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 fried egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egggggrid Egg, Bride Egg.
Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump course. Hello and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about the evolution of the Old Course at Saint Andrews. With the Open Championship at the Old Course for the thirtieth time this week, we thought it would be fun to dig into some of the deep history of this place and it might surprise you to find out how different the course was in its early days and why it eventually took on
the form that it has today. My guest is Bob Crosby, who has been on the podcast a couple of times before. Bob is a golf historian. He's working on a book project about John Lowe, a major figure in the golf world of the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, and my and Bob's discussion touches on some of the very important contributions low made to the design of the
old course at a critical juncture in its history. But our discussion also just sort of ranges through time and gives a general picture of the way the old course has changed over time. All right, let's get to it. Here is me and Bob Crosby on the evolution of the old forms. We have just kind of gotten through the first round of this year's Open Championship. In fact, it's still going on as we record this. Bob, did you catch any of the action this morning?
Very briefly, I do note that the course is playing awfully dry and awfully firm, which is absolutely wonderful.
Yeah, delight to see the ball running along the ground like it like it does.
I think a lot of people took a lesson from Tiger Woods at Hoyle Lake, which has hit two irons off tees.
We're seeing a good amount of like load trajectory shots today from the players who can pull those off, which is nice. So we were going to dive a little bit into the past of Saint Andrews. You know, most of our discussion is going to revolve around the Saint Andrews of the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but I want to make clear upfront that a lot of what we're going to discuss is significant for today's discussion and understanding of the course as it's probably going to
play out over this Open Championship. I think we'll hear a lot of similar debates about the course and whether it's obsolete or not, what kinds of changes should be made to it or not. So just to put that out there up front, this discussion of Saint Andrews as it was in its you know, kind of not early days, but it's middle days, is I think directly relevant to
what's going on right now. So let's rewind a couple of hundred years and just talk about what Saint Andrew's looked like before, say eighteen fifty, Like in the first half of the eighteen hundreds, I think people will be surprised to hear what the course was like before it was widened. So tell me about that.
The course until about eighteen, I want to say, eighteen fifty six or something like that was a single corridor hole out and back. You played the same same holes on the outward side and then back towards the clubhouse. The outward nine that we play now was added gradually over about fifteen years starting about eighteen fifty, and work
on it will continue to until about eighteen seventy. That outward that what we now play is the outward nine, was called the time the field course because it was basically carved out of winds and gorses gorse on that
side of the fairway. It was very, very wild. For example, what's now the second green was a thick batch of winds and gorse that was burned off about eighteen sixty five or eighteen seventy to create that green, which gives you a sense of the kind of work they had to do to build at the same time they built the current first hole, but also it gives you a sense of the kind of work they had to do to clear the way for the second, third, fourth, and sixth, fifth,
and sixth holes. They really were all new holes. The current back nine is essentially the same are essentially the same whole corridors and frankly the same bunkering as the original pre eighteen fifty course.
So well, first of all, winds, you've mentioned those a couple of times. What are those? What are winds?
Winds is thick wispy grass that if dense enough is literally impossible to hit out of and or impossible to find your ball in. I've lost many balls and winds. Gorse is a very nasty animal, which is lots of thorns. I don't recommend even if you see your ball in a gorse bush, don't reach him to grab it.
Will rip.
This happened to me a couple of times. You'll rip your glove off and gash your hand.
Yeah, yeah, I forget about playing it. You shouldn't even try to retrieve it.
You shouldn't even try to retrieve it is. It was just basically unmaintained natural vegetation in the area that they had to that they had to I think apparently from what I understand, they burned a lot of it all off, but probably they took crude farm implements also and cut it back.
And I want to make sure that people picture this specifically. Basically, the old course was half of today's corridor of the old course. You know that the back nine half of it with this impenetrable vegetation essentially on either side where you'd lose a ball, And so the essence of the old course as a kind of wide playground that you know, that's how we met imagine it today, was just completely the opposite in this era. That changed in the middle of the eighteen hundreds. And can you tell me a
little bit about why it changed. Why did they do this?
Well, they did it because of the volume of play, at least that's what the reports say, is that the volume of play was so high, and it was golf was growing so quickly in the last half of the nineteenth century that they needed some way to leave the traffic. And so the idea of building a different set of whole corridors to relieve that traffic, I think was a
natural solution. Part of that though obviously, and this is unique to the old course, they didn't build new greens for those holes, the new holes, well, with a couple of exceptions, they did. They essentially expanded the old greens, right words, to accommodate the new holes. And so now most of the greens that august at excuse me, at the old course are massive, absolutely massive, but they have retained these wild contours that still come into play in terms of how you approach the greens.
And this was done essentially to make play go two directions, you know, to to enable people to play the course on the outward nine and the back nine at the same time, instead of having to you know, run into each other on the way back as or on the way out as they would in a previous era.
Yeah, that's right, and you tend to for you know, we all tend to laud the Old Course as the sort of mother of modern golf architecture. We can get to that in a minute, but it's important to remember that before they expanded the course, it was a very narrow, tight, tough course with lots of what would have been carry bunkers you had going out the wall and the rail line on the left side. On the right you had basically unattended rough area, and it was it would have been a very very tough course.
Yeah, and pretty long for the area, which we can talk about as well, which is funny to think about now with all of these pros driving half of the par fours on the course. But in any case, the Old Course became wide in the middle of the nineteenth century essentially, And did this have something to do with the introduction of the guta percha ball and the way that that popularized the game and you know, made more people want to go out and play or do those timelines not quite match up?
Yeah, I don't. That might take is slightly different. I don't. In the stuff I've looked at, I don't see many references to the nature of the golf ball as having an effect on what they did. They needed to build a separate outward set of holes that ran parallel to the original inward nine. They did that because of play on the golf course. I don't think, and the authorities I read aren't clear on this. I don't think that
outward nine was particularly wide. Initially. It got to be wide because of the volume of play and the fact that the gorse and the winds on the right side of those holes was, as Horace Hutchinson said, trampled down, and that became a problem. It was viewed as, as one commentator put it in eighteen ninety one, a paradise for while driving.
So essentially they thought, like the more that you trample down the winds and the gorse, the less of an emphasis is put on accurate driving of the ball.
Exactly the the the the whole defense on the right side of the outward holes was that gorse, and that and those wins and once they appeared to have disappeared, that defense was gone by the way. The the other the other factor in the trampling down of those winds and gorse was the construction of the new course, which
ran parallel to a number of the outward holes. So you would have had players on two courses, trampling down the wins and the gorse on the old course, And that became by the late eighteen nineties, or at least it was perceived to be a very very big problem.
So we're into the eighteen nineties at this point. One thing that happens in the teen eighties and nineties is that people really start to write about golf and golf courses at a higher rate than they did in the decades before. At least from what I've seen right, there's not a whole lot of golf literature that even really exists before the eighteen eighties. There's a little bit, you know, you can find references here and there. But eighteen eighties
eighteen nineties, suddenly there's entire magazines devoted to golf. And perhaps this has to do with the rising popularity of the game in Britain at the time. It's making its way down to England, making its way down to England from Scotland, and so perhaps that has something to do
with this kind of print explosion. But when that writing about golf really starts to take off, what is your understanding of what people thought, what these writers thought of the Old Course and why they thought it was good. If they thought it was good.
The curious thing about the writing at the time and by the time, I mean, let's say eighteen ninety, is that the Old Course was considered the best course in the world, not so much because of the reasons we think of today, which is this interesting arrangement of bunkers and other architectural features, but for the old Victorian reasons that the length of the holes were such that they required full shots, and it was at the time one
of the longer courses. But the reason people thought it ought to be the primary rotor course for the amateur and the open at the time was for that reason that the holes required full, well executed shots to reach greens in the regulation number.
Yeah, and you see this specifically in the writings of Horace Hutchinson, who was would you say he was the best known golf writer of the late eighteen eighties and early eighteen nineties. Was he the pre eminent golf writer of that time?
Yeah, yeah, Garrett, I guess so. I mean he did an awful lot of right, you know, you had though a lot of other figures that chimed in as well. W. Laid Law Purvis was a very cantankerous guy, with strong, sharp elbows about views. He was a classic Victorian golfer
who believed in very rational, predictable rules. He was the first person to formulate what he took to be a scientifically designed golf course, which is what we would now consider a classic Victorian golf course with cross bunkers at intervals here and there and that sort of thing.
And he was behind Royal Saint George's. When we talked to you and I talked about Royal Saint George's in its early days, that was sort of representative of Purvis's principles.
The first iteration of Royal Saint George's was almost the definition of a Victorian golf course. But Hutcheson was important too. I mean, he had won the Amateur twice I think early in the eighteen nineties. He was a prolific writer, was actually one of the first proponents Ofvictorian architecture. He lated changed his mind, but he said laid law purposes ideas embody the quote Procrustian axioms of golf architecture, which will live forever?
The Procrustian axioms.
Right, the Procrustian axiom.
I know what axiom means, but I'm not sure I know what Procrustian means.
I think it means basically timeless forever, going back to the Greek era.
Something perfect. Yeah, I mean this is sort of how Hutchinson writes too. But you know something that's striking about Hutchinson's writing about golf courses in the early eighteen nineties. I'm thinking of his book Famous Golf Links in particular, where he has an extended description of the old course. And you realize two things as you go through this description of the old course. One is that he's describing
what we would now call the reverse routing. You know, you sort of get that if you holds in, it's like, oh okay, so that you know the out of bounds are the the course is on the left as he's describing it here, So all the famous holes that you're thinking he's going to get to he just doesn't get to.
And then the other thing you realize is that what he likes about the course and what he doesn't like about the course are just sort of the opposite of what many people like about the course or don't like about the course today. What he liked about the course was its length, as you said, you know, nice full shots.
There's you know, all the holes are the right length where you you know, you have to have a full stroke with this or that club, and it really tests your ability to hit the full shots and make those carries, et cetera. What he doesn't like about the course is all the random what he calls banks and braves, the undulations. So he was not a fan of the kind of chaos of the old course, which is something that most people today sort of embrace about it and think of as part of its.
Charm al A central tenet of Victorian golf architecture, and a tenant still debated today, is the role of luck and chance in golf architecture, and the Victorians were absolutely adamant, adamant that luck and chant should be eliminated in a golf course to the extent possible. We still argue about that today. I think I might even argue that there's nothing new we ever argued about in golf that doesn't find an echo somewhere back in the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties.
But that's that's coming from a historian's perspective.
For heaving, well, I think you're right, and it's not surprising given the volume of writing about golf and discussion about golf that was produced during this era. They had seemingly time and room enough to talk about nearly everything, and so it's tough to compete with their sheer output.
And let me just make a quick note, the volume of writing was prodigious, but it is absolutely fantastic writing. These guys were well educated. They had classical they studied Latin and Greek. Their language sentences are eloquent, and they it really repays reading. There is a prejudice among people that are interested in golf that any debates that took place that far back in time can't possibly still be relevant.
They are profoundly So just pick up the stuff you haven't been skipping over and not reading and read it because it's absolutely fascinating stuff.
Yeah, agreed, All right, So we were talking about their ideas about architecture. Okay, Horace Hutchinson had kind of representative ideas of the time about the old course. It was a good length. I'm not sure about the undulations, but you know, you have to take a lot of full swings, so it's a good course. A very strange way to view the old course and something that we don't quite recognize now. But within about fifteen years the most popular
way of thinking about the old course definitely shifted. And could you just tell me about that shift and why you think it happened.
Let me begin by saying that about ten or so years ago I had a series of conversations with Peter Lewis, who I want to thank for plining me in the direction of a lot of things and for the things he has written in things he's found.
I'd highly recommend if I can interrupt Why eighteen Holes? His book Why eighteen Holes? Yeah, excellent, you know you can. It's pretty easily accessible, I believe, and fantastic account of why we have eighteen holes on golf courses now. There's some really interesting history there.
Which won the Herbert Warren Wind Award from the USGA for the best Book of the Year. So I was a co winner that year is absolutely worth finding and buying. But Peter and I began a series of discussions, and the discussions were triggered because he called me at some point out of the blue by what I think is one of the most interesting questions in the hit history of golf, which is, how did the old course get so good? Spoiler alert. I don't have a great answer
for that. But if you think it got so good because a bunch of sheep dug out burrows to protect themselves from the wind in the rain, I've got a bridge for you in Brooklyn that you might be interested in buying.
That's sort of the romantic idea, right. People are just like, oh, it's a completely natural you know, just the bunkers are where, you know, they dug it out, and yeah, it's there was a little more human intervention than that, wasn't there?
There was a lot of human intervention. No one knows that history better than Peter Lewis, and Peter doesn't know. So I don't pretend to know. How did the road hole get so good? I don't know, and nobody does. How did the edenhole get so good? We don't know, but it is there are remarkable holes. I mean, I have a theory that maybe some of it was put together by Scottish gentleman there on the scene who thought wagering was really important, so they wanted holes with potentially
catastrophic outcomes that would settle bets. That's but that's pure speculation. Somebody designed those holes and they are lost to history. Having said that about some of the better holes and all, you know, a lot of those tend to be on the inward nine. The outward holes. The newer holes were ones that we know a little bit more about. Peter was able to uncover and he gets I want to give him full credit for this, the story of I think it was seventeen bunkers that were added to the
outward holes in nineteen hundred. I can go into as much detail about that as you want. He wrote a wonderful article about that in Through the Green a decade ago. But the idea at the time was that because of the because of the absence of gorse and winds on the right side of those holes, as we talked about earlier, they've been trying by multitudes of golfers that they needed to do something to protect erratic play on that side
of the golf course. So the decision was made to build about sorry about seventeen bunkers on that side of the course. That is not well known and there was a very little commentary about it at the time, but it is notable that a special committee was formed at the time to look into the possibility of building those bunkers. A twenty nine year old John Lowe was on that committee,
that special committee. His good friend Freddie Tate, who would die about a year later, was on that committee, and they, along with the rest of the committee, helped set out those bunkers on the right side of the outward holes that's risked really just to the second hole through the sixth hole. Their plan also included the addition of three or four bunkers on eight and nine. Nito was called the end hole. They wanted bunkers in the end hole.
What's interesting to me, and this sort of follows through the other large bunker building epoch five years later, was that what they were trying to do in nineteen hundred, and they were doing more of it again in nineteen oh five, was to make the hole those holes quote harder, but and this is the interesting twist here they wanted to make it harder because players were complaining that the best approach into the greens was from that old trample
down gorse. In other words, a ball hit down the middle of the second fairway, it was not where ideally you wanted to be. You wanted to be over in what used to be the gorse. So while they're talking about making the course harder, I want to argue that it was John Low's brilliance to figure out what was really going on here and to use that's those sorts of concepts as the basis for a whole new way
of thinking about golf architecture. That is to say, if you were trying to put bunkers in the places where you would ideally want to hit a drive to make the next shot easier, maybe that ought to be a principle around which you use that you use to place bunkers, Maybe that's exactly where they ought to be. Those bunkers were built on the old course, on the outward holes. In nineteen hundred, Low publishes his first sort of sketch
of what we would call today strategic golf architecture. The next year, in a discussion in Golf Illustrated about the best holes in Golf. He follows up with his book Concerning Golf, where he lays out what amounts to a theory of strategic golf architecture more tail. But I like to think that the thought process that was going on about nineteen hundred was absolutely seminal in low developing those ideas. And he did it at the time pretty much alone.
I mean, there was you know, he was uniquely brilliant because nobody else was thinking along those lines at the time. Now they caught on quickly, his friend Harry Cole, Tom Simpson, Mackenzie, the whole clatch caught on pretty quickly. But Lowe was out there at the beginning thinking and the context was the Old Course. We're not just make you know, we don't want to make these shots merely harder. We want to make them more interesting. And the Old Course set
up made that kind of thinking possible. It was just, maybe purely by chance, that the best approaches to the outward holes was from the right sides of the of the of the whole corridors, which happened to be Old gorse. And that leads, you know, it's it fairly thins the fair short step from that to thinking about strategic golf architecture and how in theories of how bunkers are to be placed.
This episode is brought to you by Gooder. Gooder makes twenty five dollars active sunglasses for anyone. It's been a bit cloudy at St. Andrew's so far, but if I were there, I would definitely be wearing my Gooder sunglasses. I have multiple pairs, and one thing I really like about them is that they are large size to fit my relatively large head. They also have a golf specific lens that I'm not exactly sure what it does, but
things look very vivid and sharp. Gooders are comfortable, stylish, and lightweight, and they are one hundred percent UV protective and one hundred percent polarized in all styles. So treat yourself to a pair or two. They are very affordable. And here's the deal for Friday listeners, Gooder is going to give you fifteen percent off your entire order. Go to Gooder dot com that's good R dot com, slash TFE and get fifteen percent off when you use code
TFE at checkout. All orders over fifty dollars get free shipping in the US Again, that's code TFE at goodr dot com slash tf look good golf guder. So I know that this is probably speculation here, but how do you think John Lowe came up with the idea that hazards should be placed where an ideal drive ought to end up? In other words, was he learning that from
the old course as it existed before nineteen hundred? Did he see that there were bunkers on the old course that were kind of in those places where the ideal approach to the green was. You mentioned that there were winds and gorse along the right side of the outward nine, which is often the ideal line for those holes to attack approaches. So do you think he came up with this idea that hazards should guard those best angles instead of merely catching bad shots, which was the dominant idea
of the time. Do you think he came up with that idea by studying the old course as it was, or do you think he came up with it by philosophically thinking it through?
I who knows number one?
Yeah, right now.
I tend to think that he was trying to solve and help a group work through a very practical problem, the solution to which led him to think more broadly that maybe we're working here with a different principle of golf architecture, at least the one we haven't talked about much before. Let me note that at the same time those discussions were going on, probably in the winter of
nineteen hundred, Victorian golf architecture was at its peak. It was the dominant theory of how you designed golf courses. There were proposals at the time to deal with the problem of the gorse or the absence of gorps on the right side of the Howard holes. There were proposals to build trench bunkers all along the right side of the course and all along the left side of the course. There were other proposals to build trench cross bunkers across
the course. Oh my god, classic Victorian ideas that, interestingly were all rejected at a time when those ideas were common currency in golf architecture.
That's what's so fascinating to me about this is that those Victorian ideas, and when you say Victorian, you're referring to the historical era that's normally thought to last from about the eighteen thirties through the end of the eighteen hundreds Queen Victoria's reign, which was very long in the UK.
But in any case, that's the Victorian period, and when you talk about Victorian architecture, you're talking about kind of the popular modes of new course construction and old course renovation in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, which had a lot to do with penal ideas, right, that you would catch bad shots by putting bunkers in front of tees, you know, so that if you kind of thin the ball that it would catch the bunker and stay in
the bunker. You would put bunkers along the sides of holes so that if you sliced it or hooked it, you would be in a bunker. The idea was to penalize shots by putting bunkers where bad shots ended up, and that was absolutely the dominant idea in you know, in nineteen hundred when these changes were being made to the old course. So you would assume that those would be the changes that would be made to the old course.
But somebody, maybe John Lowe, your man, stood in the way, and said, no, that's not what this course is about.
The paradox of the changes in nineteen hundreds of the old course, and the paradox continues in nineteen oh five, is that in an attempt ostensibly to make the holes harder,
they were also making them more strategic. And I think John Lowe saw before anybody else did, and that I think it led to the further elaborate It took him a couple more years, but I think he sorted it out finally and came to a fairly concise, clear articulation of the principal strategic golf architecture that I think flowed out of all of these flowed out of trying to solve that very practical problem.
So could you briefly explain, just in basic terms, why placing bunkers in the way that low promoted and in the way that it was done during these old course renovations in the early nineteen hundreds, where you put the bunkers where you really want to place your ball in order to attack the green, instead of putting the bunkers where bad shots end up, you're putting the bunkers where good shots might end up. Why is that more strategic?
It's more strategic because the hazards on a golf course on a strategic golf course, that is, are problems that you engage voluntarily. You elect to play close to the bunker to obtain the benefit of an easier shot into the green from near that bunker. The hazards and the problems that they give you are not forced on you, and penal architecture, what we today call penal architecture, and to some extent of Victorian architecture at the time, forced
hazards on you. You had to negotiate them whether you wanted to or not. In the case of Victorian bunkers, you typically had to carry them, and if you couldn't hit the ball well to carry them, you were a dead man. You were in the bunker and it would take two or three shots to get out of these
cop bunkers with huge lips that were just disasters. And so the idea of introducing the concept of elective difficulties essentially is I think at the heart of strategic golf architecture, you take on as many problems as you have an appetite to take on. You can avoid them too. If you have no appetite, then don't take them on, but you may find yourself with for more difficulties on the
next couple of shots if you do. But those are choices the strategic golf architecture creates, and I think why strategic golf courses are so wonderful to play.
All right, So another thing that's happening at this time is the introduction of the Haskell ball. Do you think that the introduction of this new and very much more powerful ball had an impact on how the old course at Saint Andrews evolved in the early years of the twentieth century. Now, my understanding is that these initial changes to the old course that you're talking about in nineteen hundred, those would have taken place like before the Haskell really took over.
Right, Yeah, you know, I have trouble convincing people that the Haskell didn't play a huge played maybe some role, but I number one, the Haskell didn't appear in England or Britain until November of twenty nineteen oh one. Okay, the changes made at the old course in nineteen hundred. Low's initial articles on strategic golf architecture appear early in nineteen oh one, essentially a year later. The Haskell appeared
after all of that. Clearly, by nineteen oh there was another round of changes in nineteen oh five to build yet more bunkers, essentially in the same areas as they had started to do in nineteen hundred, for the same reasons. Essentially they didn't think there were enough bunkers there to have an effect on play, so they built more bunkers there.
There was some talk in nineteen oh five about the RNA being concerned that the Haskell ball would overwhelm the course, and teas were moved back in some cases, but the theory of bunker plays at the old course the new ones in nineteen oh five, I just don't read much about people thinking that the Haskell had much bearing on that at all. It's just it's a question of where
you hit the ball. They you know, teas were moved back on I think three or four holes that year, the beginning of tea extensions that go on till today, I guess. But I don't think the Haskell had a lot to do with the with the development of theories of str teaging golf architecture.
Okay, yeah, so you have made arguments against the impact on the architecture of the old course of both the Guttapercha and the Haskell ball and those are pretty common narratives that those technological advances had a profound impact on golf architecture at Saint Andrews.
Now.
I'm sure that they had an impact on golf architecture elsewhere in the way that new courses were built, especially the Haskell you know, courses had to be lengthened and renovated. But maybe the impact is a little bit less at the old course. By the yeah, go ahead, I was.
Gonna say it had some impact. I mean the the you know, there was some concern that the bunkers on the right side of number two, for example, could be overdriven, and so they added a couple of bunkers to handle that, which are now well, you know, completely obsolete.
It's the green side bunkers that are in play for drives. Well, the green side bunkers, they were added a couple of years ago, right, they.
Were added under the Peter Dawson regime. I vehemently rejected objected to them at the time because that is the bailout side of the hole. And I think those bunkers turned the second green into something more like a penal approach shot rather than a strategic approach shot. The second green is I'm sure you know, has huge landforms both front left and in the front and in the left side of that green. You do not want to approach that green from the left side. It's very hard to hold from there.
Makes it equally bad to go left and right. In other words, yeah, well said, well said. So okay, let's go back to nineteen oh five. Now, from what you were saying before, my understanding is that the changes for the nineteen oh five Open Championship at St. Andrews were essentially extensions of the changes that were made in nineteen hundred, where bunkers were being added in the ideal positions in fair ways in order to make the course more difficult for the best players in the world at the time.
Is that an accurate characterization, Yeah, I think it is.
The sixteen more bunkers were added in nineteen oh five. Let me just know that with a couple there were a couple of more bunkers built a couple of years after that, won by Bo's Boase who was the one of the chairmen of the Rules committee at the time, And there was another bunker that Herbert Fowler wanted built on the fifteenth toll, but essentially, that was the end of the addition of new bunkers to the old course nineteen oh five, that is, and the end of any
major structural changes to the course. Now I'm not counting moving te's back as a structural change to the course. We can argue about that if you want, but that was it. The map Mackenzie does in nineteen twenty four of the old course shows all of those new bunkers, and there really have been none sent, none built. New new bunkers at least built since some of the shapes have changed, but the basic locations of those bunkers have
remained essentially unchanged since nineteen twenty four. Well that's when the map was done. I would argue that they really essentially remained unchanged since nineteen oh five, and it was so it was a major, major event.
Why do you think it was that the old course stayed so for many many decades since at least nineteen twenty four, and maybe in nineteen oh five.
The greens, the greens and green and the green surrounds are extreme enough to make it absolutely essential to play off the tee into the correct side of the fairway to approach them. And if you can't do that. You simply can't score at the Old Course. There are very few other courses that have anything like the extremities, the extreme landforms in and around the greens that the Old
Course has. That's where everything starts, and you modify the rest of the course to enhance the power of those extreme contours on the golfer trying to play the course. And I think that, at least in my view, is the core reason why the Old Course is held up so well. It has a unique set of greens that don't tolerate not only mishits, but shots that aren't quite good enough. As Low put it.
Yeah, And that's part of the brilliance of the changes that were made to the Old Course in the early nineteen hundreds is that the bunkers that were added didn't have to do with penalizing the drive necessarily, right. It wasn't about the bunkers. Those bunkers were in a way about the greens, because what they did is that they
changed the player's relationship to the greens. And that's why they were a smart move for the Old Course, because the Old Course is and always has been about the contours of the greens, and so when you're adding new bunkers, you should be thinking about how those bunkers relate to the angle at which players are approaching the greens. If you play away from them, the greens aren't going to
be your friend. If you play near them, the greens are going to be much more friendly to you because of the way they're designed in all those fascinating contours.
The greens, if you care to look carefully, tell you how to play them. They tell you there is a way to play them as better than other ways. Now, these guys playing the Old Course today can overwhelm a lot of that just by how high they hit the ball and how far they hit the ball.
Is there anything else significant do you think to say about how the Old Course evolved in the early nineteen hundreds that we didn't get to so far.
I just want to add that after nineteen oh five, the bunkers were put in place. In nineteen oh five, unlike the bunkers in nineteen hundred, they were incredibly controversial. Incredibly controversial. J. H. Taylor Garden Smith then the editor of Golf Illustration, Harold Hilton, Alex Smith Varden. Everybody hated them. They thought that they were brutally unfair. Golf Illustrated had a series of cartoons about the bunkers, and you know, they depicted them as the sort of Martian landscape out
there on the old course. And in all these cartoons there's a bemused figure in the background looking on smiling. That bemused figures. Golf bag carries the initials j LLL, which is John lang Low. Terribly controversial. Why the changes in nineteen hundred were not controversial remained something of a mystery.
Taylor writes an article condemning the changes to the course, which was an indirect attack at Low, responds in nineteen oh seven in Nesbitz directly to Taylor, and it is a further wonderful articulation of the basic theory of strategic golf architecture, where I think, well, my view is a low dismantls Taylor. But it's a remarkable exchange that the five changes were remained controversial for several years, for several maybe decades.
Why do you think it is that they stayed the changes? You know, who was in power that allowed Saint Andrews and these new changes to stand up against the criticism?
Good question, Good question. I think well. Number one, Lowe remained a very very powerful, powerful figure in the RNA until his death in nineteen twenty nine, so you did mess with the old course as long as he was alive. Number two is that there were in fact several proposals in the thirties, including one in the late thirties on the eve of World War two, to combine some of the holes on the old course with some of the whole.
And I think it was the Eden Course and maybe the New Course to strengthen some of the old course holes at the turn eight nine ten, some of those holes back in there. Harry Colet through had some interesting ideas about that. This is thirty eight to thirty nine, the war comes, nothing happens, and the idea is dropped. So it was to some extent a matter of just chance that changes weren't made. But after World War Two, nobody had any money, nobody really had any money to
invest in course changes. Maybe into the sixties or seventies. By that time, no one dared make significant changes to the course. And I think that's sort of the story. But people thought about it in the thirties.
It was on the table, and history intervened. I mean maybe the changes would have been made if everybody had to sort of abandon golf for several years, and so maybe things would have been different.
Yeah, there are many things that is spinning his grave since his death, but that's not one of them.
He was smiling in his grave about right exactly. All right. Well, so fast forward to today. The old course is still essentially the course that Low defended in the early nineteen hundreds, right,
the course as it stood in nineteen oh five. Now, I don't know exactly how long the course played in the nineteen oh five Open, but in the nineteen eleven Open it was right around sixty five hundred yards, so I assume that's that's more or less what it was, which was, you know, a good long course for the day. Now the course is playing somewhere in the range of seventy three hundred yards. There are teas on other courses. I think I agree with you that this has not
made a structural change to the course. That that's sort of cosmetic in a lot of ways, and maybe necessary given the links that guys are hitting the ball today. But you know, as you consider the way that the old course is being played, now, how do you you see the future of the old course playing out. Do
you think it's going to stay essentially the same? I mean some rough has been added, as we've discussed on the website and article by Tony DearS is on there about rough that has been added on the sixteenth holes, the seventeenth hole, you know, so there's little things like that. But do you see big changes in the old courses future? And if not, do you think that the Open Championship should continue to go back there or if it would be better maybe if it just let it be.
Let's see how the scoring is this year. I do worry about that if somebody wins at thirty hunder par, are people going to cool on the idea of coming back to the old course? It is because well, with some exceptions it's out of land. There's just so much
that they can do to extend the course. And by the way, if you do the math, and I'll keep this quick, if you want the course today to play the same length that it played, say in nineteen twenty, based on a comparison of driver links then to driver links today, the course today needs to be about eighty four hundred yards right eight, There's not eighty four hundred yards in the town of Saint Andrews to build that course.
So we're going to have to live with what historically plays, even at seventy three hundred yards, a radically short championship course. Particularly it was dry and firm. So I worry about that, I really do. And maybe we just don't care about scores. We say that, but we really do care about scores.
It becomes a part of the narrative every time. You know, there are a lot of people beforehand who say, oh, who cares if they're thirty five under, they're still all playing the same course. But you know, if they get to thirty five under, then that's the story of the week all of a sudden, and there Arena doesn't like that.
I have a debate on golf Clube Ballast every six months over whether PARR matters. I think it does matter. Actually, I think there's this mystical entity that's PARR that you try to live up to and you can pretend you don't care, you care, you care, And the effect of par on people's thinking about golf courses. I think it would be can be problematical at the old course. I hope that doesn't happen, but I worried it might.
Yeah. Well, so who do you think the old course serves now? Because it used to serve the best players in the world. Right, This was considered a test for the very very best players. It was a hard course. I mean, just looking up what the scores were at the nineteen oh five Open and keeping in mind that the year before, you know, Jack White had set what I believe was a scoring record at two ninety six. You know, various people had gone under seventy. On the
last day of that Open Championship. At Royal Saint George's nineteen oh five, James Braid wins at three point eighteen. His low score was seventy seven. He won with rounds of eighty one. No, the low score of the week, I should say, was seventy seven. James Braid won with rounds of eighty one, seventy eight, seventy eight, eighty one. All right, Just this morning a sixty four was fired by Cameron Young. We are in a very different era of the old course, but the old course still serves
the average golfer pretty well, right. The average golfer will still hit some longer irons into holes, you know, depending on how much clubhead speed they have, I suppose, and so have we just come to a point where the old course just shouldn't be expected to serve pros.
I think we have probably no choice about that, Although I'm open to ideas. I think the principal constituency that the old course serves today is number one, regular golfer is like me and maybe you. But number two, and maybe this is even more important, It serves architects. It is a model of good design. Whoever the original architects happened to be, and again we don't know who they were.
It is a historic model that has been written about, thought about, discussed for one hundred and fifty years or so, and for that reason alone it is an important golf course. It is for that reason, frankly, that I was shocked by the changes that were put on the new bunkers on the second hold. They've resloped I think the eleventh green back five or six years ago. It is such an important course as a marker for a certain kind of architecture that for that reason alone it needs to
be left alone. Now, if you want to put Te's back an additional sixty yards, and you've got the room to do it. Have at it, but leave the greens alone, leave the b anchoring alone, leave you know.
The.
Defences alone. Just it is a It is a monument to golf architecture that everyone has aspired to one way or another and should be and should be preserved for that reason. And it seems to me that's the best possible reason. Whether you and I enjoyed is almost irrelevant. We will, but it's irrelevant. What matters is that it is a It is a placeholder for architecture and an important sort of touchstone that we always go back to
and rethink and reanalyze and look at again. And that's a very rare sort of thing.
All right, Bob. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for being here today. And in case the message wasn't clear enough, leave the old course alone.
A pleasure, Thanks, Garrett.
This episode of the Frida Egg Podcast was edited by Meg Atkins. If you haven't visited the Fridagg Pro Shop in a while, we have some special Saint Andrew's themed merchandise. We've got a long sleeved tea, a ballmarker, a headcover, things of that nature. So check it out at proshop dot Thefrida egg dot com. All right, thanks for listening.