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 brid egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egg, frid Egg.
Bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hum.
Hello and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we have a special episode on a particular aspect of match play golf, or I should say something that used to be a factor in match play, and that is the stymy. Basically, a stymy worked like this. You and your opponent were both on the green, but your opponent's ball blocked your path to the hole. Today you can ask your opponent to mark their ball and even move their mark out of your line.
But until seventy years ago, that wasn't the case. Unless the two balls were within six inches of each other, you just had to play it as it lay. You were stymied. As you can imagine, this led to all sorts of complications. It was an entire dimension of match play golf that good players had to master the strategy of it. The question of whether to create a stymy intentionally the techniques for playing around or over another ball, all that kind of stuff. But in the twentieth century
the steymy became controversial. Many golfers began to think of it as a relic of an old, antiquated form of the game, and finally, in nineteen fifty two, when the USGA and RNA came out with their first jointly published set of rules, the stymy was abolished. So the basic goal of this episode is to tell the story of the stymy, and I hope one thing that becomes clear is that it wasn't just a charming little core of
match play, though it certainly was. That it was also an embodiment of a whole attitude towards the game, an attitude that fell out of favor around the same time and for many of the same reasons that the stemy did, and the result was essentially modern golf. To learn more about this history, I called up Stephen Proctor.
My name is Stephen Proctor. I write books about the history of golf, narrative history books. My first book was about young Tom Morris, and I have a next one coming out next June that is about the age of golf before the Great War.
Stephen and I actually talked last year, so his book is available for pre order right now. It's called The Long Golden Afternoon. Now, a quick note on the format I'm using here. Some of you may be familiar with Frida Egg's stories are audio documentary series which I host. This episode has some elements of that, but it's not quite a full fledged documentary narrative. The focus is really on the interview I did with Stephen, and I started that interview by asking him to tell three stories about
three different stymies. I wanted to understand how the stemy functioned in an actual high stakes golf match. So story number one, John Henry Taylor versus Horace Hutchinson, eighteen eighty eight.
You know what would happen is that players who are looking to establish their reputation as a gifted golfer could often do so by the lofting of a brilliant stymy in a critical moment. So in eighteen eighty eight, John Henry Taylor is a young man, not yet a professional. He's just a greenkeeper at Northam, at the westward Hoe golf course there where he was born in Northam, and he plays in a match as a member of the working Man's Club against the Amateur champion, the reigning Amateur Champion,
Horace Hutchinson, for whom he had previously worked as a bootblack. Honestly, so it was a kind of an interesting match in that regard.
Taylor, by the way, went on to become a five time Open champion and, along with James Bray and Harry Varden, one of the so called great Triumvirate of golf in the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds.
In any case, John Henry Taylor surprisingly beats Hutchinson, and he notes in his memoir with great pride, and if you don't mind, I'll just quote it. It may be that mister Hutchinson treated me with some tolerance, but the truth must be told that once I had a grip on him, I stuck to him with a greater intensity and finished him off by winning three and two, successfully pitching a stymy with my one and only iron on
the sixteenth green. So you can see that he took a bit of pride in the fact that he had one iron. It was probably a mid iron, I would guess, or a mashiet, but it wasn't a very high lofted iron like a niblick or what we would think of as a sand wedge, And he was able to loft the ball over a Hutchinson's ball and drop it directly into the cup and win the match with that shot. And those were the kinds of things that could establish a reputation for you as a crafty, skilled golfer.
Yeah, and so the ability to negotiate a stymy could be a particular point of pride for a golfer in this era.
It most certainly was, and I think the players who opposed to the stymy being eliminated felt that it took a key level of match play skill out of the game. And I'm pretty sure that Bobby Jones was in that same category. He was brilliant at lofting stymy's, putting around stymi's, as were most of the great players of the age, Willie Park Junior, John Henry Taylor as we mentioned, and others.
Story number two Freddie Tait versus Douglas Rowland eighteen ninety four.
In eighteen ninety four, the first Open Championship ever to be played on English soil was conducted at Royal Saint George's where the Open happened this year. Naturally, as part of that, they wanted to have a special event to supplement the Open itself. And what they did was they arranged a match between amateur golfers and professional golfers, eight
amateurs versus eight professionals. This was a per perfect time for that kind of match because amateurs, for the very first time in history, had shown the ability to play against and beat professionals. John Ball had won the eighteen ninety Open Championship as an amateur and Harold Hilton followed that up by winning the Open in eighteen ninety two as an amateur, both of them players from Hoyley.
It's worth noting.
In eighteen ninety four the amateur players didn't do nearly so well in that match as the amateurs who ran the game hoped for. Only John Ball and Freddie Tate, the great hero of Scotland, manages to five even around. Freddie Tate went on to almost get to the final and it was a stemy two stemies actually that thwarted him from getting there.
And that's the interesting.
Part about this story. He was playing against a man named Douglas Rowland, a professional from Scotland, a bit of a rascal, and on the eighth hole he was brutally stymied when he had a two up lead, so he ended up having that hole that he should have won and taken a three up lead into the ninth hole, which is a pretty tough lead in a match at the turn. He ended up then fighting against Roland the whole way on the back nine and the match was
all squares they came to the seventeenth. On the seventeenth hole, Freddy Tait hits a gorgeous approach to the green that's probably four feet from the hole. Rowland's approach is way wide, forty to fifty feet from the hole, but when he puts, he puts offline and leaves Freddy with the dead stymy. The dead stymy prevents Freddy from winning that hole, which would have left him with the one up lead going
into the eighteenth and thereby almost unbeatable. Unfortunately, the match ends up being haved in regulation and Freddy loses on the twentieth hole. And it was really those kinds of stymies that prevented somebody from winning a match in which they had clearly played better, that turned people against the Stimy in the long run.
In other words, there was a sense that this was unfair.
There was a sense, yes, that it was unfair in the regard that Freddie Tate lost the match when he played better golf, and of course Roland then went on to win the whole thing against John Henry Taylor, the great English golfer who had won the Open that year at Saint George's, tremendous breakthrough for English golf.
Yeah, so it seems like in this case the Steymy injected a kind of chaos into the match.
Yes, that is pretty rare that it produced that kind of outcome, but it did on occasion, and that was the thing that aroused the ire against the stymy to begin with, is that in certain matches, at certain critical moments, Steymy's would prevent the right person from winning. On the other hand, other people looked at it as a fabulous way for Douglas Rowland to stay in the match when he was clearly up against it.
So it depended on your point of view.
Finally, story number three, Cyril Tlly versus Bobby Jones nineteen thirty, the year that Jones won the Grand Slam, which back then consisted of the US and British Opens and the US and British Amateur Championships.
Certainly the most difficult tournament to win, at least in Jones' opinion in the mine also is the British Amateur Championship, because you have to win a million, not million, but seven or eight singles matches and then a thirty six hole final. And obviously, as match play shows all the time, and the reason television hates it is that anything can happen in an eighteen hole match, and a person who might be considered an inferior player can get on a
heater and defeat a great golfer. In any case, Jones was playing in the nineteen thirty Amateur in one of his late matches to get into the final against a man named Cyril Taly, a big burley golfer from England who was a great golfer and one of the top figures of that age. He is playing against Tolly and beats him on one hole by virtue of the fact that Tolly accidentally stymies himself, allowing Jones to win the hole.
And Jones himself wrote in his own book Down the Fairway, I believe that he regretted winning the tournament in that way, and he probably wouldn't have been able to advance because Tally had to drop on him at that moment. And winning that hole when he would have maybe lost it proved pivotal in the outcome of that Amateur championship and eventually, obviously in Jones completing the Grand Slam. That's probably the most famous stemy in history.
Yeah, and this one was where he stemied himself. And when you say steymied himself, you mean that Jones's ball was quite close to the hole and Tolly accidentally hit a lag putt that was farther away from the hole, and Jones's ball was in the way.
Correct, That is exactly what happened.
And maybe the usual stemy scenario that we would think of would be the opposite, where a player farther away from the hole would stemy the other player by lagging it up closer in between the other player's ball and the hole exactly.
And this kind of steymy was the sort of stymy that really raised Hackles about the outcome of the match, because Tali had just inadvertently in lagging his putt stuck it right behind Jones's ball, and there was pretty much no way he could negotiate the stymy without knocking Jones's ball into the hole. And of course, if you did that under the Steymy rule, Jones would have been considered to have hold his previous shot and therefore it would
all be over. So those kinds of stimys were more painful, I think than even the Roland one, which you could take a two edged point of view on that. You could take the point of view that Roland did a brilliant thing in preserving himself by steymying Tate, or you could take the point of view that he unfairly won by steymying Tate. But there were at least two distinct
point of views. But most people, and I think even the winner himself, acknowledged that nobody likes to win when somebody accidentally stymies themselves.
Right, Yeah, there's something ungentlemanly about it, but you know that's golf, okay, So why don't we go back to the beginning. Could you just tell me about the origins of the Steymy in some of the earliest rules of golf. Where did it come from, how did it come about that this was a thing that was a feature of golf.
Certainly, the Steymy was never actually written down itself as a rule. It evolved from the understanding of the original thirteen rules that were created in seventeen forty four by the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith, who later became the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. They got from the City of Edinburgh that year a silver club to compete for annually
over their links. But the one thing that was necessary was a set of rules for the game to be played by, and so they wrote down the original thirteen rules. Rule six of those rules stipulated that in a circumstance in which two balls laid very close to one another, the ball closest to the hole could be picked up while the other ball was played. So they were referring primarily to situations what you would call through the green,
on the fairway or somewhere else. But it was inferred from that that you were not able to move your ball under any circumstance other than that circumstance, and so it eventually evolved into a rule whereby if a ball was within six inches of your ball and within six inches of the hole, it could be lifted, but no other circumstance could it be lifted. So and then eventually it just became a rule where you couldn't pick up your ball on the green at all in a match.
This only applied to when you had an opponent's ball blocking your ball. If you were in a stroke play match, you were not considered to have an opponent per se. You was only in match play that this applied, And that's how the rule came to be in existence.
So, in other words, it was defined negatively. The rule said, this is the specific scenario in which you can pick up the ball or pick a request that an opponent's ball be picked up, if your balls are within six inches of each other and within six inches of the hole. And it was a since that was the you know, the one situation where you could pick up the ball. It was, as you said, inferred that in all other situations you couldn't.
It's definitely defined by its negative I think the original rule referred only to balls in play, not specific to whether they were on the green or not on the green. And then eventually the rule that was adopted by clubs was that if you were on the green and within six inches of the hole. There were circumstances in which a ball closer to the hole could be lifted, but
under no other circumstances. So you're right in the sense that people inferred from that that the only two times you could touch your ball was to put it on a tee and to pick it up out of the hole.
That was how golf was always played.
And of course the player actually never did either of those two things.
They had their caddy do it. But that's neither here nor there.
Am I right to say that no player would admit to intentionally stymying his opponent.
That is correct the way the original rule was written in the original thirteen rules. As we talked about at the beginning, one of those was you are not to play against your opponent's ball. You're to play fairly for the hole. So the noble idea was that stymis were always accidental, but the real idea was that they were
they were not always accidental. You can be sure that Roland wanted to hold his putt, but if he didn't hold it, he wanted it to stop in between Freddy's in the hole, that's for sure.
And you know, players I.
Can assure you that the man chipping off the green against McClain was hoping that if he didn't make it would stop in between McLain's ball in the hole, because.
It saved you.
It gave you one last out, you know, one last get out of jail free card. So you know, I think it was just really had a level of tension in a man because of the last minute uncertainty that it could occur from a devastating stymy that was unanticipated.
Yeah, And you know, and when you're playing one of those shots, when you're behind on a hole and you're and you're lagging a ball up or you're chipping a ball when your opponent's ball is closer to the whole part of your calculation, your silent calculation, you would not admit to this is this is the good place, This
is the good side to miss two. And this is about the pace that I need to play this shot at because if it doesn't go in the hole, which would be the best scenario, if it doesn't go in the hole, then at least I want it to end up between my opponent's ball and the hole, and so that that would be in a player's mind, you think.
There is no question that that was in Roland's mind at the moment he made that puck, and I don't doubt that any player who laid a stymy on another player had that thought in the back of his mind that if this doesn't go in, it would be best if it stymied him.
Now for a quick word from our sponsor, Club Champion. A Club Champion is a new sponsor. They are the best in the business at club fitting. So I've been personally I could talk to this for a very long time. I've been going to Club Champion since before it was Club Champion. I used to get my clubs fit by one of the founders of Club Champion out of his
garage when I was in high school. And it's been really fun as a consumer, as a customer of theirs, to watch them grow from a garage into this huge corporation that has club fitting centers all over the country. They are the best in the business. It is an experience. Go there, They get you on track man, and you
get to try out a bunch of different clubs. I think that the big thing that I admire most about Club Champion is just the idea of like going there with an open mindset and they will get you dialed in with the best equipment for you. This is you know, golf equipment is not a X brand is the best
brand for everybody. That's That's not how it works. Go in there with an open mind and get the best clubs for you, and they will get you the best chef's, best irons, drivers, whatever you get fit for for your game. So go to club Champion golf dot com. That's Club Champion golf dot com to find a location near you and schedule a fitting today. And if you use the promo code Frida Egg just Friday Egg, no spaces, you will get twenty percent off you're fitting with the purchase
of a club. So if you use the promo code Friday Egg, you will get twenty percent off your fitting. That's not an inconsequential number. There is some value there. So go to club Champion golf dot com to schedule you're fitting today.
So let's let's go back to the kind of origins of the stemy rule. It was initially defined by its opposite. This is the situation in which you can pick up the ball. Could you talk a little bit about the sort of philosophical and cultural implications of the Stemy rule, and generally of the principle that you need to play the ball as it lies, of which the Steymy might be the ultimate example. Right.
I do think that the Steymy itself and that original rule six of the thirteen Rules of Golf helped create the notion that you should play your ball as it lies by the inference that you're not allowed to touch
it at any given time. The only other rule that existed where you were allowed to pick up your ball was if your ball landed next to something that would break your golf club what they referred to as break club, meaning like a giant stone or something, then you were allowed to move your ball with a penalty or watery filth as they called it, because they played on the seaside and you know, slimy seaweed and things would wash up on the shore and your ball could land in
those and you couldn't really play very effectively from the watery filth as it were, and you were allowed to take your ball and drop it behind and take a penalty. But from those rules it became clear that you were never allowed to touch your ball, and so evolved the notion that you play the ball as it lies, and
that's a critically important part of golf culturally. I also think it goes to the notion that golf is a game in which you encounter rubs of the green that are horrible, but that are part of the challenge of it.
And I think that's probably the more culturally significant aspect of the stymy, is that the people who really loved the stymy and wanted it to be maintained felt that it corrupted the game every single time you tried to eliminate a possible rub of the green, which of course has been the thing that people have been trying to do since the beginning without cessation and continue to try to do today, is to remove the difficult bounces and make everything quote fair.
So let's talk about some of the arguments against the stemy. There were arguments against the stemy early on, and obviously they increased, but what were the basic main arguments against the stemy.
I would say the principal argument against the steimy was that it was unfair in the sense that it often produced winners who weren't deserving. As many people felt that Douglas Rolin was not deserving of the victory that he earned over Freddie Tait in that Gentleman versus Players match at Sandwich in eighteen ninety four. That was probably the main underlying issue.
With it, you know.
I think in particular, as the game spread from Scotland, this notion that it should be fair begins to creep into the game and one of the various first places where you see that is the objections to the Stymy And I think the English people who took up the game didn't have the same reverential view of it that Scottish people did, and they began to view it in a different way. And it was English people primarily who had,
you know, campaigned to change the Steymy rule first. You know, before the formation of the Rules Committee at Saint Andrews in eighteen ninety seven, there was huge commotion to try to get a universal set of rules for a very fast growing game and the ultimate result of that was Saint Andrews became the governing body of golf at that time.
But during that agitation, which included years worth of letters to the editor in the Field magazine newspaper, the Country Gentlemen's newspaper by the way, and these had a lot to do with the stymy, and they just it was the English who generally felt the stymy was not fair, and when the game really took root in America, that idea only quadrupled. The Americans in particular loathed the stymy and didn't understand why it should be part of the game.
They felt that every player should have a fair chance to hold his ball and that a ball interfering with their ball ought to be removed out of their way to give them a chance to make the putt they had in.
Front of them.
Was the emergence of stroke play as the dominant form of golf also a.
Factor here, Probably not since stymy's mostly figured in match play, so I wouldn't say that, but I do think stroke play would have this effect on it, Garrett, which is that English people took the rather rare step of keeping their score even in a match, which drove the Scots absolutely crazy. And Americans were me even more obsessive about their score than the English had been before them. And so if you are a person who's keeping their score match, well,
a steymy is going to affect your score. So yes, in that regard, I mean it didn't factor in stroke play. It was a match play rule, but it did keep you from making a great score, and anything that could keep you from making a great score was an anathema to Americans in particular, and somewhat to the English before them, because it was the English really who adopted stroke play as there what they felt was the purest test of a champion.
Scott's never thought that, and I don't think they do now.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess my argument would be that even if it was never a rule that affected stroke play, the devotion that somebody has to stroke play, or the idea that somebody has that stroke play is golf, right, that that is what golf is trying to make a score, trying to do as well as you can individually against
the course, as opposed to beating your opponent. The more you have that idea of golf, the less likely you are probably to embrace something like the Steymy, where somebody else is impacting your game.
I think that's completely fair to say, Garrett, in one percent true. You know, the English invented a competition called the bogie competition. This is another thing that drove the Scott's completely mad and for many years, De Royal and Ancient absolutely refused to write any rules that applied to bogie competitions because, as far as they were concerned, that
was not golf. In any case, the bogie competition was one in which a ground score was set for the golf course, which was essentially the score that the best club player could probably make on any given hole. And instead of playing a match against a component, you played a match against Colonel Bogie. In other words, did you beat the bogie score that hole? If you did, you won the hole. If you didn't, you lost the hole.
And when you were playing that kind of match against Colonel Bogie, that only increases this idea that I need to make great scores. And so was those kinds of evolutions that helped stroke play become the dominant form of golf.
You know, the very first thing that helped stroke play become a dominant form of golf was Tommy Morris Junior started making some absurd scores that made people realize, my goodness, you can put up a great score if you're really trying and if you have the capability, and that did start to get people interested in stroke play, and then it kept going from there.
So was Colonel Bogie, the first emergence of par as a dominant force in golf.
It's they're linked together, but not completely. You know, the Bogie score was usually not as good as what you would consider a par score, because a professional would be better than your best club pro.
So we've outlined some of the arguments against the stymy and where they might have come from. What about the arguments in response to those in favor of the stymy? What did people say?
The people who loved the stymy, and those included Bobby Jones and many of the high level amateurs who played golf in Britain, probably as well professionals, but mostly the amateurs, since they were the ones who primarily played match play at that time, favored the stymy because they felt it was one of the most skillful shots in the game. To be able to negotiate to steymy took great skill and anybody who has ever watched Bobby Jones loft over a stymy on his videos can see that it's rather
an artful shot. Willie Park Junior was a master at putting around stymy's, and he in his book The Art of Putting, he explains the art of slicing or drawing putts to avoid stymy's, So it was considered a highly
skilled part of the game. And the early players in golf truly valued the skill that risks required to get the gutty ball airborne, to make it fly straight, to execute these kinds of shots, and they felt and still you know that the introduction of rubber balls and these other kinds of changes were taking the skill out of the game.
So that's one our given in favor of the stimy. Surely another argument would be the traditional one of play the ball as it lies. Rub of the green is
part of golf. And it seems to me that these two arguments are somewhat at odds with each other, right, because on the one hand, you're saying the steymy is unfair, and you need to accept that as part of golf, as part of rub of the green, the stymy being, you know, one of the ultimate rubs of the green, and that's a that's a perfectly persuasive argument in its
own right. But then you have another argument that you know, skilled players can negotiate a stymy, which is essentially saying, actually, the stemy is fair, right, And so were these two arguments somewhat somewhat at odds, you know, I.
Think you could see it that way. I guess.
I feel as if it's more the question of touching your ball that makes people rebel against the notion of
eliminating the stymy. Is many people, and like let's take for example, the amateur Robert Harris, who is a amateur champion in nineteen twenty five, and you know, just a leading figure of his age during that pre war period and after the war, and when he wrote a memoir called Sixty Years of Golf, and it came out not very long after the stymy was eliminated from the rule book, and he has a chapter in there about rules changes, most of which is devoted to an apoplectic reaction to
the emanation of the stymy, and he says things in the essay like it will result in unnatural and distasteful man handling of the ball. Crude, grotesque and ungolf like situations are possible. So people had a very passionate devotion to this notion that you can't touch your ball ever, and that I think was one of the principal reasons that people opposed eliminating the stymy.
Well, so I love the language of man handling.
The bl a natural and distasteful man handling.
Of the ball. Another outspoken proponent of the stymy was the great Bobby Jones, as Stephen mentioned earlier, and one of my favorite stemy stories can be found in Jones's book Golf Is My Game, which he published in nineteen sixty. The story goes like this. Jack McLain and Johnny Fisher are facing off in the finals of the nineteen thirty six US Amateur. They're on the thirty fourth hole of a thirty six hole match, and McLain is one up. McLain plays the hole very well from tita green and
leaves his second shot within ten feet. Fisher, on the other hand, hits his drive in the rough, comes up short on his approach, and plays a mediocre chip barely closer to the hole than McLean's ball. So mclan is lying two and Fischer is lying three. If McLain wins the hole, he's two up with two to play and has great odds of winning the match and the title. Here's what Bobby Jones says in his book about the situation quote, Obviously, it was time for a conservative play
by mclin. The wise play here was to sneak his ball down as close as possible to the hole, leaving Fisher the job of holing his putt to avoid being two down with two to play. A good putt here would make a punishing stymy impossible unquote, but that is not what McLain does. He plays aggressively and his putt overruns the hole by more than three feet. This, in turn gives Fisher room to lay a stymy by nudging his ball between McLean's and the hole. So suddenly McLain's
advantage is gone. Whereas Fisher has a short putt for a bogie five, McLain needs to negotiate a stymy with his fourth shot. Once again, McClain plays boldly, trying to chip over Fisher's ball and hole out, and once again he goes a few feet past. McLain does make this putt, but he has to just to have the hole. So McLean remained one up, but Fisher took the thirty sixth hole and then won the playoff, and so history remembers Johnny Fisher as the nineteen thirty six US Amateur Champion.
Here's Bobby Jones again. Quote the stymy had been the decisive factor, but the blame lay squarely upon McLean. Whether it was the fault of his judgment or his putting touch, he had invited his own destruction. Without the possibility of the stymy, the situation on that thirty fourth green would have been completely routine. With the stymy always in the picture, suspense and excitement were present from the moment the players
walked onto the green. With the stymy in the game, match play golf becomes an exciting duel in which players must always be on guard against a sudden, often demoralizing thrust. In my observation, the stymy has more often been the means of enforcing a decision in favor of the deserving player, rather than the contrary. I think it merits respected place in the game. I know a return to it would greatly enhance the interest and excitement of match play golf
for player and spectator alike. What strikes me about this story is that it wasn't just a physical skill. It wasn't just a skill with having the shot or whatever. There was also a strategic aspect right Like anything in golf, there's a risk reward question here, How aggressively. Should you try to negotiate the stimy. Do you play really close to the ball, do you pitch it over, do you try to go for the hole? Do you try to just sort of lag it up there on a safe angle,
et cetera, et cetera. So I wonder if this was a common part of this discussion, that it wasn't just like a trick shot skill that you had to have, though players were proud of that, it was also a strategic aspect of match play on the green.
There is no question that that was something that was very highly valued by people who supported the stymy. There is a strategic aspect to how to deal with the stymy and when to take the risk of lofting it, when to take the risk of going for the hole. In that particular case, you know what McLain should have done is just lagged up and made sure he got a four. And you know, McLain clearly did make a misjudgment there in terms of how aggressively he attempted to negotiate that stymy.
So tell me about some of the specific shots that players used to get around Steymy's.
I would say most of the time, the preferred method was to put around it. You know, most of the time you weren't dead stymy, you were partially stymied, so you could put it. You could either depend on the borrow of the green as they would call it, to carry the ball down to the hole and just assume that you could then put a little bit farther right at the right pace, and then it would dribble into
the side of the cup. That was probably the most That was the safest method of getting around the stymy for the simple reason that if you didn't hold the putt, your next one was going to be very holable because you were just barely up to the lip probably, and you also probably could not be stymy a second time.
But in certain situations, in particular, if you were in a situation where there was a ball a foot in front of you and there was another ten or twelve feet between your ball and the hole, if you could just pitch the ball in the air and let it start rolling again, it could roll into the hole exactly the same way it does when someone chips in from off the green, no different than that shot, just executing it in a different moment and in a different way.
So those were the two primary methods. I think people only attempted to loft stemies if there was no other option. If it was absolutely dead in front of them and there was no brake or anything they could ride a little bit of or even a little slice on the ball wouldn't carry it down to the hole. Then they had to try to pitch the stymy. But that was a very very artful shot, and the ability to execute
it was highly prized. And obviously a player who had that shot in his bag is a dangerous match play golfer because even if you stymy them, they might still be able to win the hole, just as if they were putting.
How exactly would you go about lofting a stymy, What club would you use? What kind of technique would you use?
You would use a highly lofted club, like a modern sand wedge, sixty degree wedge, something like that. In those days they had niblicks. A typical niblick was probably around fifty six degrees of wedge, so common, you know, equivalent to a modern sand wedge. No bounce on it, though, something that makes it difficult to use, and you would just flatten it out and just pop the ball up
in the air. Enough that it carries the ball in front of it and then lands on the green and hopefully at a slow pace, trickles down.
Into the cup.
And you can see videos of Bobby Jones doing that and it's amazing thing to watch. There's a nice image too of John Henry Taylor doing it, I believe, in the Lonsdale Library book Golf. But it's a very crafty, artful shot.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a little risk shot. It's like you don't see it anywhere else because you don't use that club unless you're usually farther away from the hole, and so there's this little.
Like, yeah, it's a little tiny flick of the risk that gets it over the other ball. I mean, the big danger there is if you happen to scull the ball, the most likely outcome is you knock your opponent's ball in the hole and then lose the hole by virtue of having done so most of the time.
Right, So we've already sort of talked about this, but could you give me a general narrative of why you believe the tide of opinion shifted decisively against the stimy in the first half of the twentieth century.
I think when the game first spread into England, the notion of the game becoming more fair crept into it, and that thing was like a cancer that has continued
to grow from that day until this day. And it all only became metastasized when Americans started taking up the game in earnest because Americans were absolutely obsessed with low scores as the British many British players were before them, and as you pointed out earlier, Garrett, an obsession with low scores turns you against anything that produces a higher score, one of the most obvious being this silly rule that you couldn't pick up a ball that was obstructing your
way to the whole when you wanted to putt, and that is basically the root of it. And more and more as Americans began to play, they just rebelled against that rule. And of course they had their own governing body, which is a unique situation to the rest of the world. And eventually their governing body yielded to the many voices that didn't want the stymy, softened it, and finally eliminated it altogether. And then the royal and ancient went along. I don't know how reluctantly.
One of the interesting wrinkles here, and it's it might seem obvious, but it struck me as interesting that the most passionate voices against the Steymy within American golf tended to be farther away from England, right. You know, the more west you got, the more likely people were to oppose the Stymy. Right, it was the Western Golf Association.
I think it still limited it out right at one point. No, and I don't think that's untrue, Garrett. You know, obviously, when the game came to America, came to New York, initially, well, I mean obviously there were very ancient clubs in South Carolina and things, but the only club that stuck was the Saint Andrew's Golf Club of New York, which was founded in eighteen eighty eight and still exists today. So
the game had its epicenter in New York. And the reason that we stuck with the RNA was that Charles Blair MacDonald, who was so influential in early American golf and built the National Golf Links there on Long Island, was passionately devoted to keeping in check, in step lockstep with the Royal and Ancient, and you know that mostly has happened over time. But Americans are very independent and eventually they assert themselves on things they think are necessary.
And there have been.
Many examples of that, the Steymy being one, the steel shafts being another. It was a long time before the RNA agreed to allow steel shafts after the USGA had done it. And there have been various different points like that over time where the American sensibility about the game has overridden the Royal and Ancient sensibility of the game, but few fortunately.
Right, maybe you could give me just a basic narrative of exactly how the stemy was ultimately eliminated. So going forward through through the you know their alterations to the rule in the twenties and thirties by the USGA, how was it that eventually the international governing bodies agreed to eliminate the rule.
In nineteen fifty two, the Royal and Ancient and the USGA agreed to put out a joint set of rules to clarify any ambiguities and to have one that was for the first time in history, and this was a very important development for the history of the game. A set of rules jointly agreed upon by the two main governing bodies, and as part of that process, the USGA had already eliminated the Stymy in nineteen fifty one, and so as part of the negotiation is to come up
with the joint set of rules. It was agreed that the Stymy rule would be eliminated from both codes of rules, and that's ultimately how it happened. But it was the USGA that ultimately undid the Stymy, partly by virtue of movements from other associations like the Western Golf Association, and partly from unrest within their own organization about the Stymy and the way it produced unfair winners or whatever you
would like to call them. So it was the United States that finally put the nail in the coffin of the Stymy.
Do you have a sense of why the RNA was ultimately amenable to getting rid of the stymy? I mean, was there some resistance or I.
Sense that there was just a lot of hue and cry against the Stymy in Britain. You know, Scotland has a very different vision of the game than even its neighbors. Many of the English felt the way that the United States did, perhaps not as passionately, and they are not, you know, work of nature to rebel in the way that the Western Golfer Association did and eventually the USJA did.
But there was a lot of unrest about the stymy, not just in the United States but in Britain as well, and I think they just felt like the hue and cry had become too loud and it was best to move along.
Do you think there's some significance to the fact that all of this happened, that the Joint Rules came out, that there was a there was a move to put out an international set of rules, and that there was also this move to get rid of the stymy in the post World War two era? Is there something about that era that you know, supplied the conditions that were necessary for this change to happen.
Yes, there was one thing about that era, which is America had become the dominant golf country by far, you know, really starting after the.
First World War. The First World War.
Is devastating on England and it never really recovers, you know, everything is very different even after that. But the Second World War more so, I mean, obviously Britain was bombed incessantly. They were, you know, a great deal of privation in terms of supply of materials, including golf balls, and you know, the us just assumed such a hugely dominant position in golf that it became difficult in some ways to resist
the tide of what America wanted. You know, obviously, America is a much much larger country with many, many more people. So eventually America had many, many more golfers, and they just you know, America became the dominant force in golf. And you know, I think the RNA, probably wisely on their part, felt that they needed to at least be working together or maybe they would be subsumed. I don't know if the RNA ever actually felt that. And I am not in any way an expert on the evolution
of the rules of golf. I'm knowledgeable, but not expert, and there's a very big difference between those things. But I do feel that probably just you know, it would only make sense. You know, there had been by that time, the whole steel shafted thing had happened, and there had been more and more cases of conflict coming between the USGA and the RNA, And I don't think either side really wanted that, and that was probably a big motivating factor.
And then you know, in any negotiation there's going to be give and take, and I guess the British didn't feel like the stymy was a hill they were going to die on.
Overall, what do you think was lost when the Steymy was lost?
I feel like the Steymy was fabulous for match play and created a great deal of excitement in matches. You know, when Freddy Tait is lying there four feet from the hole and Rolling is forty feet away, you figure the matches on the verge of being over and the only thing that's able to change that is a stymy. So it inject's what I would refer to as a delicious element of uncertainty into a game, and that's a good thing for an exciting thing like the thrust and perry
of a match. So I feel like a lot of the tactical excitement of match play evaporated along with the loss of the stymy, So that would be I think is the major thing that it brought to the game is a level of excitement that is lost, and I personally would love to see the stymy used in the Ryder Cup. Can you imagine, for instance, if Ian Poulter is able to stymy someone on the American side and the excitement that would create and the Twitter would just lose its mind.
And that's actually something that we didn't talk about when we talked about the pro stemy arguments that what you've just named there the element of tension and excitement that the stemy brought to match play. That seems to have been one of the main points in its favor in the minds of people who defended it absolutely.
You know, the thing about it was is that a hole was never quite won. You would think Freddie Tate has that hole, you know, but he doesn't. And the same with McLain. You would think McLain has that hole because the guy's not even on the green and you know he's gonna have to get up and down and you have a chance to make an eight or ten
footer and win. So it made people. It preserved a rallying point for the desperate golfer and that's a fun thing and a match part of what makes match play so fun to watch is the idea that anything can happen at any minute. Some shot could go crazily awry. That changes everything, and that's what the style he brought to it that we've now now loss, and I feel it's a sad loss.
Another general question here, you know, at the risk of making a mountain out of a molehill, maybe this isn't a mall hill, though, I mean, the stymy certainly seems important to me. But do you think the elimination of the stymy in nineteen fifty two pretended anything about the direction that golf and golf culture were about to take in the second half of the twentieth century.
I certainly do, Garrett. And as I said before, I feel like the stymy is the true manifestation of the notion that somehow golf needs to be made more fair, and that is something that has been an idea that
has really caught hold. You hear players every day, PGA tour players saying I like this course because it's fair, and they don't like courses that are quote unfair, which mean that you could get odd, bad bounces, the sorts of things that those of us who watch the game, or at least a certain segment of those of us who watch the game.
Love to see.
Is the uncertainty of the bad bounce, And I do feel like the stymy is the leading edge of the fairness police and the first introduction of the fairness police to the game, and therefore, to my mind, the elimination of the stymy is the beginning of a destructive process in which people consistently try to make more fair golf courses that are therefore less interesting to watch golf on and to play, and the whole notion that golf should
be more predictable. It is the very unpredictability of golf that makes it addictive and makes it fun.
Yeah, I want to get into what we're really talking about here, and one of the things is fun, right, You know that when the game is more unpredictable and more dynamic in the ways that you know a game can be, when you have you know, crazy undulating courses and bunkers in the middle of fairways and stymys, you know,
those things are fun. They introduced some tension and excitement to the game, and that's certainly one of the intentions of designing the game in all these senses, designing the rules of the game, designing the courses to make it as fun as possible, and we've lost a little bit
of that because of our devotion to fairness. But I also think, you know, at the risk of getting too moralistic about it, that some of that original idea that golf is a test of character gets lost a little bit when you eliminate the stymy, because one of the things that revealed somebody's character, revealed a golfer's character was being able to deal with things like the stymy, being cool in the face of it, being stoic in the
face of it. And do you think that has also that that nature of golf as a as a test of character has been attenuated somewhat by the law of things like the stymy.
Yes, I would say it has. You know, I think you are right that a golf reveals people's character in a way that other games often do not. And I think the person who is willing to accept every rub of the green shows a certain character that's valuable. And I think that's truly exemplified most by the life of
Bobby Jones. You know, Bobby probably got dealt the worst rub of the green of any person that I know, being the great athlete of his age, and then getting a crippling disease and living with that all the remainder of his days, not even being able to get out of a wheelchair and all that, And yet he bore all that with the same exact cheerful stoicism that he did when he loft at a stymy and knocked it
into the cup. And I do think that this softening of the game is something that requires a less stout character than it once did.
This episode of the Frida Egg podcast was produced and edited by me Garrett Morrison, with transcript assistants from meg Atkins. Let us know if you like this type of episode. It's somewhere between a documentary narrative and a traditional interview. I enjoyed making it, but it's not about me. It's about you, the audience, and a great way to give feedback is by leaving a rating and review in iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you here next week as we start to build up to the Masters.