Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast.
Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by our friends over
Speaker 1: at bet Dratty. Today, I actually played a golf tournament
Speaker 1: and I wore a new be Dratty Sport. So they
Speaker 1: just came out with us. They did a limited release
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Speaker 2: I really liked it kept me cool under pressure, even
Speaker 2: though my game put me under pressure a lot. It
Speaker 2: was not a good, good round of golf today, but anyways,
Speaker 2: the shirt was great if I played as well as
Speaker 2: my shirt did. We've been playing the US four ball
Speaker 2: next spring, so those will be in the pro shop
Speaker 2: hopefully next year right January one, but you can get
Speaker 2: them at a few participating clubs, a lot of them
Speaker 2: on the East Coast. If you're in one of those
Speaker 2: pro shops, they might have be Dratty Sport.
Speaker 1: Also with new happenings in the pro Shop, we have
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Speaker 1: so use the code Fall twenty five and you'll get
Speaker 1: twenty five percent off T shirts, the b Dratty T
Speaker 1: shirts and then also with an Angles T shirts. So
Speaker 1: we got a new podcast and actually Garrett Morrison, or
Speaker 1: managing editor, is the host of this. So this will
Speaker 1: be with Bob Crosby and Garrett you.
Speaker 3: There, yep, right here.
Speaker 1: So this is exciting. Yeah, so we're gonna We're gonna
Speaker 1: have Garrett come in. He's gonna do some hosting. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do some hosting. But you know, Garrett's probably better
Speaker 1: host than I am.
Speaker 3: Anyways, I doubt that. But I'm getting my seed legs
Speaker 3: and it's been really fun. And the conversation with with
Speaker 3: Bob was great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's he That was a great I listened to
Speaker 2: it and what a what an intelligent guy.
Speaker 3: I know, seriously intelligent. So my idea is that, you know,
Speaker 3: when when I'm tracking down guests and asking people to
Speaker 3: talk with me, I'm going to make sure that they're
Speaker 3: uh smarter than me, which which won't be too difficult.
Speaker 3: But Bob is definitely smarter than me, and so it
Speaker 3: was really really fun to talk to him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that all of our guests are smarter
Speaker 2: than I. I think, so it's a little bar so awesome. Well,
Speaker 2: we'll hope you guys enjoy Bob Crosby and h Garrett
Speaker 2: as a host, and so we'll just you know, it'll
Speaker 2: be noted in the notes who's hosting, but should be
Speaker 2: should be, if anything, better than when I'm hosting.
Speaker 3: And I should mention that my guest, Bob Crosby, who
Speaker 3: goes by Robert Crosby in publication, is a great golf historian,
Speaker 3: and if you're interested in the content of this podcast,
Speaker 3: you should check out his two essays on John Lowe
Speaker 3: for the Journal Through the Green, which we'll link to
Speaker 3: in the show notes. You can also follow him on
Speaker 3: Twitter at otay seventy one. That's ote y seven to one.
Speaker 3: All right, So, without further ado, here's my conversation with
Speaker 3: Bob Crosby.
Speaker 4: The Frida egg requires a different technique. What you need
Speaker 4: to do is actually square the face so it'll dig
Speaker 4: down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right
Speaker 4: out onto the green.
Speaker 5: Here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely
Speaker 1: different than playing out of a night clean lion a
Speaker 1: greenside bunker. You need to be aggressive on any show,
Speaker 1: whether it's sitting cleanly, or it's Frida Egg.
Speaker 6: Well, we've all faith that the dreaded Frida Egg. It's
Speaker 6: not to be feared, though. It's actually a pretty easy
Speaker 6: shot to hit.
Speaker 3: How did you initially get into golf? Were you a
Speaker 3: player when you were younger? Did you play on teams
Speaker 3: and things like that?
Speaker 6: I was, yeah, I was a fairly serious junior golfer.
Speaker 5: Captain.
Speaker 6: I went to Culver Military Academy, played in a wonderful
Speaker 6: Langford and a role course at Culver, won some high
Speaker 6: school tournaments, played golf for Harvard College for a couple
Speaker 6: of years, and then the student demonstrations created enough cognitive
Speaker 6: dissonance with that activity that I gave it up essentially
Speaker 6: for twenty years, and got back to it sometime in
Speaker 6: my mid late thirties and found I loved it more
Speaker 6: than ever, Certainly without playing for tournaments and trying to
Speaker 6: qualify for travel squads and that sort of stuff, it
Speaker 6: was a lot more fun. So I've been a golfer
Speaker 6: since I was seven or eight years old.
Speaker 3: So tell me more about when you were at Harvard
Speaker 3: and there were the student demonstrations, and it sounds like
Speaker 3: it led you to question your involvement in the game.
Speaker 6: I'll give you a very concrete example. Our two home
Speaker 6: courses I didn't appreciate how good they were at the
Speaker 6: time was the Myopia Hunt Club and the country Club
Speaker 6: in Brookline. I was sitting in Brookline with I had
Speaker 6: long hair, I had a bandana, I had a black
Speaker 6: armband of anti Vietnam stuff, and there was a student
Speaker 6: demonstration going on back at campus, and I thought to myself,
Speaker 6: I'm in the wrong place, and all that was much
Speaker 6: more pressing. Walked, I caught a ride home that afternoon,
Speaker 6: left my golf clubs at the country club and never
Speaker 6: went back to fetch them. As far as I know,
Speaker 6: nearly fifty years later, they're still there.
Speaker 5: Were That's probably not possible, but.
Speaker 6: That's how abrupt it all happened. And then I kind
Speaker 6: of got swept up in events.
Speaker 5: At the time.
Speaker 3: So is there something about golf that just keeps itself
Speaker 3: separate from the world at large? Do you think that
Speaker 3: that cognitive dissonance, as you call it, between golf and
Speaker 3: current events or politics is a natural thing that's always
Speaker 3: going to be there.
Speaker 6: You know, Garrett, For me, it really did. When I
Speaker 6: walk onto a golf course, I really walk into a
Speaker 6: different mental universe, at least for me, and that which
Speaker 6: is one of the reasons I love it so much.
Speaker 6: I'm a recently retired lawyer, and there were just so
Speaker 6: many times when I walked, you know, got out of
Speaker 6: the car, and it was a different universe at the
Speaker 6: golf course as I was walking on to the practice.
Speaker 6: To you or wherever, Yes, the answer is yes, and
Speaker 6: strikingly so.
Speaker 3: For me, right, And that can be either a good
Speaker 3: thing or a bad thing. It can be an escape,
Speaker 3: as you're talking about, or it can be a kind
Speaker 3: of realm of denial.
Speaker 6: You know, I know too much about this, so I
Speaker 6: don't know how much time you have. But Bernard Darwin
Speaker 6: wrote a piece in nineteen fourteen called The Fascination of Golf,
Speaker 6: and it was about the power of golf to in
Speaker 6: some cases, simply take over somebody's life. He worked less hard,
Speaker 6: he spent less time in the office. His wife was
Speaker 6: mad at him all the time, but he was at
Speaker 6: His fascination was such and it was so different from
Speaker 6: the rest of his life that he, you know, spent
Speaker 6: way too much time in the game. But Darwin thought
Speaker 6: that was actually probably a good thing. He published that
Speaker 6: in the Times. I wrote a piece on this for
Speaker 6: Through the Green. He published that in the Times in
Speaker 6: I think it was April of nineteen fourteen. For the
Speaker 6: next two months there were sixty five or seventy counter
Speaker 6: letters and articles outraged at Bernard Darlwin's view of the
Speaker 6: importance and fascination of golf. How it was a bad
Speaker 6: thing for society, how it corrected young men, how it
Speaker 6: was not a good thing in the long term. It
Speaker 6: was unbelievable dispute. The ending irony of all of that
Speaker 6: is that arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated in August second
Speaker 6: or third they launched, you know, World War One is
Speaker 6: kicked off, and all of those young dissolute golfers marched
Speaker 6: dutifully off to war. So it hadn't been that harmful.
Speaker 6: But the whole topic is the topic really goes back,
Speaker 6: and you'll appreciate this. It goes back to theories of education.
Speaker 6: Should young boys be taught golf? Now, everybody agreed to
Speaker 6: teaching cricket was a good thing because it was a
Speaker 6: rough team sport, or soccer was a rough team sport.
Speaker 6: But golf was an individual, quote selfish sport, and there
Speaker 6: were a lot of people that said, it was a
Speaker 6: bad influence on boys, but that's another topic for them.
Speaker 3: So how did you become serious about researching golf history,
Speaker 3: or maybe the better question is at what point did
Speaker 3: you become interested in the game beyond just playing it.
Speaker 6: I had always been interested in golf architecture, primarily because
Speaker 6: I kept scratching my head over what I thought were
Speaker 6: odd bunkers and odd things on the golf course I
Speaker 6: grew up on, which is in Athens, Georgia, and there's
Speaker 6: this oddly placed bunker, the first hold Athns Country Club,
Speaker 6: But I never quite understood why it was there. And
Speaker 6: then I got to thinking, well, you know, everything that's
Speaker 6: on that golf course is there for a reason. Somebody
Speaker 6: decided to put it there or not put something there,
Speaker 6: and that led to just a whole bunch of sort
Speaker 6: of meditations on my own. It wasn't until Frankly Golf
Speaker 6: Club Atless and some of those old blogs that cranked
Speaker 6: up in the late nineties that I realized that other
Speaker 6: people wondered about the same things, and it was an
Speaker 6: enormous relief. I thought I was sort of crazy, And
Speaker 6: out of those blogs, I've made some of the best
Speaker 6: friends I have. We share an interest in golf architecture,
Speaker 6: and it's been wonderful the Internet has made has richly
Speaker 6: enhanced my life.
Speaker 3: For that reason, What was the role of golf Club
Speaker 3: Atlas specifically in your exploration of the history of the game.
Speaker 6: There were a number of really serious architectural historians, and
Speaker 6: I was absolutely fascinated by their research. A couple of
Speaker 6: them are dead now. They led to some very very
Speaker 6: bitter fights, which were unfortunate, but the research and I
Speaker 6: came to see. Let me back up a mite. I
Speaker 6: came to see golf courses as objects of art that
Speaker 6: had a history that reflected various ideas about how golf
Speaker 6: ought to be played. And I thought that whole nexus
Speaker 6: was absolutely fascinate.
Speaker 5: The history part in particular.
Speaker 6: The other part of that is that I came to
Speaker 6: see and this is really a tell tale for golf
Speaker 6: history in a lot of ways that I can get
Speaker 6: into this later.
Speaker 5: If you want.
Speaker 6: I began to read Alistair McKenzie, Max Bear, you know,
Speaker 6: the usual suspects, and I realized at some point that
Speaker 6: they weren't really writing descriptively. They were writing arguments. They
Speaker 6: were being polemical, and as I dug more into it.
Speaker 6: I kept the question kept coming up, who are they
Speaker 6: arguing with? And that led to a lot of discoveries
Speaker 6: about sort of other theories of golf architectures that they
Speaker 6: were trying to beat back in one way or another.
Speaker 6: And those other theories had to some extent been lost
Speaker 6: to history. Not lost, but they were just lightly buried
Speaker 6: and nobody had bothered to dig back into them. The
Speaker 6: first long thing I wrote on golf architecture was a
Speaker 6: four part essay in Golf Club Attlas on the Joshua
Speaker 6: Crane Alistair McKenzie Max Bair debates. Literally nobody knew anything
Speaker 6: about Joshua Crane, but that's who they were writing.
Speaker 5: Again.
Speaker 6: They hated him, And then I further came to find
Speaker 6: out that really the one of the reasons they disliked
Speaker 6: him so intensely. First of all, he was a jerk,
Speaker 6: but very wealthy Bostonian. But the real reason they came
Speaker 6: to dislike him so intensely was because he really reflected
Speaker 6: a lot of older Victorian golf architecture ideas and he
Speaker 6: carried them forward into the nineteen twenties. And then that
Speaker 6: led me to John Lowe, who fought the same battles
Speaker 6: with a different cast of characters circa nineteen hundred through
Speaker 6: nineteen oh five. And I came to think that Lowe
Speaker 6: was both a better writer, a better thinker, and had
Speaker 6: more worthy opponents to argue against than Mackenzie Bear and
Speaker 6: Joshua Crane were. And plus it predated them all by
Speaker 6: almost two decades. And so I dug into it. I
Speaker 6: dug into it, and that's really how I got to look.
Speaker 6: I have a problem with most golf histories. I'm on
Speaker 6: the Herbert Warren Win Golf Book Award Committee at the USGA,
Speaker 6: been honored for five or six years. I read a
Speaker 6: lot of golf books, some of them really really bad,
Speaker 6: some of them very good, but very very few of
Speaker 6: them see golf history as other than a series of
Speaker 6: more or less isolated events. You know, Harry Cole did
Speaker 6: Swinley Forrest on this date, and he did this to
Speaker 6: the he built, He built these sorts of holes. The
Speaker 6: stymy was was eliminated from the code book in this year.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 6: You know, Jade Taylor wins the Open in nineteen oh five.
Speaker 6: I don't find that very interesting. I mean, I'm happy
Speaker 6: to be informed. I can sort of show off at
Speaker 6: a cocktail party. But it's just it's not terribly interesting
Speaker 6: that there. What I did come to discover, and I
Speaker 6: think I'm right about this, is that there are long
Speaker 6: term storylines in the history of golf, and nobody in
Speaker 6: bodies what I took to be the most important of
Speaker 6: those storylines better than John Lowe, not just in his
Speaker 6: own time, but continuing today. And that the storyline that
Speaker 6: I'm trying to articulate that basically encompassed Lowe's career in
Speaker 6: the game began about eighteen ninety five, where the game
Speaker 6: the game was very, very different from the game we
Speaker 6: know today. There were the rules were basically driven by
Speaker 6: various clubs. They set their own rules. Golf courses were
Speaker 6: tended to be very Victorian, with these cross bunkers and
Speaker 6: steeple chase things other than the traditional links courses, but
Speaker 6: anything that anything that was inland tended to be these
Speaker 6: horrendous Victorian golf courses. And there were literally no rules
Speaker 6: by balls. You could use anything you wanted, anything.
Speaker 5: You wanted.
Speaker 6: What Low as a Scott faced and Low grew up
Speaker 6: in Dundee, went to Repton Public School, graduated from Cambridge
Speaker 6: Claire College at Cambridge in.
Speaker 5: Eighteen ninety one or ninety two.
Speaker 6: What was happening in golf at the time was that
Speaker 6: it had exploded in England. England had new golf courses
Speaker 6: were popping up daily in England, new clubs. England had
Speaker 6: more money, They had more political clout, They published all
Speaker 6: the golf magazines.
Speaker 5: In other words, they had all the power.
Speaker 6: And they brought to golf these Victorian preconceptions about how
Speaker 6: golf and any sport ought to operate, and that basically
Speaker 6: was highly realistic. Low described them as the Party of Equity,
Speaker 6: and he described his traditional Scottish take on things as
Speaker 6: the Conservative Party. So one of the long running themes
Speaker 6: that begins with rules debates in eighteen ninety five between
Speaker 6: Low and others and Englishmen like laid Law Purposal the
Speaker 6: technically he grew up he was born in Scotland almost
Speaker 6: likely and other people based in the London area, was
Speaker 6: the extent to which the rules ought to be answerable
Speaker 6: to concerns of equity or fairness. Low, the traditional scott
Speaker 6: along with Walter Simpson and others, said that's got nothing
Speaker 6: to do with the rule. The rules of the rules.
Speaker 6: Some are fair, some aren't fair. It's part of what
Speaker 6: makes golf so interesting, and they has no duty to
Speaker 6: some higher moral concept. At the same time, everybody was
Speaker 6: promulgating theory Victorian golf courses, which really turned on similar issues.
Speaker 6: That is to say, hazards are to be laid out
Speaker 6: on a golf course, which were fair and proportionate based
Speaker 6: on the quality of the shot. Good shots should be rewarded,
Speaker 6: any bad shot should be punished, worst shots should be
Speaker 6: punished more heavily. It was this neat Victorian moralistic universe
Speaker 6: of how a golf course are to operate, and Lowe said, no, no,
Speaker 6: the old course at St. Andrews and other great lengths
Speaker 6: courses don't operate on those principles. They operate on what
Speaker 6: we now call he didn't call it the time strategic
Speaker 6: golf architecture principles, which is to say, I'm going to
Speaker 6: give you choices to the extent you want to take
Speaker 6: on risks for easier shots later on the whole.
Speaker 5: You can do that, but if you.
Speaker 6: Don't successfully pull them off, you're going to be in
Speaker 6: deep trouble. And bad golfers, let's leave them alone. More
Speaker 6: or less, they're their own world enemies. So there was
Speaker 6: this deep rupture in golf. Well, it was really a
Speaker 6: fight between two camps, the Conservative Party and the Party
Speaker 6: of Equity, which were roughly divided along geographic lines Scotland
Speaker 6: versus England. And I would argue that out of that
Speaker 6: the basics of modern golf emerge, the golf we are
Speaker 6: familiar with today.
Speaker 5: And what I mean by that.
Speaker 6: Is that a rules a codebook that is basically rooted
Speaker 6: in older Saint Andrew's codes. There's been lots of tweaks
Speaker 6: to it since it's basically the St. Andrews Code was
Speaker 6: established with the formation of the RNA Rules Committee in
Speaker 6: eighteen ninety seven, on which Flow served as a very
Speaker 6: young man. At the same time, the architectural principles that
Speaker 6: were found in courses and for which Lowe was the
Speaker 6: first to argue for, and I think the first read
Speaker 6: to discover, came to very quickly dominate golf course architecture
Speaker 6: through Harry Coles, Alison Simpson and a whole bunch of others,
Speaker 6: so that the rules we play under today, the basic
Speaker 6: rules we plunder today, the basic kinds of golf courses
Speaker 6: we play on, and the kinds of balls and equipment
Speaker 6: we play with all can be dated back to the
Speaker 6: early Edwardian era, and in the middle of every one
Speaker 6: of those issues was my man John Langlowe, either as
Speaker 6: a member of the rules committee, either as an incredible
Speaker 6: or incredibly articulate exponent for a wholly different kind of
Speaker 6: golf architecture, or in his fight to regulate the Haskell
Speaker 6: ball and later clubs.
Speaker 3: That's fascinating. So that gives us kind of the general
Speaker 3: outline of it. Could you tell me a little bit
Speaker 3: about who John Lowe was? You mentioned a bit earlier
Speaker 3: about where he was from, but you know, who was
Speaker 3: he outside of golf? What was his general social status?
Speaker 3: What kind of person was he in the world.
Speaker 6: John Lowe was born north of Dundee and he was
Speaker 6: born to a manorial estate. His father owned a lot
Speaker 6: of land in an area called dunk Eld the Duncle
Speaker 6: Castle Mansion house, I'm not sure it was called. He's
Speaker 6: still there and I would love to go there visit
Speaker 6: one day. Lowe is buried there on the premises there.
Speaker 6: He married into a very wealthy Dundee family, the Langs.
Speaker 6: His middle name is Lang, I'm sorry. His mother was
Speaker 6: a Lang and they were a very wealthy Dundee family.
Speaker 6: He spent a lot of time in his childhood in Dundee.
Speaker 6: They were major jute manufacturers, which is which in the
Speaker 6: time was the major component for ropes.
Speaker 5: Wasn't smoked, I don't think.
Speaker 6: Low grew up playing a lot of golf at the
Speaker 6: old course with his mother's brothers, the Langs. Tragically, his
Speaker 6: father died as he was going off to college. His
Speaker 6: older brother died at about the same time, and low
Speaker 6: was charged with taking over the family business when he
Speaker 6: was still nineteen or twenty years old. He was so
Speaker 6: he was late getting to Cambridge. He took a year off,
Speaker 6: did some traveling in Europe, but was late getting He
Speaker 6: and Harry Cope, by the way, exactly the same agent
Speaker 6: and were classmates at Cambridge and very close friends. But
Speaker 6: at any rate, Lowe then sells the company made a
Speaker 6: bud I'm not clear how much money he cleared in
Speaker 6: the sale, but he was very wealthy and never had
Speaker 6: to work a day in his life. Before he graduated
Speaker 6: from Cambridge, he was became a member of the RNA,
Speaker 6: ditto for Harry Colt, his classmate. He captained the Cambridge
Speaker 6: golf team and then moved his principal residence became Woking
Speaker 6: on the Woking golf Course in Surrey outside of London
Speaker 6: about nineteen hundred, and that's where he spent. Between Saint
Speaker 6: Andrews and Woking is where he spent most of his
Speaker 6: time thereafter. Close friends with Bernard Darwin, who was also
Speaker 6: a member at Woking and who also went to Cambridge,
Speaker 6: he founded the Oxford helped found the Oxford Cambridge Golfing Society,
Speaker 6: in which everybody that was anybody in golf architecture was
Speaker 6: a member because they all went to college at Cambridge
Speaker 6: or Oxford. Was on the rules Committee from nineteen twenty.
Speaker 6: From eighteen ninety seven until just before he died in
Speaker 6: nineteen twenty nine, was chairman of the Rules Committee for
Speaker 6: eight of those eight critical years. In the middle of
Speaker 6: that span, died though he was only sixty when he died.
Speaker 6: He died what I think was from throat cancer. He
Speaker 6: was still not he had not turned his sixtieth birthday,
Speaker 6: had not He'd not got his sixtieth birthday. Yet there
Speaker 6: was an outpour. He was really beloved, outpouring of oh bits,
Speaker 6: including a very long loving one from Bernard Darwin, a
Speaker 6: major figure in the game who has been largely forgotten.
Speaker 3: Right now, did he first really rise to prominence in
Speaker 3: the world of golf during the rules debates of the
Speaker 3: mid eighteen nineties or was he a kind of well
Speaker 3: known figure in the game before that.
Speaker 6: He that's a great question. He as an undergraduate at Cambridge.
Speaker 6: He weighs into what was a really really nasty rules
Speaker 6: debate but between the English and the Scots about the
Speaker 6: role of equity and the rules in eighteen ninety one,
Speaker 6: which is incredible. I mean, this is a nineteen year
Speaker 6: old weighing in with these guys who were forty and
Speaker 6: fifty years old.
Speaker 5: Didn't flinch.
Speaker 6: He was a very fine golfer, so he had a
Speaker 6: reputation for both being a good writer and a fine golfer.
Speaker 6: He he got more deeply involved in that same debate
Speaker 6: on the eve of the formation of the Rules Committee.
Speaker 6: I'm telling you more you want to know. But the
Speaker 6: RNA formed the Rules Committee reluctantly, and they formed it
Speaker 6: reluctantly because it was essentially a defensive move against Lee
Speaker 6: Larvist and other English golfers who wanted to form their
Speaker 6: own democratic golf union which would havesent fair representation from
Speaker 6: all golf clubs in Britain and would make more democratic
Speaker 6: decisions about the rules. And he was push hard for that,
Speaker 6: and members of the RNA, Benjamin Hallblithe, John Lowe and
Speaker 6: others brought the RNA around to the idea that you know,
Speaker 6: you really have to organize a rules administration. You have
Speaker 6: to form a committee or else they're going to take
Speaker 6: over the rules front. It was a real threat that
Speaker 6: was going to happen. It was an existential issue for
Speaker 6: the RNA. Lowe was in the middle of that. Pointed
Speaker 6: to the first Committee along with his buddy Harry Cole
Speaker 6: of coras Uchis and other people you know, and they
Speaker 6: promulgated the first first uniform rules in golf that were
Speaker 6: basically went effective essentially the beginning of nineteen hundred.
Speaker 5: And it was a big moment for the game.
Speaker 3: It sounds like Lowe's general position on the rules. Now
Speaker 3: this will become relevant when we start talking about his
Speaker 3: opinions on golf course architecture, but when he was dealing
Speaker 3: with the rules, it sounds like he was against the
Speaker 3: notion that everything needed to be fair. Could you say
Speaker 3: a little bit more about that and how did that
Speaker 3: get borne out? In the kinds of rules that he endorsed,
Speaker 3: or were the types of things that he argued against
Speaker 3: or argued for.
Speaker 6: I'll give you two concrete examples he he was. He
Speaker 6: was adamantly opposed to using the fairness we can we
Speaker 6: can talk about the old philosopher and me.
Speaker 5: He's happy to talk about what that means in this context.
Speaker 6: But he was adamantly opposed to using fairness as a
Speaker 6: as a criterion for the For the for a rule,
Speaker 6: a rule was a rule. He said, this We're not
Speaker 6: we're not creating a penal code here. This is a
Speaker 6: These are rules for a these rules for a sport.
Speaker 6: And fairness really has no play or should have no
Speaker 6: play other than you know, we can talk about in
Speaker 6: limited situations. Let me give you two concrete examples of
Speaker 6: his views. There were all sorts of arguments that the
Speaker 6: STYMI was unfair. Low said, it doesn't matter. What matters
Speaker 6: is that it increases the drama of the game. And
Speaker 6: absent to steymy, you're gonna mark your ball and you're
Speaker 6: gonna put around and that. But the steymy adds a
Speaker 6: degree of drama that is what makes golf special. He
Speaker 6: had similar arguments about and everybody's forgotten this rule existed.
Speaker 6: It used to be a rule called the lost ball rule,
Speaker 6: which applied in match play. The rule stated that as
Speaker 6: soon as a player had lost his ball or his
Speaker 6: ball was out of play and he couldn't use the
Speaker 6: same ball, his opponent had automatically won the hole, without
Speaker 6: regard to what the opponent did afterwards, automatic you're out.
Speaker 6: Lowe defended the rule. It was very acrimonious. Opposing him
Speaker 6: were literally all the professional players, Harold Hilton, everybody uh
Speaker 6: low defended on defended it on similar grounds. If you're
Speaker 6: playing golf and you know what the rule is, then
Speaker 6: you play accordingly. And if you lose your ball in
Speaker 6: a match, there might be catastrophic consequences. Take that into
Speaker 6: account and it makes for a better game. It might
Speaker 6: be whether it's fair or not, you know what, I
Speaker 6: don't care. I don't know whether it's not relevant to
Speaker 6: whether or not this rule is a good rule.
Speaker 3: It sounds sort of just sorry. It sounds like his
Speaker 3: priority was the drama and interest of the game as
Speaker 3: opposed to its fairness. And when those two drama versus
Speaker 3: fairness came up against each other and you had to
Speaker 3: choose one or the other. He sided with drama. Is
Speaker 3: that fairly accurate?
Speaker 6: Yes, he wanted golf to be, first of all, a
Speaker 6: sport for gentlemen. Is not a sport that was an
Speaker 6: adventure and heroic and less about athletic prowess. I want
Speaker 6: you to I want you to have. It needs to
Speaker 6: test perseverance, judgment intelligence as much as your physical ability
Speaker 6: to strike a golf ball. Now, there's similar veins of
Speaker 6: arguments that come out literally just two years later when
Speaker 6: he first broaches the idea of strategic golf architecture, and
Speaker 6: there's very similar issues here in the arguments over that.
Speaker 6: And you know his famous saying that there is no
Speaker 6: such thing as an unfair bunker was part of that argument.
Speaker 6: You know it's there, deal with it.
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Speaker 3: s i PC, all right, and now back to my
Speaker 3: conversation with Bob Crosby. Yeah, that's part of what I
Speaker 3: was leading into because it strikes me that his approach
Speaker 3: to the rules debate is so consonant with his approach
Speaker 3: to golf architecture. So how did John Lowe end up
Speaker 3: getting involved in golf architecture. You mentioned earlier that he
Speaker 3: that he took up a residence near near Woking Golf Club.
Speaker 3: How did it come about that he got involved in
Speaker 3: the in fiddling with that golf course.
Speaker 6: I'll get to Woking in a second. But he first
Speaker 6: established a reputation of golf architecture in nineteen oh one
Speaker 6: in Golf Illustrated that ran a survey on the best
Speaker 6: holes in Britain and they wanted everybody to pick a
Speaker 6: par five, a par four and a par three and
Speaker 6: give reasons for your picks. Low ended up in the
Speaker 6: context of that survey writing a three page essay on
Speaker 6: the merits of strategic golf architecture, something that had literally
Speaker 6: never been seen before. And what he was writing against,
Speaker 6: and this gets back to the polemical side of things.
Speaker 6: Exactly what are they who they are arguing against. What
Speaker 6: he was arguing against was Victorian golf architecture, and in
Speaker 6: nineteen oh one, Victorian golf architecture it was not just
Speaker 6: a crude form of golf course construction. It was, to
Speaker 6: the contrary, a very sophisticated theory of how hazards on
Speaker 6: a golf course are to be laid out. And Lowe
Speaker 6: was arguing against that, and it's a remarkable piece of work.
Speaker 6: It starts a huge flurry of arguments back and forth
Speaker 6: with J. H. Taylor, with Harold Hilton. Lots of lifelong
Speaker 6: enemies were established based on that essay. He goes on
Speaker 6: from that essay with his friend Stuart Payton at Woking
Speaker 6: to take out on the famous fourth hole what had
Speaker 6: been a classic Victorian cross hazard that stretched all the
Speaker 6: way across the fairway and reduced it down to a
Speaker 6: simple circular central line bunker as on the sixteenth third
Speaker 6: the old course, and then reconfigured the green to make
Speaker 6: it such that if you wanted to come into the
Speaker 6: green from the right side, which was the easier side,
Speaker 6: I'm going to force you to hit a drive down
Speaker 6: the narrow neck on the right of that center line bunker,
Speaker 6: which by the way, slightly farther right has a railroad track,
Speaker 6: and if you can do that, I'm going to let
Speaker 6: you have an easier shot into the green. That was
Speaker 6: enormously controversial at the time. This is probably nineteen oh one,
Speaker 6: nineteen oh two. Nobody knows quite exactly when you made
Speaker 6: that change. But the other big change, and this is
Speaker 6: fascinating because we take some of these features on a
Speaker 6: golf course today, for granted, but the time they were revolutionary.
Speaker 6: On the seventeenth toll Low dug a bunker into the
Speaker 6: green right at the green, which we now see on
Speaker 6: every golf course you and I've ever played. It was
Speaker 6: hugely controversial on the argument that well, but you know,
Speaker 6: a decent shot is going to catch that bunker, but
Speaker 6: a worse shot is going to be okay, way far
Speaker 6: off the green. But it was this bunker that quote
Speaker 6: ate into the green that caused enormous controversy. It was
Speaker 6: that bunker, and I write about this and through the
Speaker 6: Green Essay that Tom Simpson is still a young lawyer
Speaker 6: just out of school, went at him, looked at because
Speaker 6: of all the controversy, and it struck him that golf
Speaker 6: architecture was dealing with a fascinating set of issues, and
Speaker 6: he decided on the spot to become a golf architect,
Speaker 6: dropped his legal career. But and Lowe was always a
Speaker 6: hero to Simpson.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: It's striking to think how different those bunkers were in
Speaker 3: the early nineteen hundreds, you know, and they're pretty commonplace
Speaker 3: ideas to us now, okay, a center line bunker and
Speaker 3: a bunker really near where a pin could be on
Speaker 3: a green. But of course, what was unusual about these
Speaker 3: kinds of hazards at the time is that people assumed
Speaker 3: most people assumed that the purpose of hazards was to
Speaker 3: punish poor strikes of the ball. But Lowe was doing
Speaker 3: something very different, you know. He was doing again something
Speaker 3: that was opposed to the kind of common sensical fairness
Speaker 3: school of golf and going a different direction with it,
Speaker 3: making the game more interesting. What what what was the
Speaker 3: purpose of these hazards? Why was he putting them there?
Speaker 3: What kind of drama and interest did they introduce to
Speaker 3: the game?
Speaker 6: Low low put it very succinctly, and his phrase has
Speaker 6: been copied for by thousands of people since, which is
Speaker 6: that I have no real interest in punishing the bad golfer.
Speaker 6: What I want to do is catch the not quite
Speaker 6: good enough shot of the good golfer. And in other words,
Speaker 6: anybody that wants to play ambitiously but can't quite pull
Speaker 6: it off, he's the guy I want to punish. And
Speaker 6: that's that's how hazards ought to be arranged on a golfer.
Speaker 6: That's that's the point the function of He rewrote the
Speaker 6: function of hazards in his essay in nineteen oh one.
Speaker 6: It's a remarkable I don't know intellectual is the right
Speaker 6: word for it, but it was a remarkable tour to
Speaker 6: fource to have thought that through so carefully, and it
Speaker 6: it remains as modern today as it was when he
Speaker 6: first wrote it. It's just unbelievable.
Speaker 3: Right, It's still counterintuitive for because you think, like, why
Speaker 3: would you put a hazard exactly where you want to be,
Speaker 3: you know, because it isn't that unfair? Isn't that absurd?
Speaker 3: But what Lowe's saying is that, yeah, put those hazards
Speaker 3: where good players balls might gather, because then if the
Speaker 3: hazard's there, you have to play close to it in
Speaker 3: order to have a good position, right right, right.
Speaker 6: The whole calculus plays out beautiful. I'm going to put
Speaker 6: a really nasty hazard close to where your ideal shot
Speaker 6: and you want to you want to want to negotiate that.
Speaker 6: How You're gonna play as close to that hazard as
Speaker 6: you possibly can. Now, if you don't pull that shot off,
Speaker 6: you know your shot is not quite good enough, then
Speaker 6: there's no reason in the world what the consequences of
Speaker 6: that myss can't be catastrophic.
Speaker 5: Because you took on the risk. You could have.
Speaker 6: Bailed out another part of the fairway didn't give you
Speaker 6: a nicer shot into the green, but you had you
Speaker 6: picked it. You chose to take on that risk, and
Speaker 6: you can and and and and the price for not
Speaker 6: pulling it off can be drastic. So that the very
Speaker 6: carefully balanced more moral scales of the old Victorian golf courses.
Speaker 3: He blew apart.
Speaker 5: Well, they were irrelevant.
Speaker 6: They were in fact, they made for bad golf courses, so.
Speaker 3: So and it's and it's truly the key to making
Speaker 3: golf courses challenging for the good player as well as
Speaker 3: playable and fun for the less expert player, which is
Speaker 3: something every golf architect claims to do. But this is
Speaker 3: what he was doing. He found he found to it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, bingo, that's the architectural squaring the circle, and Lowe
Speaker 6: was the first to figure out how you do that?
Speaker 5: Now he didn't.
Speaker 6: It was really curious, is he didn't. He redesigned a
Speaker 6: couple of courses in the south of France, he had
Speaker 6: some design work at the Poe Course in the southwest
Speaker 6: of France, but he really didn't go in He didn't
Speaker 6: really go into golf course design. He really spent most
Speaker 6: of his time on the rules committee and writing, and
Speaker 6: he played in a lot of very He was a
Speaker 6: superb amateur player, reached the finals of the Amateur one year,
Speaker 6: lost to Harold Hilton, that sort of thing. But he
Speaker 6: never really practices a golf architect, nor did Stuart Payton,
Speaker 6: his friend at WOK.
Speaker 3: Right now, around the same time, golf world is dealing
Speaker 3: with the introduction of the Haskell ball, which went enormously
Speaker 3: farther than previous models of golf balls and created an
Speaker 3: existential crisis for golf and golf courses basically, either outlaw
Speaker 3: this ball or change the playing fields. And it turned
Speaker 3: out that the golf world decided to change the playing fields,
Speaker 3: and further, it turned out that this led to a
Speaker 3: lot of great architecture. But Low was right at the
Speaker 3: center of the debate about the Haskell ball about and
Speaker 3: the debate about how golf courses should transform in order
Speaker 3: to accommodate it. So what was his role in that discussion.
Speaker 6: There is a temptation to think that Low came up
Speaker 6: with his architectural theories as a response to the Hassle.
Speaker 6: I don't think that works Chronologically. He came up with
Speaker 6: his notions of strategical of architecture before the Haskell appeared
Speaker 6: in Britain, before anybody really, but almost a year before
Speaker 6: it appeared. We can argue that, you know, it seems
Speaker 6: to me that but he was he was stridently opposed
Speaker 6: to the Haskell from the get go. In fact, he
Speaker 6: was made an object of fun and cartoons for years.
Speaker 5: He was so adamant about it and what his fear was.
Speaker 6: And this takes us to the current issues with the
Speaker 6: solid core ball. What really concerns me about it was
Speaker 6: that it represented an early technology whose further development was unpredictable.
Speaker 6: The woundcore ball was brand new, unlike anything that anybody
Speaker 6: had seen before, and while clearly in nineteen oh two
Speaker 6: nineteen oh three went farther than the gutty. What really
Speaker 6: bothered him was how much farther it might go in
Speaker 6: the future, because nobody knew and the technology had been
Speaker 6: had not been developed, and there was no reason to
Speaker 6: think it wouldn't be developed, and that's what freaked him out.
Speaker 6: And at bottom, what he was trying to do in
Speaker 6: both the context of the rules and the context of
Speaker 6: golf architecture and ultimately in the context of the Haskell,
Speaker 6: is to protect the traditional Scottish game. And if balls
Speaker 6: could be if balls were going all of a sudden
Speaker 6: sixty yards farther than they used to, golf courses didn't
Speaker 6: work anymore. The hazards didn't work. That auto ring a
Speaker 6: bell in twenty nineteen. But that was a critical issue,
Speaker 6: is that golf courses couldn't possibly keep up with the
Speaker 6: technological developments of the ball. And he beat that drum
Speaker 6: as hard as he could until he became chairman of
Speaker 6: the Rules Committee in nineteen thirteen. By then, everybody he
Speaker 6: was very upset about the huge array of different golf
Speaker 6: balls out there. It was just a blizzard of golf balls,
Speaker 6: no rules applied at all. He becomes chairman, the rules
Speaker 6: could be nineteen thirteen, World War One intervenes when they
Speaker 6: come back first, the first thing he does is begin
Speaker 6: the process of drafting limitations on the ball, which are
Speaker 6: finally inactive in nineteen twenty one, and then he sort
Speaker 6: of retires as chairman but continues to serve in the
Speaker 6: committee after that. But it was a huge issue for Low.
Speaker 6: It cost him, no doubt, a lot of emotional capital.
Speaker 6: People made fun of him, laughed at him, but he
Speaker 6: saw it as a profound threat to the game, and I.
Speaker 5: Think he was right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, that's what I'm going to ask bluntly, Have
Speaker 3: Low's nightmares come true?
Speaker 6: Well, the story's probably more complicated than that in the sense. Well, yeah,
Speaker 6: I think in many respects. In twenty nineteen the Hair Country,
Speaker 6: we have ineffectual, what appear to be ineffectual regulation of
Speaker 6: golf balls. Something needs to be done because they are
Speaker 6: outstripping the ability of golf architects to match up with them.
Speaker 6: And there's no reason to think that's going to change
Speaker 6: in the future. Maybe it will, maybe the technology will plateau.
Speaker 6: I don't know, but there's no reason. I get no
Speaker 6: assurances that it will, and there's every indication it will
Speaker 6: continue to ramp up, they'll find.
Speaker 5: Various ways to increase distance.
Speaker 6: So yes, I mean, it's absolutely and in fact, I'm
Speaker 6: shocked there's been so little written about what I call
Speaker 6: the Haskell, the post Haskell interregnum, that period between the
Speaker 6: appearance of the Hassle and the first limitations on balls
Speaker 6: in nineteen twenty one. There's been remarkably a little written
Speaker 6: about what happened.
Speaker 5: During those two decades. But it was this.
Speaker 6: Wild, crazy, wild West of golf balls that just anything went,
Speaker 6: and it did go. I mean there was this different course,
Speaker 6: different covering, size, shape, some floated, some didn't. They use
Speaker 6: liquid centers, metal centers, all sorts of stuff, and it
Speaker 6: was crazy, and it got so crazy that by nineteen
Speaker 6: twelve nineteen thirteen, the delegates to the Amateur said, look,
Speaker 6: we gotta find we can't have all these players coming
Speaker 6: in here and playing the Amateur with wildly different golf balls.
Speaker 6: They're playing different games, so let's adopt a standard golf ball.
Speaker 6: And that began the process. It took ten more years
Speaker 6: essentially to enact rules that limited golf balls.
Speaker 3: Right now here we are today, and it seems like
Speaker 3: in some respects the wild West has returned. Though there
Speaker 3: is some some standardization of the technology. We have come
Speaker 3: a long way in golf ball technology since nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 6: We really have, and and the parallels to me with
Speaker 6: twenty nineteen, you know, current period strike me. They're just
Speaker 6: so obvious they jump off the table.
Speaker 5: But some of the other.
Speaker 6: Debates that Low is in the middle of are still
Speaker 6: relevant too. I mean, the penal versus strategic golf architecture
Speaker 6: issues still appear in how the US Open sets up
Speaker 6: US Open venues.
Speaker 5: You know, should we.
Speaker 6: Narrow the fairways, get the rough up knee high, or
Speaker 6: should we let the golf course try to handle these folks?
Speaker 6: You know, rule It still comes up in rules issues
Speaker 6: today there's this Low would be spinning in his grave.
Speaker 6: Today's there's this great desire to have make rules fair
Speaker 6: in the sense that we're going to interject into the
Speaker 6: rules intent. So did he mean to do something improper
Speaker 6: or did he just do it? Two prongs for the
Speaker 6: proof he both did it and he meant to do it.
Speaker 6: Lowold have said, no, he did it. That's it. You know,
Speaker 6: that's it, and it's easier to administer, you know, did
Speaker 6: he do it or did it's not whether he meant
Speaker 6: to do it, So you know, did he mean to
Speaker 6: addressed the ball. Well, he either addressed the ball or
Speaker 6: he didn't. You know, that's sort of if the ball moves.
Speaker 6: So I find all sorts of places where the battles
Speaker 6: Low fought more than one hundred years ago haven't gone away.
Speaker 6: In fact, I want to make the argument, this is
Speaker 6: a little bold, I guess that were there have been
Speaker 6: since eighteen ninety five or so, two basic polls, two
Speaker 6: visions of how golf ought to be at its best.
Speaker 6: One is Low's conservative view, and one is the Party
Speaker 6: of Equity view, which is the Party of Equity view
Speaker 6: being And I think these camps still largely describe different
Speaker 6: views about golf. The golf ought to be an objective
Speaker 6: athletic test, and the more objective the test, the better.
Speaker 6: And that means straight, you know, fair rules for everybody,
Speaker 6: all sorts of things, or the conservative rule, which is
Speaker 6: that you know, none of that is really relevant to
Speaker 6: what makes golf great. It's more of a test of intelligence, perseverance, courage,
Speaker 6: all sorts of things, ability to analyze a golf course.
Speaker 6: That's sort of thing. So a lot of that carries forward.
Speaker 3: And that gets it something I'm curious about putting a
Speaker 3: finer point on as we navigate the current debates about golf,
Speaker 3: which are so similar to the debates that have happened
Speaker 3: through history in that often they take the form of
Speaker 3: these two opposing camps that you're describing. How can John
Speaker 3: Lowe teach us a way forward?
Speaker 5: There?
Speaker 3: Can he teach us a way to navigate these waters?
Speaker 6: Lowe was, although he didn't ever really put it this way,
Speaker 6: but Lowe was really part of a of a long
Speaker 6: running theme in golf golf history which runs back to
Speaker 6: Arnold Holtein, which tracks up through various people in fifties
Speaker 6: to sixties, and it's picked up again brilliantly by John Updike,
Speaker 6: And that theme is that golf is about testing yourself.
Speaker 6: It's about character, it's about it's. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 6: as much character, logical and intangible in that way as
Speaker 6: it is a competitive athletic export. And if you miss
Speaker 6: out on that first part, you're really you're missing what's
Speaker 6: what's most intriguing about golf. It's a maddening, sometimes unfair,
Speaker 6: sometimes very fair, but fascinating sport. And if you're in
Speaker 6: it just for the athletic achievement. You miss all that
Speaker 6: now that the athletic achievement is certainly well rewarded these days,
Speaker 6: but it is it is not something that Low thought
Speaker 6: was important to the game to make sure that athletic,
Speaker 6: the athleticism of the game is fair, transparent, and the
Speaker 6: tests are objective. That would he would have found all
Speaker 6: that anathema to what he thought was really the best
Speaker 6: about golf.
Speaker 3: And a true test of character comes through adventure and
Speaker 3: challenge and things happening that are unexpected and perhaps unfair,
Speaker 3: and the test is whether you can deal with that
Speaker 3: and persevere. You know, it seems to me that golf
Speaker 3: in the eighteen hundreds was so much more like mountaineering
Speaker 3: than it is now. And it seems like there is
Speaker 3: this there is this trust, or this this desire that
Speaker 3: we have in the present day to find equipment that
Speaker 3: will allow us to put that in the past, to
Speaker 3: subvert or to do an end run around the test
Speaker 3: of character, to kind of get ourselves to the top
Speaker 3: of the mountain using implements. But of course that's the
Speaker 3: that's to the side of what the what the real
Speaker 3: appeal of the game is, which is that it's you
Speaker 3: against the golf course, and you're going to try to
Speaker 3: try to overcome it using what you have inside you.
Speaker 3: It seems like, are are we losing that? And have we?
Speaker 5: Have?
Speaker 3: We been losing that for a long time.
Speaker 6: Well, I think we have, And I think you say, well,
Speaker 6: what was at the heart of his argument against the Haskell,
Speaker 6: which is that it makes the game easier and and
Speaker 6: that shouldn't be a goal. What what golf legislators should
Speaker 6: aim for is a game that is challenging, that presents
Speaker 6: to you temptations that create great anxiety about whether to
Speaker 6: take them on or not, where failure to pull things
Speaker 6: off can be somehow a disaster, and that adds to
Speaker 6: the thrill and drama of standing on a tee trying
Speaker 6: to decide where to hit your ball. Yes, I mean,
Speaker 6: and the Haskell, to the extent, is much longer than
Speaker 6: the older balls and rendered so many courses obsolete. Took
Speaker 6: those choices out of out of out of play. I
Speaker 6: mean they did, they just didn't matter as much and
Speaker 6: did over today, and the ball has the same effect.
Speaker 6: Low made similar. Maybe it was a sort of a
Speaker 6: disaster in all ways. But he was involved with the
Speaker 6: banning of the Schenectady Putter, which I don't know if
Speaker 6: you're familiar with that story, but days back to nineteen
Speaker 6: oh eight, and it was a disaster.
Speaker 5: I mean, the Americans won't like that.
Speaker 6: The RNA didn't the whole idea of a center shafter
Speaker 6: club low found to make the game too easy, although
Speaker 6: it turned out it really didn't, and there was almost
Speaker 6: a split between the RNA and the USGA, and it
Speaker 6: was a big mess, which in part accounts for why
Speaker 6: they were so careful when they rolled out the first
Speaker 6: ball rules to bring in the USJ and do that together.
Speaker 6: But he was the same issues applied. The idea of
Speaker 6: making the game easier is a misnomer, and we need
Speaker 6: to avoid that temptation because it's deeply tempting, and it
Speaker 6: makes Related to that is the notion that we shouldn't
Speaker 6: have as a main goal as a golf legislator making
Speaker 6: the game more popular, and that's I think an inevitable
Speaker 6: part of opposing better and better balls, you know, keeping balls,
Speaker 6: you know, not at the technological max, but somewhere before
Speaker 6: you get there. That because the high school was enormostly popular,
Speaker 6: and one of the reasons the RNA Rules Committee didn't
Speaker 6: act on it because they were afraid to create a
Speaker 6: schism in the game, and they probably those fears might
Speaker 6: have been well placed low thought, though the threat was
Speaker 6: significant enough to risk it.
Speaker 3: So same thing today. People are afraid of blowing apart
Speaker 3: the game or ruining its popularity. But as you say
Speaker 3: that the popularity, you can't have the goal of making
Speaker 3: something popular. Everybody knows that if you try to be popular,
Speaker 3: you're you're never gonna be. It's putting the cart before
Speaker 3: the horse. There's got to be a compelling experience and
Speaker 3: then it'll become popular.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: My guess, and this is just one guy's guess, is
Speaker 6: that there's if you took the latest and greatest balls
Speaker 6: out of people's hands and did a rollback, and based
Speaker 6: on what we can discuss some other time, it would
Speaker 6: be enormously unpopular initially, I think, though over time it
Speaker 6: would have really no effect on the game. People would
Speaker 6: come back to it. I've never understood, for example, the
Speaker 6: opposition of ball manufacturers to a rollback, because people would
Speaker 6: have used just as many balls as they ever did now.
Speaker 6: Their Their fear might be that fewer people would play
Speaker 6: golf with a shorter ball.
Speaker 5: Maybe for a while.
Speaker 6: I think people would still come back to the game
Speaker 6: after after a period of adjustment and golf courses.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: Part of something I wanted to talk to you about
Speaker 6: is that I think part of all of this too,
Speaker 6: and this is modern times, is this hickory move hickory
Speaker 6: shaft movement and people playing with gold per Simmon clubs
Speaker 6: and the old Wilson staff irons, is they want to
Speaker 6: get back to a game that matches up better with
Speaker 6: these older golf courses, and it's just much more fun to.
Speaker 5: Play, right.
Speaker 3: There is that discovery and it gets made fun of
Speaker 3: a little bit, right, you know, it's I think it
Speaker 3: seems sort of like an affectation to people. But and
Speaker 3: I've never gotten hickories myself. I haven't tried it. I
Speaker 3: may not even really I think I've rolled myself back
Speaker 3: through my lack of ability. But I sometimes think about
Speaker 3: getting an older model of driver, you know, maybe a
Speaker 3: late nineties driver with a smaller head, and seeing what
Speaker 3: the game is like with that. But but it seems
Speaker 3: so much about about leveling the playing field a little
Speaker 3: bit between the golfer and the course, reintroducing that sense
Speaker 3: of the golf course as a piece of nature that
Speaker 3: is imposing and intimidating and difficult and unyielding, and you're
Speaker 3: you're given the barest implements to to conquer it, and
Speaker 3: so that if you do conquer it, there's a wonderful
Speaker 3: sense of achievement. I don't know if the current model
Speaker 3: of driver especially provides that same thrill of achievement, because
Speaker 3: you know, for many people, even for a player like
Speaker 3: me just slightly above average, hitting that kind of driver
Speaker 3: is pretty easy, right, There's not much misery involved in
Speaker 3: and going playing a round of golf with a driver
Speaker 3: like that. Sometimes the ball goes in the fair way
Speaker 3: every single time. And uh, and so when you when
Speaker 3: you have a when you hit a good shot, or
Speaker 3: when you go through a really good round, there's not
Speaker 3: the same thrill. And so it seems like people are
Speaker 3: trying to get that back. I don't think they're trying
Speaker 3: to be pretentious. I think they're just trying to find
Speaker 3: a different way of experiencing the land.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I could agree with you more. I would add that,
Speaker 6: and I've played some here. I don't own any, but
Speaker 6: I've played with some hittories. Is that you end up
Speaker 6: playing different kinds of shots too, which a much wider
Speaker 6: variety of shots. You don't hit the usual driver lofted
Speaker 6: iron into the green ball lands and checks and that's it.
Speaker 6: You play stuff on the ground because you're farther back
Speaker 6: and you know all sorts of It's just a whole
Speaker 6: different variety of shots that you have to think about.
Speaker 3: Playing, right, So well, thank you so much for talking
Speaker 3: to me today, Bob. That was fascinating. I'm very much
Speaker 3: looking forward to your book, as I'm sure many people
Speaker 3: are about, John Lowe. Could you give us a sense.
Speaker 3: I know you're in the midst of writing it. I
Speaker 3: know what it's like to be in the middle of
Speaker 3: a project and have somebody ask you about the end point.
Speaker 3: It can that can feel not very good. But where
Speaker 3: are you in the process and what can we look
Speaker 3: forward to in the future from you?
Speaker 6: I was worried you're going to ask me that question. Sorry,
Speaker 6: I'm guessing maybe a year, maybe slightly less. I mean,
Speaker 6: the basics are in place, I just need to bring
Speaker 6: them all together. I'm going back over some older things
Speaker 6: today before we talk, and they could use some work.
Speaker 3: But yes, Grace, all right, well, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Looking forward to that book and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks.
Speaker 5: Enjoyed it enormously.
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Speaker 3: We do the digging for you.