BobC:
Personally, I think there is a ton of interesting historical information on how golf's administrations over the years have looked at the whole idea of I&B, its regulation, standardization of same or lack of it, and what those traditions and interpretations might mean to the subject of your thread. Your point and question sure got diverted early on and I feel partly responsible for that.
Would you care to have some info supplied on the interesting ways golf and its administrators used to look at your initial point and post and how those traditions might have evolved things to the point we're at now?
I know I think that's necessary to have a good comprehensive discussion of your thread's point.
I would love to have more information about how the unique idea evolved in golf that everyone can play the ball of his choice.
As we have discussed in the past, these sorts of rules (or absence of rules) didn't evolve by accident. They evolved out of some pretty specific conceptions of what golf was supposed to be. I'm talking big metaphysical questions here. Between 1900 and about 1920 there were wide ranging of debates about profound rules issues. Profound in the sense that the rules are in important respects constitutive of what the game of golf IS.
Many rules were developed amidst a great deal of debate and acrimony. People tended to line up on one side or another based on their vision of what golf, at base, was supposed to be. They saw the very nature of golf itself at issue. And most were quite conscious of the stakes.
John Low, Harry Colt, Stuart Paton, ACM Croome and other members of the R&A rules committee during those years are all prime examples. What golf is, is in major part a function of the rules by which you play the game. You change the rules, you change the nature of the game. Those guys knew they were messing with big issues.
And in the midst of all that turmoil, there was a surprise guest appearance by - yes, you guessed it - our own Max Behr. He weighed into that debate from his perch at Golf Illustrated in NYC. The first time he rolled out his sports - game distinction was to make a specific point in a heated debate about how to deal with lost balls in match play. (Behr, the purist, thought that if you lost your ball you automatically lost the hole. Those of the "equitable" school prevailed, however, and thus our current rule. It's just a two stoke penalty.)
The history of those rule kerfuffles has been written. Albeit in a half-assed way. What has not been written is the ways in which the same issues raised in those debates fed directly into debates about architecture that were going on at the same time. That, my friend, is a fascinating chapter yet to be written. Rules issues and golf architecture issues are - at fundamental levels - joined at the hip.
Bob