaker 1: Age of golf architecture, I think nineteen oh one in
Speaker 1: the suburbs southwest of London is a really good starting point.
Speaker 1: It's very specific, right, and that's because three big things
Speaker 1: happened in that year in that place. First, Sunningdale Golf
Speaker 1: Club opened. Second, nearby at Woking Golf Club, a pair
Speaker 1: of members named Stuart Payton and John Lowe started to
Speaker 1: make changes to the course. And later in nineteen oh one,
Speaker 1: back at Sunningdale, Harry Colt became the first secretary of
Speaker 1: the club. And these three events kind of launched these
Speaker 1: ideas of money, strategy and naturalism, which in turn I
Speaker 1: think powered the Golden Age of golf architecture. Okay, so
Speaker 1: I've set up a framework, right, three events, three ideas.
Speaker 1: It's important to note, by the way, you know, since
Speaker 1: we're talking about land as well ideas being applied to
Speaker 1: good land. Sunningdale and Woking both occupy a particular type
Speaker 1: of terrain called heathland, right, and we don't won't get
Speaker 1: too deep into the geology here. I think it's interesting,
Speaker 1: but it would take us down at you know, different road.
Speaker 1: But essentially heathland is pretty well suited to golf because one,
Speaker 1: the soils are sandy and drain well. A lot of
Speaker 1: inland sites don't do that. Right, Heavy clay soils are
Speaker 1: not as good for golf. Heathland soils are unusually good
Speaker 1: for inland golf. The best terrain tends to be seaside linksland,
Speaker 1: which is sandy. Heathland at least has a little bit
Speaker 1: the sandiness to it. Right. Two, they're covered by these
Speaker 1: this low scrubby vegetation called heather, which is a decent
Speaker 1: natural hazard. You can find your ball in it, but
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to play out of it. And three,
Speaker 1: heathland generally alternates between open and wooded, which makes for
Speaker 1: some nice variety in a golf course. But even though
Speaker 1: heathland is a good landscape for golf, it's not Lynksland. Right.
Speaker 1: And in order to make the terrain golfable. You usually
Speaker 1: have to do quite a bit in heathland. At the
Speaker 1: very least, you have to remove some trees and take
Speaker 1: out a bunch of heather to make way for the
Speaker 1: fairways and greens. On Lynksland, often you could just kind
Speaker 1: of play golf right heathland. There there would be some
Speaker 1: engineering required, like many inland sits, and and that's a
Speaker 1: that's an important factor here. Okay, all right, so the opening.
Speaker 1: The first event is the opening of the old course
Speaker 1: at Sunningdale Golf Club. Sunningdale was architecturally speaking, really the
Speaker 1: first modern golf course, and that is that's a big claim.
Speaker 1: But I think a major reason for it is that
Speaker 1: it was the first golf course project to have a
Speaker 1: large amount of money behind it. Now, in order to
Speaker 1: understand why that was so important, I think you have
Speaker 1: to know a little bit about how golf courses were
Speaker 1: created before Sunningdale. So in the eighteen hundreds and before,
Speaker 1: courses tended to be laid out very quickly. If a
Speaker 1: designer was involved, he would spend a day or two
Speaker 1: walking around the site and making recommendations. Sometimes these recommendations
Speaker 1: would be really excellent. I don't want to discount you
Speaker 1: know the expertise that goes into routing a golf course,
Speaker 1: But the reality is it would happen very quickly, no
Speaker 1: offense to old Tom Morris, basically is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: And then the club members would usually complete the course,
Speaker 1: they would build it and very little earth moving would
Speaker 1: be done. So the quality of a given course really
Speaker 1: depended on the quality of the routing and most importantly
Speaker 1: the land. Where the land was good for golf, the
Speaker 1: courses turned out well. Like Scottish Linksland. This is where
Speaker 1: the game was invented, so the land was obviously perfect
Speaker 1: for it, and many very old Scottish links courses are
Speaker 1: still with us today and treasured today. But something important
Speaker 1: happened in the late eighteen hundreds, eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the late Victorian era, and that was that golf got
Speaker 1: popular in England. The historian Michael Morrison no relation calls
Speaker 1: it the great English golf boom. So English people start
Speaker 1: establishing a lot of new courses very quickly, and often
Speaker 1: these courses are not on Linksland. For the first time
Speaker 1: in golf history, new courses were by and large being
Speaker 1: created Inland, and it's hard to express how big of
Speaker 1: a change. This was golf was moving away from the
Speaker 1: land that inspired the game to be played in the
Speaker 1: first place. Golf was a way of using linksland. The
Speaker 1: game and the land were very intertwined, right, So when
Speaker 1: English people started trying to move the game inland in
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties and nineties, they kind of had to
Speaker 1: reinvent what a golf course was. Now. At first, the
Speaker 1: attempts at creating inland courses were pretty rudimentary. Basically, the
Speaker 1: same method was used that had always been used. A
Speaker 1: golf professional would visit for a day or two, tell
Speaker 1: the members what to do, et cetera. Courses were built
Speaker 1: very cheaply, partly because no one knew whether the enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for golf would last. Right, if this fad goes away tomorrow,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be stuck holding a bunch of debt.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, understandable.
Speaker 1: Now, again, this wasn't a bad method for laying out
Speaker 1: a links course, but what English people found is that
Speaker 1: it wasn't as good for laying out an inland course.
Speaker 1: Early inland courses in England were pretty poor for the
Speaker 1: most part because they were often muddy. You know, once
Speaker 1: you move away from Lynksland, it's much harder to find
Speaker 1: naturally occurring close cropped turf. They weren't as interesting to
Speaker 1: play as links courses because the land usually didn't have
Speaker 1: the natural undulation and the natural hazards of links and
Speaker 1: you know, so as obvious why they weren't as good.
Speaker 1: But they were golf courses and people enjoyed them, and
Speaker 1: the game kept growing in England. The fad did not
Speaker 1: go away. So nineteen oh one rolls around. The game
Speaker 1: is in a secure place. It's starting to be taken
Speaker 1: more seriously as a permanent feature of British life. And
Speaker 1: two brothers Ta and Ga Roberts. Don't ask me what
Speaker 1: Ta and Ga stand for. I think probably Tom and George.
Speaker 1: But you know, who.
Speaker 2: Knows, could be Harry Potter fans who knows.
Speaker 1: They decided to found. They decided to found Sunningdale Golf Club.
Speaker 1: They hire Willie Park Junior to design the course. Park
Speaker 1: was a well established golf professional and course designer, two
Speaker 1: time winner of the Open. So Park designed the course
Speaker 1: and helped to oversee construction starting in the year nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred and This was a kind of golf course construction
Speaker 1: project that had never been seen before. The course took
Speaker 1: a year and a half to build. At one point
Speaker 1: there were seventy men, thirty horses and ten plows on site.
Speaker 1: In total, it cost four thousand pounds. This obviously seems
Speaker 1: like a miniscule, minuscule amount now, and not just just
Speaker 1: because of inflation, right, people just spend more relatively even
Speaker 1: on on golf course projects now, but at the time
Speaker 1: absolutely massive. It was way way more money than had
Speaker 1: ever been spent on building a golf course, way more time,
Speaker 1: way more effort. So, for example, to my knowledge, Sunningdale
Speaker 1: was the first course ever to be seeded all the
Speaker 1: way through. Before Sunningdale, courses would mostly just use natural
Speaker 1: turf and sort of encourage it to spread and be
Speaker 1: be good. Right at Sunningdale they actually planted turf grass
Speaker 1: on all the teas, fairways and greens and that was
Speaker 1: just revolutionary. So how did they do all this? How
Speaker 1: did they have all this money to spend on a
Speaker 1: golf course project. First, Sunningdale was located in a region
Speaker 1: where wealthy people lived, and it was built by and
Speaker 1: for these people. So the developers of the course, the
Speaker 1: Roberts Brothers, felt comfortable that they could earn back the
Speaker 1: relatively big investment that they made on the construction of
Speaker 1: the course. Secondly, and relatedly, Sunningdale was basically a land
Speaker 1: speculation scheme. So the Roberts brothers were going to build
Speaker 1: the course and then they were going to sell the
Speaker 1: surrounding lots to wealthy London suburbanites to build houses. So
Speaker 1: this gave them some confidence that they could they could
Speaker 1: make that initial heavy investment.
Speaker 2: It's always a land speculation scheme. At the end of
Speaker 2: the day, everything everything is a lance speculation scheme.
Speaker 1: Behind everything is real estate, right and so it obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, this became an important model for golf course
Speaker 1: development in the Golden Age and beyond. You know, something
Speaker 1: that people discount a little bit. People sometimes act as
Speaker 1: though real estate golf was invented in nineteen sixty, but no,
Speaker 1: it was there right at the beginning of modern golf architecture. Now,
Speaker 1: I think maybe the most important reason that so much
Speaker 1: money went into Sunningdale is that the people building the
Speaker 1: course were trying to solve the problems of inland golf.
Speaker 1: They had seen enough inland English courses over the past
Speaker 1: two decades to know that these courses just weren't as
Speaker 1: good as Scottish links and so they made a bigger
Speaker 1: commitment at Sunningdale and tried to create a course that
Speaker 1: could stand toe to toe with a real links course.
Speaker 1: They put effort, time and money into engineering this piece
Speaker 1: of land for golf. This was it was really what
Speaker 1: turned golf course design into golf course architecture. Right, does
Speaker 1: that distinction make sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So you know, Sunningdale was a professionally constructed environment. Now,
Speaker 1: by our standards today, it's an extremely natural golf course, right,
Speaker 1: But in its time it stood out as a work
Speaker 1: of architecture rather than just a piece of land adapted
Speaker 1: to golf. And this is the key I think, like
Speaker 1: the idea of spending a lot of money on golf
Speaker 1: course construction essentially created a new discipline called golf course architecture.
Speaker 1: Now the obvious next step what is golf course architecture?
Speaker 1: And that, to me is the huge question that the
Speaker 1: Golden Age was addressing and working out the ramifications of
Speaker 1: if we're architects now for calling ourselves architects and we're
Speaker 1: doing architecture, what should we be building and why? Right?
Speaker 1: Suddenly this was a hot topic of discussion in the
Speaker 1: golf world, and it led I think to the first
Speaker 1: properly worked out theory of golf course design. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: that's something opening, all right, any any reflections or questions
Speaker 1: on that so far?
Speaker 2: I don't know. This feels like kind of the Pandora's
Speaker 2: Box moment of this. This whole thing is that when
Speaker 2: you start putting money into something for the first time
Speaker 2: and getting maybe not even necessarily profit out of it,
Speaker 2: but getting returned and out of it, people are inevitably
Speaker 2: going to copy that at some level.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's a virus, right, and you know it's
Speaker 1: not an entirely it's not always a bad virus. It's
Speaker 1: usually a bad virus, money being the root of all evil,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But look like it was a Pandora's Box moment.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great way of putting it. Once
Speaker 1: you invent this new financial technology of building a golf
Speaker 1: course with a lot of money, then it just tends
Speaker 1: to kind of spiral, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's like with anything, you know, the more money you
Speaker 1: put into it, the more money you put into.
Speaker 2: It, yeah, and the more money everybody else puts into it.
Speaker 2: So this is that that makes sense? I do uh.
Speaker 2: I think the acknowledgment at some level that it was
Speaker 2: kind of a real estate play is also funny too,
Speaker 2: because especially as you've seen land values kind of grow
Speaker 2: everywhere recently. I know, land is a is like a
Speaker 2: big thing when people talking about the new golf courses
Speaker 2: being built. So I think the acknowledgment that at its
Speaker 2: very basic, first ever level, that this was also in
Speaker 2: some sense of real estate play, to me is very
Speaker 2: funny because you know, the more things change, the more
Speaker 2: they stay.
Speaker 1: Is say, you know, if people say that core golf facilities, right,
Speaker 1: golf facilities that are not connected to any other kind
Speaker 1: of economic activity like real estate, that that's a legacy
Speaker 1: of the Golden Age, I think that's incorrect.
Speaker 2: Mm h.
Speaker 1: It's just not like links golf courses from the eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds were core golf facilities, but they also weren't really
Speaker 1: you know, economic propositions where they were more or less
Speaker 1: open land, most of them free to play. They weren't
Speaker 1: they weren't really part of the economy for the most part.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's some of that's there are some nuances there.
Speaker 1: Saint Andrew's obviously has always the town has obviously always
Speaker 1: benefited from from it's the tourism that the golf attracts,
Speaker 1: and that goes back a long way. But but it's
Speaker 1: it's different. The Old Age invented the real estate golf course. Now,
Speaker 1: these golf courses were not the type where you had houses,
Speaker 1: cookie cutter houses lining both sides of the fairway. That's
Speaker 1: not where we're talking about. But Cyprus Point was a
Speaker 1: real estate play. Pebble Beach was a real estate play.
Speaker 1: You know, pas tiempo real estate. There are some exceptions.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of exceptions to this from the Golden Age.
Speaker 1: I would venture to say that most of the golf
Speaker 1: courses were core golf course facilities. But if we're talking
Speaker 1: about innovation and innovation of the Golden Age was the
Speaker 1: real estate golf course. Now, Sunningdale doesn't feel that way
Speaker 1: when you play it because the property has integrity, it's
Speaker 1: not crowded with houses. But along all the boundaries there's
Speaker 1: a neighborhood that's the Sunningdale neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not a coincidence, I'm sure.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to Woking Golf Club in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh one, one of my favorite golf course names because
Speaker 1: it just bothers people that it's woke, you know, and
Speaker 1: that was I mean, it was basically invented here woke
Speaker 1: golf architecture at Woking Golf Club. This kind of delights
Speaker 1: me so so two particularly woke members of Woking named
Speaker 1: Stuart Payton and John Lowe started to make some alterations
Speaker 1: to the golf course around nineteen oh one. They were
Speaker 1: thoughtful guys, both members of the Oxford Cambridge Golfing Society.
Speaker 2: Just kind of the this it sounds sounds intense.
Speaker 1: This is the secret society. I mean, to this day,
Speaker 1: to this day, if you want to if you want
Speaker 1: to locate the power source of global golf, then look
Speaker 1: look no further than the Oxford Cambridge.
Speaker 2: Golf getting into like the assassin's cretification of golf. Here
Speaker 2: this is who are the Knights templar? Really, I mean
Speaker 2: we're at the or at the end of the table here.
Speaker 1: That's exactly where we are. We're at the center of
Speaker 1: the maze. Low was he was an RNA member and
Speaker 1: a writer who wrote about golf topics prolifically. And Peyton
Speaker 1: actually lived in a house on the club property. So
Speaker 1: you know, envision low and Peyton talking after dinner while
Speaker 1: drinking some brandy in Peyton's house and then maybe they'd
Speaker 1: sneak out onto the golf course with some shovels and
Speaker 1: start digging. That's kind of the vibe. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that actually happened, but I kind of think it did.
Speaker 2: Sure, why not just walk out the back door. It's fine,
Speaker 2: it's right.
Speaker 1: There now, Yeah, it's right there. We were liquored up
Speaker 1: and we've been talking about golf architecture. Let's go, let's
Speaker 1: do it. Put some things into practice here. So the
Speaker 1: reason they were making changes to the course at Woking
Speaker 1: was that they thought it was bad. Woking had been
Speaker 1: built in eighteen ninety three. It's actually thought to be
Speaker 1: the first course established in the English heathlands. It was
Speaker 1: designed by a Scottish professional named Tom and Done was
Speaker 1: the leading golf course designer of that great English golf
Speaker 1: boom period. He designed a number of courses in England,
Speaker 1: a remarkable number of courses in England in the eighteen
Speaker 1: eighties and nineties, and like all golf course designers of
Speaker 1: that period, he worked very quickly. He walked a site
Speaker 1: for a day or two, made his recommendations and left.
Speaker 1: And he also followed what was the prevailing philosophy of design,
Speaker 1: which was that hazards should be positioned to penalize poor shots.
Speaker 1: We've discussed this before as the penal school of design.
Speaker 1: Do you remember this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think that's a bad take. I think
Speaker 2: I think he's making some good point. I think if
Speaker 2: you had a bad shot, that's when you should get penalized.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of like the way this guy picks.
Speaker 1: The distinction here.
Speaker 2: That makes me though, right, yeah, because if the work
Speaker 2: guys thought that was bad, then you know, that's it's
Speaker 2: a whole other issue. So the no spin zone you
Speaker 2: can accept. Yeah, you can set me straight.
Speaker 1: You're a common sense guy. There is a certain common
Speaker 1: sense appeal to this philosophy penalized bad shots. But I
Speaker 1: think you know, the nuance here that we have to
Speaker 1: keep in mind is that these hazards were positioned to
Speaker 1: punish poor shots by poor players, not just to punish
Speaker 1: bad shots, but to punish really bad shots. Right, and
Speaker 1: so's that's I think an important point. But yeah, and so, yeah,
Speaker 1: like penal courses weren't necessarily hard, they were just designed
Speaker 1: with the intention of punishing those poor strikes by poor players.
Speaker 1: So you'd have those linear cross bunkers in front of
Speaker 1: tees to catch top drives. You'd have similar cross bunkers
Speaker 1: in front of greens to catch topped approaches, and ideally
Speaker 1: you'd have rough and additional bunkers along the sides of
Speaker 1: the fairway to penalize hooks and slices. Some people now
Speaker 1: call this the steeple chase style, and yeah, steeplechase the
Speaker 1: golfers of the horses, Yeah we're jumping out over jumping
Speaker 1: over cross bunkers. And that was the kind of design
Speaker 1: that Tom Dunn originally implemented at Woking. For the most part,
Speaker 1: I think that he did some things that were like
Speaker 1: a little more interesting there. And if his routing is
Speaker 1: I think mostly intact, and it's a really good routing.
Speaker 1: I played the course a couple of months ago and
Speaker 1: loved it. But it has been changed a lot over
Speaker 1: the years, especially by John low and Stuart Payton. So
Speaker 1: by nineteen oh one, we know that John Lowe in
Speaker 1: particular had had it with this stuff. Right. We know
Speaker 1: this because John low wrote a lot about it, right Peyton. Peyton,
Speaker 1: to my knowledge, didn't do much writing, so we're not
Speaker 1: sure of his perspective, but John low did. He had
Speaker 1: noticed and many others had as well, that it simply
Speaker 1: didn't produce interesting inland golf courses to design them in
Speaker 1: this steeplechase style, especially for good players if you hit
Speaker 1: it reliably long and straight. These steeplechase designs were not
Speaker 1: challenging or compelling. They were too easy and above all
Speaker 1: just thoughtless. Right. You didn't need to strategize. You just
Speaker 1: had to find the fairway, find the green rinse, repeat.
Speaker 1: And yes, if you were playing a match against a
Speaker 1: poor player, you would win, and that would be great,
Speaker 1: that would be fair, right, But the game you want
Speaker 1: a little bit more of a challenge. Sure, it's understandable,
Speaker 1: more challenge, more interest. You know, these courses just just
Speaker 1: war thin after a while, was the argument that John
Speaker 1: Lowe was making. You were free to like them. PJ. Now, Okay. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: another point here is that low had picked up on
Speaker 1: the fact that the old Scottish links like Saint Andrew's
Speaker 1: were strategically complex and interesting, and this was This was
Speaker 1: a key insight because the conventional wisdom was that Scottish
Speaker 1: links courses didn't have any design content. They were just natural, right, random,
Speaker 1: and many English gol Rather, many English golfers felt that
Speaker 1: they could do better if they just applied their Victorian
Speaker 1: intellects to the task of golf course design. Here are
Speaker 1: these natural wild courses, and hey, if we just think
Speaker 1: about it a little bit, we can design better ones. Well,
Speaker 1: Lowe was saying, no, no, we're not doing better. Maybe
Speaker 1: we should take another look at these old wild courses
Speaker 1: which are so fun to play, and consider whether they
Speaker 1: do actually have design characteristics worth emulating. Eventually, through his
Speaker 1: study of Scottish links, Lowe came up with a brand
Speaker 1: new theory of hazard placement. He said, we shouldn't be
Speaker 1: placing hazards to punish poor strikes by poor players. We
Speaker 1: should be placing them to punish almost great strikes by
Speaker 1: good players. This was an intuitive idea, he was saying.
Speaker 1: One of the main things that makes Saint Andrews so
Speaker 1: interesting is that the bunkers are exactly where a good
Speaker 1: golfer might want to play. Yeah, and this generates what
Speaker 1: low called a contest of risks. In order to earn
Speaker 1: the greatest advantage the best position in the fairway, you
Speaker 1: don't just have to hit the ball well. You also
Speaker 1: need to take a risk by playing near a hazard
Speaker 1: without going into it. And you can certainly decline the
Speaker 1: risk and play away from the hazard, but you won't
Speaker 1: earn the greatest advantage on the whole for your next shot.
Speaker 1: So here's how Low put it. He said, the true
Speaker 1: hazard should draw play towards. It should invite the golfer
Speaker 1: to come as near as he dare to the fire
Speaker 1: without burning his fingers. Good sentence, Johnny Low. Good writing there.
Speaker 1: So this was the foundation of what we now call
Speaker 1: the strategic school of golf course design. Big idea number
Speaker 1: two that set off the Golden Age. Does that all
Speaker 1: feel pretty familiar to you at this point?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I mean we talked about that at length,
Speaker 2: and it makes sense providing rewards for taking on risk. Again,
Speaker 2: pretty logical, like this book line of thought we have
Speaker 2: going on here.
Speaker 1: Speaking of which, back to Woking, the fourth hole at
Speaker 1: that course was originally a pretty simple straight par four
Speaker 1: with a railroad on the right. There was a wide fairway,
Speaker 1: no bunkers, some rough on the left, maybe some trees.
Speaker 1: Then there was a classic Victorian cross bunker in front
Speaker 1: of the green. So this was essentially an embodiment of
Speaker 1: the penal school. The hazards were there to capture poor shots, hooks,
Speaker 1: slices tops. So in nineteen oh two, Stuart Payton makes
Speaker 1: a couple of alterations to the hole. One he builds
Speaker 1: a pair of bunkers right in the middle of the
Speaker 1: goddamn fairway. His inspiration here is the Principal's nose bunker
Speaker 1: complex on the sixteenth hole at Saint Andrew's. Okay, So
Speaker 1: basically what he's doing is recreating the strategic geometry of
Speaker 1: that par four at the old course. Now, the center
Speaker 1: line bunkers are obviously a controversial change for the members.
Speaker 1: They say, why in the world would you put a
Speaker 1: hazard right where I want to play my ball? But
Speaker 1: for Peyton and Low, that was exactly the point, right.
Speaker 1: So other key change that Peyton makes to this fourth
Speaker 1: hole is redesigning the green complex. He takes out that
Speaker 1: fronting cross bunker and he puts in one bunker smaller
Speaker 1: at the left front corner of the green. That bunker
Speaker 1: gets in the way of approaches from the left side
Speaker 1: of the fairway. That's the safe side of the fairway, right, Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because you have the Principal's nose in the middle of
Speaker 1: the fairway and then you have the railroad out of
Speaker 1: bounce on the right. So you have two main options.
Speaker 1: You can try to thread your drive between the Principal's
Speaker 1: nose and the railroad, or you can bail out to
Speaker 1: the left, to the left of the Principal's nose, where
Speaker 1: you don't have to contend with the bunker and the
Speaker 1: railroad right now, Furthermore, the green tilts from back to
Speaker 1: front and a little bit left to right, so if
Speaker 1: you're hitting from that left side of the fairway, you
Speaker 1: not only have to carry the new bunker at the
Speaker 1: front left corner of the green, but you're also dealing
Speaker 1: with a green that runs away from you. It's much
Speaker 1: preferable to be able to land your approach short and
Speaker 1: let it run onto the green. But you can only
Speaker 1: do that if you play between the Principal's nose and
Speaker 1: the railroad.
Speaker 2: I'm sure, I'm sure the people who had never experienced
Speaker 2: this before just loved this. I'm sure the general public
Speaker 2: were huge fans of what was going on here. I
Speaker 2: can't imagine.
Speaker 1: People were in and uproar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I riots even pitchforks fire all of those medieval
Speaker 2: times things.
Speaker 1: There were many things written about how pissed off. Woking
Speaker 1: Golf club members were about this change to the whole.
Speaker 2: That's great, get the people going, it's provocative.
Speaker 1: But ultimately, somehow the changes did remain. I don't know why,
Speaker 1: but they stayed and they're still there today.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, this kind of you know, hullabaloo found
Speaker 1: its way around the English golf world. A guy named
Speaker 1: Tom Simpson visited Woking and was actually inspired to become
Speaker 1: a golf architect by seeing the hole for the first time,
Speaker 1: and he went on to become a significant golf architect
Speaker 1: in his own right and a golf architecture writer. Amazing.
Speaker 2: Sure, you know, take inspiration for anywhere. I can just
Speaker 2: imagine these newspapers getting passed around all of South London
Speaker 2: being like, can you believe this? Can you believe what's
Speaker 2: going on over here? I could just yeah, this sounds fantastic.
Speaker 1: So this is It turned out to be a major
Speaker 1: moment in history, right, a clear instance of something changing
Speaker 1: in the zeitgeist.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: Now, not all Golden Edge courses from that point forward
Speaker 1: were strategic, but I think it's fair to say that
Speaker 1: all the significant ones were influenced by this new tension
Speaker 1: between strategic and penal. Okay, and architects had to make
Speaker 1: a choice, Now what am I about? Am I about
Speaker 1: strategic golf or am I about penal golf? Or am
Speaker 1: I saying that we have a mixture of both?
Speaker 2: So was that kind of like a sweeping kind of
Speaker 2: move across everything or was that more gradual, Like did
Speaker 2: everybody just adopt this new line of thinking immediately or
Speaker 2: did it kind of creep up on people?
Speaker 1: It crept up on people, But I think by the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, the strategic school of design had won.
Speaker 2: Okay, Like if you were to put a percentage on it,
Speaker 2: like by nineteen twenty it was like eighty twenty.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure you could put a percentage on it.
Speaker 1: I think if we're talking about the significant golf courses,
Speaker 1: what people considered the really good golf courses, the ones
Speaker 1: that were made by the top architects, then a majority,
Speaker 1: for sure, sure you could say we're strategic school golf courses.
Speaker 1: But it's not always that simple. Like I don't think
Speaker 1: Donald Ross, for instance, is consistently strategic at all. In
Speaker 1: some cases, it's clear that he understood how to make
Speaker 1: a strategic hole, but he didn't always do it. The
Speaker 1: same with Seth Rayner. Right, A lot of the templates
Speaker 1: are not strategic. Some of them clearly are, but others
Speaker 1: don't seem to be, and so you know, these things
Speaker 1: are always a little bit chaotic. But I would say
Speaker 1: that the introduction of this idea kind of changed everything.
Speaker 1: It didn't mean that everybody immediately adopted it, but it
Speaker 1: meant that there was now an understanding and a discussion
Speaker 1: about how to strategically arrange golf court, golf golf holes
Speaker 1: and golf courses.
Speaker 2: Makes sense.
Speaker 1: I think that's a big deal, and that tension really
Speaker 1: ended up helping to define the entire era. Okay, so
Speaker 1: the third and final moment of nineteen oh one that
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about is Harry Colt arriving at
Speaker 1: Sunningdale Golf Club and beginning his job as secretary. So,
Speaker 1: like so many of the characters that we've talked about
Speaker 1: so far, Colt was educated at Cambridge University. He was
Speaker 1: an intellectual kind of guy, very in touch with the
Speaker 1: latest ideas in English golf. Now, as a reminder, the
Speaker 1: old course at Sunningdale had just been built by Willie
Speaker 1: Park Jr. It was by far the most expensive and
Speaker 1: ambitious golf course construction project to that point in history.
Speaker 1: You could even say it was the first true work
Speaker 1: of golf course architecture. But over the next several years
Speaker 1: Harry Colt made a lot of changes to Sunningdale. For
Speaker 1: one thing, he did follow John Lowe's new philosophy of
Speaker 1: hazard placement, so he removed some cross bunkers and replaced
Speaker 1: them with more strategically positioned bunkers. And as he rebuilt
Speaker 1: these features he did something new and very interesting. He
Speaker 1: intentionally shaped them to appear natural. He gave them a
Speaker 1: low profile right so that they blended in with the
Speaker 1: lay of the land. They didn't stand up out of
Speaker 1: the terrain. They were set into the land, and he
Speaker 1: gave them an irregular, ragged esthetic that mimicked the natural
Speaker 1: sandy wastes in the surrounding heathland. This idea of making
Speaker 1: artificial features appear natural was again new right at inland
Speaker 1: courses built in the eighteen eighties and nineties. Bunkers and
Speaker 1: other manufactured hazards were what you might call functional in appearance.
Speaker 1: They weren't shaped for any particular effect. You know, if
Speaker 1: you built a bunker, you would just dig out some
Speaker 1: dirt in a straight line and stack it up on
Speaker 1: one edge. This was more or less the process followed
Speaker 1: initially at Sunningdale in Willie Park's design, though to my
Speaker 1: eye he did make at least some effort toward a
Speaker 1: pleasing esthetic. But Cole clearly brought a more specific attitude
Speaker 1: about shaping to Sunningdale. He was pursuing naturalism. Now, we
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of information about why Coult in
Speaker 1: particular turned toward naturalism in golf architecture. Certainly we know
Speaker 1: that he was one of the first to practice it,
Speaker 1: maybe the first to become completely proficient at it, skillful
Speaker 1: at it, and certainly the most influential exponent of it.
Speaker 1: We know that cult had a direct influence on Charles
Speaker 1: Hugh Allison and Alistair Mackenzie because he worked with them,
Speaker 1: he later brought them into his architecture firm, and then
Speaker 1: Allison and Mackenzie exported those ideas across the world, right
Speaker 1: to the US, to Australia, Japan, etc. Mackenzie was especially
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about all this. He compared naturalism in golf architecture
Speaker 1: to battlefield camouflage, which proved to be a very influential
Speaker 1: formulation of this idea, you know, the idea being that
Speaker 1: military fortifications would be blended into the landscape so that
Speaker 1: the enemy couldn't see them. Mackenzie thought about bringing this
Speaker 1: to golf architecture that enemy, I guess, being the.
Speaker 2: Player, that is quite a way of thinking.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, isn't it. And and Mackenzie did some of
Speaker 1: this work in the in the in wars, in the
Speaker 1: in the Boer War in particular, which is a semi
Speaker 1: obscure war these days. But but he he helped to
Speaker 1: conceptualize battlefield fortifications that blended into the landscape. If you
Speaker 1: think about it, that's kind of what naturalists golf architects
Speaker 1: are trying to do. At golf architects are trying to
Speaker 1: create artificial features that aren't noticeable as artificial.
Speaker 2: Everything I learned about Alistair Mackenzie just goes further and
Speaker 2: further down a rabbit hole that I never expected to
Speaker 2: actually go down. This guy's out here doing augusta national
Speaker 2: but at the same time going like, oh, I'm going
Speaker 2: to go win a war too.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: He did the war thing well first, but yeah, like
Speaker 2: same guy.
Speaker 1: Same guy, Yeah, same guy. He had quite a life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, clearly.
Speaker 1: I mean, just imagine traveling as he did from England
Speaker 1: to Australia. Yeah, I mean that's before planes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's already too much for me. So he had
Speaker 2: a lot of time on on boats, I guess to
Speaker 2: think about his war strategies and also golf courses. Yep,
Speaker 2: A true renaissance man. We talked about Renaissance a lot
Speaker 2: already in this podcast. I mean, I don't, I don't
Speaker 2: know how you could get better than that.
Speaker 1: He's a fascinating figure. You know, he starts in England,
Speaker 1: he ends up in you know, Santa Cruz, California, living
Speaker 1: in a house at Pasa Tiempo.
Speaker 2: I don't, I don't know. I think that might need
Speaker 2: to maybe run the Masters next year. Golf Architecture one
Speaker 2: O one. Just the biography.
Speaker 1: McKenzie, Yeah, we've already we've already given you too many
Speaker 1: tantalizing details about him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know it's left, but I want to
Speaker 2: find out.
Speaker 1: Oh. Fascinating guy, Yeah, endlessly fascinating to me. So all right,
Speaker 1: naturalism comes into golf architecture through Harry Cult. Now, as
Speaker 1: with strategic design, it would be wrong to say that
Speaker 1: all the courses from that point on were naturalists. You
Speaker 1: could say, though, that all the serious courses had some
Speaker 1: relationship to naturalism, either embracing it or resisting it. But
Speaker 1: you know, I think the bigger and more interesting question
Speaker 1: here is where this idea of naturalism in golf architecture
Speaker 1: came from. Aside from Harry Colt's brain, what.
Speaker 2: Was besides one day to do it? Like? What prompted it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not how humans behave. They don't just come
Speaker 1: up with a brand new idea completely on their own
Speaker 1: and use it to revolutionize everything. No, there is there
Speaker 1: is a source for this, So you know, I have
Speaker 1: and a couple of others have had some theories on
Speaker 1: this one. This is another example of links golf informing
Speaker 1: inland golf architecture in the Golden Age. Part of what
Speaker 1: makes links golf so compelling is that it's natural. Right,
Speaker 1: It feels like you're contending with Mother Nature rather than
Speaker 1: an artificial construct. Okay, and that's pleasing and satisfying. Right
Speaker 1: that you feel like you're a you're a burly man
Speaker 1: out in nature or a burly woman out of nature.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: I don't know if women often like to think of
Speaker 1: themselves as burly. But let's just go with it. You're
Speaker 1: an adventurous person out there, and you're contending with nature
Speaker 1: as opposed to some little contrivance that an architecture architect
Speaker 1: has come up with, and that can be fun. Right.
Speaker 1: So when you go to inland courses, though, you have
Speaker 1: a problem because they can't be as natural as links courses,
Speaker 1: because the land needs to be altered to be playable
Speaker 1: and to be interestingly playable. Right, the links naturally suits
Speaker 1: itself to golf. You don't have to change much, and
Speaker 1: so you know, links courses can be natural. Inland courses
Speaker 1: have to be engineered in some way. But with some
Speaker 1: artistry and effort in construction, we can at least make
Speaker 1: inland courses appear natural. And that was the insight and
Speaker 1: the goal of Golden age architects, Harry Colt in particular.
Speaker 2: Is just to get the feeling of the links land,
Speaker 2: like as the player like what, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think it's just to get the feeling of mother nature,
Speaker 1: okaycts some architects we're trying to imitate the look of
Speaker 1: the links land, right. Sometimes they do try to do
Speaker 1: that specifically, but I think it's more like trying to
Speaker 1: adapt the artificial features to the surrounding landscape in a
Speaker 1: convincing way. So engineering the golf course to be playable,
Speaker 1: to have turf at the very least, right, Yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's important. Yeah, and to have some interesting undulations and stuff,
Speaker 1: but also to be skillful enough when you're building this
Speaker 1: stuff to make it appear as though it was always there.
Speaker 2: I've never been to Scotland. Obviously it's great and all
Speaker 2: that is that, Like, I don't know in your personal opinion.
Speaker 2: Personal opinions are hot these days in golf, and your
Speaker 2: personal opinion, like, is that mandatory? Is that important to
Speaker 2: have some level of naturalism?
Speaker 1: No? I don't think so. Okay, it is my personal preference.
Speaker 1: It's not mandatory though, and many people disagree with me
Speaker 1: about that personal preference. Many people say it is okay
Speaker 1: for a golf course to be overtly manufactured.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, if you look at a lot of
Speaker 1: McDonald and Rainer courses, if you look at Langford and
Speaker 1: Moreau courses like Lasonia Links, they don't look natural, really,
Speaker 1: the features don't look natural, and yet they're very pleasing
Speaker 1: to play. And so that would be the counter argument,
Speaker 1: but it was the belief of Harry Colt and especially
Speaker 1: how Alistair McKenzie and Tom Simpson and others, that the
Speaker 1: goal was to fool the player, essentially deceive the player
Speaker 1: into believing that the features of the golf course were natural.
Speaker 1: All right, So what's another source of naturalism in golf
Speaker 1: architecture aside from links golf? I think that this was
Speaker 1: very much part of the general naturalist movement in English
Speaker 1: culture at the time, even in global culture. Right in
Speaker 1: the US, there was a naturalist movement that I used
Speaker 1: to teach my students about in literature class with with
Speaker 1: Emerson and Threaux and all those sorts of people. Right,
Speaker 1: this is about the appreciation of nature, the esthetic beauty
Speaker 1: of the wilderness in its untouched state, the physical health
Speaker 1: benefits of being in nature. These weren't new ideas, obviously,
Speaker 1: but they were very much gaining cultural power through the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, especially as industrialization and urbanization we're speeding up
Speaker 1: in England more than anywhere else in the world, aside
Speaker 1: from to an extent, certain places in the US. Right,
Speaker 1: England was the epicenter of global industrialization. As this was happening,
Speaker 1: there was a strong sense among writers and artists and
Speaker 1: philosophers and wokesters that human beings needed to get back
Speaker 1: to nature. And the catch all term for this is
Speaker 1: the romantic movement Romanticism, but I think that might be
Speaker 1: a little bit too broad. Naturalism, I think is the
Speaker 1: best word for it now in building architecture, right, so
Speaker 1: we're getting closer to golf architecture now. In building architecture.
Speaker 1: Naturalism found expression in what's called the Arts and Craft's movement,
Speaker 1: And this was a style of art and architecture in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds that emphasized sense of place. It
Speaker 1: emphasized natural, organic shapes and materials. Basically, it was a
Speaker 1: reaction against the perceived over mechanization of artistic products. And
Speaker 1: I'll give credit to the historian Tom mic Wood for
Speaker 1: documenting the connections between the Arts and Crafts movement and
Speaker 1: naturalist golf architecture. There are many many connections, right, These
Speaker 1: all these guys were friends with each other, you know,
Speaker 1: around London. The people who were spearheading these movements naturalism
Speaker 1: and golf architecture, Arts and crafts and building architecture, they
Speaker 1: were all part of the same social circle and reading
Speaker 1: each other's stuff. So that is a big deal there, right,
Speaker 1: the general surge of romanticism and naturalism as a reaction
Speaker 1: to industrialization and urbanization that came out in the first
Speaker 1: decade of the twentieth century in golf architecture.
Speaker 2: Okay, I never I never thought about it that way.
Speaker 2: I had no reason to think about it that way.
Speaker 2: But now that you lay it out there, it makes sense.
Speaker 2: I get it that. You know, people are tired of
Speaker 2: the industrial revolution at this point.
Speaker 1: Sure, did you learn about this much in school? The
Speaker 1: romantic movement, the naturalist movement is this is this registering
Speaker 1: for you? Is a framework? Yes you already have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is unlocking things that I haven't thought
Speaker 2: about in a long time. So yeah, I definitely my brain.
Speaker 2: You can probably see the wheels shirting in my brain
Speaker 2: right now. But yeah, I'm bringing with some images of notebooks,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm with them during during final exams. Yeah exactly, sure, Yeah, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope it doesn't bring back too much trauma. But
Speaker 1: but yes, this is a key connection to make right.
Speaker 1: Golf architecture and golf are not isolated from history. They
Speaker 1: are part of broader history. They're part of culture, and
Speaker 1: they react to those influences from history and from culture,
Speaker 1: and so when anything changes in golf architecture, we have
Speaker 1: to consider what else is happening around it, because we're
Speaker 1: all members of the same world and inevitably influenced by
Speaker 1: what we're seeing in other domains of life, even if
Speaker 1: we're not really conscious of being influenced in that way. Right.
Speaker 1: But I do think that the broader underlying factor here
Speaker 1: is that golf architecture in the early twentieth century suddenly
Speaker 1: took on the status of an art. There was more
Speaker 1: money behind it. It had become a higher status pursuit.
Speaker 1: It was being practiced not just by working class Scottish
Speaker 1: professional golfers, it was being practiced by middle and upper class,
Speaker 1: often snobby Oxford and Cambridge educated Englishmen. Not to stereotype
Speaker 1: too much, but this is what was happening, and they
Speaker 1: were bringing their tastes into the discipline. Naturalism. This this
Speaker 1: this desire for the complexity of strategy, right beyond just fairness.
Speaker 1: This this idea that that you could engineer a landscape
Speaker 1: and then make it appear natural afterwards. All of these were,
Speaker 1: you know, strike me as very typical lines of thinking
Speaker 1: among this class of people in this location in the world,
Speaker 1: and that, more than anything is I think what's set
Speaker 1: off the Golden Age of golf architecture. New people with
Speaker 1: a new perspective were taking the craft seriously, and that
Speaker 1: is that is a complex legacy. Just because it's called
Speaker 1: the Golden Age doesn't mean that we can't criticize some
Speaker 1: aspects of it. One indisputable legacy of the Golden Age,
Speaker 1: which we made glancing reference to toward toward the beginning
Speaker 1: of this episode, is that golf became more expensive to play.
Speaker 1: The best new courses became the domain of wealth people
Speaker 1: and to an extent, you know early Scottish golf, if
Speaker 1: you looked at who was playing golf at Saint Andrew's
Speaker 1: in the late seventeen hundreds, there was a mix of people,
Speaker 1: but a lot of the most most frequent players on
Speaker 1: the links were wealthy Scottish guys, Scottish aristocrats. That kind
Speaker 1: of changed in the middle of the eighteen hundreds with
Speaker 1: the introduction of the gut of percha ball, which was
Speaker 1: much cheaper and it democratized the game. But the fact
Speaker 1: is that until basically the twentieth century, almost all golf
Speaker 1: courses in Scotland on the links were free to play.
Speaker 1: They were essentially just public land open. You didn't pay
Speaker 1: a green fee, you didn't go to a pro shop.
Speaker 1: You just you know, you might. I don't know. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if it was like the if it was
Speaker 1: like the surf breaks in Hawaii where if you went
Speaker 1: out there you might get your ass beaten by old
Speaker 1: Tom Morris or something, if you had to like follow code.
Speaker 1: I'd love to know more about the dynamics of that.
Speaker 1: But there there wasn't a green fee here, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: That changes memberships and green fees got to be much higher.
Speaker 1: And not just because it's not all the fault of
Speaker 1: Harry cult or whatever, but that is I think that's
Speaker 1: undoubtedly a legacy of the Golden Age, that expectations were
Speaker 1: raised for what a golf course would be, and in
Speaker 1: order to meet those expectations you had to spend money.
Speaker 1: And if you're going to spend money, you had to
Speaker 1: get it back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So I like pinning that all on one guy,
Speaker 2: Harry Cole, sticking him to the board, being like this
Speaker 2: all came back to you. I like the idea of
Speaker 2: doing that. No, I mean that makes sense if you
Speaker 2: are like, like I said before, if you're putting money
Speaker 2: into it, you have to inherently get money out of it,
Speaker 2: unless you're just like this giant philanthropist, which I feel
Speaker 2: like probably not if you were a giant philanthropist in
Speaker 2: nineteen oh one, I feel like building a golf course
Speaker 2: was probably not your way of doing it. So that
Speaker 2: all tracks makes sense. And then you think about where
Speaker 2: at least, like you know, the great golf courses are
Speaker 2: on Long Island for the most part, it is all
Speaker 2: in the Hampton's Like that is not a coincidence. I'm sure.
Speaker 1: Well, listen, you know, you know who really explored the
Speaker 1: outer limits of how much you could spend on a
Speaker 1: golf course.
Speaker 2: C B.
Speaker 1: McDonald at National Golf Links. He raised I believe the
Speaker 1: number is seventy thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a lot of money.
Speaker 1: To build National Golf Links. He he was a member
Speaker 1: of all these clubs in New York. He knew all
Speaker 1: the rich guys and he got like seventy of them
Speaker 1: to each pay a thousand dollars, an unbelievable sum of
Speaker 1: money to spend on a golf course, just completely breaking
Speaker 1: through all previous barriers for how much you would spend
Speaker 1: on a golf course and in the US are probably
Speaker 1: even Britain England. Yeah, I don't think anybody had done
Speaker 1: anything like that before. And that is part of c
Speaker 1: me McDonald's legacy. He figured out how to finance a
Speaker 1: super ambitious golf course project. And it was not easy
Speaker 1: to build the national Like they didn't have turf for
Speaker 1: a while. They had to they had to like invent
Speaker 1: new forms of agronomy to make that golf course happen.
Speaker 1: And what do you need to do that You need money? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what's the result of that. You can't walk up
Speaker 1: to National Golf Links and play it.
Speaker 2: No, no, you can't. So I as a whole would
Speaker 2: you say this was all a good thing? I assume, Well.
Speaker 1: I want to know your perspective on that for me,
Speaker 1: and just to put my cards on the table here,
Speaker 1: I think every single historical legacy of every phenomenon ever
Speaker 1: is complex. Yes, but I think if there's one thing
Speaker 1: that I would insist on, it's that just because we
Speaker 1: call it the Golden Age doesn't mean we have to
Speaker 1: say that it's perfect.
Speaker 2: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: That's my perspective on it. But how are you feeling
Speaker 1: at this point, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean it feels like in order to hashek grow
Speaker 2: the game, this had to happen, right Like the sport
Speaker 2: would not be in the place that it is today,
Speaker 2: would not be in the place that it was in
Speaker 2: the eighties. Any of this would not have happened if
Speaker 2: this time period and this development of pay for play,
Speaker 2: pay for building becoming more of an art however you
Speaker 2: want to phrase it occurred.
Speaker 1: Absolutely correct, and plus we can't just reduce the whole
Speaker 1: thing to money. Now, there was a lot of brilliance
Speaker 1: that went into this as well, those ideas that we
Speaker 1: talked about, strategic design, naturalism.
Speaker 2: I would like to be very clear, I do not
Speaker 2: mean to offend the Knight's templar of golf. Take me
Speaker 2: off of your list, Oxford Society. I'm not call back
Speaker 2: the stuff I'm scared of. I am scared of you.
Speaker 2: I'm good like It's not what I'm trying to do here. However, However,
Speaker 2: I definitely think there is an aspect to losing the
Speaker 2: I don't want to call it like the ideals of
Speaker 2: the game, but from the origin of just like having
Speaker 2: it be public land and anybody can like losing any time.
Speaker 2: And this goes for probably anything to some extent. As
Speaker 2: you said, anytime you infuse a boltload of money into anything,
Speaker 2: I think you're losing part of the soul of anything
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, and that has clearly
Speaker 2: happened here.
Speaker 1: Very well said. I do think that that spirit of
Speaker 1: links golf, which can be fetishized and romanticized, I would
Speaker 1: agree there were problems with it, and you know, not
Speaker 1: everything was hunky dory all the time. But listen, the
Speaker 1: Golden Age is understood generally as a recovery of the
Speaker 1: ideals of links golf. Okay, and in the sense that
Speaker 1: it brought strategic golf design and naturalism into architecture, that's
Speaker 1: absolutely valid. Yeah, But in another sense, the Golden Age
Speaker 1: was a complete betrayal of the ideals of links golf
Speaker 1: in that it made it private, It took it out
Speaker 1: of public land. In fact, it took public land in
Speaker 1: the heathlands what it used to be public land, yes,
Speaker 1: and privatized it. People now listen, if you go to
Speaker 1: the English heathlands now people are kind of walking around
Speaker 1: it and it feels very communal. It's not like it's
Speaker 1: not like private golf clubs in the States. So I
Speaker 1: don't want to overstate that, but it's so interesting to
Speaker 1: me how the Golden Age is both of those things
Speaker 1: at the same time. It is a recovery of the
Speaker 1: early spirit of links golf and and it is an
Speaker 1: abandonment at the same time. And it is it is
Speaker 1: something entirely new, a new model. Now, was there any
Speaker 1: other way to create excellent inland golf. Maybe not, right
Speaker 1: those there wasn't.
Speaker 2: Somebody would have figured it out a different way, right.
Speaker 2: It's one of those like life finds away kind of things.
Speaker 2: If there was another way to do this, inevitably it
Speaker 2: would have happened. Then it didn't se this was the
Speaker 2: answer at the end of the day.
Speaker 1: This was the This was our you know, our universe
Speaker 1: and the multiverse. This is this is what happened. But
Speaker 1: it probably would have gone this direction because because capitalism, right,
Speaker 1: this is is kind of how how things how things work.
Speaker 1: But but yes, I think this is I think this
Speaker 1: is the big takeaway is that, you know, when people
Speaker 1: toss around the term Golden Age, it kind of has
Speaker 1: a rosy hue to it. Everything Golden Age is great,
Speaker 1: but that's not necessarily the case, and one of the
Speaker 1: legacies of the Golden Age that we can build beyond
Speaker 1: is this sense that in order to make something really excellent,
Speaker 1: you have to throw more money at it. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't think it was unreasonable for them to do that
Speaker 1: at the time, And in fact, the amounts of money
Speaker 1: that they were spending on golf courses in the Golden
Speaker 1: Age pales in comparison to the thirty million that were
Speaker 1: that has now become conventional for golf course projects. But
Speaker 1: if we're thinking about how we understand the Golden Age
Speaker 1: and react to it, and how we bring its ideals
Speaker 1: into our own time, maybe we can borrow some architectural concepts,
Speaker 1: We can borrow some of the theory of design, while
Speaker 1: at the same time acknowledging that there's some reversing of
Speaker 1: course to be to you done here, and that the
Speaker 1: that the idea of of lands on which you play
Speaker 1: the game that aren't perfect and aren't overly engineered, that
Speaker 1: that idea can live somewhere in golf. There's a place
Speaker 1: for that.
Speaker 2: Do you are there? I don't. I don't know the
Speaker 2: way to phrase this question. But as you went down
Speaker 2: the list before, and you're talking about all of these
Speaker 2: great iconic golf courses built within this area, Like are
Speaker 2: there just are they're bad Golden Age golf courses that
Speaker 2: like are not relevant in any way, shape or form,
Speaker 2: Like as you said, we look back on rosy colored
Speaker 2: glasses and all of these iconic places, and that are
Speaker 2: they're just like was there like a lot of wasted
Speaker 2: time and opportunity through this too?
Speaker 1: That's such a good question. And you know, I generally
Speaker 1: haven't I haven't really met many Golden Age courses that
Speaker 1: I haven't loved. But that's part partly because there's a
Speaker 1: selection bias inevitably, right the courses that have survived have
Speaker 1: generally been well taken care of and were pretty good
Speaker 1: in the first place. Yeah, but there were some bad
Speaker 1: courses built in the nineteen hundreds, tens, twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: in the US, in Britain and elsewhere. You just don't
Speaker 1: hear much about them right there. And so there's there's
Speaker 1: always a selection bias at play here in what we discuss,
Speaker 1: what we're exposed to and what has managed to survive
Speaker 1: the times. But there's no doubt that the quality that
Speaker 1: the hit rate right as they're saying, cricket, the batting
Speaker 1: average was high. Okay, I don't know if it's hit rate.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's strike rate in cricket, I don't know cricket.
Speaker 1: Cricket is the sport that I know the least about.
Speaker 2: I can't help you there either.
Speaker 1: And you're in. You're like a sports savant. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know everything about everything, but bad cricket.
Speaker 2: I have nothing on cricket, So don't look at me
Speaker 2: on that.
Speaker 1: The batting average was very high among the best architects
Speaker 1: of the Golden Age, partly because again to bring this
Speaker 1: idea back, that the land was really good, the properties
Speaker 1: were really good, Land prices were fairly low. Things hadn't
Speaker 1: been over developed. Stuff was available near major metros. You
Speaker 1: could find a piece of land like the ones just
Speaker 1: outside of San Francisco where a San Francisco golf club
Speaker 1: and Lake Merced are just wonderful rolling pieces of land
Speaker 1: right abutting a major metro area. That stuff doesn't exist
Speaker 1: right now. It's not available for golf development. And so
Speaker 1: in order to find great land, current golf architects have
Speaker 1: gone very far afield, have gone to remote places to
Speaker 1: find the undulating sandy soils that they like and that
Speaker 1: that has totally changed the nature of golf course development,
Speaker 1: and it's one way in which the original gold Golden
Speaker 1: Age has has a huge advantage over every era since.
Speaker 2: Okay, I mean that makes sense that that there was
Speaker 2: more opportunity. I was just wondering if everything, you know,
Speaker 2: seems like everything was going well. It seems like there
Speaker 2: are a lot of famous people that came out of this.
Speaker 2: Everybody had a lot of great ideas. Everybody who's having
Speaker 2: such a great time that length.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of really good courses. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: were also very active debates about what made a good
Speaker 1: golf course. You know. I've I've you know, talked about
Speaker 1: the ideas that I think are the most important and
Speaker 1: the ones that ended up becoming the most influential. But
Speaker 1: there were other ideas that other people had. There were
Speaker 1: there were people who were arguing to their dying day
Speaker 1: that penal architecture was the way to go, and that
Speaker 1: was a big mistake to go the route that we did.
Speaker 1: There were there was a lot of discussion, and in fact,
Speaker 1: I think that that actually is an important characteristic of
Speaker 1: the Golden Age as well. Was just the volume and
Speaker 1: quality of discushion that people had about it. An unbelievable
Speaker 1: amount was written about golf architecture in these decades, in newspapers,
Speaker 1: in magazines, in books that were published. People were and
Speaker 1: you know, that doesn't even account for the verbal conversations
Speaker 1: that we had, I'm sure relentlessly at golf courses. But
Speaker 1: just if you're looking at the print legacy, the literary legacy,
Speaker 1: it's enormous. And that kind of stopped more or less
Speaker 1: in the forties, fifties, sixties. It has been revived recently.
Speaker 1: The Internet has had a big, big role to play
Speaker 1: there where discussion has come back. But I think that
Speaker 1: the existence of that conversation is also a big reason
Speaker 1: that the quality of work during the Golden Age was
Speaker 1: generally so high. Whether that work followed the most popular
Speaker 1: ideas or not, the work was engaged with the conversation
Speaker 1: that was happening, and that gave it a complexity and
Speaker 1: a you know, an integrity. You know, I'm searching for
Speaker 1: the right word here, but it gave it something that
Speaker 1: made it feel live, even if it wasn't all strategic
Speaker 1: and naturalists, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people were engaging with the work. I mean that
Speaker 2: that makes that makes sense that there's anytime there's a
Speaker 2: feedback loop, it's never a bad thing. Again, like if
Speaker 2: it gets people talking at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: that's that's what you want, right.
Speaker 1: That's right. You often say, you know, it's good to
Speaker 1: have a take. You want to listen to people who
Speaker 1: have takes. They had takes, everybody, Everybody who is designing
Speaker 1: a significant golf course in this period how to take.
Speaker 1: And I think that's true today as well, which is
Speaker 1: something that makes the current era that we're living in
Speaker 1: pretty exciting.
Speaker 2: All right, So I have one more question here. So
Speaker 2: you focused a lot on on the London aspect of
Speaker 2: kind of the genesis of this. Yeah, did anything like
Speaker 2: different happened once it came to America or even Australia
Speaker 2: or Japan or any of the other places that you mentioned.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, And this is part of the oversimplification that I've
Speaker 1: had to do in order to make this topic manageable
Speaker 1: for an episode of the podcast. But you could have
Speaker 1: a whole discussion about the American Golden Age and how
Speaker 1: that came about the particular features of that. I think
Speaker 1: that you know the story that I would have told
Speaker 1: you if I had engaged with that subject. Would be
Speaker 1: the building of national golf links. We've already kind of
Speaker 1: covered that in our Ideal Holes episode, our Template Holes episode.
Speaker 1: But C. B. McDonald was a North American who went
Speaker 1: over to Scotland, got educated there and experienced links golf
Speaker 1: and brought those ideas to the States, but put his
Speaker 1: own completely different spin on it. This this idea of
Speaker 1: ideal holes was a new one, and he'd did pick
Speaker 1: up on the financial technology of spending a ton of
Speaker 1: money and constructing a golfers and having those big ambitions
Speaker 1: and those big expectations for what it would be. But
Speaker 1: it was different. For sure. It was the same kinds
Speaker 1: of ideas and trends, but just kind of reflected back
Speaker 1: in a funhouse mirror, and so yes, it was different.
Speaker 1: But in other respects. Listen, who were the architects who
Speaker 1: were building a lot of the best courses in the
Speaker 1: Golden Age in the US during the nineteen twenties. We're
Speaker 1: talking about Alistair McKenzie. We're talking about, you know, earlier
Speaker 1: on Willie Park who designed Sunningdale, designed quite a few
Speaker 1: courses in the States. Harry Colt came over a couple
Speaker 1: of times, Allison came over a couple of times we
Speaker 1: were importing some of the same architects while developing some
Speaker 1: homegrown talents like C. B. MacDonald, like George Thomas. You know,
Speaker 1: there were definitely Americans who who became engaged in this,
Speaker 1: but they were you know, they could read London newspapers
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, so a lot of the same
Speaker 1: ideas were circulating. Now. One factor here is that the
Speaker 1: English Golden Age is generally concentrated earlier than the American
Speaker 1: Golden Age. The English Golden Age was really from about
Speaker 1: nineteen oh one to the outbreak of World War Two,
Speaker 1: and I believe nineteen fourteen that was where most of
Speaker 1: the action of the English Golden Age happened. In the
Speaker 1: United States. The beginning point you could really kind of
Speaker 1: fix at nineteen eleven when National Golf Links opened, But
Speaker 1: most of the stuff happened in the nineteen twenties. It
Speaker 1: was the Roaring twenties. There was plenty of there were
Speaker 1: plenty of people who were willing to fund golf course projects,
Speaker 1: and that's a big reason why they happened. And these
Speaker 1: ideas came over from Great Britain to influence what happened
Speaker 1: in the twenties. But it was generally happening later. The
Speaker 1: same thing didn't really go down in England in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties because England was more affected by World War One. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so you know that's the reason why you know,
Speaker 1: you're Alistair McKenzie's probably ended up setting up shop in
Speaker 1: the US because there was just more to do here.
Speaker 1: There weren't as many projects happening in England.
Speaker 2: That makes sense. That's putting it in the context of
Speaker 2: the times again that like you said.
Speaker 1: Before, it's all every place is a little bit different.
Speaker 1: Australia is different again. You know, I've told the story
Speaker 1: before on different podcasts about Alistair McKenzie going to Royal
Speaker 1: Melbourne and then you know, kind of spreading seeds through
Speaker 1: throughout Australia that eventually grew into an impressive flowering of
Speaker 1: Golden Age architecture there. But that happened in the late twenties, right,
Speaker 1: that was later again, so different. Japan is a whole
Speaker 1: subject that I haven't I've been too intimidated to take
Speaker 1: on myself. But Charles Elison and went over there and
Speaker 1: did some interesting stuff and and so yeah, every every
Speaker 1: little place is different. And you know, we if we
Speaker 1: were doing a proper survey of the Golden Age. We
Speaker 1: would also talk maybe about the ending point of it,
Speaker 1: what affects the Great Depression had, what affects the the
Speaker 1: Second World War had, But if we dug into all
Speaker 1: that stuff, we'd be here for another few hours. So
Speaker 1: I think a good starting point is these three ideas
Speaker 1: of money, strategic design and uh and and naturalism. I
Speaker 1: think those are That's a good starting point for us.
Speaker 2: This is great. I'm just I'm happy that we found
Speaker 2: Harry Cole is the one guy to pin this wole
Speaker 2: on and put him up on the board, circle him
Speaker 2: in red, and then the branches can go out from there.
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. He he deserves it.
Speaker 2: Maybe God blame somebody, God blame somebody.
Speaker 1: We but yeah, it's fine with me that we blame
Speaker 1: Harry Colt. You know, he's been dead for a long time,
Speaker 1: so what's he gonna do? Genuinely, seems like he was
Speaker 1: probably a pretty nice guy. But I'm but I'm still
Speaker 1: I'm still willing to pin it on him.
Speaker 2: It's okay. Everybody needs a fall guy.
Speaker 1: All right. PJ, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2: This is thanks thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam.
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