TE –
I’m going to try to give you some kind of answer/theory.
On another thread, Shivas suggests that “judgment” has always been a fundamental part of the game (e.g. judging distances, judging risks and rewards etc). I think he’s right. I also I think we can extrapolate from that in regards to golf course architecture, i.e. golf holes designed to test and challenge a golfer’s judgment have also long-been a fundamental part of the game and the spirit of the game.
Bernard Darwin quotes a golf professional in the 1920s saying that he’d rather play TOC than anywhere else because “you may play a damned good shot and get into a damned bad place”, and then adding, “I think that is the real game of golf." Darwin goes on to relate this idea to Old Tom Morris' line about golf as a game that’s "aye fechtin' against ye", a game that demands at once a dour and daring spirit in the playing; a “contest of risks” in John Low’s words.
And again, I think we can extrapolate from this and say that the golf holes/courses that best ‘frame’ and allow for these risks and those risk-tasting are what underpin the real game of golf. The Old Course, in its time of width, seemed to fit the bill; the likes of Dr. MacKenzie and Max Behr and Bobby Jones said so too. And, though it might be an anachronism, we could say that what those men were praising in TOC was the judgment-testing qualities inherent in its “strategic architecture.”
So, the question seems to be: At what point during the long life of someone like Old Tom Morris and at what point in the latter 1800s did some idea/sense (conscious or intuitive) emerge that an important/fundamental principle of golf’s fields of play is that they should frame and engender a contest of risks? At what point, in short, did some notion of some version of strategic architecture emerge? (Note that I’m not making any distinction between a conscious awareness of these principles and an intuitive sense of them – that would make developing an answer/theory impossible, at least for me.)
You mention 1880, and that seems plausible to me: first, because someone like Old Tom was in the mature years of his life and golfing experience; but more importantly because that would leave 20 years or so for that awareness to become more focused and refined, and to start to “attach itself” to specific golf holes, golf holes that were being called “ideal” and recognized as such by a wide-range of experts. I think that describes the situation in the 1906 time period you mentioned, when Mr. Macdonald’s opinion-poll of experts produced answers/consensus like the Alps, the Long, the Sahara, the Redan, The Himalayas etc. Now, I can't imagine that consensus having emerged over night; nor can I imagine that the experts polled had only a few years or even a decade earlier come to value these holes and types of holes above all else. So, yes, 1880 seems plausible to me as a date when some sense of the fundamental principles of good golf architecture first emerged; though maybe it was earlier than that, say to the 1850 date and Alan Robertson you mentioned -- maybe that's why some smart fellow(s) decided long ago that Robertson was the first golf architect.
But then what happened? What happened to this awareness (at least until Mr. Macdonald promoted and publicly value and made those principles manifest at NGLA)? I’m going to guess, and I’m going to use improperly something that Max Behr wrote. In the following quote, Behr is explaining a loss that came about in the “art” and “aesthetics” of golf course architecture as it moved inland from the original links lands. I’m going to use it in a completely different context and one that Behr didn’t intend, i.e. to explain what happened to that awareness of fundamental principles as golf course architecture moved from the UK to America. Behr wrote: “The natural architecture of linksland, passed through the sieve of the mind, came out utilitarian in aspect and mathematical in form. The novice at landscape gardening cannot see the planting of trees otherwise than in rows, nor the lawn in front of his house otherwise than in a series of terraces”.
What I’m suggesting is that in the transition of fundamental principles from the UK to America, the early practitioners of golf course architecture in America missed the forest for the trees, that they were utilitarian in approach and mathematical in mind-set, and that -- if they were familiar with the great and ideal British golf holes -- what they "saw" in those holes were not the principles but the surface of things, i.e. they saw the fairways and the greens and the bunkers and not the contest of risks that might have been. In other words, through the sieve of the mind came the features by which the principles manifested themselves, not the principles themselves nor the true spirit of the game.
That is why Mr. Macdonald was so vitally important – he had the instinct and intelligence and insight to identify for Americans those principles of good golf architecture, and the self-confidence and connections to promote those principles and make them manifest, in the ground, at NGLA. That is of great importance.
But, to get back to the question, or at least to my question i.e. was Mr. Macdonald the only American or transplanted Scot/Brit to recognize these fundamental principles of good golf course architecture, or at least capable of recognizing/understanding them? I find that hard to believe, since that is the nature of those principles, i.e. they are not invented by anyone as much as they simply exist for everyone, waiting patiently there for someone with innate talent to see them for what they were. There were others, I think, that had this innate talent back then, and there were others who had seen or read about those great British golf holes/courses who were able to discern the underlying principles.
Anyway, Tom, I just started typing and this is where I ended up. Hope it holds at least a little water theory-wise. (By the way, before I started writing I thought I was going to argue that these fundamental principles have existed almost forever, in the ether someplace even before the first shepherds started batting a rock around with a stick; but then I started typing and my fingers argued something else...)
Peter
Or - what Dan Hermann said: invented by the artistic types and refined by the analytic types!