Bob:
This is why I think TOC (and Jones's opinion of it along with the others he agreed with and agreed with him) was pretty seminal in this debate. Many of the specific issues of the overall debate are included in the following article by Behr.
Bobby Jones And St Andrews
(Experience of Star is argument against golf course standardization)
Mr. O.B. Keeler, the Boswell of Bobby Jones, in writing what he saw of British Links in the September issue of American Golfer, quotes the Great Champions’s opinion of the Old Course at St. Andrews. Mr. Jones is evidently a man of few words. But whenever he has condescended (sic ?) to express an opinion about some phase of golf, we have always found that his thought deserves respect in its own right, and not merely because he is the great player that he is. And his thought in this particular case is of extreme value.
He is an amateur who plays for the joy of playing. He cannot be suspected of prejudice as might be a great professional, part of whose vocation in life it is to make low scores. Anything that might hinder the professional from achieving this end is likely to be criticized. And that is only natural. Golf to him is a business. The goods he sells are composed of his skill. As a good business man he likes to sell those as easily as possible and on parity with his competitors. Consequently golf must be reduced to a species of trap-shooting. If he can shoot straighter than his brother, he should be rewarded. Therefore it is only right and proper that there should be a marketplace for his wares. This is a definite area, the fairway, which will reward him if he can keep his ball upon it, and punish him if he does not succeed. Thus true golf, a sport similar to wild shooting over a good dog, has degenerated in the degree that this demand has come to be satisfied.
I think it may be justly observed that the moment competition enters into the affairs of life, individuality ceases to exist, and standardization results. Singularity is crushed in the interest of uniformity. And thus, owing to the stress today placed upon competition in golf, golf architecture has come to be rationalized. The old road which seemed to wander with no intent or purpose, and from which wandered off byroads to fool the traveler, has now become a well-posted concrete highway. Every inducement is offered to step upon the accelerator as long as one can keep the car of skill from slipping into the rough.
But it may be said that we only get out of a thing what we bring to it. If we have an axe to grind we cannot possibly remain disinterested. In our practical activities the things we deal with tend to shrink to the dimensions set by our practical requirements. In other words our practical activities go on in an impoverished and denuded world. In them we see no more than we wish to get out of them.
But to Bobby Jones golf is a diversion, a pleasant way of spending his time. Consequently in the playing of golf he is cognizant of many factors, and can take joy in them, which, if golf were a practical activity to him, might well prove to be a nuisance. Then, with an open mind, he brought and applied to St. Andrews the greatest golfing skill in the world today. And the reaction of his skill against the character of the Old Course precipitated an opinion that might well revolutionize the prevailing ideas as to what a golf course should be.
“Employing a comparison with our own best golf courses in America,” said he, “I have found that most of our courses, especially inland, may be played correctly the same way round after round. The holes really are laid out scientifically; visibility is stressed; you can see what you have to do virtually all the time, and once you learn how to do it, you can just go right ahead, next day and the next day and the day after that.
“Not at St. Andrews. The course is broad and open, and the rough is distant, and the fairways confront you in every direction. The greens are huge. And with all that, and with almost all the visible universe to shoot into, you may plume yourself on any round of 72 or 75 that falls to your fortune there. From tee after tee, you are offered almost all the real estate you can cover with your drive. But you would better place that drive with some thought and exactness, or your second shot will be a terror. The fourteenth hole, for example—I think it perhaps the finest on the course---may be played four different ways, all correct and widely at variance, according to the wind. And the wind is a worthy foe. It is just as likely to oppose you all the way out, and turn as you turn, and battle you all the way back. Or it may follow you around the entire horseshoe. You must use something besides shots and clubs, playing St. Andrews. I can learn more golf in a week on that course than in a year on many a sterling championship test in America.
The comparison of St. Andrews with our so-called championship courses is certainly not flattering in the general trend of golf architecture in this country. Mr. Jones used the right word when he said our holes are laid out “scientifically.” Science comprehends a desire to arrive at measurable knowledge. Hence with us, “visibility is stressed.” We consider it wrong that a golfer should be left in doubt as to the distance of a stroke. Thus he quickly learns the distance values of a course and knows how to play it and “he can go right ahead next day, and the next day, and the day after that.”
But this cannot be said about the Old Course. As to visibility, Mr A.C.M. Croome gave the British view when he remarked in the London Field that “St. Andrews suffers no loss because the approach shot to a round dozen of the putting greens is in greater or less degree blind.” But this does not mean that they are in greater or less degree blind from all angles. It simply means that, according to the British view, blindness is on occasions a legitimate and delightful hazard, and especially so when it forces the player to make a placement shot to attain visibility.
But blindness in an undulating, tumbling terrain such as linksland presents is quite different from that we are subject to in this country. The greens are not separate creations apart from the whole. They are as the Creator made them. They belong. The eye can pick up distance as it wanders from one hillock to the next till it arrives at the pin. It does not meet with a sudden blockage such as artificially created green and contours of which are separate and apart from its surroundings. Such is the character of the blindness at St. Andrews.
It is peculiar that golf architecture has drifted so far from this great example. The trend has been to make golf courses merely difficult to score upon. But to accomplish this requires no imagination or vision. The trick is easily turned. One has only to narrow fairways, make the rough damnable and restrict the size of the greens. And that is what we have been doing.
But the very opposite is true of St. Andrews. The greens are enormous. Some slope away from play. Seemingly one can drive in any direction. There is, of course, the hazard of the wind. That is not to be belittled. Nevertheless, “you may plume yourself on any round of 72 or 75 that falls to your fortune there.” Golf at St. Andrews is all strategy. The taint of penalty is absent. The steamroller of logical thought has not been allowed to destroy it.
St. Andrews violates every conception of what we think a golf course should be. It is now up to our authorities to prove the beneficence of the terrors they spread in the golfer’s way. But this they can never prove. The final appeal which a golf course makes is to the feelings. As I said at the beginning, we get out of a thing only what we bring to it. Mr. Jones brought the greatest golfing skill in the world to St. Andrews, and after he had been tested by it, it was sufficient proof for him to pronounce the Old Course the greatest in the world.