Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over b Dratty. It's summer. Yeah, it's a Memorial Day weekend.
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That's what it usually is. Yeah, I think Frida eggs. I'm pretty sure these are things that you should know. Hey, this is Garrett cutting in here. The promo code is actually Friday Egg twenty five. Friday Egg twenty five, so you get twenty five percent off. All right, back to the tape.
So bdraddy dot com and now on to today's episode with h We're joined by Garrett Morrison, managing editor of The Friday Egg and uh Stephen Proctor.
Yes, so Stephen Proctor is a golf historian. He wrote a book about the life of Young Tom Morris called Monarch of the Green that is very very good. I highly recommend it. And he's a fun guy to talk to.
And today we are going to talk to him about challenge matches, about the history of challenge matches, of which, of course Young Tom Morris was a big part in the eighteen hundreds, but This is intended to give some perspective to the matches that are happening right now during the pandemic, the match last week at Seminole, and of course the upcoming one at Metalist Golf Club featuring Tiger and Phil.
So we're just kind of getting Peyton Manning of course.
Yeah, yeah, those guys too.
I think they're going to bring some real human interest into it because they're going to be chopping it around and they're gonna be really relatable.
Maybe, So, I don't know, I don't have a sense for how good these guys really are. And you know what, and if we're looking for relatability, Peyton Manning kind of exudes that Tom Brady doesn't as much. Who has ever in their lives related to Tom Brady. I mean, even if he's playing poorly, he's probably gonna look good doing it.
I'll tell you, there's one moment in Tom Brady's life that I can think is relatable as watching the replay of him running the forty yard dash.
That's very true, Okay, I think that that's gonna be true the way most people would look running it, you know, you look, Yeah, but I think it'll be it'll be a fun match to watch.
I'm excited.
I think those two I think not necessarily, Tom Brady's not going to bring a lot of spice to it, but I think Peyton Manning could be the guy that's like that much needed relief, especially then you've got Barkley also doing the telecast. I hope they don't overproduce this one like we saw last week, where they just couldn't seem to get out of the way of showing golf, which which is essentially what people are turning turning the TV on to watch is golf, but you can't seem
to show it. But this week, hopefully, I think this week will be much better, and I think they'll have learned a lot from the last match they did.
Yeah, do you think it's going to be a better product on TV?
I think so.
I can't foresee it getting worse than the last one, Right, you can't do something a second time and be worse at it.
Well, I mean, you never know. It just seems like there's a momentum that happens with these things where somebody just says, oh, why don't we add this, Why don't we add this? Oh we should throw this in you know, and that's what you end up with. You end up with kind of a mess. I think that just sort of happens without people really knowing that it happens.
So I think the more I've thought about it is golf is such a challenging sport normally to broadcast because there's not one central field of play that everything's happening on right, So they're always having to cut around, keep people updated as to what's going on, and almost we tell the story for the viewer because it's impossible to know the story without having that because you can't watch fifteen cameras at once to see everything going on in
the course. So the struggle is if they had they probably have a golf producer for the most part doing the producing these shows, and the guy doesn't know anything except for this complicated, like very produced broadcast where you're
telling people what they need to know. And I think if you had an NFL producer or an MBA producer produce these matches, they turn out so much better because they'd understand, Okay, all we have to do is put the camera here, turn their mics on, and tell the announcers just just add to this, do not talk over it.
Yeah, allow the people to watch the game being played.
You would, you would hope that would be the case. And you know, with the ad of aast, at least Peyton manning to the mix, and he's on the other team from Phil, so it seems like those two guys at least could have some back and forth and get a little bit of a nice vibe going between them. You know, maybe that'll happen. But in any case, I mean, beyond the kind of critiques of the broadcast that I'm sure will come, I mean, there's always going to be
stuff to critique. I'm really looking forward to this match. You know, I really look forward to last week's match and thoroughly enjoyed watching it and kind of being in the golf community while it was happening. And I think the same thing is going to happen with the Tiger Film match. There will be a scene on Twitter, people will be excited about it. It'll be something different to do,
and I just really appreciate that it's coming up. I think it's exciting and fun and it's great to see golf again.
Yeah.
The best case scenario, I think is like for this to be a smashing success and it lead to more of them, yeah, through the core of the year. Because I love this format of golf. I really do believe that there is an unbelievably great product in the idea of these smaller matches.
And it's a format of golf that obviously has deep historical roots. It goes back to the beginning of the game, and that's what we're talking with Stephen Proctor about. Are you ready to get into it?
Let's go I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
And when I find my ball.
In a bright egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg Frida egg egg Frida egg, bride egg lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course. Golf obviously existed for a long time before the Open Championship, Prior to that kind of major stroke play competition. How did golfers measure themselves against each other the way that.
You measured yourself at the very beginning of golf. And we're talking here about the early eighteen hundreds, So around eighteen twenty nine, eighteen thirty, players start getting involved in what was known as a challenge match. So what would happen is a rich guy from your golf club would put up one hundred pounds and challenge a rich guy from a golf club in a rival town to put up his best guy, and we'll play thirty six holes a day over four different golf courses. You picked too,
and I picked two. Winner takes the pot. And that was how it's started in the earliest days of golf. And so you made your bones by winning those challenge matches marathons, I mean marathons. Everyone you know you would play what they might call a friendly, you know, thirty six holes one day over a course for say ten or twenty pounds sterling. But if you were going to do a big match, it was always over multiple courses
a really great match. So all of the legendary matches took place over at least three golf courses and sometimes four.
And it was the idea behind that to test, like to see who the best better golfer was, because different courses might favor different players.
There was certainly some of that in it.
A lot of it was there was huge town from town rivalries, so Saint Andrews and Musselboro in particular were massive rivals and they you know, so the towns wanted to show off in front of their own people, so they wanted at least one of the matches to held on their links, and then they would be held on neighboring links. Like a typical lineup would be. You played at Saint Andrew's, Musselborough, North Berwick and Mirrorfield or someplace like that, depending on the time of the age of
the match. But you would play three or four courses and thirty six holes a day.
And so if you were to go out onto the links during one of these big challenge matches, what would you see.
What you would see is the same thing you might see if you were out of prize fight. People in the modern age who listen to everybody speaking whispers on the golf broadcast have no idea what golf was like at the beginning. It was insane. So there would be a crowd depending on the match. Some of the matches would bring thousands out, but the majority would bring hundreds, you know, two or three hundred. But there were no
gallery ropes the players would have. The fan would be crowded all around the players and circling them and in some towns they got rather close to the opponent, so much so that they tried purposely to constrict a swing by just hemming him in. And a match always had a referee, but they had a heck of a time controlling the crowd. A lot of the time balls would get kicked into gorse bushes, they would get stomped on,
So I mean it was a rowdy scene. The other thing is gambling was a huge deal at these events. Gambling was the very reason that the events existed. The rich guys who put up the stakes, what they wanted to do was bet. These were sporting gentlemen who had land and property and big homes, and they didn't have anything to do but do sporting things, and gambling is one of their main things. They wanted to do on whatever it was. So they would be betting like crazy,
and the townspeople would be betting like crazy. Players would be betting on them, caddies, everybody was betting. There were bookmakers walking up and down the side of the course, and you could get a new bet if, for instance, the match was really tilted heavily in one player's favor and you wanted to take the other player you could get twenty to one just from there to the end of the match right now, and so it was a pretty wild scene.
What kind of money could a professional golfer himself make on one of these matches.
Well, you know, obviously in those days, professionals were looked down upon by the people who ran the golfing establishment. They were, you know, I think Horace Hutchinson once referred to him as feckless, reckless creatures whose only loves are golf and whiskey, which they would never have denied actually, But in any case, they played for a tip. So if you won, you would typically get something on the
order of ten percent of the steak. So let's say the steak was one hundred pounds sterling, you might get ten pounds if your guy.
Won, almost what a caddy gets now.
Yeah, exactly.
If your guy lost, well, you know, you hope he's a bit generous, but you're not gonna get very much. And so that's how it was at the beginning.
It's funny just listening to the description. It almost feels like the sport completely flipped in a way where the players were empowered. Everybody's quiet around them. There's ropes and and the almost the focus in the whole match was centered around the fans.
Originally, yes, no, And you know there's so many famous quotes from even at the Open Championship there were no gallery ropes, So an Opening Championship that came down to a closely contested final round.
Would be have a massive.
Crowd out there. They'd be you know, they're be an umpire trying to keep them under control. And one of you know, there's famous quotes like the players, please the players, please respect the players.
And the person in the.
Crowd says, damn the players I've come to see and you know, they they It was a different time then and a lot a lot it's so much different than what we experience now and a lot of ways, I think better and more fun.
But I read somewhere that the different areas, like different areas produced different types of players. Was that true, like different you know, the guys from Musselborough had different skill set than the guys from you know, East Lothian.
You know that's not you know, it's probably true in some degree obviously, because really what was more true is the course you played your golf on at home would require different shots than the recourse that somebody else played their golf on.
So, for instance, if you were.
A player that played all their golf at North Barrick, you were a great approach shot player because that was pretty much what you were doing all the time, was approaching.
You know, you didn't have the holes weren't especially long.
It was a very tricky golf course, so you had to be great at run up shots and chips and all that. A player from there would be better at those kinds of shots probably than a player from Musselborough who had less of those to make. And St Andrew's player, you know, they were great at the run up shot
also because they played on super fast greens. Those greens in those ages were very very quick compared to what players were experiencing, not so much today because the greenkeeping is so much better, but the ground would get baked out and it would be really hardly any grass on it and be rolling pretty quick. So it was kind of tough to stop a ball on it, and you had to become expert at the art of running the ball up at a certain speed and letting it die
near the hole. And so they were they would come with different skills. They did definitely take different mental approaches. Like the Musclebirg players were way more aggressive than the Saint Andrews players, who would play a type of goss that was described and as palky, sort of cautious keeping away.
From the hazards. The Musclebird players were half crazy.
Like Willie Park he would bet people I can beat you with one club, I can beat you standing on one leg. I will play with your very expensive watch as my t on all nine holes. And if i'dn't, don't break it, its mine. That's the way, you know, things were approached there a little more sedate and upper crust at Saint Andrews.
Yeah, that's the sense that I get reading some of these historical accounts that the Saint Andrew's players were considered sort of you know, refined and boring in comparison to the rowdy Muscleborough players. Right there was there was almost like a like a class conflict there or something.
Well, they were just different towns, you know. Saint Andrews had the university and most of the nobility were members at Saint Andrews. Musselboro was was a coal mining town and a lot more industrial, you know, with so as always in the case, you know, the the industrial town's probably going to be a little more loose around the edges than the university town, and that that was reflected in the golf for sure.
It kind of reflects of us the way American team sports are, where different different stadiums have different dynas, especially like say in college football, you know, going to Notre Dames a lot different than going to LSU.
That is a perfect analogy, and that's the way it was. Every course developed somewhat of a culture on its own, mostly based on its demographics and its membership, and so there were differences there and they were great rivalries, you know, particularly between St Andrews and Musselborough.
Would you say, Steve that there was a kind of Golden age of challenge matches at some point in the eighteen hundreds.
Yes, the first really the Golden Age begins in eighteen forty nine. And in eighteen forty nine Alan Robertson, who was the great golfer of the age as far as most people were concerned, and his apprentice at the time, Tom morse Or, who had been his apprentice, Tom had just recently left to open his own shop. They play a match against Jamie and Willie Dunn from Musselboro for four hundred pounds sterling aside, which is an astronomical sum
of money in that age. Just to give you an example, an average working man at that time earned less than thirty pounds a year, probably closer to twenty, so four hundred pounds sterling was quite a bit of money to have riding on a match. They played it over multiple greens, ending at North Barrick. I mean, excuse me, I'm forgetting where they ended it right now because I'm nervous on
this podcast. But anyway, they played on multiple greens, and it was weird because at the time, the way they scored it is who won on the most golf courses, not who won the most holes. Interesting made on four links and the person who won on three of them was the winner of the match, and if two if you won on two links each, then the match was halved.
And of course this match was the one that got rid of that scoring system because the Duns, I think they won by thirteen holes at one of the four events, but the Saint Andrew's guys squeaked by by a hole on their own green, and then they barely win the match at the end because the guys from Muscle Birr's ball get stuck under a rock, a big giant stone sort of Tiger Woods like, just off to the left of the fairway there, and they asked the umpire can
we move the stone? And of course, you know, they were not going to haul out a crew like they did for Tiger and move the stone. They said, of course, you can't move the stone. It's an integral part of the golf course. You got to play your shot. So they're hacking away, hacking away, hacking away. They don't get it out. They lose the hole by a million miles, which they should have won pretty easily if they hadn't hit it under the stone. And then they lost that match,
and that was the one that decided it. But they had won by multiple, multiple holes if you counted the holes over the four golf courses. So that changed that. But that was such a big deal at the time. It got written about for one hundred years afterwards, and every kid who grew up after that, you know, grew up with that as a legend of their lifetime. And so that was when it begins, and really it extends as a major major thing through about eighteen seventy three,
I would say is sort of a turning point. Tommy Moose Junior by then is a big superstar. He and Davey Strath pay two one hundred and eight hole matches, one in July and one in August at Saint Andrews. Tommy hasn't been beaten in the Open Championship in four the last four seasons.
Five.
There wasn't an Open in eighteen seventy one, but he'd won the last four Opens in a row. He was pretty much invincible winning. You know, in eighteen seventy two he'd won eighty percent of his events that he entered, so he was winning at a clip that no one had ever even conceived of. Just giant crowds came out
for that five or six thousand. The Ladies Home Journal covered it for Christ's Sake, and that was probably the heyday of it, and the thing that was, I would say, the biggest one that has ever occurred.
After that.
It still continues really up through the early nineteen hundreds, but less frequently, and other things become more popular, like tournaments and exhibitions and things like that.
Listen, you talk about it It's almost like these are like playoff series, you know, with the with the multiple days, the multiple courses, and I imagine just like you see in a series of in the NBA, where you know, every game the relationship between the opposing parties gets a little bit more contentious and chippy. Is the same same thing that happened And is there any specific examples of this type of relationship evolving through a match?
Oh, my gosh ya.
So eighteen seventy there is the third in a series of great matches between Old Tom Morris and Willie Park senior guy. He was betting that he could play nine holes from their top.
Of your watch.
So the last last round of that match takes place in Mustleboro, Willy's hometown. That is a prescription obviously for disaster. Tom is winning too at the time, which is which is also stokes up the partisan pride quite a lot. Anyway, the match got so incredibly contentious that the umpire halted it because he said it was just impossible with the
behavior of this crowd for fair play to continue. They were just really abusing Old Tom, physically crowding him around, not letting him have a free swing, kicking his ball into the bushes and everything I was mentioning before.
So the umpire stops the match.
And there's a bar there at Musselborough called Missus Foreman's that was right off the golf cour I believe it's off the fourth hole, but I'm not.
I can't remember right at the moment. In any case, they go.
Into the bar there and the umpire says, we're gonna cool off and we'll come back tomorrow and finish these last six holes. And Willie Parks says, there is no way that we are quitting, and he goes out and plays the last six holes. Uh so the uh He plays the last six holes and then he writes publicly in the newspaper demanding the purse, saying.
That he'd won.
Tom had quit, that he had refused to come out and play. Well, Tom was just doing what the umpire said.
So then the ends up.
The end result of this whole thing is Tom comes out the next day, he plays the final six holes with the umpire and has declared the winner. But he had played the last six holes in twenty eight as opposed to Willy's twenty two. So WILLI played far better golf that particular afternoon and probably would have won the match if it had been able to continue, if the
crowd had allowed him to continue. Anyway, the result was that Willi sued and it ended up in court, and it was the whole process was vacated by a judge. So the match and everything that had happened was absolved. Nobody, everybody got their money.
Back, and it was.
They didn't rejoin that battle until eighteen eighty two, when Tom is sixty and Willy was twelve years younger than him. So Willi was not you know, forty eight, not quite fifty, and Tom crushed him then.
So the referees were, you know, still the the you know, much controversial then as they are now.
Well you know that that particular referee was a guy named Robert Chambers, and he, uh, he was a very famous publisher, and you know, he loved the Morris family. And when young Tommy died, it's he's the one that writes the elegy to a golfer that is like this really wonderfully overwrought poem in praise of young Tom. So he may have you know, I would assume he was an honorable man. But you know who certainly want Tom to get his fair treatment.
So the Musclebirough crowd probably wasn't particularly kind toward his No, you know.
They were notorious and late. Probably the last one of the two or three last great matches ever takes place in eighteen ninety nine between Harry Varden and Willie Parks senior's son Willie Junior, and Willie wants the match to be played at Musselboro, his course in Ganton where Harry works at the time down in England, and Harry says, there is no force on earth that's getting me to play a match against you at Musselborough.
Forget it.
And they ended up doing it at North Berrick and Ganton, but that was the reputation of Musselburg by that time. Harry was like, that's not a not that's a non starter. We are not playing there.
By then too.
But I think Harry's main concern was the crowd. He feared no golf course.
And it was it was a place where a lot of balls got kicked and stuff done.
Yes, it was a lot of things of an unsavory natured when you were playing, and you if you were not the player from Musselborough, if you were from Musselboro.
Well that was a different matter.
So you got the Parks, the the Morrises, Harry Varden, who were some other formidable challenge match players.
Well, you know, Tommy and Davy were two great ones, and they played a lot together and played as it they they had a standing offer that they kept in the paper. We'll take on any two for one hundred pounds sterling, and they're gonna.
Worried.
Pardon me, this would be Straf Davey Strath.
Yes, so they would offer had a standing offers. But Willy, did anybody in the world who wants to take me for a hundred bucks?
Here I am and the hey put it in a newspaper.
Yeah, yeah, it was.
They were published in Bell's Sporting Life for various places like that here by challenge Willie Park.
You know this is a great little story.
Willy Park in eighteen fifty four Senior he wants to play Alan Roberts because Alan has this reputation of invincibility and he doesn't believe it. He wants to play them one on one. So he puts an advertisement in Bell's Sporting Life saying I offer to play any player, and then he names them Old Tom Morris, Alan Roberts and names them and other for one hundred pounds aside, name your day and name your courses and uh. Then they
don't answer the challenge. So he goes to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club meeting at Saint Andrews and challenges them in person. And Alan wouldn't take it up then either, he you know, allan my own view, and there would be a lot of horse storians who disagree, But my own view is Alan thought if he played Willi, he'd get killed and his reputation for invincibility would be destroyed.
And that is that is my personal view.
Is that something that happened regularly. Is where you know, a if some if a player just knew they were going to get beat, they just would decline the challenge.
You know, yes, at the beginning, it would happen sometimes. You know, I think you might also take the view that Alan felt like I have. You know, I'm the King of the Hill. When you beat somebody, you can come and challenge the King of the Hill. Garden refused to accept the challenge from Willie Park initially, and then Golf Magazine just called him right out. You know, you can't be the champion and not accept the challenge. If you're going to be the champion and somebody challenges, you
got to answer the challenge. The papers were more aggressive then too. You know, they would just call people right out, you know, every time an Englishman won the Open, for instance in eighteen nineties, they would have, you know, have like an admonition to Scotland they better look to their laurels at their own national game and this and that. So papers are a little tougher then too.
I was going to ask about the newspapers. Actually, it seems to me that there was a kind of like symbiosis between the newspapers and these challenge match golfers in building up the popularity of the game, right because the matches made for such great content, as we would say today, Yeah, retelling the stories of the matches in the papers was great fun and also a great source of information for
historians today. And so would you say there was that kind of relationship, this mutually beneficial relationship between the newspapers and the golfers all, you know, kind of with the result of making the game more popular.
I would say that, yes there was a relationship, but it was between the newspaper and the landed gentlemen who put up the money for the match. You know, the professional golfers were pretty much nothing.
Have you seen Shakespeare in Love.
There's one where the guy comes into the middle of a theatrical performance sys who's out over there, and he says, oh, nobody, he's the author, And that was pretty much the way it was with professional golfers.
He's nobody, He's just the golfer. So it was good for the.
Gentlemen who put up the stakes if it generated a lot of interest, because then they could get a lot of action. That's what they were looking for, was betting action, gambling action. A lot of them would be involved in betting at multiple levels on these events. The newspapers was good for the newspapers just because for the same reason everything is good for a newspaper, which is it makes people pick it up.
And read it.
So they definitely But if they were doing anything for anybody, it was not for a professional golfer. I can tell you that they weren't even allowed in the clubhouse. They had to change their shoes in a shack somewhere. You know, they weren't They weren't getting any love from anybody except the person they won money for usually.
So moving forward in time a little bit, right now, I know you're working on a book about the eighteen nineties. By the eighteen nineties, obviously the Open Championship is very well established. It's been going on for three decades, I suppose it at that point, and that helps to usher in not exactly maybe a stroke play era, but more
popularity and validity for this tournament's stroke play format. And so by the eighteen nineties, with the Open Championship happening, what is the importance of challenge matches at that point, Well, you got to.
Keep in mind that the Open Championship was the only regular stroke play event that happened annually at that time for professional golfers for a while, but it didn't last forever. Saint Andrews had an annual tournament as well for professionals
that was associated with one of their meetings. Almost all golf events were associated with the meeting of a club of the Royal and Ancient of the Honorable Company of North Berwick, of Mirrorfield, or of one of those, so almost all of it would be in association with that, and in fact, the Challenge matches were originally put on as entertainment for the rich gentleman and the people who attended the meaning and also an opportunity to gamble.
Then when you.
Get into the eighteen nineties, the thing that changes about challenge matches is that now you're in a period where golf courses are opening all over England and Scotland like never before, and so what really becomes the money making machine for professional golfers And that changed the equation for
them financially. The most is that exhibition matches. One day, little exhibition that you put on a foursome of Harry Varden and John Henry Taylor against James Braid and Sandy Hurd, say to Scotsman, two englishmen to open the new course that's coming up here in Lancashire or whatever it is, and then you would get a paid to set fee or peer you know, and so like for instance, Harry Varden and John Henry Taylor and those guys, they were making sixteen pounds ten to fifteen pounds for every single
exhibition they appeared in win loser draw. They might be able to do as many as twenty or thirty of those in a year, and so that was a big, big chunk, the majority chunk of their income at that time. They'd be working for a club that was paying them somewhere between fifty pounds and seventy five pounds, probably more for champions, but you know they weren't. Their base salary was low, and they were making their money in exhibition
matches and tournaments. To the extent that they were good in tournaments, the tournaments only paid five places or six places, sometimes ten, so you weren't gonna make a lot of money in tournaments unless you were top of the leader, were guide, so there were fewer of them, but you still had to make your bones as a player by winning a challenge match against an established golfer. For instance, John Henry Taylor in eighteen ninety three, John Henry Taylor
is just starting out in this profession career. He's been a professional for like two or three years now, and he needs to make a name for himself. And so happens that the Great Saint Andrew's golfer, Andrew Kircaudy, is temporarily filling in at a course a train ride away
from him. So they set up a thirty six hole home and home match between him, and Andrew Kircaudy his the president of his golf club, does John Henry's and Taylor wins, and then all of a sudden he starts to get some recognition and some opportunities, and then the following year he wins an Open championship and is the first Englishman to win the Open. So that's how you would prove yourself, and some of it was your own
self confidence. You know, you went into the Open with a lot more confidence if you could take down, one on one a player who was always a threat to win the Open and had been for many years.
So that was how they fit in.
Then there were fewer of them, but the big ones were still huge. What I would consider to be the finale happens in nineteen oh five when Scotland is just getting killed on the golf course year after year by the English, which you can imagine, nothing galls to scott
more than losing to the damn English. So they decide, you know, that they're going to take them on it what they would consider the true game, and they get their two best players, James Heard and James Braid and Sandy Heard, and they play a long four four green thirty six holes a day match against Harry Varden and John Henry Taylor, the two principal antagonists from England.
They just get annihilated.
I forget what the final score is, but it's like thirteen and eleven, you know, thirteen soles up with eleven to play, so complete humiliation for the Scots and that, and then you know, after that they begin to really fade from the scene. And that's pretty much the tail end of that age.
With the challenge matches, were they historically always two man best ball or do they have different formats within the you know, four rounds of thirty six holes at four different courses.
They would always, in the beginning, always be played as a foursome alternate shot. That was the only form of golf really for the first three or three.
Hundred and some years.
Then they then occasionally they would have a single because they wanted Tom versus Willie, you know, but they only had singles or foursomes. I'm not aware of any challenge match of consequence that was conducted as a better ball that was a sort of an English. One of the things that Scott's hated about the English is they they hated the fact that the English loved handicap competitions far as they were concerned, a real medal, a real cup
is won by the lowest score. This idea that you could win without shooting the lowest score, they thought of.
Is insane.
That's not golf. They also hated stroke play. Freddie Tat, who's probably one of the great Scott's golfers ever, would say that what score play is no more a game than rifle shooting. A game is when you play someone else, right, And they they didn't like the exception with stroke play
in England. They particularly didn't like it with handicaps, and they really hated the thing the English invented called the bogie competition, where you played against par or you know what was conceived then as par as opposed to against an opponent at all, or even against a field. You just played against what they called the ground score of the course.
I'm curious if you know anything about it, But you know what, I'm just thinking about golf today and golf then, and with match play, and you had these rascius highly engaged crowds watching these challenge matches. How did crowds differ in like the Open, with the stroke play competition? Were they bigger or were they smaller? Were they more tamed? Do you know anything about that?
Yes, the open crowds were tended to be not as big as a super powerful match like Tommy versus Davy, or Willie versus Old Tom or that one that I was just speaking of in nineteen oh five. Those might get ten thousand people there, and open will usually get somewhere closer to a thousand, maybe two thousand for a really big one, you know, and some of them, like when Tommy was in the position to win the belt in eighteen seventy, there was a very large crowd for
that one. But on the rule, they would be smaller crowds, and they would also be a little better behaved because, especially in the early rounds, because there wasn't quite the partisan fervor that's involved in a match. A match almost always involved, like you were saying, Andy Town against Town, and that just creates a different level of, you know, fan fervor than watching somebody play good golf against the
whole field. It would get rowdy in a final, though, if it was close, like eighteen ninety eight, you know, the final between Harry Varden and Willie Park Junior at Prestwick comes down to one stroke on the eighteenth toll from four feet away. You know that one would get loud and difficult for players, but most of the time was a little bit more sedate than a match.
So I want to try out a theory here. It seems like the more the kind of center of power in the game of golf moved away from Scotland, the more the challenge match declined as the primary form of golf or the most important or prestigious form of golf. Right because by the early nineteen hundred's the game has obviously expanded to England and become very important there, and
it's also beginning to become important in the US. And it seems like in England and the US there aren't these kind of rooted traditions of matches that right from the beginning, you know, stroke play seems to be the most prestigious way to play the game and to identify the best players. So is there some validity to that where you know, as golf moves away from Scotland, that the challenge match kind of you know, declines as the power moves elsewhere.
That is completely true, Garrett, and it's true on a much broader scale than that. You know, the farther the game moves in St Andrew's and the center of the game, which was then in Fife and East Lothian, the farther it drifted from its traditions and the more different it became. And that really picked up speed in England, as I was mentioning a couple minutes ago, with the handicap competitions
and the focus on stroke play. But the killer is when it moves and gets big in America, because Americans had a whole different point of view on the game than Scott's. For one thing, they practiced like crazy, and no Englishmen or Scotsmen ever practiced.
They just played.
They might practice in the sense of taking a club they were having trouble with somewhere out in the middle of the golf course and hitting a lot of strokes with it to see if they could figure it out, But they didn't practice the way Americans practiced. And Americans also were much more individualistic as a culture than any European culture that I know of, and so the focus on your score in America was quadruple even what it was in England. So yes, the more that it went
away from sc the more different the game became. And that applied first to challenge matches and then to lots of other things.
It seemed like in America the origins centered around exhibition matches that which you already alluded to, took away from some of the challenge matches and as well as tournament play.
Yeah, that was definitely in America.
There was very regular scheduled tournaments from the outset, and by that time there were very regular scheduled tournaments in England too.
You know.
At nineteen oh one is when the British Professional Golf Association is formed and they set up a whole qualifying system for their new championship, the PGA Championship, which in those days was sponsored by the News of the World newspaper and was known as the News of the World Championship.
And so there was a whole series.
Of tenor tournaments during the year that earned you quality, you know, points or whatever to get into their championship at the end of the year. So that's the beginning of what an actual schedule is. And that so America doesn't really start golf seriously till about eighteen eighty eight. So by the time American golf gets really going in the early nineteen hundreds, after Harry Varden pays a visit
there in nineteen hundred. They already have the benefit of seeing how the structure has been created over in Britain, and they just replicate it pretty much event for event, tournament for tournament.
And in a way, that tournament schedule was created in order to create similar competitions across the country to get qualifiers for the big tournament.
So it wasn't you.
Know, it was a way to accurately measure, you know, who the rightful players were to be in the in the big tournament.
Yes, that was a big part of it, Andy, And another part of it was what professionals needed was more opportunities to earn money, and so it created many, many more opportunities to earn money in tournaments. Honestly, in some ways it's like today's tour because it's kind of aimed more at the middling professional than at the John Henry Taylors and Harry Varden's of the world.
Because they could still earn way more doing a challenge match. They could earn the most of anything doing a challenge match, just like you know, Phil and Tiger showed last year that they could just play for the same amount of money as the fed X Cup. Yes, the entire tournament, the entire year, competition one day.
Yeah, well in that age, yes, But I think, really Andy is what happened is if you were a championship winner, you were the one that got invited to every exhibition match, So you just cashing just to ring it up the cash register, you know, twice a month, three times a month. Whereas if you were in fifty second, well then you probably didn't get invited. But when there was fifteen tournaments during the year instead of three, you know, you could put in your alger to participate in all of them.
By virtue of your membership in the PGA. As a golf professional, you then had many more opportunities to earn money and to get yourself noticed that might get you invited to an exhibition match or a challenge match. So it was a multiple multipurpose thing. A lot of it was just to create more opportunity for the professional golfer.
So the you know, the challenge match has morphed into
something else. It morphed into something else in the twentieth century, maybe even by like the nineteen tens by the Warriors, when Bobby Jones was playing some of these exhibition matches, and then of course by the sixties we have Shell's Wonderful World of Golf and these different from that point on, these different permutations of a television product designed around a match between well known players, and so, you know, the role of matches between prominent players has completely changed has
it has become something else? And that's what we have today with these matches during the pandemic. They're they're on that model of the kind of television product that has a charitable intention and that features the best known players of the day, but nobody really takes them seriously as a measure of who's the best player.
Yeah, no, no, I would think they are thought of really, as you know. I love the one that they did at last year between Tiger and Phil. I mean, there was a lot of things that were wrong with the broadcasting, this and that. But Andy, you talked about this on your podcast and I had the exact same observation. I live on a farm with my brother in law who's a rugby player. All of his friends are rugby players. I watched the event up in his game room with
like twenty rugby players. You know, they play golf, but they play golf mainly to drink, you know what I mean, and.
To hang around with their buddies.
They're not golfers in the classical sense of the world, but they love that match.
They were betting money on shots.
They were just really interacting with golf in a way that you seldom see what I would consider to be the routine sports fan, which they all are. They live around sports, especially college football.
Just loving golf like that.
I don't know that we've never had an individual get together that was golf related, except a Masters with Scotty's friends. So it was kind of interesting in that way. But it's more of I don't think I think it has the same cachet as a challenge match anymore because it's not a serious competition. It's sort of a show that's being put on.
I think there's also a lack of hometown pride, you know, where these these towns, and it's the same way with like, you know, I just finished watching The Last Dance, and I grew up a Bulls fan. I had, you know, I have tremendous Bulls pride, you know, no matter who's on the team.
But obviously those years where you're you're you're rooting for your team and you're rooting for your player.
One of the things that these head to head matches provide is an opportunity. It's like similar when you know, I get in the debate between Ernie and Phil all the time and you see the people that back Ernie and the people that act Phil. Because it's a one
versus one, it's a much easier way. And I think that's the thing with the difference between the golf tournaments are better for the player, the whole group of professional players, but for the fan and for the general public, the challenge match is a much easier and approachable match to watch because you don't have to you're never missing anything in a tournament, you're missing ninety nine point nine percent of the action because you're only watching one shot at a time or one group at a time.
Exactly.
Andy, you're so right, And you know when they first put out that Premier Golf League thing, I was thinking, you know what they should do is they should resurrect the Challenge Match. Let's have Adam Scott play a match over four courses. Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath for Adam Scott versus two courses that you know, some great golfer in United States picks out as his courses that he wants to play on. That would be fun for fans to watch play two courses in Ireland with Rory against Brooks.
Brooks plays whatever to lousy as larda courses he wants and Rory plays two great courses in Ireland.
Yeah, I mean, the possibilities are really tantalizing. But you know, I think something that was missing from the first Tiger film match and obviously you know I liked it too. I thought it was I thought it was a great idea in something that really generated unusual interests. So I'm not trying to bash that match, But the fans weren't
really part of that match, right. We talked about how integral the galleries the fans were and their rowdiness their excitement were to the early Challenge matches, and the match at Shadow Creek really lacked that. Now, of course, at these matches during the pandemic, we can't have crowds, we can't have fans for obvious reasons. But at Shadow Creek I wish there had been a sense of that rowdiness.
I almost wish that that match had been played a TPC Scottsdale or something to really see what was going on in people's homes during that match, because I think people were getting excited even if the level of the golf wasn't very high. But the potential for drama in a one versus one match like this is truly so high, and I would love to see an engaged, big gallery.
I just thinking about this.
To me, it seems like the closest thing today to challenge match is the Ryder Cup.
That is exactly what I was going to say, Andy, I agree one hundred percent. The atmosphere, you know, the incredible intense pride that's on the line between countries. That is what a challenge match represented.
What's ironic is everybody's searching for, like you know, there's a big power struggle. You know. One of the reasons the PGA Tour might absorb the European Tour is just because of the Ryder Cup and the amount of money that's generated from it. So you have this uber profitable you know property golf property that's essentially based the most similar format of golf to the beginning of competition of golf, which was also extraordinarily popular, and not just among golfers.
I mean, I imagine that this led a lot of people interest to get interested in the game. I know my friends love watching the Ryder Cup that aren't big golfers, and it's like, and yet we still don't ever look and say, why don't we do more of things like that? And instead of doing things like it, they just tried to copy it with the President's Cup.
It's amazing to me, Andy that the PGA Tour and the European Tour jointly cannot realize the formula that makes their main event such a great success and completely ignore it in every other enterprise they undertake. You know, it's just like, I'm so baffled by that, and I just don't get it.
I don't care what level you're at.
If there are two good golfers playing and they both happen to have their game on that day, there's going to be amazing drama in the you know, thrust and perry of match compared to the kind of thing that you see weekly on the PGA Tour. Last year's Amateurs
were both amazing matches. The one thing I would say about the match that happened last year's I think the fans would like it a lot more if they played for their own money and it's not like they don't have enough, then then you would get some stakes.
Let's play for.
Five million aside, and we're putting up the five million now now we're talking.
Or even if it was just a part, even a portion, if it's you know, we know we're gonna make a bunch of money TV wise, and we can put money from the TV pot.
In to make it bigger.
But even if it's one hundred thousand, you know, I don't necessarily think it's the general it's it's the idea that exchange of there's I have a really good buddy that you know, he's a really he's a good player, and we'd had we had a summer where we had matches and I just kept beating him. In one match he started, you know, he's he's three up or four up through five holes like just in, he starts John. He has and beating me in months and he's John and up. I end up coming back and it was
just for twenty bucks. I end up coming back and beating him and I have. He was so distraught at the end of the round. He gave me the twenty bucks and I have a picture of the twenty dollars of a hand and him with his head in his hands, and it's just whatever he calls me, it comes up, and it's just like that. Exchange of money is like the worst Having to open your wallet and hand hand your opponent money is one of the worst feelings in golf.
Yeah, and the rules should be that they have to hand over the hunter k on the final hole if you lose, hand it to him right there on eighteen.
Have it in a statuel.
You know.
I'd be fine with this the old rules, which is somebody puts up a big stake and winner gets this percent, loser gets no percent.
And it would bring out a different dimension of the competition because something that I got the sense of, I don't have any proof of this, but something that I out the sense of in the first match was that neither Tiger nor Phil was playing particularly well and they didn't care.
Still cared, and Tiger didn't you know, maybe still to win that match, at least, I think personally, and probably just to have at least one thing he can say about Tiger Woods, that's not he killed me. And but I don't think Tiger cared a wit about whether he won or didn't.
What What of the disadvantages of matches are blowouts? You know, that's that's like one of the big fears is, oh, it's a snooze fest because one guy plays lousy and something I was. I went to the NBA All Star Game this year, and that's always been one of the big contentions of the All Star Game, was like, you know,
these guys don't try. It's not really a competition. And they went with a new format this year, the Ela Mende, which essentially gave a player once they reached you know, the third quarter, they gave one team a certain amount of advantage and it was play until here, until you score this many points, and then all of a sudden, it was like one of the most incredible games of basketball I've ever seen, because you're seeing the best players in the world all on this on two teams, and
they were playing it was like they were playing pickup basketball.
It was like pickup that's how you play pickup basketball.
Yeah, So, Mike, I'm wondering if, like, if there was a way you could do that, whereas almost you could create a new type of format that's match play based, but you know, after nine holes your lead transfers to a you win, you need to win this many more holes and it becomes almost sudden death.
Yeah.
I think that would be fun. You know, I think it requires some thinking out, but I love that kind of thing. I think golf is not inventive enough. You know, we just have the same seventy two whole grind every week.
Yeah, I mean it's you just got an experiment. You know, how can we bring back some of the intensity of the early days of challenge matches? How can we reintroduce some of that drama and unpredictability and just playing insanity to the game.
Alternate shot is a format that by its very nature introduces a lot of volatility and instability into it. And one of the things that I think is going to be fun about Sunday's match is that a portion of it is going to be played at alternate shot, and then you're gonna have Tiger hitting it.
From wherever Brady, I mean, wherever Manning or whoever it is. I think it's is it Tiger with Manning? Right?
Yeah?
Yeah, So you know, wherever he hits a tiger has to play from, and you know there could be some interesting adventures that go along with that. And that was part of what made the early matches great to bet on, because you never knew what would happen, because you know, one player could be off form frequently. For instance, Tommy played with his dad, and his dad's form was off and on. He had a lot to do in life. He was laying out golf courses, he was managing the green as Saint Andrew's.
So his game came and went.
And you know, Tommy could beat most people's best ball by himself, but a lot of days his father made it impossible for him, and that introduced an element of uncertainty, even against a great player like Tommy. That made it great for betting and for interest. And I think alternate shot is something that you know has really completely disappeared, except you know, the mornings of the Ryder Cup or whatever. And I think that's part of why match play was so interesting.
Then it's so much more of a team game too, like you have to be there for your teammate, you can't let him get down, because it's a much more challenging format to play because there's more pressure on you.
Challenging psychologically everywhere.
You feel so horrible when you hit your ball into oblivion and you got to then turn around and look at your partner and say your go here. You feel so much pressure compared to when you're playing your own ball. Also have to consider, you know, when you're hitting a shot, that's an approach if you're not going to get it there, what does your partner want next?
Does you want ninety? Does he want a hundred? What does he want?
So there's so many different elements that enter into it, and I think it's the greatest.
Form of golf myself personally that.
I obviously I'm in an incredibly shrinking minority on that point.
I'm convinced that the key or alternate shot becomes the most fun format to play when your mindset shifts from oh shit, I shouldn't have put my partner there, to thank God, I don't have to hit that next shot.
You know that's what you are thinking, but you have to pretend that you're not. You have to pretend that you're feeling remorse.
But what's in your own head? You realize I got that one yeah, no, it's you.
Know, it's so much fun to play, and you know, people's scores are so much higher. And I think, you know, Americans don't like it because they can't score that well at it, and plus they only play half the.
Shots and yeah, and that and that can be a problem if you're playing a course where you really want to play all the shots or whatever. You want to say that you've played the course. But when you let go of that two yeah, exactly, Yeah, you're not going to do that. But when you when you're able to let go of that, it really you know, you're playing fewer shots. Also because it so it has less of a physical impact, even if the mental component is is a bit more complex.
It was very much quicker as a game too.
Oh yeah, oh yeah about for sure.
Three hours to play an alternate shot match if you're moving as slow as an American.
We did. We did.
We had a tensome at loss Sonia playing five balls but sling shotting so that you're always one hundred yards ahead of your partner.
And we we ended the we ended the round. We played just over three hours. It was incredible.
Yeah, all walkers, so Steve just to just to wrap up here. Do you have a pick for the Sunday's match?
Do you think o rooting interest?
What I'm rooting for is a close match, you know, something that's exciting. You know, I would say that I'm not a huge I'm more of a Tiger fan than a Phil fan. Phil kind of lost a little bit of luster for me when he's running around chasing his ball and knocking it backwards in the middle of the open while it's moving. Even though he's probably right, I don't think it's very good for him to throw Tom
Watson under the bus publicly after the Ryder Cup. So, you know, some of the things Phil's done have made me feel not as well as attached to him as a lot of people do.
So, so Tiger is the slight rooting interest.
Well, obviously Tiger is the is.
If he's not the greatest player ever, he certainly has had the greatest stretch of golf that's ever been played that I don't think there can be.
Much dispute about.
So, I mean, I have a lot of respect for that as a person who's looked back at the history of the game, just the accomplishments he's had or just bag of the mine
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