1. Pre-1899:The ‘architects’ of this day spent only one or two days on site to stake out the tees and greens. They made few decisions as they didn’t have the ability to move much land. However, the lesson learned from studying the works of the Old Tom Morris and the like is timeless: nature, as opposed to money, provides the most enduring challenges.
Someone posted the above excerpt written by Ran that appears on the homepage for this site. It caught my eye when reading through this thread and I don’t know that I’ve properly read it before. What struck me in reading it was the assumption that the design of the course was a one or two day event.
I think this assumption is basically flawed and shows a lack of understanding of how early courses effectively evolved quite significantly over the early life of the course and that this was an accepted part of the design/build process.
Think of how Old Tom and others would often lay out a course with an allowance to move the tees back once the ground in front of the temporary tee had been hardened by foot traffic so as to provide sufficient run for a longer course, and that how the courses would be laid out initially without sand bunkers on the basis that they would be put in after play over the course helped determine where they should go.
Ran also goes on to say that “they made few decisions as they didn’t have the ability to move much land.” Again I think Ran (or whoever wrote the blurb) misses the point on how courses came about at that time. While constructing courses back then was much more labour intensive than perhaps it is today given the relative amount of earth shifted, a fair bit of earth was shifted using not only man power but horses, carts and scoops. Even as late as the 1920’s they were building courses in the UK by the same means but in a different way ie. all of the construction done up front prior to play on the course. In contrast the emphasis back then was get playing on the course as soon as possible and improve it or build it up as you went along.
The early pro’s involvement in this process would often be not only laying out the course (which I take to mean anything from deciding position of tees and greens to constructing tees and greens) but often tending to the course (this was the days of professional/greenkeepers), advising on changes and building the changes through their own labour and supervision of others. And there was a lot of this work going about as courses were constantly being tinkered with the ideas/design behind the work not necessarily coming from the original architect/pro.
So basically a lot of those early Scottish and English pro’s would have had a pretty good grounding on how to lay out a course.
Niall
Ps. As for the “they made few decisions” comment, think how much thought and how many decisions have to be made in deciding the basic routing of a course given how each hole impacts on the others, particularly where you are relying on the lay of the land rather than bulldozing away any awkward problem areas. I think Ran greatly underestimates these early guys.