Over the weekend, I was re-reading HWW's coverage of the 1968 Masters in his Rule 38 Paragraph 3 chapter of Following Through. It includes this terrific quote by Bobby Jones. Perhaps it has been posted here before, but I thought I would share it along with a separate quote from that article as we approach the 50th anniversary of the competition:
“The point I set out to make was that on the old hard, fast courses golf was a more exacting game and, in a way, a more fascinating one. I was discussing this with Arnold Palmer the other evening, and my position was that we’ve permitted ourselves to go too far in the other direction. With our soft, holding greens today, golf has become almost entirely target golf. You fly your shot right to your target and it settles where it lands. Of course, mine may be an old-fashioned view, but I believe that the bounce of the ball should be part of the game, and when you play a fast, resilient course it is. Then, as I said, you must improvise all sorts of shots to cope with the terrain. I know that some of those little pitches and pitch-and-runs—the one that came off successfully—gave me as much satisfaction as any shots I ever played.” -Bobby Jones
And there is this additional passage making the case for amending said rule:
“Some people defend Rule 38 by arguing that it is not putting an unreasonable burden on the golfer to require him to be responsible for the correctness of his scorecard, but—since accidents do happen—it is possible that they underrate the stress a player is under. Other people who want the rule to stand believe that the way to insure that nothing goes wrong is to set up, off the last green, some enclosure—say, a large tent—in which a player can go over his card in peace and privacy. This would assuredly be a step in the right direction, but I do not think it goes to the heard of the matter, which is this: The score that the player makes on the course is the score that he should be credited with. It should be the responsibility of the tournament officials as well as of the golfer to see that the score he returns is the right score. If an error is discovered, the important thing is to see that it is corrected. No penalty should be imposed. Golf, like every other spot, is meant to be a test of athletic ability and not of bookkeeping. Granted, it will take many, many sessions for our rules-making body, the United States Golf Association, even to begin to develop the machinery necessary to take into account both the game’s traditions and the realities of present-day tournament golf, but I trust that this matter is on the current agenda. Nobody wants ever again to have to go through another such Sunday as the one at Augusta, when legality is served, but justice, as golfers understand it, isn’t. It is really an indignity to the game.”