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