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 Egg.
Friday, Egg, Frida Egg Friday, Fridagg.
Bride, Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the course. Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Golf Podcast. I am Andy Johnson, but this is not my episode. This is actually Garrett's podcast. He's on a doctor ordered vocal rest, so I'm subbing in just for the intro and the and the advertisements from our partners. I would, uh, you know, I'd say that a vocal ordered rest is one of the worst things that could
happen to a podcaster. I think I'm starting to think about injuries that can derail my life, and something with my vocal cords would be a problem. So anyway, this is an exciting series. I haven't listened to this podcast and I am quite excited to listen to it. It was an idea Garrett had and I'm fascinated about the topics of this is he wanted to do a short series over this holiday break and maybe into early next year on a few of the greatest and most influential
golf courses in the world. So naturally, the first course up is the Old Course at Saint Andrew's. So he's going to go into depth on the Old Course, i think, on the history and architecture of it. His guest for this episode is Scott McPherson. Scott is a golf course architect and historian and he's the author of the book Saint Andrews The Evolution of the Old Course. So Scott just came out with a new edition of the book and you can purchase a copy of your own at
Scott McPherson Golfdesign dot com. That's Scott McPherson Golfdesign dot com. So we're gonna get to this interview, but first let's talk about our partner, Fat Cork.
Uh.
Fat Cork is a you know, much like the Old Course, like a wonderful you know, champagne that's super unique and a kind of a pilgrimage. If you're into champagne, or if you know somebody that's into champagne, you should be getting them Fat Cork. We're here in the holiday season. There's a couple of things. You should have a nice little stock of champagne, for your holiday parties. If if you're going to holiday parties, it's an awesome host gift. And then also if you or a loved one love champagne,
a great holiday gift is Fat Quirk's membership. They are golf lovers over at Fat Cork. The unique value prop of Fat Cork is that they get their champagne from the growers directly. So think about craft beer, you know, craft coffee. This is really like craft champagne. They come from the growers. These are the most unique grapes you can get, and you know, with the membership, you can get you know, a denomination of bottles based off how much you want. You know, they have three tiers shipped
to your house every quarter. This makes an awesome gift. If you join the Champagne Club now you will be you know, and use the promo code golf. You'll get a bunch of goodies. You'll get a cork like a cork Seamus headcover, a couple stoppers which are awesome stoppers. They make the best stoppers on the market that I've ever used, as well as a bottle sleeve that like if you want to go on a picnic with a champagne bottle. This thing's perfect. You don't have to bring
a cooler, you just have to use the sleeve. So that's for the club. And if you're just looking for bottles, if you want some bottles for whether it's New Year's you know, go to fatcork dot com use the promo code golf and you get free shipping on your order. So that's not significant. You know, you're talking twenty to eighty dollars for free shipping and they are. They're great people, awesome customer service. Fatcork dot com. That's f A T. C O r K dot com and thank you for
their support. Now let's get to Scott McPherson.
All right, So Scott, your book is this incredibly detailed account of the Old Courses evolution. How did you first get familiar with Saint Andrews and then what prompted you to dive so deeply into the history like this.
Oh, I'm a fan of the Old Course like everybody else you know, and and a visitor in many ways like everybody else. My grandparents were Scottish and they had immigrated to New Zealand, and my dad was born in New Zealand and we come back, Okay to Scotland, and I think in the eighties I came with mom and dad and you know, we got to the first tea and you know, I was a teenager at that point and there wasn't the chance to play that that particular day.
But I think a little spark that when I got to the university age St Andrews as a university was kind of on my radar. It wasn't going to happen, but it was on my radar as a you know, this dream opportunity possibility. So I think I've always had a knowledge of Scotland and of St Andrews, and you know, when I decided that I really wanted to get into
the golf design industry, I went to university. I did a horticulture degree, and I won a scholarship and went to California and UC Davison did landscape architecture, which was great, particularly the environmental side of golf course design, which is which is what I was interested in then and still am now thirty years later. I ended up my first, I guess, real job. My parents were on a farm and I designed a pass three on the farm and
all that sort of stuff. But The first sort of real job was working for Peter Thompson, five times Open champion in Melbourne in Australia, and you know it was great and he's an incredible man. Was an incredible man, a great ambassador, I mean obviously a great player, but very warm human being. And you know, he had a
house in St Andrew's. He designed the links the Duke's Course in St Andrews, and so there was a number of conversations in the office around about St Andrew's and you know, it just kept reinforcing it in my mind
that I really need to go back. So there was a dip in the fortunes of the Peter Thompson Design Company, mainly because we had a lot of work in Malaysia and there was sort of a dip in I think there was a coup in the in the mid nineties, and so I was one of the young guys and you know it was sort of put to me that maybe this is a good time to do some traveling. I thought, yeah, actually, maybe this is a good time
to do some traveling and go to St Andrews. So Peter very kindly wrote me a letter saying, look, if you get to St Andrew's call the RNA. A friend of mine is the second through the RNA. Michael Banellick very recently passed away, very sadly. That was obviously discern Michael Banellick. Now anyway, so I do this, so I, you know, this kid in a candy store right rock and to St. Andrews with this letter in my hand, called the RNA and say, look, you know, can I
have a meeting with Michael Banellick? You know an introduction by Peter Thompson. Sure, and Michael was incredible. Yeah, you know, next week, come on down to the RNA and in the trophy room there, sit down and he said, you know, what would you like to do. And I said, I'd like to stay in design if possible. And he said, well, actually, they're planning on building a new golf course just up the road. You know, I might be able to get you introduced to the people doing it. They're here for
a meeting next week. And it was actually, you know, Jean Sarason turned up. So once I knew Jean Sarason was going to turn up, I went down to one of the local bookstores and bought, you know, thirty years of Championship golf, and you know I couldn't wait to meet him because he invented the sandwich.
In credible guy.
So took this reprinted version and got him to sign it and got to meet the new developer and the new architect, an American guy called Dennis Griffiths.
And they said, hey, this is cool.
You know, we don't know if we're going to get permits to build the golf course, but you know, what are your plans? And I said, well, you know, I'm going to stay around for a bit. I had a New Zealand friend who was doing his PhD at s Andrew's University, and so.
I thought, well stay for a bit, and you know, threw all.
My eggs into one basket, thinking if this, if this comes off, you know, it's a dream come true. So you know, it took a little over a year to get the planning permits and then I was offered the job as the on site architect for the two golf courses at s Andrew's which is is now the Fairmont and Andrews. It was s and Andrew's Bay back in nineteen ninety nine when I started on site. But in that in that year, the intervening year. You know, I had to doing some money, right, So my New Zealand
friends said, hey, do what we do. Just caddy on the old course. You know, it's easy. And I had done a little bit of cadding on the Australian tour, so I was capable of blacking a background a residential caddying and two caddying, you know, two very different things. And you know, you sort of going around and we're doing sort of eleven ten or eleven rounds a week. You know, I think I ended up doing about three
hundred rounds. And you know, you go round around often with different caddies, but there would be caddies that you'd see again and again and they'd tell very similar stories and I hope to ingratiate themselves with whoever their player was to get a bigger tip at the end of it. In fact, Tip Anderson, you know, legendary caddy, was one of the caddies that were still alive at the time, and I did a few looks with him. Unfortunately, his caddy notes so I think Palmer is one of the
things in the book. He gave me a time. But the caddies would say, you know, all the bunkers were made by sheep, and you know, these things have never changed. And you know the railway was put in and make up a year, you know, and I'm thinking this isn't right, you know, this is just been with Peter Thompson. And I had a great library in Melbourne. I was going through all through the books, thinking, of course has changed
quite a bit, but I had no proof. So you know, once the winter months came along, I sort of went into the different libraries and I bought different books and I started put together a spreadsheet thinking I've got to try and track all the lengths of all the holes, and I thought the only one I could do it was really the Open Championship, the first one being eighteen seventy two, is it right?
And eighteen seventy three, seventy three? Yeah.
I was just going to say, it's one of those seventy one, seventy two, seventy three, one of those.
Yeah, yeah, yeah it's And I'm thinking there's got to be there has to be quite a lot of change here. But I needed to be able to prove it. So I started with that first Open and went through and tried to get.
Eighteen seventy three.
All the opens that very early years, there was not much information, in fact, no information. You know, they'd tracked the results, but they wouldn't track the course changes. And it wasn't really until I got into the eighteen nineties there was sort of an inkling of how whole longs, how long the holes were. In eighteen ninety five it became really clear that was the first open where they had the whole lengths, and certainly by nineteen hundred they had it.
So I filled out all this.
Spreadsheet and I started to notice certain periods where there was very deliberate change, and I thought, hang on, I have to two or three yards didn't feel like deliberate, so I made up eleven yards if I'd noticed there was eleven yards more or less, because actually holes were
getting shorter sometimes as well. I started a color code these whole changes once I went through all the opens, and this was up until because the first, the first dish of the book came out two thousand and seven, so I really could only get to the two thousand
and five open. Once I got them, I noticed really deliberate changes around certain periods, and they all linked interestingly enough to changes in technology, mainly golf ball, and so you could see all of a sudden there was a direct correlation between technology and the expansion of the old course. And I thought that was I thought that was pretty interesting. And I don't think it had been seen before, certainly not in the way that I tried to document it.
And you know, I had no intention to write a book. That was the irony of this whole process. It was really only for me to prove to myself that there
had been significant changes over this period. And a couple of people found out about it, and George Peppo, who's a you know, American, wrote he lived in St. Andrews, actually on the side of the eighteenth Fairway, and so he became interested in a couple of the journalists who were writing getting ready for the two thousand and five Open, so they were starting to use my research for their newspapers or for Peter Alice used it for the Open itself.
So and they then encouraged me to into a book, which was great on one level, but you know, ended up being another two year project and endless out. I was a sleep sleepless nights trying to combine it altogether. But I became kind of determined to try and find a way to make to show this in a way that was easy to read and easy to understand, in a book that had all the great plans.
You know. I obviously for a day job, we'd.
Draw plans, and there's so many great plans of the Old Course that I wanted to have a book that showed all those And it was a very visual book because you can easily get bogged down in the numbers with st Andrews, So I wanted it to look like a coffee table book, but effectively to be a research piece for people who really wanted to do a deep
dive into the evolution of the Old Course. And that's where the name came from, because it tracks the evolution both with and length and the physical changes mainly spurred on due to technology over a key two hundred period. So the first map of the Old Course was eighteen twenty one, and that's really where the book starts, and it goes now with this new edition, it goes up to well, actually really it goes up to twenty twenty three.
That follows the open up to last year, and then there's bits that happened post open that are also included in the book.
That's the short version, the short version of how the book came to be. Now, that's all very interesting. Why don't we dig into a little bit of the history. As you say, the book really properly starts in eighteen twenty one, I believe it is with one of the first really detailed or informative plans of the Old Course, or it was not then called the Old Course, of course, it is Saint Andrew's Lynks or some version of that,
or pillmore links. But in any case, I'd like to maybe start with a general sketch of what the course was like in its very early days. I know there's not much evidence, but just briefly, if you could take me back to the beginnings of golf in Saint Andrews, how early was the game play on those lengths and what information do we have about what the course was like in its early pre nineteenth century days.
There's not a lot of information, and I guess one of the things that I've tried to do in this book is be quite factual, because it's really easy to get into writing about things without great information.
Speculation and romance and generalities about what the course was like in the seventeen hundreds. We know though that it went from twenty two to eighteen holes. That's one thing that kind of happened in this period.
Yeah, correct, So that's in the mid seventeen hundreds, So it's quite a long way before the first map came along. I think we know that the Gulf was very hard, that the course is very difficult. You know, there was no concept of fairways. It was all through the green.
You know.
It's really it's interesting terminology when you dip into that sort of stuff, because I could talk to people today and say, well, you know, there weren't fairways. What do you mean they weren't fairways? You know, there weren'ts you know, what do you mean? There were moas well? It was I mean there was sheep on the golf course until nineteen forty six, you know, I think there was postcards
still being put out with images of sheep. So the game has come and the golf course has come so far that it's very difficult for people to even visualize what golf was like. I think one of the one of the one of the takeaways from the book, and I might be jumping head here a little bit. But one of the takeaways for the book for me as a golf course architect was how we look at a golf course now. So one of the ways that we look at golf courses now is to do with greens.
You know, you'll think of a golf course and you go, boy, the greens are fantastic, you know, rolling, really smooth. Maybe they had maybe they were pretty flat, or maybe they had quite a lot of contour change, whatever they might have. We talk about the greens a lot. You look at St Andrews and you look back to those early plans,
there is almost no mention of the greens. Some some mentioned, you know, certainly when they got into double greens, there was talk about that, but there's no real detailed plans of the greens. But what there were were detailed plans of the bunkers, you know, eighteen thirty six and was the second main plan. Very you know, they're getting into the detailed look at the bunkers, and other courses around
Scotland and the UK were doing the same thing. You know, you could talk about Pandemonium, the bunker that was at Muscleborough, or you could go over to the Alps at Presswork or you could go down to you know, Ross and George' or wherever, and they were talking about the hazards and how difficult they were, and they were proud of that. It was almost like that's how they compared golf courses,
not to do with greens. So that's kind of an interesting takeaway that you know, we've moved a long way from. I mean, hazard's still important, obviously, and but they're not They're not the defining factor. They're not you know, they're not swaying people one way or another in terms of where they're going to go on plane next. It's not
a bell Weather sort of thing. And actually, I mean you could you could widen that out and talk about you know, us as humans, right, we're made up of I think they, I think the scientists think that human body is made up of about fifty nine different elements, which in there there are in their own right and not really very important. You know, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, you know, I think we're sixty percent oxygen. Now obviously most of
that's mixed with hydrogen so it turns into water. But each of those elements is not particularly important until you put it together in the form of a human and that is really important. And the old course is a bit the same that the elements are not not particularly important. A reveted bunker here, a tea there, you know, a green over there, wall there, gorse here, individually don't really
mean much. But it's the way that they're combined in St. Andrews on the signe on the sand with the wind that you have turned it into this just increable golf course, you know, And that's why it can never be replicated. You know, you could never think, well, you know, people have tried, you know, we're just going to build you know, the seventeenth hole, that we're going to build the eleventh hole and do that. Well, they never played the same.
So yeah, there's I think there's broader takeaways with the whole, with the whole experience of s Andrew's that make it so unique, and I hope that comes out in the book, that we dive into the details. But ultimately it's the overall picture that gives us this just most incredible place.
And that overall picture has really evolved over time, starting with that course you were talking about earlier, which didn't really have distinguished greens or distinguished fair ways or distinguished teas for that matter, those evolved at a particular point in the course's history. And so I think that one thing that people need to adjust their perspective about when they think about the early Old Course is that it's
not like we draw golf holes now. When we draw golf holes now, we draw a little tea, we draw a fairway, and we draw a green. But the golf course wasn't understood that way, I don't think in the seventeen hundreds or even for much of the nineteenth century. And so that's just a very interesting thing to know and to remember. I'd like to get to the old Course as it was in sort of what we could call documented history, and that really starts in the early
eighteen hundreds, eighteen twenties on. If you were to take a modern person and PLoP them down on the old course in the eighteen thirties, say before the Gutta Percha ball entered the picture and started to motivate some change, what would be the surprising thing, the most surprising thing to this person about what they would see on that golf links.
That's great, and isn't it. If you were dropped from the moon, what would you what would you see or.
Drop from the twenty first century, Right, you're a golfer in the twenty for a century. You're used to what golf courses look like now, or you're used to even what the old course looks like now. What would be surprising about that that earlier version of the documented old course?
Yeah, I would say that one of the things you'd noticed quite clearly is the lack of defined edges. So if we think of MOA's and what they do, they leave an edge, and you know that that wouldn't have happened because they just weren't there. Then they weren't. They weren't doing it in that sort of way. So I think you've got to almost imagine this place where grasses are longer and hairer, and there's a lot more of a blurred area, blurred perimeter between the different play zones.
I often say to people, I see, you've got to think of golf in those older periods as a cross country adventure. There was a starting point and there was an endpoint, and there's really no definition in between. In the book and the very towards the end, I do a comparison between nineteen hundred golf and twenty twenty golf. And one of the difficult things in doing those side by side diagrams was trying to blur the trying to blur these edges, to not even define really where the
green is. We have to, but it was trying to not show that, you know, I think there was I think there are critical periods, and you've chosen an interesting one there, and I move at about thirty years forward too. I tend to think that arguably the most important period and the evolution of the Old Course is between about eighteen fifty and eighteen seventy, and the gutt aperture was in play at that point. But what happened to the Old course was the double hole. The double greens came
into play eighteen fifty six. Eighteen fifty seven, the RNA allowed that all the greens to have double holes cut in them that only been one prior to that. Because the game was growing in popularity, the railway just sort of started in Saint Andrews. There's a lot more people coming. I'm a busier golf course. Old Time returned to St. Andrews in eighteen sixty four, so then there's starting to be the expansion the building of the eighteenth Green the
first Open Championship eighteen seventy three. You know, so I think there's a key prea there where it goes from that kind of ruggedy sort of golf course not you know, an you got to remember it's free, right, there's no green fees here. People just go and play golf as organized.
Matches, no maintenance budget basically.
No, that's right. So you know, it goes from that, and then and then I think it hits this. The RNA starts it, and it's to do with golf growing and popularity, and the train is a big and a big part of this picture bringing people into the town and parking them effectively right next to the seventeenth Green there. So yeah, and then old Time coming back and he does obviously incredible work on the conditioning of the golf course.
You know, they're adding sand everywhere, starting to move flags around, taking holes out of play, you know, taking heather out, relaying with turf, just constantly increasing the quality of the links through that period right through then having the first the first Open in St.
Andrews.
So you've been going around since eighteen sixty, but that was the first one in St. Andrews and then right the way through. So for me and the book talks about it a little bit to new but it's a new addition to this book which new information we've found out since the first edition came out, which was to do what with the expansion of the area around the Swilken Burn the first Green, the seventeenth Green, and it
had always been a mystery. It was a mystery to me until last year that we never quite knew how the first Green came to play, came into play, you know, we knew that there'd been a change, and the thought was that it was a green that was built a bit like the eighteenth Green was. It was an act. It was almost commissioned, and it was built and it was opened, and there was a date around that, whereas the first Green was it was never quite so clear.
And I think what has happened now? And this came to light due to a court case to do with the Himalayas, a trespassing case to do with a man who felt that he could play on Himalayas at any time he liked, and actually he had a very good case. He ended up losing the court case. But what happened was we had we got ninety pages of testimonial from old Tom some of the leading players of the day the RNA, including washerwomen who were working in the b
and you know, doing clean clothes in the burn. So we became we've got a very clear picture of kind of what was happening around that area. And I think the reality was that the first green evolved. There was the Secretary of the RNA at the time, at chat with Stuart Grace, gave evidence very early on and I think it was to a three day case that the new hole second hole in that double green was cut
closer to the burn and towards the sea. So there's been some debate about whether the seventeenth Green was ever a double green, and for the first time we now know and we have it an evidence from the chap who was secretary from about eighteen forty two right through to this court case in the eighteen eighties. You know, he was in position for little over forty years, so from when the mandate was put in eighteen fifty six for the double greens right through to this court case.
So yeah, he made it very clear that firstly that the seventeenth Green was a double green, and then we hear all this evidence about where the balls were landing, about the washing being laid out over the I say fairways out over that area and then being put on the gorse to dry. And it was the trampling effect really of these long agricultural grasses that started to repair what is now the first green area for becoming a green.
And it was it was Tom Morris who took advantage of that when he was moving around and trying to look at player safety, ball strike issues with the seventeenth Green moving that green away. And I mean we even know at one point that first the first hole played as a part three. The hole wasn't even over the burn it was cut short of. But there was just a lot of change, you know, they weren't. We seem quite stuck now and kind of where holes are and
where they need to play from and play too. There wasn't those restraints in that period between the eighteen fifty sixty seventies and until the right hand course got more established with the new T's right.
So, Okay, there's a lot in there. There's a lot of detail here. What you're documenting is some of the changes that happened in the middle of the nineteenth century.
I want to get a general picture of what was happening to the course at this time, because one surprising thing to this hypothetical modern person that might be plopped down on the old course as it was before the advent of the gut of percha ball and the coming of the railroad, one surprising thing to that person would be that the old course was a lot narrower back then, as in the playing area, the playing corridor was bordered by kind of wild grasses and gorse, and the space
in which you could reasonably play your ball was narrower than it is now, and players would play essentially the same path out and back. They would play to the same holes. There weren't double greens yet, and so coming back you would play to the same hole that you had played to on the way out, on that particular green. So that changed over the course of the mid nineteenth century, and the course became more what it is now, very wide with these double greens and defined courses for going
out and coming back. You don't come back on the same path that you go out. So how generally was that change made? Why was it made?
Yeah, you're right, absolutely right. I mean, it would have been a very narrow golf course originally, and so the widening of the golf course was a response to increase play popularity, ball safety and the you know, the key one of the key areas with the widening of the course was around that first eighteenth whole area as we know it today and the reclaiming of the first fairway from the sea, which took place over over a longer period sort of a mid eighteen hundreds to nineteen hundred,
and the bruce Embankment was a big key part of that. It's really hard to imagine these days, but the sea that comes up if you've ever been to Saint Andrews, you know the RNA Clubhouse and up behind the clubhouse as a car park known so locally as the Museum car Park, Well that never existed, so that the sea which is there sort of sea World could have flowed up over the beach and kind of around that right
hand side. So when that bruce Embankment came, that broke that opportunity for the sea to get through that area and reclaimed a significant amount of land. So that was a that was a really key part. But the widening of the golf course more broadly was due to popularity.
And you know, the cleanest example to go is the fifth Fairway where previously they you know, the hole would have played up to the Lising Fields, which is the fourteenth fairway, and then you would have played across to what's the fifth green.
You would have had to hit your drive across the hell Bunker. People who are familiar with that hell Bunker in its position on the now fourteenth hole, the old fifth Hall, which players at the time thought was a really great hole. You would have your drive over the hell Bunker and it was quite a carry back then it's kind of crazy.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So you had to cross it twice.
You had you had had it over and up on the Elizaneth Fields and then as you went along you'd strike the beardies and then you'd have to go across the beardies to get on to you know, the fifth green or the watch is the double Green, and that was the first of the double greens, and you know, you start to think about the difficulty of that shot, you know, with Hickory clubs, with these gutty golf balls, potentially and you know what we have now and there
was obviously the sandwich. You know, we'd talked about Jeane Sarahson earlier. Right, there was no sandwich in those days. So they had these clubs that they could get out with, but it was a lot more difficult, incredibly more difficult, you know, So you hear these stories of you know, guys going around hitting seventies, I think seventy seven, you know, course record young Tom Morris going around and doing it sequentially,
you know, in the high seventies or maybe eighty. You think, oh, that's pretty good, but we're comparing with modern day technology and these wide fairways. Those were incredible scores in those days based on the difficulty. And of course coming back, you know, you'd be teeing off and the rules were changing. So part of the story is a constant changing of
the rules. So originally, you know, you were sort of within a club length or two of the original hole, and then it went to four and then eight, six, twelve, and then ultimately that rule was changed and they could build teeing grounds. But if we go to that period when the rule was still within say, you know, eight club lengths of the whole, then from what we now
know as the fourteenth hole. You're coming back across the beads, which are pretty much out of play on golf, but they would be to write and play then and on your line of play up to the listen fields, and then you've got to get over hell bunker and the other bunkers around it, and then and then get onto the green. So I mean, you're absolutely right, incredibly difficult game. And I don't think even today, I'll talk to people and say, look, it's very easy to think golf is
a fairly easy game. You only need to go out to any golf course on any particular day and see how hard it is for most people to play and to play well. Well, you amplify that by ten times or more. And that's how you know Hickory golf would have been. But I think in that sort of nineteenth central period.
Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about our partner, the USGA. Speaking of last minute gifts for the golfer in your life. I've got a great gift. You know, if you've got somebody that's impossible to give gifts, to give them the gift of the USGA membership. They will receive great benefits like the members only hat the bag tag and a subscription to the USGA's Golf Journal, and the game of golf will get the support it needs
to continue to thrive for generations to come. You know, this includes all the turf grass research they're doing, all the stuff they're doing around, you know, growing the game in underdeveloped areas of the country. You know, really, the us GA is is much more than the just the people that put on the tournament or the people that are making rules changes they are doing. They have so many great programs, whether it's you know, turf grass or you know, how to figure out how to get more
people playing golf. Give a USGA membership today by visiting USGA dot org slash fried Egg. That's USGA dot org slash fried Egg thanks to our partners from the us GA. And now back to Scott McPherson.
One striking realization I had as I was reading your book and looking at the evidence of what the course was like and how it turned into the course we're familiar with today is that a lot of the bunkers that we now know as kind of center line strategic hazards,
there's room to play around them. If you're in them, you're not in good shape, but you can go to the side of them, play safely away from them, but you get a little reward if you play closer to them, and you can kind of shorten the hole or get a better angle or something like that. It's the classic idea of a strategic bunker. But on the early Old Course, a lot of these bunkers were effectively cross bunkers because the course was so narrow that these bunkers basically went
all the way across them, so you couldn't play around them. Now, what happened with widening is that you could play around them, and a different sort of spirit of the old course emerged, one that the Golden Age architects like Alistair Mackenzie and Tom Simpson John Lowe really loved and thought was a feature, not a bug. But how did players initially receive this widening of the old course? Because surely it made the place easier to play, right, Yeah.
So that's great.
So you know, John Lowe, incredible thinker of the game, editor wrote concerning golf one of the great golf books in my mind, so he was saying, and I think his quote was, golf is a contest of risk. So if you think about what that actually means. It means that in every shot you're having to balance you know, your ability versus the weather, versus the course and the hazards and the result. So those center line hazards is the example of say, having to get as close as you can.
To risk going in them.
In order to get some type of reward and easier angle to the whole the shorter line, whatever it might have been. It's that contest of risk, which I think is one of the things that separates golf from all other sports because it's ever present. So, you know, there was a period of time and you look at the evilue in the old course when the ball was going further and further astray and maybe it wasn't getting into trouble as much of maybe some people on the RNA
committees at the time were hoping to. So there was this increase in the amount of bunkering along the periphery of the golf course, which may not have been prevalent in that nineteenth century earlier mid nineteenth century period. And I you know, it's still there today and it's well documented in my book. But I don't think those are the key bunkers. I think we still come back to those central bunkers. It could be you know, Principal's nose,
you know, as another example. But the end whole bunkers, even on nine, you know, is still in play because you don't really want to be down the side. So there are some newer bunkers, which is still central bunkers. But you know, cheaps bunker was always a great target. You know, the flag was never down the right hand side that we see it now. It was always up on tops needed to get left in order to have
a better angle in. But yeah, if you think about it in that sort of way, that as a contest of risk, and that the best position bunkers make the game more interesting, then I think you're starting to understand the real essence of what the old course is.
And what's so interesting is that that real essence that we understand now about the old course. The reason we think it's such a great course because of its width and its strategic hazards and this contest of risk that you mentioned earlier that evolved that wasn't there from the beginning. The course took on its width because of this response to the increased popularity, and it just happened that it turned the course into something different. I just find that
completely fascinating. This wasn't necessarily by design. It just evolved this way and people realized once it happened, Wow, this is great.
Yeah, and it's an interesting commison.
You know, if you're sitting in the sitting in the pub with your friends, right and you say, well, actually, even if the gold golf course who was say, two or three times wider again than what it is now, it wouldn't really make a big difference to the playing of the course because you actually still have to come
back to the middle. You know, in life, you could probably live your life on the fringes, and certainly in terms of our justice system, the further you head off line, you know, the greater the punishment once you end up in front of a judge. But in golf you can't really do that. You still have to you have to come back to the green. The green is in the middle of You've got to come back at some point.
So yeah, this idea that we target the preferred line of play, the desire line, has to be the central essence of really good golf course design, you know, And that's what I mean That's why the Old Course is such a great place to learn from, right for anybody
and anybody interested in golf course design or architecture. You know what what is it separates this course from you know, apart from the fact that I mean another that's probably another discussion for down the pub is you know, all the greatest golfers of all time have played the old course.
I mean, I can think of one great golfer who i'd call a great golfer who's not played the golf course the old course is Ben Hogan, you know, never never got to Sir Andrews, and I would say is a great But you know, with him to one side, it's tested every great golfer I can think of in the history of the game. And yet it's still providing a great test today. You can't say that about I don't think anywhere else.
Now. Another thing that happened with the widening of the course is that it could start to be played both clockwise and counterclockwise. Now it's played almost exclusively counterclockwise. Are along the right hand route?
Right?
Do we know how often the left hand route was used in the late eighteen hundreds, and it would have to be the late eighteen hundreds, because before there wasn't really a left and rate, but once there came to be the possibility of a left and rate, there were different ways that the players could go around the course. Do we have a sense of how popular the left hand route was and then how the right hand route came to be the preferred one?
Yeah, I mean it was. I mean it was pretty much a weekly thing. It would swap around that regularly. There was no preference for a long period of time. And really the change was just to do with spreading the wearer, you know, so that the divots are in different places between those periods.
But what happened, and again we're going to.
Come back to technology with this one, is as the new golf ball. So the gunner percha ball sort of came into play, and you know, the late eighteen hundreds, eighteen eighties came into play. It's starting to go further now. So people are getting a sense that the contests of risk might be changing. They want to try and get that back in play. So maybe we need some more tees. Okay,
well where were going to put the tees? So now you have to make a decision, right, it's decision time we go left hand course or do we go right hand course. You can't do them both. So if you look at the routings for what they are, you know, the right hand course, as we know it's the right
hand courses. The course we know today has only one crossing, one crossover where players crossover, so it's the seventh and the eleventh holes, whereas if you play the left hand course or the reverse course as we call it, there's two or three depending on how it's played. So from a safety point of view, that there's a greater element
of risk. So I think it came down simply to that fact of why the right hand course was chosen to be extended and why it is now the open courses we know it was literally black and why as a safety related decision.
Very interesting what could have been I guess you know, we wouldn't We wouldn't have the road hole as we
understand it today. There are so many holes that would be different, and one of those crossovers that you mentioned would happen on the final hole of the course, I believe right, because the first hole would have to play across the Swolkenburn to the other side of the course to essentially the site of the road green that's an incredible first hole, and then to come back, of course, you would have to play from the area of I guess the second te to the eighteenth green that old
Tom Morris built, and so it would just be a totally different course. People still occasionally play it today. The Links Trust offers some opportunities for people to do that, but it is more of a curiosity than it is something that people do as part of competition.
I suppose, yeah, exactly. I mean lucky.
I mean through the years that I've been here, they've opened it up a few times, and I've been lucky enough to play it a number of times. And I think next year, twenty twenty four, they're going to do it for three days, and it's great that I think people get that the chance to play it in the opposite way, and you know, you could argue there's probably a couple of holes which are maybe better in the reverse way. You know, playing twelve back up the hill
makes more sense because you can see the bunkers. You can't see them when you play the way we play today on the right hand course.
But you know, and you.
Could hypothesize that you know, if they were in the eighteen eighties when they were starting to lengthen the t's and they wanted to get rid of that crossover between you know, on the first and eighteenth holes, they could have abandoned old Tom's new eighteenth green, which would have only been ten or fifteen years old, and built a new green you know, where the current first tee is.
You know, they could have maybe done a workaround, but that's not where they were at at the time, and you know, I would probably argue that they made the right decision. Whether they had to make the decision, you know, whether you believe that technology has been good and the longer ball has been good as a different debate. You know, we kind of know that you know, round about nineteen hundred the old course was actually there was a big extension.
They added about two hundred yards, but let's just say for round numbers period that at nineteen hundred it was six three hundred yards, which it was. You know, where we are today for the Open Championship last last year, we're over a thousand yards longer, you know, and there's been this push you know, more recently around two thousand, the new teams were put on areas that would have been considered outside the boundaries of the old course. So
the second hole, it was put on the Himalayas. Once you get to thirteen it was on the Eden golf Course, and again coming back up seventeen was in the practice range. So they pushed outside the boundaries. But if you do a parallel and that's done that I do it in the book for fun. Fun, So the right word interest's
sake as much as anything. If you look at the power of the ball where it was in nineteen hundred and where it was now, and what it would need to be, how long the old course would need to be in order to have that relative similarity in the old course would need to be about nine thousand yards long now and there's no way, of course, you know, there's no way you could find we could find another fifteen hundred or seventeen hundred yards to make it nine thousand,
and I don't think actually it would be enjoyable. I think it would be a slog It would take away a lot of the nuance. But you know, back to your question about how would it play if we rolled the clock back, you know, one hundred and fifty years it's a really difficult game, and the ball's not going as far fare ways and narrow the grasses a while, the rabbits running around the hole has been worn out. There's no whole cups, you know, there's no tin cup
in the middle of the hole. You know, it's golf, but not as we know it now.
Something that you've mentioned a couple of times is the changing teeing grounds. This one way that the Old Course has been lengthened in response to technology. Really, the Haskell ball, which came about in the early nineteen hundreds was one of those moments that forced the Old Course to consider where else can we put these teeing grounds to extend the course and bring some of the key hazards back
into play. But something that's so interesting about what you discovered about the changes at the Old Course in the mid eighteen hundreds is that teeing grounds weren't really a thing until a particular point in the course's evolution. You would simply take a certain number of club lengths from
the hole and tee it up there. But at some point, and I believe it was old Tom Morris, they introduced distinct teeing areas and This strikes me as a really important moment in the evolution of golf course design in general, to think of the teeing area as a designed thing. So how did that happen at St. Andrew's And what was the significance of that move toward teeing grounds as opposed to just the sort of ad hoc teer it, you know, close to the hall.
Yeah, it's a it's a thesis in its own right. And I'm not going to remember all the details. I need to dive back into the book as well, but yeah, certainly it was a It was the changes and the rules.
So I think the idea if you can visualize the game getting really popular, and the idea of a group standing next to the hole waiting to tee off and problem and potentially waiting because there's a group in front of them, and now there's a group behind them trying to hit to that hole as well, and the area around the hole is becoming worn out because you know,
you've got players and caddies. You know, the caddies get the ball out and then they take some sand and they build a little raised cup for the team for the player to tee off the gentleman goal for the tee off. These areas are getting really worn, so I think what was happening is an evolution of the rules to try and keep up right. Okay, we now need to move the place where the ball is teed further away from a current hole until it got to a point where you know, the rule was abandoned and that
you could actually create these separate tea in grounds. I can't remember that the year off the top of my head, but what I think what we found on and it was kind of fun. On the right next to the thirteenth green is this area of you know, it's rectangular and it's level, and you know, I think it's one of the first te's that would have been would have happened, and old time would have built it in that sort
of nineteenth century period. And it clearly shows on that whole hole which leads into the fourteenth hole of a seat, that the procession is back and right, and that's generally happened across the course. So as the ball's going further there's a new tea and it's further back and it's the right, and you know, that's one of the great things about the old course is we can use it.
It's like looking at DNA, right, you know, this is how the game's developed, and we can see it and the proof of it here.
That's such an interesting point that the expansion has happened back and rate, because if you think about it, the initial teeing ground for a hole would be sort of in the in the intuitive spot, which would be near the hole of the previous hole. But if you need to expand the course, you can't go into the middle of the course, so you need to go back and rate, and that changes some things about the holes.
Right, yeah, it does, so we touched on it earlier. Again, So if we think about the fourteenth hole, if you were currently teeing off on the thirteenth green to head up to the fourteenth green, right in your eye line, are those beards. Now as you go back and right, they move off that center line. They move left. They don't move obviously, but you move, you move right, and so therefore they are left, and so you lose strategy.
And you know, you could look at the course and say, well, there are courses that are the holes that have become better because of that? Are the holes that have become maybe less challenging. I mean, I would argue that the fourteenth is one that's become less challenging because those beardies are simply not in play now. One thing that's changed is the wall has become out of bounds I think
nineteen eleven. So you know, there's obviously a consciousness taking play where they say, okay, well, people playing plays now taking this way.
What can we do maybe to keep it?
But you know, and I'm not sure it's always easy to say this is better or worse, to have me black or white about it. I think there's examples where it is reasonably clear that would be one, but there's others where it's it's some far more nuanced conversation. And you know, are we in a better place than we were?
I mean arguably yes. Have we lost some of the experience of those original golf Yes, possibly, but we're you know, you put on you know, we live in a modern world and we look at what they're doing, and I think what the book does is it really tries to
follow the process. So if we look at the most recent Open Championship last year, incredible conditioning of the golf course, vast firm, dry conditions and the Links Trusted in the RNA just did a great job with the agronomy, but they're still looking to protect par right, so they're still looking at this overall scoring. So we know historically that length has a fairly minor impact on scoring, so it hasn't mattered that the old course has got longer and longer.
If you look at scoring over that one hundred year period, it's decreasing, so it's probably kept it in check. You know, long golf course kept in check a little bit, but the old course has kept the score of the ability of the players who are getting bigger and stronger and having it further with better technology, is still able to keep scoring going on a downwards tjuctory. So therefore, you know, the RNA and the Links Trust have looked at other ways.
So you know, it was the flattening of the bottom of the of the bunkets, so if you ran into a bunkie you might be up against an edge. It was the positioning of the whole closer to hazards. So on the as an example, and this is documented in the book. On the first Green, we knew from the previous open that they had three greens quite close to the Swulkan burn on on whole one and one of them was back one of the holes and one of the days, I think round three was cut back left.
Well, it was a very.
Similar configuration last year in twenty twenty three, three of them quite close to the burn and one further back, but the distance that they were to the burn was almost half, so instead of being twelve yards or thirteen yards from the burn, they were six and seven yards. So I think it's an indication that in order to try to protect some of the scoring, that had to move the position to places where putting is a more difficult or there's more more risk, contest of risk, you know,
back to that again. So yeah, I think we're I think the course is changing, and I and it's and I stay away from this whole better or worse, because I think it's a I don't think you can look at it the way, but it's certainly a more nuanced conversation.
And the result, you know, last year was fantastic.
It was just incredible open and we got everything we wanted out of it, right, But yeah, it's it's just a very different golf course than it was, certainly in eighteen twenty one.
And from what it was in the nineteen twenties. You know when when Alistair McKenzie drew that diagram of the fourteenth hole, probably from that old teeing position that you mentioned, where you can play out to the left, play out to the right, play down the middle. You have all these different options, and that's not as much the case because of the new teeing position back into the right.
Another thing that's emerged at the Old Course more recently, really in the twenty first century, is the introduction of some rough right and the narrowing of some fairways with maintained rough What do you make of that change?
Now?
I would describe you as very diplomatic and circumspect about better or worse right. You don't really get into those debates. From my perspective, I feel like the width of the old course that was discovered, the great discovery of the nineteenth century was that width and what it brought to the game. I don't know. It seems to me that the rough is taking a bit of that away.
So so let's talk about those non fairway areas. And I think you have to include in that heather and gorse, because those are this floora that you're going to find along the way, depending you're.
On generally farther out right, but not always, but generally there's usually the maintained rough and then yeah, past that there will be the more natural grasses and stuff.
Yeah, that's right, So you might encounter a long the way, but I would say there's been quite a change in that through the years.
You know. Part of the recent research.
I found, you know, Old Tom closed the ninth and tenth fairways for about six months and put a sign on the first t green I think, saying that they're closed while he took away all the heather and returfed the whole area. And so the the you know, the old courses continue to change, but I'd like to think that that those remain part of the foliaedge that's on the old course. I think it's important that there's a
chance you're going to find a lie. Now, Heather is difficult because so many people, you know, going around the old course of the fifty two fifty five thousand rounds of golf for a year plus caddies, you know, you're getting a lot aware so and heather doesn't stand up to that.
So well.
One thing about the gorse that I've noticed is there's always been gorse, say behind the first green, you know, that's where when the washerwomen were there, they would lay there the blankets and the sheets on top of the gorse to dry. And earlier, earlier this year they took away kind of one of the last stands of gorse. So I was it actually a little bit sad to see that because I felt that there was a historic
component to having some gorse in that area. The rough itself does change, you know, it goes through different growth patterns. It'll be thicker and it'll be thinner. They've certainly tried to manicure it in certain places for an Open Championship. You know, one thing it does from a playing point of view, if you're in the rough, you lose some control. So if their flags are tucked behind certain humps or hollows, then you know the ball is going to come out hotter.
So therefore it's harder to get it close to those spots. So it makes sense for the golf course to be prepared in a way that will add that element of risk to for elite golfers at certain times of the year. Well, but you know, I think and it sometimes overlooked. I've got a son who's thirteen, and he's now played the Old Course a couple of times, and occasionally we've gone
out and we've seen other kids. And one of the great I mean, it's really fantastic that literally kids can play the Old Course, you know, not physically, but they can get around, you know, and actually play pretty well because there are quite wide fairways and they can get it running.
You know.
There still have to be a minimum handicapped and all that sort of stuff, but this is not like you know, you can go to some great championship courses. They're almost unplayable for normal people and certainly for kids who can only say carry it so far. But I just see it as one of the great virtues of the Links is that it's playable for every level of golfer age group wise, as long as a certain level of ability, and that includes the rough, the rough grasses and the
heather and the gorse. So yeah, it's definitely a component. And I know that the RNA think really and the Links Trust think really deeply about how they manage that, but I think generally they've got it.
They've got it right, you know.
The other if you're thinking about and if you're trying to make a comparison in your mind about the old courses and how it's changed. One of the things to think about is the is the look of the bunkers. You know, they weren't revetted originally, right, they had these collapsed faces. And now you go there and every bunker there's one hundred and ten, half of which are named,
but they're all revetted. And that's you know, the bunkers have quite a visual, strong visual impact on people that take away that take lots of photos, but they take away this image of what the bunkers were, but that's not what they were. You you could you could have a conversation around about that. Is that now what the gold course is? Is that just what we are now? Or could you ever reintroduce maybe a non revetted face.
Could it go that way? We have a combination. I don't know.
I mean, these are debates that the RNA links trusts have, But it's when you have it in a historical context to say, look, we haven't always been revetted. It definitely retains those faces. It offers a certain look. But is that are we now fixed in that position? You know, it's an interesting question.
We're definitely less willing to consider drastic changes at courses like the Old Course than we were one hundred and fifty years ago. Certainly, you read about some of the things that happened at the Old Course, especially during Old Tom Morris's tenure there, and you just think, Wow, they were really free to go ahead and make some changes, to build a new green that's now the Eighteenth Green,
to relocate entire holes. Basically, there was a kind of freedom of evolution that way that for a variety of reasons, we no longer seem capable of. So I want to I want to ask you a question that you yourself ask toward the beginning of the book that is related to what we're discussing here. It's a question that I don't think you necessarily come down and answer by the end of the book, but it's an interesting one to pose, and I wonder how you might go about answering it.
The question is is man or nature most responsible for the making of the physical features on the Old Course. You've just been discussing the bunkers, right, and how those evolved is a bit of a mystery, But now they're certainly more formalized than they once were. You have the contours of the fair ways of the old Course, which have been there for a long long time. Nobody has
necessarily intervened with those. But as your book documents, there's been quite a bit more intervention from the hand of man, certainly more intervention than people usually believe there has been at the old Course. So how would you answer that question? Is man or nature most responsible?
It's a great question, right, And the answer is it's changing. So if we go back to two hundred years the hand of man was very limited, I would have thought in what the course is, and now it's greater to a large extent, and it all continued to be greater. So we go back to you know, what are the elements?
You know there were bunkers there, well, there were sandy areas and by the way, regarding by because I don't have a view on it necessarily, but I think those those are interesting conversations that need to be have within historical context. So again with what you're what you're what you're asking, it's it's not quantifiable to say one or the other. It's a combination. So I would say at the moment and every year we go forward. There is a greater element of human intervention in the Old Course.
There has to be, because they have to maintain certain areas, and it might be just a little bit here and a little bit there, but that's therefore a change from it's say, a natural if we just think about the broken ground, the humps and hollows, most of those we'd like to think fairly natural, and they probably and we're probably right. But every time something has changed, it's another half a percent, quarter of a percent, one percent, you know, of the Old Course being touched or changed or in
some way manipulated by human intervention or machine. So you know, at what point do you think we've gone too far? You can never really wrap something in plastic like this. You could never seal it and say that's it. It's never going to change, because it will. There'll be an open they'll put up another TV tower, somebody will have to put some foot stands in there for it to be it's another spade in the ground that's changing another
little bit. But I think that I like to think that generally the RNA and the Links Trust have the best interests of the Old Course at heart. That's the golden goose, right, don't want to kill the golden goose. It is the way the ball runs on this broken ground. It's the running ball. So I think they're aware, acutely aware that they need to make sure that really things don't change, and there has to be a very good limit.
The watermark has to be incredibly high for them to make a change, because not only is it important, more people are watching than ever before. I don't think, you know, even when I did my first edition, it was quite hard even to get aerial photographs. Now there's drone photography everything, everything's mapped. You know, you could see if there was if there was a change, and there'll be questions to be asked.
By you know who.
Those are, those who are in charge to say to try and have to give very plausible reasons about why this is required. And I think previously they've been talk about maybe doing this or maybe doing that, and for one reason or another it had been turned down, and I think probably rightly so, So I think I think it's becoming increasingly difficult to do any changes. But I think it's a myth if people think that everything out
there is done by you know, nature. Increasingly there is small bits that are changing, and I just hope we get to a point where and this will come back to technology. And I'm very supportive of the RNA's move to try and restrict the golf ball because it is places like Andrews that I think tend to suffer. So without that some type of change to the golf ball and the equipment, then these places become increasingly at risk of further change.
Scott.
I think that's a good place to wrap up. I'm going through in my head all of the fascinating things in your book that we did not talk about, and I feel a little bit regretful about that, but I would definitely point people to your book. There's so much in there that we didn't cover in this episode. And you know, it's a book that I that's going to be on my shelf and I'll pull it out frequently. So could you tell people how they might get a hold of a copy of this book?
Great, Yeah, I mean it's not widely available. There's a couple of shops in St. Andrews if you're visiting St Andrew's, or the easiest way is to order through my website.
Scott.
Scott Macpherson goolf Design dot com. And I think what I want to say about the book is that it's you know, it's a coffee table style book. It's full of great photography of the Old Course, but effectively, like you've found out, it's a research book. You know, people can dip in and dip out and if you're making it, certainly if you're making a visit to St Andrews and they'll put you on good stead to learn how the Old Course has evolved over the last two hundred years.
Thank you very much, Thank.
You, Thank you for listening to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. That was Garrett Morrison. I'm andy last time you're going to hear from me on this podcast. This episode was edited and produced by Matt Rush's Thank you, Matt. Quick reminder, while we're at the goal line here for gifts, a great gift is Club TFF. We are wrapping up the year. We've got a few more posts they'll go up there. We're gonna have a little bit of a hiatus between Christmas and New Year's but this is an
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