[Steve Lang]

  its first a game, then a sport, then a profession or obsession

[Peter Pallotta]

Jason - not really to your point, but I think we don't make enough of the fact that Behr was an excellent golfer and succesful tournament player. Which is to say, he had no axe to grind in terms of competition, nor was he spouting the sour grapes of a failure. So when he talks about golf as a sport, I think he was suggesting that it offered ALL of what a game could offer PLUS something more - that 'more' being the fuller participation by the sportsman in the sport - body (physical skill), mind (judgement) and soul (soul...or at least spirit...or at least temperament), and that's because the sport was not limited to a man vs man dynamic, but also encompassed man vs himself and man vs nature. I've had glimpses some times on some golf courses of how architecture can encourage/demand that more 'internal' kind of competition....

Peter     

[Jason Topp]

Jason - not really to your point, but I think we don't make enough of the fact that Behr was an excellent golfer and succesful tournament player. Which is to say, he had no axe to grind in terms of competition, nor was he spouting the sour grapes of a failure. So when he talks about golf as a sport, I think he was suggesting that it offered ALL of what a game could offer PLUS something more - that 'more' being the fuller participation by the sportsman in the sport - body (physical skill), mind (judgement) and soul (soul...or at least spirit...or at least temperament), and that's because the sport was not limited to a man vs man dynamic, but also encompassed man vs himself and man vs nature. I've had glimpses some times on some golf courses of how architecture can encourage/demand that more 'internal' kind of competition....

Peter     

Thanks Peter.  When I think of this, the first thing that comes to mind is wind rather than golf architecture.


A player approaching the game as Behr suggests will enjoy the windy day because one cannot play by yardage book or based on standardized challenges.  Instead, every single shot is different and demands intuition and execution or the conditions will wear the player out.  I really enjoy the game when I approach a windy day with that attitude.

If, however, fight heavy wind, it crushes me.  I'm better at avoiding that mental state in my 40's but it is a battle at some point in almost any round - especially in competition against better players on courses a bit long for me. 

[RJ_Daley]

Jason, are you describing your day playing in brutal wind and cold against Chad?    That day took more than just intuition and execution, it took fortitude and perserverance! 

[Dan Kelly]

Jason --

A sport is something you do at 36 degrees Fahrenheit.

Games are what you play on pleasant midsummer days -- or in warm office buildings downtown.

(Emoticons omitted.)

Dan

P.S. Tonight, after the game, I'm going to spend some time reading "Decisions on the Rules of Hunting."

[TEPaul]

Peter:

I think your post #26 is a pretty good description of where Max Behr was coming from when he used terms such as "The game mind of man", golf as a "sport" vs golf as a "game."

Behr was a very good competitive golfer (he won the NJ State Amateur and was runnerup in the US Amateur at least once and perhaps twice. Ironically it seems like Jerome Travers was Behr's career long competitive nemesis).

But Behr was definitely more than capable of getting beyond just the mind of a strictly competitive golfer.

Behr's basic mentality on a "sportsman's" philosophy of golf was not unlike the classic old fashioned "sportsman" with the sports of say hunting or fishing and such. That old fashioned idea of the classic sportsman was that he was willing to personally "adjust" his implements (clubs and balls in golf or the gauge of a shotgun or the test of a fishing line) to do what Behr called "just sustain his skill" and no more.

Behr, somewhat like Macdonald did not believe in the "standardization" of balls and implements in golf for all golfers even if he did propose a "competition ball" only for competition. Behr ultimately believed that in golf and architecture any golfer should somehow be allowed to seek and find his own personal "Freedom" (that's also a word he used a lot in his articles). What he meant by that is that limitation of space and particularly the extreme DEFINING of space into general penal areas juxtaposed to the rest worked against that sense of "Freedom". Behr felt a golf course should give a golfer a sense of being able to actually find his own best way and I suppose he felt that raw Nature with its randomness or a pretty good simulacrum of it via architecture provided that sense of freedon to find one's own best way whereby things such as the standard defined lines of a tennis court, for instance, did not.

But that was no knock on tennis from Behr (who was also an excellent tennis player) because he understood that the fundamental construct of tennis was so different than golf----eg in tennis the human opponents vied for a common ball so in a real way they were physically vying against one another but in golf they did not.

In my opinion, that last part filters through just about every single thing when it comes to golf and architecture and the mentality of architects and golfers in that underlying philosophy or Freedom. I've come to believe it is so fundamental that most golfers have actually forgotten all about it and how important it really is----all the way to the point where they hardly understand or can comprehend what it actually means or once meant. I think for that reason it all began to slip away at some point towards the apparently human inclination to both define and limit things until the essence of Freedom and the idea of what "sport" really once was becomes almost completely lost.

Those kinds of things were Behr's concerns when he wrote those fascinating series of interconnected articles on golf and golf course architecture as well as on the Rules of the Game and also on I&B.

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