GCA WINTER BOOK CLUB TOPIC 1: RELEVANCY!

[Mark Smolens]

[I'm thinking of the 4th at Lost Dunes; that green site was flat originally.]

I confess to being absolutely astounded by this. From my clearly unsophisticated eye, the topography of the fourth green appears to simply flow into the hill/ ridge upon which the second and fifth tees are located. If someone (other than the creator of the actual green) had told me this, I wouldn't have believed it.

As for Tim's question about RH's "happiness" with the standards of courses being built around the world today, can it really be argued that the answers is necessarily sometimes yes, and sometimes no? One need not read too far between the lines to see that Hunter would not be very impressed with the waterfall 18th at the new Wynn course in Las Vegas, but I'd surmise that he'd be pretty "happy" with an opportunity to tee it up at a place such as Bandon, or Sand Valley.

[Garland Bayley]

...
But back to Hunter's quote (which I assume is accurate), have you ever heard a golfer say about his course how much he liked it because it was really easy?  I never have.

I have heard, "I really liked the course." In the same conversation I have heard "I shot a personal best." In fact, I may have said that myself.

Few people are going to say they loved a course because it was easy. Too many social norms against that.

[Colin Macqueen]

Gentlemen,


A number of participants have commented on the fact that "The Links" has been a very enjoyable read and actually an easy read given that the unwashed masses would consider the subject matter a very dry and uninspiring topic! Thank goodness for the shelter given to us by the Golf Club Atlas forum!


I also found it very easy to read and at the same time I did enjoy Hunter's umbrage at times. He was particularly good when decrying the dearth of good architecture and golf courses in the United States of America in what he claims the Brits described as the "Victorian" age of golf architecture.
"We have no name for ours. It was so indescribably bad that anyone knowing better things must have thought it the work of some maniac with an extremely malicious spirit, determined to deface, with every kind of misshapen erection and eruption known to a depraved mind, those lovely fields and meadows which first caught the eye of our golfers"
Terrific stuff!


As to relevancy I think that this book is still highly relevant. I suspect if any clubs directors followed, to a large extent, Hunter's principles in regard to the placement and purpose of hazards, course routing and layout, green complexes and green contouring then they would be well ahead of the curve albeit these ideas are now a century old.


My club is almost in the process of rebuilding new holes. Do you think I should suggest "The Links" as compulsory reading prior to  any turf being disturbed! I personally think that the holes in question could be redefined using Hunter's basic ethos and a perfectly good and much less disruptive outcome would appear. So yes I consider Hunter and "The links" very relevant.


Somewhere nearer the beginning (I can't quite find it) of the book Hunter mentions " ...golf course anatomy..." which set me to a'wonderin' if Tom Doak, subliminally and subconsciously, absorbed this and came up with the title to his most excellent book on the subject!


Cheers Colin

[David Harshbarger]

As to relevancy I think that this book is still highly relevant. I suspect if any clubs directors followed, to a large extent, Hunter's principles in regard to the placement and purpose of hazards, course routing and layout, green complexes and green contouring then they would be well ahead of the curve albeit these ideas are now century old.


My club is almost in the process of rebuilding new holes. Do you think I should suggest "The Links" as compulsory reading prior to  any turf being disturbed! I personally think that the holes in question could be redefined using Hunter's basic ethos and a perfectly good and much less disruptive outcome would appear. So yes I consider Hunter and "The links" very relevant.

Hunter wrote for them.


A little into the preface (p. xv  pp. 2) "[The books] chief aim is to bring together and examine some of the more important principles of a practical nature for the guidance of those undertaking to construct a golf course.  Many clubs start work with little or no information about the many difficult problems which they mist face, and in book for little is now available."


Yes, it's a fine book to share as it really is written to speak to the golfer/club officer reader. 

[Peter Pallotta]

David, Colin -

yes: the biggest surprise for me was how practical The Links was, how much a primer on golf course construction it was intended to be. The 2nd biggest surprise was how elegantly it combined its practical advice with its aesthetic considerations/ideals. A book about both the art and the craft of gca. I've not read a ton of golf books, but I can't think of another that strikes so seamless a balance. (I've only read snippets/selections from Wethered and Simpson - does the Architectural Side of Golf comes close?)   

[David Harshbarger]

The uphill par-3 I mentioned at Biarritz was accepted in its day because you had to get back up that hill to finish the course and in 1895 a golfer expected to play up it, instead of taking a golf cart to the top.  It would be a tougher sell now, but that's why I would want to do it, to get golfers to understand that the game is a trek along which one plays golf shots.

That's a Hunter-ian sentiment and speaks to a qualitatively different golf experience than other common golf experiences.  (Beer, country music, and beverage cart attendants have their merits as well). 

I imagine the earliest golfers seeing the game as a mix of horse and parkour (gloss over the fact that those didn't exist).  They went out with their friends and spent the day kidding and teasing and one-upping each other challenging one another to "get it closest to the whins there...and then there...and then there..." all about, over and around the dunes.  The land was their playground and besting your bro's never goes out of fashion.

[David Harshbarger]

David, Colin -

yes: the biggest surprise for me was how practical The Links was, how much a primer on golf course construction it was intended to be. The 2nd biggest surprise was how elegantly it combined its practical advice with its aesthetic considerations/ideals. A book about both the art and the craft of gca. I've not read a ton of golf books, but I can't think of another that strikes so seamless a balance. (I've only read snippets/selections from Wethered and Simpson - does the Architectural Side of Golf comes close?)   

Peter, I agree with you that he lays out a number of good practical best practices. I didn't expect what you may be referring to as the 2nd surprise. 


He spends so much of the early book evoking the feeling great golf creates in its practitioners. 


I don't know about you but in my experience men don't spend a lot of time talking about how their activities make them feel.  We spend quite a bit of time talking about our status relative to others, about plans and accomplishments, about outrages and slights.  But we don't often ask each other "is this experience all you want it to be, all it can be?"


And he challenges us to ask ourselves if we are going to make a grounds to go out and play, how do we want that grounds and that play to make us feel?  Is to be work?  Or is it to be fun? 


Too often he warns that unthinking design, or mean-spirited design will leave us with work in play's clothing.  But he also promises that with thoughtful design our play can verge on transcendence. While not every course can deliver transcendence, any thoughtful course could deliver play that kindles the spirit, but only if that objective is kept at heart when the challenges are laid out.


I don't know how that could ever not be relevant.

[Peter Pallotta]

I once speculated in an essay that the young gentlemen who came of age in the newly emerging Edwardian era sought their spiritual nourishment in Nature, having abandoned at Oxford and Cambridge the more traditional forms & structures of their Victorian ancestors. And one place they sought (and found, and wrote about) this sense of the numinous was on golf's fields of play:'in the misty silence, as the rain fell from low grey clouds draped over a sea-side links like a shroud'. (A sort of coincidence: James wrote "The Varieties of Religious Experience" in 1902; Hultain wrote "The Mystery of Golf" in 1908; Low wrote "Concerning Golf" in 1903.) Jump ahead about 100 years, and the even more secularized counterparts to those Edwardian gentlemen (today: men and women, young and old, of various economic classes) living now in great teeming cities like Chicago, London and New York and with little respite from the 24 hour news (or work) cycles and a constant digital buzz, have once again sought (and found, and wrote about) their refuge in the quiet and expansive peace of far flung sea-side links: on fields of play seemingly untouched by the hands of man, with the low grey clouds and the soft tumble of waves, they experience the numinous, and are entranced. They return home rejuvenated and refreshed: marking their rating/ranking cards enthusiastically, paying off their credit cards with pleasure, planning to return to their place of spiritual nourishment as soon as possible.
I think that's why Hunter's "The Links" is still relevant: it describes an evergreen antidote to a perennial longing of the human heart.     

(David - just saw your post before I posted mine: we were thinking along the same lines at the same time!)

[Tom_Doak]

Don't believe me if you want, outside of this site, the vast majority of golfers place higher priorities on things other than course design.  You may be surprised how many people don't know who Tom Doak is and don't really care to discuss architecture, "strategy", the WHS, and that the ball goes too far.

Lou:  I'm always surprised when anyone does know who I am.  As someone once said, in America, you're not famous unless you're on TV.  And I have no desire to be famous.


But whether they understand golf architecture or not, and whether they are good enough players to interact with it, or not, most golfers appreciate architecture at some level.  For the majority, just hitting the ball solidly is hard, but they wouldn't keep coming back unless it was also interesting and, at some level, fun.  And that's what golf architecture is all about.

[Tom_Doak]

Somewhere nearer the beginning (I can't quite find it) of the book Hunter mentions " ...golf course anatomy..." which set me to a'wonderin' if Tom Doak, subliminally and subconsciously, absorbed this and came up with the title to his most excellent book on the subject!

Colin:


No one has ever asked me where that title came from!  It was suggested by my publisher, Peter Burford.  He thought he might sell the book to libraries and that such a title would appeal to librarians. 😄


It is the only one of my books I didn't name myself - and the best selling of them.


I had never noticed the phrase in The Links that you highlighted - even in this reading.


P.S.  My own history with this book dates back to when I was eighteen and decided to pursue my profession.  It was a hard book to find then, but my mother managed to find a copy through inter-library loan.  Since she had gone to journalism school, she did not want to make a Xerox copy of the book and defy copyright laws, but her solution was a novel one:  she re-typed the whole thing, so I would have a copy. ❤️  My mom passed away in 1991, but I still have her typed copy of The Links, which may one day be more valuable than a first edition signed by Robert Hunter himself.

[Sean_A]

Isn't retyping a manuscript tantamount to copying it? It may be love, but it's fishy nonetheless .

Ciao

[Garland Bayley]

Isn't retyping a manuscript tantamount to copying it? It may be love, but it's fishy nonetheless .

Ciao

Copyright laws existed before copy machines.

[Niall C]

Tim,
You quote Hunter  " ....some higher power presides over linksland ..... However lamentable all this may be, there it lies and shall lie..."


I was intrigued by this passage as it smacks of Behr's philosophy of Nature being very much a part of good golf architecture and the way Hunter writes this is very "Behr-esque".


Hunter also seems to be channeling Behr when he writes we need to " ......mould all over this golf course landscapes to refresh the soul as well as suitable playgrounds for the devotees of this noble game."


And again when Hunter talks about sea-side versus inland golf "...the sportsman when battling with Nature makes no complaint. But immediately he is faced with problems of a human origin, he feels justified, if he finds them too difficult, in turning upon their creator with murder in his heart."  Pure Behr in my opinion!


There are others and I wonder if Hunter and Behr did have communications and resorted to "beard-pulling" over a whisky or two! They were certainly in exactly the same era so not impossible. Does anyone on the forum know of any interaction between the two?


Cheers Colin

Colin


I'm fairly sure Hunter and Behr were acquainted but will leave others to say where and when. What interested me was your comparison between the two. They were both very wordy and erudite but I tend to think where Hunter used words to great effect to explain what he meant, Behr just seemed to leave the reader (ie. me) more confused than anything. Where Hunter is entertaining to read Behr is just hard work, or at least he is to me.


Niall

[David Jones]

Hunter talks early on in the book about links golf at the likes of Deal being so unfamiliar to American golfers that they simply didn't have the shots to contend when travelling to the UK to play.


Since Hunter's day television, instruction books and how to guides on youtube have all meant there must be fewer surprises as to what you will find. You could even throw Bandon into that as well.


So here's a slightly contrived question on relevancy (to stay on Tim's topic!) for our cousins across the pond. When you travel to the UK do you believe you are prepared for what links golf brings, and what are some of the biggest surprises that still come to mind?

[David Harshbarger]

....there is a double standard between Golden Age courses and new ones:  on the older courses, the designer's agency has been grandfathered into being accepted as natural, whereas that is rarely the case when we know that Designer X just built a new course.  Minimalists may be granted some more license than others, but golfers understand that everything we have done was a choice.

"We are in an early stage in the development of golf course architecture.  There are, to be sure, many beautiful courses, and each year the better men are building more soundly and creating more courses of merit, at least so far as the requirements for the game are concerned.  Nevertheless, does anyone doubt that to the golfers of 1940 most of the work of the present day will appear very crude? In most cases too little regard is yet given to the beauty, harmony, and grandeur of the finished product.  When we build golf courses we are remodeling the face of nature, and it should be remembered that the greatest and fairest things are done by nature and the lesser by art, as Plato truly said. Of nearly all golf course building at present and of nearly all landscape gardening for centuries, Plato's observation is strikingly true. What garden in all the world equals some of the pictures which nature paints? What modern golf course equals in beauty the seaside courses, and especially those which have been left freest from the touch of the architect? If there has been improvement in the art of constructing golf courses, it has been largely due to the willingness of the best architects to imitate humbly and lovingly what nature has placed before them."

[Niall C]

David


As you know I'm not qualified by residency to answer your question but the question I have is there still the same need now to change your game when going from typical US golf to links (indeed how have typical US golf courses changed over the period ?) given modern equipment means the game is played more in the air ?


Niall

[Tom_Doak]

Hunter talks early on in the book about links golf at the likes of Deal being so unfamiliar to American golfers that they simply didn't have the shots to contend when travelling to the UK to play.


Since Hunter's day television, instruction books and how to guides on youtube have all meant there must be fewer surprises as to what you will find. You could even throw Bandon into that as well.


So here's a slightly contrived question on relevancy (to stay on Tim's topic!) for our cousins across the pond. When you travel to the UK do you believe you are prepared for what links golf brings, and what are some of the biggest surprises that still come to mind?

I've been to the UK over and over again, yet every time I come back I am amazed at the little intricacies of links courses, how there is never a level lie for example.  Clyde and I were walking a course this evening that I hadn't seen since before he was born, and there is just so much detail there that it would be impossible to remember it all.  When I mentioned that I probably didn't remember it so fondly because I had just spent so much time at St. Andrews and Dornoch and a few others, we agreed that all the links are so intricate that you get to a saturation point where it's hard to be impressed anymore, until you see something that's strikingly different -- which is probably why places like Brancaster or Rye are said to be "overrated" by overseas visitors compared to the locals' view of them.


Also, it's worth noting that Hunter talked about "all the shots in one's bag," and not "hitting every club in the bag" as some more modern architects did.  Back then, the clubs were not matched sets, so every club in the bag was a better standard than today, but Hunter was after something much more than that.

[Peter Pallotta]

made me think:
when long ago they said golf meant 'playing the ball as it lies', they certainly didn't imagine it laying the same way every single time!

[Dan Kelly]

P.S.  My own history with this book dates back to when I was eighteen and decided to pursue my profession.  It was a hard book to find then, but my mother managed to find a copy through inter-library loan.  Since she had gone to journalism school, she did not want to make a Xerox copy of the book and defy copyright laws, but her solution was a novel one:  she re-typed the whole thing, so I would have a copy. ❤️  My mom passed away in 1991, but I still have her typed copy of The Links, which may one day be more valuable than a first edition signed by Robert Hunter himself.

I did it the modern way when I read it and loved it last winter. It came from the library.


I took pictures, many pictures, of my favorite pages and passages, with my iPhone.

[David Jones]

David


As you know I'm not qualified by residency to answer your question but the question I have is there still the same need now to change your game when going from typical US golf to links (indeed how have typical US golf courses changed over the period ?) given modern equipment means the game is played more in the air ?


Niall

Thanks Niall/Tom,


Tom's point on the intricacies of links courses would indicate that there is still some requirement for visitors to adapt aspects of their game to meet the variability that comes with a trip from the US to the UK.


However, I suspect that some of those are being ironed out in the manufacturing process. A Kingbarns, Renaissance or Castle Stuart has fewer of those idiosyncrasies than a links course from hundred years prior. When you combine that with a move towards uniformity in conditioning then the game must be less alien I would have thought than to a visitor from Hunter's era.

[Kalen Braley]

I'm curious,


Has anyone in the biz on the site, or that you know of, tried building a course without heavy equipment of any type?  To really distill down what you can and can't absolutely live with? 

[Tom_Doak]

I'm curious,


Has anyone in the biz on the site, or that you know of, tried building a course without heavy equipment of any type?  To really distill down what you can and can't absolutely live with?

Askernish was built without any heavy equipment -- of course, it is presumably just a resurrection of a course constructed 100 years ago, which was then built without heavy equipment.


Eric Iverson and I performed the sacrilege of using a mini excavator there a few years after it opened, to build a couple of new greens and to make the approaches to a couple of greens a bit more predictable.  We could have done the same work with a crew of four guys and shovels and wheelbarrows -- but scrounging up such a crew at Askernish is not so easy to do, considering they have a maintenance staff of one.


When I built High Pointe we did much less finish work on the fairways than for any course nowadays . . . some of them had been ag fields, and those had micro-contours as ripply as the stuff I've seen in the UK this week.  Most people thought the work was substandard, or complained that it was too bumpy to drive the golf carts over.      Americans!

[Ira Fishman]

David


As you know I'm not qualified by residency to answer your question but the question I have is there still the same need now to change your game when going from typical US golf to links (indeed how have typical US golf courses changed over the period ?) given modern equipment means the game is played more in the air ?


Niall

Thanks Niall/Tom,


Tom's point on the intricacies of links courses would indicate that there is still some requirement for visitors to adapt aspects of their game to meet the variability that comes with a trip from the US to the UK.


However, I suspect that some of those are being ironed out in the manufacturing process. A Kingbarns, Renaissance or Castle Stuart has fewer of those idiosyncrasies than a links course from hundred years prior. When you combine that with a move towards uniformity in conditioning then the game must be less alien I would have thought than to a visitor from Hunter's era.

First trip to Scotland: Golspie, Brora, RD, Nairn, and Castle Stuart. Least favorite by a fair margin: Castle Stuart.


Second trip to Scotland: Kilspindie, North Berwick, Elie, Crail Balcomie, and Kingsbarns. Least favorite course: Kingsbarns.


Trip next year: returning to Elie and Crail.


And I am far from a purist. But there just is something special about a non-manufactured links course.


Ira

[Peter Pallotta]

From Hunter:

"Many a dull schoolmaster can lay down his laws of writing and reduce Shakespeare's methods to a few simple rules and regulations..."

I don't know links golf, nor the specific reasons for Ira's love of Elie and Crail.

But I do know Shakespeare: I think his greatest play is "King Lear" -- not coincidentally, a sprawling late-career masterpiece that seems to ignore all the schoolmaster's rules and regulations. 

Of course, Shakespeare isn't so much ignoring those rules as he is transcending them -- so that he can offer us the most powerfully effective & emotionally affecting scenes in all of drama, e.g. the aging King holding the lifeless body of his favourite daughter, as he says "Never, never, never, never, never".

   

[Ira Fishman]

Peter,


I am poor at Shakespeare, but my understanding is that he was successful commercially in his time and transcendent artistically at least until our time because he understood both the temporary tastes (politics, violence, sex) and the eternal (our souls plus violence and sex). So I think the same is true about Braid and Old Tom and whoever is the author of RD and North Berwick. My point is that as enjoyable as Castle Stuart and Kingsbarns indeed are, their authors look more to the pocketbook than the soul.


Ira