Joe Dey's role in the history of GCA

[PThomas]

reading Dr. Klein's book on Donald Ross today...in the discussion of Oakland Hills, Brad wrote:

"Following WWII, however, came the era of modern golf- and with it, a vision of power jointly championed by the USGA  (and its Executive Director Joe Dey) and..Robert Trent Jones....Jones pushed back all of Ross's fairway bunkers, created miniscule targets off th tees, and performed a similar shrink-wrapping of the greens...Goodbye ground game, hello aerial golf...The original design by Ross offered diagonal bunkering ...which at least offered optional angles of play...It was modernization of the most arrogant and ambitious sort- precisely what was expected of Jones."

So was Joe Dey the man chiefly responsible for what started at Oakland Hills?  And since he was probably responsible for making (much?) of Jones reputation, is he therefore also responsible for so many of Jones bland designs, which Ran has called the "dark ages of course design"?  If someone other than Joe Dey with a different viewpoint of what kind of course was needed for our national championship, might the history of GCA been radically different?

[TEPaul]

Paul:

It might be a bit easier to accurately answer whether or not Joe Dey was the one chiefly responsible for Oakland Hills than to accurately determine if he was also responsible for Jones' design style.

While one might be able to make a pretty good case that Joe Dey might have been one of the most influential men in the history of American golf who was not a player, I think there were a whole number of other developing and important factors after WW2 that contributed to Robert Trent Jones' style, his reputation and importance in golf and architecture-----other influences, and some very diverse ones, that are also most interesting to understand and discuss.

On the other hand, I think a better biographical explanation should also be given to Joe Dey on here and what-all he did in his long and august career in golf. Apparently Dey kept a pretty comprehensive record (perhaps something of a diary) of his life and times in golf and golf administration (the USGA has it). I have not seen it but one of the most interesting sources of information to me is Dey's time and dealings at his own golf club----The Creek Club in Long Island, New York. It does give one an interesting glimpse into what kind of man he was and some of his thoughts on golf and architecture, at least in a club context. His ideas on championship courses may've been quite different.

Another Dey influence was obviously in the area of the Rules of Golf, an area in which he is still considered to have been perhaps the most knowledgeable there was----both in interpretation, application and in the history of the Rules. I would think that alone probably had a fairly important influence on his ideas on golf architecture as well, and that very well may've translated into an influence on Jones as well as most all other architects of the so-called "Modern Age of Architecture."

[TEPaul]

Paul:

As far as what Jones did at Oakland Hills and what or who influenced him to do that as you think may be contained in Brad klein's quotation above from his book, I don't know that that should be taken too far. There were obviously a whole lot of new ideas, new directions, new and vastly improved equipment, both golf equipment as well as construction equipment (the latter essentially having been developed out of the massive war effort) that had become available at that time that were not available to golf players and golf architects previously. This obviously very much affected new construction ideas and styles but it also affected many changes in what already existed in golf architecture. It's important for us to note that the whole idea of restoration or even preservation in GCA was not even remotely on the minds of anyone and would not be for at least the next 35 to 40 years!

Certainly the United States in the early 1950s was at the beginning of a real explosion in building, in recreation, and basically in life itself coming out of the second World War probably something like what had happened in the so-called "Roaring Twenties" coming out of the psychologically shattering affects of the first World War.

However, at least in my personal opinion, perhaps the greatest influence on Jones and his new style in golf architecture was the additional influence of the whole idea and application of Landscape Architecture principles on golf course architecture. Don't forget, it was Jones who single-handedly pioneered the LA course and curriculum at Cornell in the late 20s.

[Jeff_Brauer]

As we have noted before, Ross did a similar OH plan which he couldn't implement because of his death.  To me, that suggests that Dey and the USGA had a hand in the general direction of the plan.

As TePaul notes, it was a time of big jumps in tech and there "had to be" a response architecturally in the minds of the then "Par is sacred" USGA Open officials.

What would be interesting speculation is to figure what might have happened if the USGA had today's attitude!  Would we now be seeing a Jones like wave of course toughening after 50 years of "too low scoring" in our National Championship? (esp given this reign of tech improvements)

And would we have more playable club and public courses, as the craze to build championship courses never got started?

[TEPaul]

"As TePaul notes, it was a time of big jumps in tech and there "had to be" a response architecturally in the minds of the then "Par is sacred" USGA Open officials."



Jeff:

In my opinion, there was another truly important factor at work basically beginning around that time, and one that probably happened in such an indirect way as to be something less than apparent or identifiable at the time.

And that was around that time of the first magazine ranking known as "The 200 Toughest Golf Courses" which was the precursor of the magazine rankings of the "100 Best Golf Courses."

Well, what was the essential architecture criterium for "Toughest?" It was essentially just total distance and that is most certainly what the likes of RTJ and Dick Wilson got into with most of their golf courses. Obviously they both well understood that was a pretty direct way to get up in golf course rankings.

[Joe Bausch]

TP, when did Joe Dey get into the game of golf?  Did he play as a youngster?  Did he play as a student at Penn?

[PThomas]

As we have noted before, Ross did a similar OH plan which he couldn't implement because of his death.  To me, that suggests that Dey and the USGA had a hand in the general direction of the plan.

As TePaul notes, it was a time of big jumps in tech and there "had to be" a response architecturally in the minds of the then "Par is sacred" USGA Open officials.

What would be interesting speculation is to figure what might have happened if the USGA had today's attitude!  Would we now be seeing a Jones like wave of course toughening after 50 years of "too low scoring" in our National Championship? (esp given this reign of tech improvements)

And would we have more playable club and public courses, as the craze to build championship courses never got started?

interesting thoughts Tom and Jeff

while i can understand why courses have had to be lengthened, I asunme Jones could have done that to OH , placed the bunkers is places where they needed to be in order to be relevant as Ross intended, etc....but instead he as i understand significantly changed the character of the course...

and Jeff, dont you think that the USGA stiil wants to keep scores in the Open pretty darn close to par?  i dont think they'd want the leader to be 10 or 12 under par...

[PThomas]

"As TePaul notes, it was a time of big jumps in tech and there "had to be" a response architecturally in the minds of the then "Par is sacred" USGA Open officials."



Jeff:

In my opinion, there was another truly important factor at work basically beginning around that time, and one that probably happened in such an indirect way as to be something less than apparent or identifiable at the time.

And that was around that time of the first magazine ranking known as "The 200 Toughest Golf Courses" which was the precursor of the magazine rankings of the "100 Best Golf Courses."

Well, what was the essential architecture criterium for "Toughest?" It was essentially just total distance and that is most certainly what the likes of RTJ and Dick Wilson got into with most of their golf courses. Obviously they both well understood that was a pretty direct way to get up in golf course rankings.

but Tom, I believe GD's first ranking of America's toughest courses was done in 1966....

[TEPaul]

"TP, when did Joe Dey get into the game of golf?  Did he play as a youngster?  Did he play as a student at Penn?"


Joe:

I have no idea at all about Joe Dey as a golf player or if he had any kind of early career as a golfer. I do know that his sort of counterpart at the USGA and with the Rules, P.J. Boatright, was a pretty fine golfer in his day but I don't know about Dey.

I do know that Dey did write for newspapers on golf in New Orleans and then in Philadelphia until maybe the early to mid 30s when he went with the USGA. In those early years the USGA was located in Manhattan and other than the Board of Directors the USGA was basically just Joe Dey and two secretaries. I believe around the mid-1930s Dey married into the very wealthy New York Knapp family of publishing fame. Joseph P. Knapp who was a close friend of C.B. Macdonald and J.P Morgan Jr and an original founder of NGLA who Macdonald mentioned helped him with the course amongst other big-time New Yorkers may've been Dey's wife Rosalie's father or at least her uncle.  

In 1969 Dey resigned the post of the Executive Director of the USGA that he'd held for 34 years (at that point P.J. Boatright became the USGA Executive Director) and became the first Executive Director of the Professional Golf Association's Tournament Players Division that was the precusor to today's PGA Tour. He held that post for five years and then retired at age 68. He died in 1991.

[Joe Bausch]

Tom, what I'm recalling from my memory is that Dey started writing first for the Evening Public Ledger (I think in early 1927) where he did mostly college sports and in particular Penn football.  Then at some point he transitioned into golf (although I can't remember if any were with the EPL) and he moved to the Evening Bulletin, where he pretty much wrote only on golf into the early 30's.  That is an area I want to explore more on microfilm this winter.

[TEPaul]

Joe:

That's right. According to his obituary Dey's parents moved from Norfolk Virginia to New Orleans in 1910 and Dey eventually wrote for those Philadelphia newspapers as well as the New Orleans Times-Picayune. I believe earlier in his life Dey considered a career in the ministry. He was a very straight-laced man. He was a pretty good friend of my grandparents and my father as well. I actually had a lunch meeting with him at Piping Rock that we set up after a lengthy telephone conversation on a Rules of Golf proposal but unfortunately he died before it.

[Dale Jackson]

Tom et al

another considerable accomplishment in Joe Dey's career was being named Captain of the R&A for 1975.  He was the second American so-named and is one of only 3 to have been honoured, the others being Francis Ouimet (1951) and William Campbell (1987).

[Tom MacWood]

The penalization of USGA championship courses actually began long before Dye and Jones. In this 1926 article WD Richardson is warning about the potential consequences. On the other side of the Atlantic they had a different point of view. In Britain there was a common belief that the more penal American courses were producing a more mechanically skilled golfer, which is why Americans were dominating the game.

What happened at OH was just the natural evolution of the process that began in the 1920s and 1930s.

[TEPaul]

"Tom et al
another considerable accomplishment in Joe Dey's career was being named Captain of the R&A for 1975.  He was the second American so-named and is one of only 3 to have been honoured, the others being Francis Ouimet (1951) and William Campbell (1987)."


Dale:

Yes indeed. It is very hard not to notice that if one walks into the administrative offices of the USGA at Far Hills. All three are captured in some very large portraits on their R&A captains uniforms.

[Mark_Rowlinson]

Paul's original premise was pretty powerful - asking if one specific person was the potential power behind a significant (the most significant yet?) movement in golf course design. We've not yet really quantified nor qualified his role. I can offer nothing, but I bet that some of you on the other side of the pond can be a little more forthright.

[john_stiles]

I have a vague recollection that someone mentioned that Joe Dey filled in many of the bunkers at the Creek Club to make it more playable.

He certainly had a long and distinguished career as a golf administrator by all and any accounts,  and was critical in the expansion of the game of golf after World War II,   but he might have been only a below average armchair GCA.

[TEPaul]

“Paul's original premise was pretty powerful - asking if one specific person was the potential power behind a significant (the most significant yet?) movement in golf course design. We've not yet really quantified nor qualified his role. I can offer nothing, but I bet that some of you on the other side of the pond can be a little more forthright.”



Mark R:

I’m not sure Paul Thomas in his initial post offered much of a premise; it seems more like a series of questions. The only potential premise I can see he offered was perhaps that Dey was probably responsible for making (much?) of Jones’ (the architect) reputation. Personally, I doubt that is true.

Here is what Paul Thomas said in the initial post that included a quote from Brad Klein’s book on Donald Ross:




“reading Dr. Klein's book on Donald Ross today...in the discussion of Oakland Hills, Brad wrote:

"Following WWII, however, came the era of modern golf- and with it, a vision of power jointly championed by the USGA  (and its Executive Director Joe Dey) and..Robert Trent Jones....Jones pushed back all of Ross's fairway bunkers, created miniscule targets off th tees, and performed a similar shrink-wrapping of the greens...Goodbye ground game, hello aerial golf...The original design by Ross offered diagonal bunkering ...which at least offered optional angles of play...It was modernization of the most arrogant and ambitious sort- precisely what was expected of Jones."

And Paul Thomas followed with:

"So was Joe Dey the man chiefly responsible for what started at Oakland Hills?  And since he was probably responsible for making (much?) of Jones reputation, is he therefore also responsible for so many of Jones bland designs, which Ran has called the "dark ages of course design"?  If someone other than Joe Dey with a different viewpoint of what kind of course was needed for our national championship, might the history of GCA been radically different?”



First of all, it seems Paul Thomas may’ve misunderstood what Brad Klein meant when he mentioned “power” or a “vision of power.” It doesn’t seem to me that Klein meant a vision of power of the USGA or Dey or Jones; it seems he meant a vision of a greater power within the game itself----eg distance and such.

And secondly, MarkR, I'm not too sure why Brad Klein characterizes what happened at Oakland Hills and for the US Open, and perhaps at the behest or direction of USGA Executive Director, Joe Dey, as a "modernization of the most arrogant and ambitious sort..." Since Brad Klein does contribute on here sometimes perhaps he can explain more fully what he meant by that remark in his book on Donald Ross.

[TEPaul]

"We've not yet really quantified nor qualified his role. I can offer nothing, but I bet that some of you on the other side of the pond can be a little more forthright.”



MarkR:


You mentioned that we have not yet quantified nor qualified Dey's role (in golf or architecture or whatever). I agree, we haven't. But I wonder what you mean when you say you bet some on the other side of the pond can be a little more forthright? Do you mean about Joe Dey, and his career and/or influence on golf or architecture or whatever?

If so, I might say that arguably Joe Dey may've been not only the most important "authority" figure in the history of American golf but perhaps in the history of organizational and administrative golf period! As far as his authority or influence on the course of golf architecture or American golf architecture I think that may've been far more ancillary than has apparently been previously suggested on this thread.

Would you like me to try to elaborate on some of the reasons I think that may be the case?

[Gary Slatter]

Did Deane R Beman have as much influence on American GCA as Joe Dey?   

[Brad Klein]

Paul Thomas' initial questions and suggestions -- it's not an argument, yet --  are interesting. I first think it's based on an interpretation of "power" that suggests that RTJ and Joe Dey/USGA thought they were powerful or influential forces in the game and the industry, whereas my intent in using that term -- I could have been clearer, in retrospect -- was about aerial, power golf and the culture of the big, long drive.

Secondly, do not underestimate the circumstances of Jones' own career arc. He was one of the very few pre-war aspiring architects to survive WWII in tact and to have a chance at a career, and for all his training and gifts he was just about broke for a decade, even when the ASGCA was formed. having done Peachtree and the renovations at ANGC he was still very much angling for a market and a brand, and there's no question in my mind that he seized the moment of the Oakland Hills renovation to draw attention to himself. Thus was born the Open Doctor. Coincidentally, he was helped in this matter by the appearance in 1951 of what i am pretty sure was Herbert Warren Wind's first full-length golf article in "The New Yorker," the famous profile of RTJ. Until then, Wind was a staff writer on the upfront sections of the magazine and had been angling for his breakthrough, and that article did as much to focus attention on RTJ as it did on Wind.

I'm not one to run off and start blaming HWW for having destroyed classic courses -- though HWW can be faulted throughout his writing career for never having said a critical word about anyone or anything. His own private thoughts and feelings aside (I know he hated the renovation of Inverness for the 1979 U.S. Open and yet left that out of his account of that tournament), he did do his best to make the subjects of his profiles into interesting, compelling characters. And in this case, he achieved that with RTJ.

It's my understanding that at Oaklnd Hills, RTJ was encouraged to proceed by the club officers themselves. In those days there was very little USGA staff set up -- RTJ did the work on Oakland Hills in 1950, hardly well in advance. But it was the beginning and the first example of hs Open Doctoring, and there followed much subsequent and well-publicized work -- Baltusrol (1954), Olympic Club (1955), Oak Hill (1956), Southern Hills (1958), Congressional (1964), Bellerive (1965) where Joe Dey's explicit philosophy of Open course set-ups that he articulated in the mid-1950s (not 1951) was actively being implemented.

So, while i think Paul Thomas raises the specter of conspiracy and exaggeration, there's something to his claim, but I would place the emphasis more on the business side of RTJ and his desperate psychological ego-deficit to be recognized and to be successful. And to make sure -- he was driven by this, too -- he distinguished himself in the the public eye as being different from Dick Wilson.

[TEPaul]

Brad:

In my opinion, while Dick Wilson was arguably RTJ's primary competitor in architecture both potentially and actually in the post WW2 era of American golf architecture (often called the "modern era of architecture") Wilson had none of the intuitive marketing skills that RTJ had in all kinds of ways. Matter of fact, Wilson in many ways was his own worst enemy.

And as far as RTJ being close to broke for a decade or so that may've been true in a business sense but not in a personal or life sense. In other words, as the golfer who just lost the championship said----"Tomorrow I will still be able to eat steak" RTJ didn't really have to worry too much-----eg don't forget Mrs Jones----she had a helluva lot of money!!  

[Tom_Doak]

I have a vague recollection that someone mentioned that Joe Dey filled in many of the bunkers at the Creek Club to make it more playable.

John:

That was from something I wrote a long time ago.  I started consulting at The Creek in 1993, not long after Mr. Dey passed away.  He had been the green chairman and main power at the club for 10-15 years before that.  The superintendent, Bill Jones, told me and Gil that Mr. Dey was a fervent admirer of Augusta National, and that his master plan for The Creek was to get it down to FOUR bunkers, on a Macdonald/Raynor course that started out with more than a hundred!

Certainly some of that was budget-driven, though ... The Creek was an old-money club with a relatively small membership full of guys who belonged to three other clubs, so they didn't want to break the bank on it.

P.S.  I only met Joe Dey twice, both on the same day.  We were working at Piping Rock at the time, and I wandered over to The Creek to have a look around, and one of the members out playing told me to leave.  That night, I was in the buffet line at Piping Rock for dinner, and Mr. Millen introduced me to the guy behind us in line ... Mr. Dey, who I recognized from earlier in the day.

[BCrosby]

Sometimes a brief postscript says more than a book possibly could.

Bob

[Peter Pallotta]

Nice thread, good line Bob. Thanks. "Starting something" might be too much for any one person to claim/be blamed for, about anything. But as maybe Gary is suggesting, the Beman-Dye-Sawgrass collaboration still seems to me the most influential one of the modern era (which era I am marking/starting with that collaboration). The neat dividing line often used - post war, RTJ -- seems less and less satisfying to me, though I can have a field day speculating about the socio-economic factors involved back then. But Dye is the great American showman from the heartland -- American enough to be willing to re-invent and promote himself and his craft, and mid-western enough not to take his own b.s. or the hype of the eastern establishment too seriously.

Peter   

[TEPaul]

BobC and PeterP:

Perhaps you got your posts on the wrong thread; I say that because I believe this one is about Joe Dey, not Pete Dye.