Joshua Crane proposed a revision of 1st at TOC

[wsmorrison]

Tom,

I am going to call Nick Chamberlin and Duncan McLeod to see if one of them can copy the British Golf Illustrated for the entire Crane article and also to see if he proposed other changes.  Articles in the journals Bob Crosby mentioned will help to shed more light on this fascinating debate.  It is clear we do not yet understand it fully but I think you summarized what we do know at this point very well (and Bob probably knows as much as anyone on this side (of the ocean, not the debate).  I hope that David Normoyle can put together an entire collection of Crane/Behr/MacKenzie articles that might be in the various British journals.  We should ask him to do us that favor while he is at Cambridge.  I'll email him today.

Clearly Crane was proposing more strategy on the first hole.  Not a lot, but those changes would influence tee shot placement.  As it stands now, the green and pin position offers some measure of indirect tax on the tee shot, but not much.  Standing on the first tee of TOC, you know there's not much to think about as long as you stay in bounds.  I wonder what else he was proposing.

The use of the term scientific by Flynn was more about shot testing and providing a comprehensive examination of one's golf skills with aerial demands, aerial and ground options, shot shaping, offset fairways and greens that required more distance control and a sense of perspective and deception.  While there is some penal elements involved, the underpinning is strategic.  

Crump (tacitly), Wilson, Flynn and others used the terms modern or scientific interchangeably.  Theirs was clearly an American movement in golf course architecture.  It didn't abandon all the principles of Old World golf, but it was meant to improve by the addition of original design styles.  I don't think Crane, Behr, MacKenzie were at such odds when it comes down to concepts.  

Crane must have been a man that had an unbounded confidence in himself and his ideas.  He confronted the one bullet-proof course in the world and proposed its obsolescence and areas that needed improvement.  He had the courage of conviction and I admire him for standing up to convention.  I am glad TOC wasn't changed (as a member of a private club with privileges there) but I'm glad he didn't keep his ideas to himself.

His mistake was to try and quantify to several decimal places the value of specific architecture and golf courses in general.  There is folly in judging things like that.  Aren't magazine rankings similarly mistake ridden?  They try to implement their own formula for evaluating courses.  What makes anyone think that the magazine panels today are doing a valuable job?  Aren't they simply descendants of an earlier process?  I wonder how many Crane-like minds there are in the magazine ranks.  A few at best.  He was some sportsman  and thinker.  I may not agree with all of  his conclusions, but I do admire the man.  

[Peter Pallotta]

TE
It's interesting to me, in light of Paul Cowley's thread on creating quirk, that in some sense the 1st at TOC is quirky compared to Crane's proposed changes to it, changes that would've made it more strategic. It just now occurs to me that a golfer's overall impression and experience of a course (even setting age and history aside) is a more subtle and mysterious thing than I've usually thought; and the notion of a near perfect course maybe not so easily defined. Would changes to 18 holes of a golf course that made each and every hole clearly more strategic be a necessary improvement, and the goal to end all goals? Or somehow, would we find then the sum to be less than the parts?

Fascinating how artists, writers, musicians throughout time have tried to perfect their crafts and to understand and seek perfection, and yet only after trying for years do they realize that that's not the goal at all; the imperfections and the art are tied too closely together. Like, from a strictly/textbook play-writing perspective, King Lear might not be a perfect play, perhaps not even close...but what a truly magnificent and majestic piece of art. Maybe Macbeth and even Julius Caesar are more properly structured and constructed, and they are indeed both fine plays. But for any of its flaws in this regard, King Lear still trumps them both, because its highest and most powerful moment -- Lear with his beloved Cordelia in his arms, realizing she's dead and crying out "Never, never, never, never, never" -- is what the true art of playwriting is all about.

Peter    

[TEPaul]

"TE
It just now occurs to me that a golfer's overall impression and experience of a course (even setting age and history aside) is a more subtle and mysterious thing than I've usually thought; and the notion of a near perfect course maybe not so easily defined. Would changes to 18 holes of a golf course that made each and every hole clearly more strategic be a necessary improvement, and the goal to end all goals? Or somehow, would we find then the sum to be less than the parts?"


Peter:

To answer that question well, I think any of us (at any time or era) need to always remember to not only look at how we consider what-all "strategic" can mean but particularly why---and by that I mean the various ways some courses can play so different from day to day while others just don't---basically never do and why that is.

I don't deny that Jones's under-par victory at TOC made many question the quality of the TOC's championship timber.

But didn't most all of them or certainly some of the most vocal critics, perhaps even Joshua Crane, forget something ultimately important about TOC?

That, of course, is that if it was and is anything it certainly is not and never has been "one-dimensional" like so many other courses.

And why is that? Because, TOC, like so many linksland courses and links style courses depends not just on its inherent golf architecture but upon natural conditons and natural forces to make it variable and highly strategic due to that perhaps almost alone.

Inherently, this makes courses such as TOC, or Maidstone, Fishers, Newport over here and their old ilk play so differently across such a challenge and strategic spectrum.

A good player can kill any of them score-wise if Nature and the weather allows it to be so but they can come back the next day and Nature and the weather will allow those courses to kill almost any competitor of any level.

I know you know what I'm talking about---eg the weather, particularly the wind, but also how natural forces deal with the ground itself in that weather way. I know what I'm talking about because one time at The Maidstone Bowl I shot a 67 on a calm day and the next day actually hitting the ball even better and probably playing better and more creatively I couldn't get within ten shots of that.

What was TOC playing like in this vein when Jones did so well there thereby evoking such criticism of the quality of the golf course?

Did Crane ever mention this? Perhaps he did but not to my knowledge. Did anyone else?

This is what happens when someone tries to rest an entire case about the quality of architecture on mathematical formulae in something of a vacuum. This is what happens when someone relies on suggested improvements and drawings on paper only.

This is also what happens when one really does propose that somehow luck should be minimized in golf and architecture and that a way to do that is by increasing consistency somehow--eg either architecturally or through maintenance practices.

Consistency of playing field is something very appropriate to competition between people and the competitive mind  because what they're really trying to do is equalize and level the playing field simply to better isolate and highlight human skill and physical execution mano-a-mano.

But what about things other than physical skill and physical execution? What about thinking, adjusting to conditions, adjusting one's expectations away from an over-dependence on consistent conditions? What about how people deal differently with the psychological? How does that factor into golf architecture and strategies person to person? How does this over-ridingly important thing some refer to as "skill", perhaps the most important thing of all to protect in golf, deal with those things that are not strictly just physical execution or a form of expected physical rote execution?

This is what Bob Jones came to know and understand so well from his first experiences compared to his later ones with TOC and linksland style golf.

I'm not really criticizing Crane for what he said, but perhaps as much as anything else it was Jones he should've been listening to more and considering more. And that goes for the others in Crane's camp too with their criticisms of TOC. Crane was a very good player but he sure wasn't a Bob Jones and he sure didn't know or understand TOC like Jones had come to over time.

The irony of this whole Crane/Behr debate or the "strategic vs "penal" debate is that Jones was apparently fairly diplomatic about the whole thing in what he said and wrote about it all.

But if any of us or anyone back then really looks at what Jones said in its entirety, it's all there to see. He basically explainrd it all as well as it needed to be explained.

Jones actually said that a great course will allow a great player to really score low on it if he's playing well given various conditions but then the next day he can come back and play his balls off, maybe even a lot better than the day before, and maybe he might just get the course again somehow particularly if he really gets lucky but mostly he just won't. That in essence is what the lack of one dimensionality of TOC and links golf is about.

Jones actually said, he wrote, and at this very time, that too many American courses were just too consistent, too one dimensional and that players like him ended up playing the same way on them day after day.

But if anything, he certainly did say that was most certainly not the way TOC was and the linksland golf style to boot.







 

 

 

[TEPaul]

"It just now occurs to me that a golfer's overall impression and experience of a course (even setting age and history aside) is a more subtle and mysterious thing than I've usually thought;"

Peter:

You know that ad we've all seen so much recently that's on golf programing where the young man in GB is in his new car looking at the wind and rain, and he drives down the lonely road to some beautiful coastal course over there and walks out on the course alone in the wind and the rain to the approving eye of the old salt looking at him with a wry smile from the clubhouse window? And he tees off on what appears to be an awesome long par 3 on the cliffs in the wind and rain.

To me that's the old mentality of golf and its architecture on the other side and the very thing that gives it its multi-dimensionality.

Who among Americans would even think to go out on a day like that for recreational golf, particularly alone? Most all would prefer to sit in front of the TV and watch a baseball game.

I'll tell you one who did---who actually said he loved it and sought out the worst weather days imaginable to practice in---

Tom Watson! Is it any wonder an American star with a mentality like that won five British Opens?

Sandy Tatum once told a great story at Pine Valley about Watson and his mentality that way compared to most other pros.

Tatum said most every pro he knew if he came upon his ball and it was in a divot would bitch and mown about the course conditions or his bad luck or whatever but when Watson would come upon his ball in a lie like that he would wink and say; "Watch this."  

[Peter Pallotta]

TE
wonderful stuff. That post 29 of yours has joined your post 25, both of them now saved on my hard drive under "Behr-Crane". Thank you.

"This is what happens when someone tries to rest an entire case about the quality of architecture on mathematical formulae in something of a vacuum. This is what happens when someone relies on suggested improvements and drawings on paper only."

That reminds me of the fellow in California who wrote a book on the "three-act structure". I think he copyrighted the idea. Screenplays, he said, follow a 3-part structure: setup, confrontation, and resolution, with a couple of plot points/reversals of fortune separating the last two. He suggests creating the plot frst, and making sure it follows the formula. It seems to make some sense at first; he certainly made a fortune preaching it. Until you realize that there's never been a screenplay worth a damn that follows the formula exactly; or until you try to write a screenplay with living, breathing people as characters instead of chess pieces, and find that they just don't seem to want to go where the plot tells them to go. Or until, as I mentioned earlier, you read King Lear and marvel that a wonky plot can create a moment of heartbreaking drama and beauty, whereas his formula tends to create crap.

Not, I know, what you were suggesting with the line above, but it just got me to thinking and riffing.

Thanks again
Peter    

[Tony_Muldoon]

That reminds me of the fellow in California who wrote a book on the "three-act structure". I think he copyrighted the idea. Screenplays, he said, follow a 3-part structure: setup, confrontation, and resolution, with a couple of plot points/reversals of fortune separating the last two. He suggests creating the plot frst, and making sure it follows the formula. It seems to make some sense at first; he certainly made a fortune preaching it. Until you realize that there's never been a screenplay worth a damn that follows the formula exactly; or until you try to write a screenplay with living, breathing people as characters instead of chess pieces, and find that they just don't seem to want to go where the plot tells them to go. Or until, as I mentioned earlier, you read King Lear and marvel that a wonky plot can create a moment of heartbreaking drama and beauty, whereas his formula tends to create crap.


Thanks again
Peter    

Peter, Sid Field?

He came to London with his book and a seminar. The PR effort involved telling everyone that John Cleese would be attending the seminar, which he duly did.

Upto that point Cleese had been a co writer on the Monty Python film’s and the author of the wonderful A Fish Called Wanda.   Since then…

[Tony Ristola]

Without knowing the course, had someone plopped down both sketches, who wouldn't have opted for the revision as the the more interesting, flexible, better design solution of the two. Could have done away with the bunker though. But as it is The Old Course...

[paul cowley]

I just want to express that I think the combined posts of Tom, Peter and Wayne.....#25 thru #31 specifically...are as fine as it gets around here.

I think [know], they would hold the attention of Crane, Behr. Mackenzie and Jones....hell, if they paid real close attention they might even learn something .

I know I did....and I know better where I stand because of them.  

[TEPaul]

Peter:

Doesn't matter at all if you respond with analogies to plays or screenwriting structure. I like those kinds of examples a lot---it gives these kinds of discussions a different life and better meaning because of it.

The analogy to plays reminds me of a play I saw many years ago called Jimmy Shine. It may've been one of Dustin Hoffman's first acting jobs. I think it was Off Broadway or even Off-Off because it was in a pretty funky little theater.

At some point in the play Jimmy Shine (Hoffman) cut the hell out of his hand or arm. I remember being impressed how realistic it seemed.

At the end after the actors took their curtain calls, the director came on stage and explained that Hoffman's cut was definitely not part of the play. We were all pretty surprised and gave him a standing ovation.

Apparently he just rolled that accident right into the play in a heartbeat and kept it going.

All these years I've been so impressed with Hoffman for something like that but not until your analogies on here to plays and screenplays did I think of the other actors too. I never thought that either because of Hoffman, through him, or just due to their own talents how well they all just picked up on it seamlessly and kept it going to---they all rolled it right into the play so no one even knew the difference.

I guess in some ways those actors were like great and adaptable golfers who just roll with multi-dimensionality without missing a beat the way a great player like Jones learned how to so well on a great stage like TOC and how it showed him how to do that with its various "screenplays" (weather related and other multi-dimensions) over the years.

Who really knows where that line or relationship is between what a golfer is facing on a golf course at any particular time and what that does to what goes on between his ears or even in his heart?

The complete story of Jones and TOC from his beginnings there until his end there just may be the greatest in all of golf of an example of what all of this (a golf course combined with a golfer) is really about-----from his beginning there and walking off the course in frustration and anger and damning TOC to his ultimate victories there in the late 20s and 1930.

I guess it is the best example via a golf course of a golfer's nadir eventually followed by an ultimate redemption over his problems. The fact that he came to understand the beauty and meaning of that particular stage and its many screenplays (variations) makes it just that much better and more apropos here with this particular thread's subject.

Is it any wonder that he came to love that course so much and what it meant for golf and that the town came to love him so, all culminating many years later in that amazing speech and the keys to the city?

It's just too bad that in the late 1920s when all this criticism of the quality of TOC was coming down from Crane and the others that the audience wasn't more sophisticated and appreciative of what they'd been seeing over Jones's years playing there.

They certainly venerated him---but I guess it's fairly apparent they should've appreciated more what he was saying about his stage, its plays and sreenplays, and why.  

 

[Tommy_Naccarato]

Tony,
Getting back to the description, yes, it certainly does look like a better hole and given the terrain, coming in from the right, it would be using that section, the actual land mass of the Pilmour Links even better, (using the land to dictate) but once again, as Peter has provided with the story of the screen writer, as well as Tony's contribution......Sometimes you just have to keep it simple stupid!

As far as Crane is concerned, I've wondered ,since he eventually migrated to Montecito, spending the rest of his years there, if he and Behr or Hunter didn't connect there? Yes, we've all wondered this before, but yet, we've never seen proof of this--I don't think. By that time, as far as golf architecture principles were concerned, they were somewhat beaten men. All of them sort of disappointed how the sport evolved; how people totally lost the true meaning or drive. We've seen it in Tillie's letter to Donald Ross; An article in the LATimes describing how Behr felt about most people involved in the Sport at that time--and how he still chose to play the floater. Hunter, he just holed up at the Valley Club, more or less squandering a fortune and Crane, who knows what was going on with him. The others, (Mac & the Captain) just simply died.

But they all ended up in California at one point, thus adding to the thinking that the California school may be the place where it was all going to happen--only it didn't. Well sort of.

Maybe this drive is something we have yet to fully experience ourselves, even in our quests for knowledge of the subject of golf architecture, or maybe we are just getting it back.

The answer maybe as simple as Citizen Kane--to the seeker of knowledge there may be no answer, but to a point there was--Rosebud.

[TEPaul]

"But they all ended up in California at one point, thus adding to the thinking that the California school may be the place where it was all going to happen--"

Tommy;

I think you're right about that. The fact that most of those "thinkers" of that era ended up in California has to have been more than a coincidence.

What did it mean?

I suspect they felt that region, at the time, could be the most receptive to their ideas and philosophies. It was a whole lot more "untapped" in the set ways in golf and architecture that the East Coast had become at that time.

Both the NorCal "Monterrey" school of architecture and the SoCal school was some very innovative stuff.

Which makes it's ultimate disposition in later years so much more ironic and sort of sad, particularly SoCal.

In a way it probably has similarities to Devereaux Emmet's stuff that was too close in that early era to NYC for the population explosion to come.

Most are not aware of the census history of SoCal in the first half or even the first third of the 20th century. It basically just exploded from the small town atmosphere to a megolopolis over night.

It's pretty hard to site and maintain golf courses and clubs in that kind of population explosion atmosphere. Not to mention the difficulty of hanging on when land values hit the stratosphere.

[JESII]

Is this suggestion by Joshua Crane in any way comparable to the suggestions so often heard on here to "improve" the 18th hole at Cypress Point? How about the suggested lengthening of #18 (I think, possibly #7) at National?

Was there anything in The Confidential Guide about suggestions to "improve" any of the 10's? This, I do not know the answer to, an honest question...


This thread has piqued my curiosity, but I know so little about Crane or TOC that I can't weigh in any differently than with these questions.

[BCrosby]

Great thread guys. It's killing me not to be able to contribute, but I'm on the run at work.

Let me just say this. What we know of Crane's views comes mostly from MacKenzie and Behr. They got Crane only partly right. For their own rhetorical purposes, that got some parts of Crane quite wrong.

To really understand Crane is - I will argue - to understanding the major pivot points around which most debates on gca turn. Even today. No, especially today.

The difference is that the debates from 80 or so years ago were much more articulate, thorough and honest than most debates today that cover the same ground.

How's that for a teaser? Gotta run.

Bob

[TEPaul]

"How's that for a teaser? Gotta run."

Bob:

It's great---a wonderful teaser, and don't worry about running.

I, for one, am a patient man, and after all you are basically the one who picked up on Crane and his ideas and introduced him and this "strategic" vs "penal" debate to this website.

I just think this seemingly "Great Debate" that should've happened, could've happened but for various reasons (that are probably most interesting in and of themselves) didn't exactly happen as it should have----is very, very much worth having now.

And more than that---eg we today have the benefit of so much pertinent hindsight that those guys back then could  not, and did not have available to them.  

JESII:

I think you will find as this discussion goes on that Crane was not some mad revolutionary with odd and unacceptable ideas. Maybe his mathematical formulae for judging architecture was sort of odd and unusual but his ultimate purpose by it was to change things in architecture, particularly existing architecture, no matter what it was or where it was, and by doing so to simply make it better than he thought it was.

I think it's pretty safe to say that a whole lot of people were onboard with that idea back then even if for their own peculiar reasons.

The ones whose position needs to be better explained today and in the futuer was not really Crane's, in my opinion, it was the postiion of the other side---eg the likes of Behr, Mackenzie, Hunter, Macdonald, Jones et al.

What they were saying was that some things should be better understood about golf and that one of those was that golf should never have the importance of its natual element and its dependence of Nature's own configurations and forces eroded.

They thought to the degree that happened would be the degree that golf and its playing fields would just become more like other games that of necessity required very defined and standardized and consistent playing fields.

That position was never to attempt to denigrate other games, and Behr never did that. He simply pointed out that because golf was so fundamentally different from other games in that the ball was not vied for by human oppoents like in most all other games, that golf's playing fields just should inherently never be standardized, made more consistent and mathematical and scientific and made to depend less on those natural things about which the way of old golf itself was.

He was very right to say that those people who originally took golf out of Scotland for the first time took the letter of it with them but they left behind the spirit of it and its connection to the natural elements and occurences of the linksland. In doing so he also mentioned they took the game to places that were wholly unsuited for the way it had always been and they did all that without even realizing it.

I don't think he was even trying to criticize them for that only to make the point they probably just never even understood what that spirit of the game was in the first place.

Did Joshua Crane understand? Did the people who felt as he did about increased consistency, increased standardizations and the minimization of luck in golf understand?

I guess that is the question and we should discuss it.

[JESII]

Could someone explain to me how "penal" and "strategic" architecture are something other than just different degrees on the same model?

[Gary Slatter]

Looking at Crane's suggestions, I get a real chuckle, simply because he is literally putting an element of risk-reward into it. The closer to the Swilcan Burn on the left, the more room you had to run it in while still making the golfer challenge the Swilcan, yet the element of dropping into the burn is all there. Also, given the high roll of un-irrigated fairways of the day, what do you think the chances were of bouncing it over the burn and on to the green by a long hitter?.

It's really not a bad hole at all. I want to say more but will withhold my thoughts on pure cowardice alone!

I am however  going to take the Huckaby Road here and agree with Bob at all times! Any suggestion to change the Old Course like this at least is pure blasphemy.

Any one suggesting it should burn in the Valley of Hades.....

I have seen several shots bounce over the burn, including during the Dunhill.  They were not drives, just nervous thin second shots.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Wayne,

Did Crane ever explain, in detail, why he felt changes were necessary and how his revised configuration would address the reasons for the proposed changes ?

I could see someone suggesting amendments to the current green surrounds, long of Swilcan Burn, but, I can't for the life of me see the benefit of moving and reconfiguring the green as he recommends.

I'd be curious to know his reasoning

One can't examine the issue/configurations without considering the WINDS, especially prevailing winds.

Down wind or into the wind Swilcan Burn provides a strategic feature/hazard that dramatically affects play.  I don't see Swilcan Burn being as much as a fronting feature/hazard in Crane's revision.

Does anyone know the directions of the prevailing winds ? [/color]

As it is:

[Tommy_Naccarato]

Pat,The prevailing wind is actually two directions (that I know of)

1-Downwind with a slight variance from left to right.
2-Directly into it going towards Leuchars.

I'm almost certain Rich Goodale will disagree with this.

Gary, I haven't seen it happen in person, but have been told that the 1st is driven quite regularly, especially from the non-medal tees. However I have seen people drive into the drink! Kaplunk!

[Peter Pallotta]

JES
I was re-reading this thread and noticed that you’d asked about “strategic” vs “penal”. I shouldn’t try to answer that (so this time I actually won’t). But Bob Crosby had some thoughts a few days ago about the subject that really stuck with me, so I went to find them.  Bob, I hope you don’t mind me taking these out of context:

“The elimination of luck - not mere difficulty - is the main goal of penal theories of gca. Penal architecture is built on the notion of equitable outcomes.”

“Nobody claims that luck can be eliminated. But many people have viewed the quality of a course as a function of how much the course allows luck to be involved in outcomes. The less luck involved, the better the course will test pure golfing skills. It's the old argument against "fluke".  At heart, it's what the USGA's "proportionate penalties" is really about. It's a powerful argument, not to be dismissed casually. It probably has (and always has had) more adherents than the strategic stuff we like to support around here.”

“The principal goal of penal architecture is to assure that good shots are properly awarded and bad shot properly punished. It is, at base, about immediate rewards/punishment that are commensurate with the quality of the shot hit. For example, a "penologist" might object to fw's bunkered only on one side because misses to the other side would go unpunished. Such a fw would fail to "control" misses properly. Two people could miss a shot equally badly, but only one would be punished. The fix? Put bunkers on both sides of the fw.”

So, to take a stab at your question (I can’t help myself) I think the difference between strategic and penal is one of kind, not just degree. But like I say, it's a subject that each time I think I understand it I later find that I was mistaken...so hopefully Bob will jump in.

Peter

[JESII]

Thanks Peter, I read that post and appreciated it. It is well written, but leaves me wondering (not arguing with the explanation, just wondering) if these people played on the most boring golf courses ever known to man.

Take the hole used in Bob's example about a miss to the right being in bunkers and one to the left is not so equitable misses are not treated the same...does the green / hole location ever dictate the player should prefer one side of the fairway or the other? If so, then the misses would not be equitable.

I fall off board in this conversation because if Crane was studying TOC, he clearly had exposure to at least one course that rewarded this preferred side of the fairway type "strategy".

My real challenge in all of this is that every explanation I have heard (like the one Bob provided) of the "penologists" (I quoted it so that you own it...) philosophies on GCA leave me thinking they must be totally blind when out on the course...and I know this cannot be the case so I can't help but think we are dealing in code, or are the subject of a practical joke...

[Peter Pallotta]

Good one, JES. I see better what you were asking, in the specific context of this thread.

I re-read this whole thread yet again; still no dice. (No subject makes me feel so dumb; well, maybe one or two.) But I probably did you no good by quoting Bob from another thread/subject.

It's not that it's a code so much, I don't think; the whole subject (terms and all) is more like a puzzle, but with a lot of pieces missing. I think a few people here know what the whole puzzle looks like; I don't.

But I've been interested in this since I first got here because, after reading just a bit of Behr etc, it seemed to me this subject was THE puzzle most worth piecing together, the rosetta stone for all the other puzzles. I can't tell you why, it's just a feeling I have. I could be wrong about that too. Best to pay me no mind.

Peter    

[Rich Goodale]

Pat,The prevailing wind is actually two directions (that I know of)

1-Downwind with a slight variance from left to right.
2-Directly into it going towards Leuchars.

I'm almost certain Rich Goodale will disagree with this.

Gary, I haven't seen it happen in person, but have been told that the 1st is driven quite regularly, especially from the non-medal tees. However I have seen people drive into the drink! Kaplunk!

Tommy I completely disagreee with you when you say you are certain I will disagree with you!

As far as I know the prevailing wind is 2. in your list and you are right in saying that 1. also occurs frequently.  One thing that I find interesting about most coastal GBI courses is that crosswinds (to the prevailing direction of play) rarely seem to occur.  Perhaps that is one reason why Muirfield and Portmarnock (which are designed in circles rather than out and back) are so respected.

JESII and Peter

I'm on Jim's side (as Bob C. will know).  To me this "penal" vs. "strategic" argument is a vapid one which has never stood up to scrutiny.  Nobody, on this board or in writings has ever convinced me that the "distinction" is any more that rhetorical, at best, and a lot of them have been trying over the past 7 years....

Let me summarize the arguments I have made over those years.

1.  All golf courses, golf holes and golf shots require the golfer to think strategically.
2.  Inanimate objects, such as golf courses, golf holes, golf clubs are not, and can never be "strategic."

The End

[BCrosby]

Yes Rich, you have been making those arguments for seven long years and for seven long years you have been unconvincing. Or just ioconclastic for the sake of being iconclastic? (Sometimes thinking outside the box is, well...just outside the box.)

First, if you think the penal v. strategic is a not useful way to describe diffrent types of courses, then by all means stop using them. You may have already done so. What you got in mind that is better? What would your term be for those courses that are the least strategic on your scale?

Unless, of course, you think all courses offer equally interesting shot choices. Which would actually be an interesting position to take. It would permit you to dismiss virtually everything that has ever been written about gca. Which will save lots of time otherwise spent reading that stuff.

For the last 80 or 90 years, the world of golf architecture seems to have thought the terms did useful work. It's unlikely the terms would have survived in the gca if they weren't doing useful things for people. The terms help people navigate the world of gca. In much the same way that open-ended concepts like "white" and "black" help us distinguish white balls from black balls. That grey balls exist or that there are no purely white balls or black balls, is no reason to give up on the distinction.

As for your concern about anthropomorphic uses of "strategic," I take your grammatical point. You are hereby authorized to substitute "strategically designed golf course" every time you see in anything I write the phrase "strategic golf course." I think we all know what we are saying.

Bob

[Rich Goodale]

Bob

I tired to simplify things so even a Harvard graduate could understand them, but I tragically failed.  Let's try to make it simpler:

1.  ALL golf is strategic.
2.  NO golf courses are strategic.

If you still don't get it, I'll try to reduce it to terms even an Yalie could understand.........

Rich

[TEPaul]

"Bob
I tired to simplify things so even a Harvard graduate could understand them, but I tragically failed.  Let's try to make it simpler:"

Richard the magnificently obtuse:

The typo of your second word is both hilarious and incredibly apropos of this point you've been making for so long on this subject!