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