Max Behr

[Stephen Brown]

Sirs:

I was hoping someone could provide me with an avenue to find the writing or works of Max Behr.  When "googled" it brings up GCA.com and, USGA info on his victory in the US AM.  I have read the pieces here, but would love to add a collection of essays to my golf library.  Does a compilation or book exsist ?  Any help/info would be greatly appreciated.

Best Wishes and Happiness in '04 !

Stephen Brown

[Tommy_Naccarato]

Stephen,
The best written works to date is Geoff Shackelford & Mike Miller's The Art of Golf Design, where several of the most important quotes from Max are hilighted in the text.

[Geoff_Shackelford]

Stephen,

I've compiled some of Behr's architecture writings for a book tentatively titled "Permanent Golf Architecture." However, I'm not quite ready to publish the book as some exciting (well to me anyway!) developments have led to new information that must be added to the book. I also hope to dig up some photographs of his courses and at least one more essay that I know is out there titled The Spirit of Golf Architecture. So far it has eluded me and some of the best researchers I know. But it must exist as Behr himself mentioned it appearing in a 1923 or 24 issue of The Country Club Magazine.

In the mean time, a version of the book Introduction will appear in the forthcoming issue of the Australian Golf Architect's Journal, titled "Why Max Behr Matters." Also, I put bits and pieces of his writings up on my web site. My next book, The Future of Golf In America (this spring), features a few Behr sidebars and an essay on Behr's belief that golf should be treated as a sport, not a game. And as Tommy noted, The Art of Golf Design features several Behr related excerpts.
Geoff

[Mark_Huxford]

Design in golf architecture
http://turf.lib.msu.edu/gsr/1950s/521117.pdf

The natural use of sand
http://turf.lib.msu.edu/gsr/1920s/260110.pdf

The nature and use of penalty in golf architecture
http://turf.lib.msu.edu/gsr/1920s/250111B.pdf

Art in golf architecture
http://turf.lib.msu.edu/gsr/1920s/2505103.pdf

Principles in golf architecture
http://turf.lib.msu.edu/gsr/1920s/2305139B.pdf

[TEPaul]

For anyone interested in reading the essays of Max Behr, it would be best to notice a general theme that flows through MOST but not all his essays. This theme, I believe, ultimately culminates in Behr's general philosophy about golf and architecture. Although Behr has a very distinct writing style and one not easy to understand at first, his essays when read and considered together have a very interesting a priori reasoning method to them. In other words he sets a premise, then goes about attempting a priori to prove it. That premise then becomes the cause for the effect of the next necessary premise (essay) that he goes about attempting to prove and so on until his premises (essays) are linked together a priori to form his entire philosophy. His essays are interesting to read individually but when looked at and considered as a whole are far more interesting.

[Stephen Brown]

Gents:

Thanks so much !  I cannot wiat to get my hands on MB's writings.

Steve

[KBM]

G. Shackleford,

Could you please give us a snippet of what the difference is between a game and a sport?  Thanks.

[TEPaul]

Throughout Behr's essays he continues to make the distinction between "sport" and "game". Ultimately Behr believes golf was and should continue to be a "sport" as opposed to a "game".

Probably the most basic distinction he makes between golf as a "sport" as opposed to golf as a "game" revolves around what Behr believes to be the necessary balance or part "Nature" must play in the equation of golf. If golf loses that part of "Nature's" necessary balance Behr believed golf then becomes a totally man concocted and man-made game in every way which he believes includes its architecture, the golfer's perception of it, the rules of golf--basically everything.

Behr makes the point that initially golfers who viewed golf as a true sport were not so concerned with things such as the prinicples some of us hold of "equity", "fair play", "a just reward to skill" etc. It's not that in his time Behr did not believe in those things just that he didn't believe golf, golfers and golf architecture should become as fixated on those things as they had become, and, he feared, would continue to become! He called that mentality when nature loses its necessary part in golf, the "game mind" of man.

The reason Behr didn't believe golf (or its architecture) should fixate on those things is because "sport" deals directly with "Nature" and those things (equity, fairness, the complete isolating of skill) aren't found in nature!

Behr wrote;

"Golf is a sport, not a game; and this distinction is fundamental if one is to attain a correct perspective of it, for both are endowed with principles of a different character. A game is enclosed in principles, strictly speaking, because everything about it is man-made........."
"Principles in Golf Architecture", Max Behr

"It may be said, then, that a game is akin to science, for everything in it, lying as is does within the concepts of space and time, is known except for one thing--the skill of the players. But every sport, of which golf is one, is an emotional experience in which space and time take on the attributes of infinity and hence, are akin to religion. If this comparison is well drawn, then man is not the master in golf as in other games. It is not given him, nor should it be his purpose, to make a precise mathematical use of space and lay his law upon it. On the contrary, his object should be to preserve the mystery that lies in undefined space (Nature). He is in the realm of art."
"The Nature and Use of Penalty in Golf Architecture", M. Behr

[Willie_Dow]

Mark Huxford

Many thanks for putting together such an interesting introduction to Max Behr.

Listening and reading Tom Paul's enthusiastic recommendations, that we all find our way into his thinking, has always prompted me to get started finding a path back in time to his writings.

You have accomplished just that.

Willie

[Mark_Fine]

I've always enjoyed reading Max Behr's essays.  He has some of the best quotes and I sight them often.  Wonder why he never made it to the same league as a Mackenzie or a Ross or Tillinghast in terms of his designs?  Thoughts?

[larry_munger]

What was the best land MB had to work with?

[The Spirit Of Ran]

Mark,
I'm sure Geoff's eventual book on the subject will delve into all of this.

Perhaps it was because Behr's courses or at least the ideals of them, got changed so much that it may have soured him further from doing them when he was alive and doing business. If you could call it business. I don't think he actively pursued to design courses as much as he was invited to do them, but I could be very wrong here. Of all odf the Behr courses I have seen, I find it ironic that none of them maintain the style of design he so much talked about. But you can still see it in the courses. One just needs to go in there and remove all of the trees that took away so much of the idea of a specific boundry or line of death.

One really cool little Behr course, Montebello Golf Course for years has gone under the knife of way too many STUPID golf architects (David Rainville & Gary Bye) who don't ironically in a recent conversation with both of them, didn't even know who Max Behr was.

When I was young to the Game, I remember many times playing Montebello and seeing these really cool ground features, knowing it was an old classic course. Later on I would come to realize that these old cool features were actually bunkers in the middle of fairways, and of course, the greens had been flattened, you could surely tell, because they outlived their usefullness in the futile effort to speed-up play. I find it ironic that for every feature removed from there, and Griffith Park, play has only gotten slower!

Montebello is a really cool sort of hilly routing that literally runs around this huge really ugly clubhouse which houses a restaurant called the Quiet Cannon. When playing the course, you never had th feeling you were walking a hillside course, it just sort of climbed its way subtely until you got back up the hill and found yourself 9th green, just across the road from the clubhouse. From there, it was a walk to the tenth, which plays downhill and then into the flatter areas of the course again climbing ever so subtley back to the clubhouse again.

The 9th was a short par 3 of some 90 yards, and it was deadly, as it was one of the few greens that hadn't been altered. It too is now gone thanks to Rainville and Bye.

So ignorance is bliss. Hacienda Golf Club is now in the hands of John Harbottle who is more certain to screw it up even more since he hasn't looked at one signifcant piece of club heritage the club has at hand; Rancho Sante Fe has met the work of Perry Dye as well as countless others. Oakmont is buried in trees, and Montecito CC, well RTJ supposedly screwed with them years ago. I think Ron Whitten lists Vicitoria CC as another, but Billy Bell Sr. & Jr. messed with it in the early 50's.

[The Spirit Of Ran]

Brad/Larry,
Without doubt, Lakeside. It's one of the Game's great tragedies. I'm learning that more and more.

[TEPaul]

"Wonder why he never made it to the same league as a Mackenzie or a Ross or Tillinghast in terms of his designs?"

Maybe he did. Maybe we just don't realize it. We, today have a sort of distorted "prism" way of looking back at some things to do with that older architecture, in my opinion. I believe  many of us on this website are either largely misreading or misunderstanding what was going on back then when it comes to the currents and influences on golf architecture.

Some of us don't even seem very clear on the chronology of the so-called Golden Age of golf architecture much less a clear idea of what the influences on it where--and particularly when. As interesting as that "jumping the shark" thread was, and I certainly did enjoy the discussion, I believe the premise of that thread was a complete misreading and misunderstanding of the currents, influences and chronology of that early time.

Behr did other things, though--he was an architectural editor and didn't even begin designing courses until the early 1920s despite being heavily involved in many things golf for perhaps twenty years prior to that. Being a very competitive amateur golfer I don't even know that Behr considered golf architecture a profession and he may not have taken remuneration for anything he did (as was not unusual amongst some of this contemporaries!).

Some (some from back then) say his Lakeside course was one of the best ever built. I believe it was Mackenzie who said that.

Max Behr was basically a writer, thinker and philosopher on golf architecture. Some believe Behr may have been a huge influence on the architectural philosophies of Alister Mackenzie and also Bob Jones and others.

I don't think it's any secret that Behr, as a golf architectural writer and philosopher was simply hard to understand. He was probably too deep for any era. You should read what Hugh Wilson said about him in a letter. There's no doubt Wilson was impressed but also no doubt that he didn't really follow him.

One of the real ironies is that most of Behr's architectural work is gone or completely corrupted apparently. And this from the man whose entire architectural philosophy basically culminated in what he referred to as "Permanent architecture".

There'll obviously be many contributors on here who will point to that as absolute evidence that Behr wasn't a good architect or that he was some kind of eccentric crackpot. I guess that's inevitable the way things go--but, I, for one, don't believe that for a second. I believe Behr was a total genius in the field of architecture and perhaps someday he'll finally be understood and listened to!  

[Mark_Huxford]

Willie, it was Neil Regan who found that USGA Greens section archive. All I did was use the search engine  

Here's one I found amusing:

"Thus was born the Penal School of golf architecture; and its thought persists today. It is pervaded with the puritanical idea that all error is a sin. It is not satisfied that it has accomplished its high purpose until it has dug a pit for every transgression from the consecrated path it has provided from the tee. It revels in that type of smartness which is forever discovering subtle errors in the conversation of others."

[Mark_Fine]

I am anxious to read Geoff's new book.  However, it is going to have to be pretty amazing for me to think of Max Behr in the same light as Mackenzie, Ross,...etc. at least when it comes to the golf courses they designed.  

[Tommy_Naccarato]

Mark, You liked Rustic Canyon didn't you? Same type of stuff, or get one of the old Syber Vision/Bobby Jones tapes that show Lakeside in an amazing natural form. I obtained one on EBAY, and was looking at it today and was ready to shed a tear! Some pretty amazing stuff.

[mikeyolympic]

I've played Hacienda GC twice, and I was impressed with the course. Behr's theory on "boundary lines" really comes true on no. 10, the par 5 with the OB line encroaching on the left side.

i'm curious to know what changes have been made to the original design at hacienda. anyone care to elaborate?

[ForkaB]

Tom P

I think that KBM is still waiting for an answer to his question as to what is the difference between a "game" and a "sport" (at least in Max Behr's mind).

I what I have read (mostly from the MSU archives) Behr just makes a priori assumption that there is a difference, but never adequately describes or explains this difference.  Since his definitons of the two are amorphous (at best) his arguments about the character of golf in this context (i.e. al the "Nature" comments) are always fuzzy, at least to me.

I'm interested to see if Geoff S will be able to clarify this muddle when his long awaited essay on the topic is published.  I am personally sceptical that a cogent argument can be made that there any differences between “games” and “sports” which are relevant to our understanding of GCA (even using Behr’s assumptions and "explanations" I think that golf is both and game and a sport).  But, I am willing to be proved wrong and to learn!

[TEPaul]

"TomP
I think that KBM is still waiting for an answer to his question as to what is the difference between a "game" and a "sport" (at least in Max Behr's mind).
I what I have read (mostly from the MSU archives) Behr just makes a priori assumption that there is a difference, but never adequately describes or explains this difference.  Since his definitons of the two are amorphous (at best) his arguments about the character of golf in this context (i.e. al the "Nature" comments) are always fuzzy, at least to me."

Rich:

KBM asked for a few 'snippets' of what Behr meant by the distinction between golf the "sport" and golf the "game". Because Behr did write with an on-going a priori method of reasoning (that connected through many of his essays) unfortunately it's both important and necessary to read all his available essays to understand both what he was saying and why.

To answer your questions I could reprint his essays in their entirety here but why bother to do that when links to them have been supplied on here? The problem with people today (and maybe in that early time also to some degree) is they want ideas and issues that are relatively complex to be supplied to them in pithy little "sound bites". Well, that doesn't work very well with the architectural philosophy of Max Behr simply because those philosophies were developed in an on-going a priori method.

And again, Behr did write in a rather odd way. However, if one spends the time analyzing his essays there are some extraordinary thoughts and ideas found in them, in my opinion. As far as I can tell today only a few people really have carefully read and considered Max Behr's essays.

Unfortunately, it takes time to have all that he said sink in and in some part because of the way he said it. I do realize, and have for years that you can't see much in Behr and one of the reasons is you probably haven't taken the time to read what he wrote in its entirety much less really consider what he said and was saying. I suggest you do that and stop asking me to explain the entirety of those essays and their philosophy to you in some pithy little pony on here.

[ForkaB]

Tom

KBM asked a simple question, which I repeated, after you tried but failed to answer it.  You still haven't answered it.  If Behr really knew what he meant when he started the whole sport/game construct, he surely didn't share it with his readers (including you), as far as I can see!

I'm sure you know that a common definition of "a priori" is:  "not based on prior study or examination; non-analytical."  Also, I'm sure you know that any attempt at deductive logic is useful if and only if the assumptions which underly the deductions are true.  So, if Behr build theories which arise from a premise (golf is a "sport" and not a "game") which he cannot or does not prove to be "true", all his conclusions (no matter how fancifully verbified) are just a house of cards.  No?

[Michael Moore]

Mr. Goodale -

Mr. Paul clearly quoted Mr. Behr as saying that games lie within the concepts of space and time whereas sport takes on certain attributes of infinity.

What could be more clear than that?

[TEPaul]

"So, if Behr build theories which arise from a premise (golf is a "sport" and not a "game") which he cannot or does not prove to be "true", all his conclusions (no matter how fancifully verbified) are just a house of cards.  No?

NO Rich, NO indeed!!

Your last post is the best indication to date of your penchant and inclination to think only in what you suppose to be true or the truth---and likely based on some hackneyed old assumptions that you draw out of and completely base on such things as dictionary definitions of words used. A bit more freethinking may be necessary than just that on your part and on the subject of Max Behr's philosophy on architecture. And it would only help if you actually read what he wrote and tried harder to understand what he was writing and saying!

It occurs to me that Albert Einstein, for one, did not manage to come up with his theory of relativity by basing his premises on that which was assumed and consequently concluded for eons by EVERYONE who preceded him---that being that the universe was filled with ether!! He actually managed to QUESTION that PREMISE (assumed to be a conclusion by all before him)!

Not that Behr's essays would ever help us understand the world better as did Einstein's "Theory of Relativity" because ultimately all Behr was trying to express was a better understanding of what he called "The Natural School of Golf Architecture" so that the ultimate result would be that golfers could derive more pleasure from golf in a meaningful way!

Behr, in his essays, is not so much questioning any time honored premises or "truths" about the fundamental essences of golf (such as "sport" vs "game")--but he may be the first  who actually asked those questions in the depth that he did  and certainly as those questions relate to the psychology of how golf and its architecture effects the golfer in a fundamental sense.

I think it's probably somewhat safe to say that Behr's questions that led to his premises and philosophy may have even been inspired by the earlier writing of Arnold Haultain. Behr, however, appeared to want to take some of those things mentioned by Haultain (such as time and space in golf and architecture) and really explore them in depth and all they could mean. And that's what he did in his on-going series of inter-connected essays.

In my opinion, the questions aren't simple and neither are the answers--despite the fact that you seem to want simple questions and simple answers. I was writing a longer post on what I think a synopsis of his distinction between golf the "sport" vs golf the "game" was about but maybe in the meantime I'll attempt a simple answer. But if you then continue to question it as "fuzzy" you really then would need to just read his essays because of their a priori reasoning method.

[A_Clay_Man]

Rihc- One need only see what has happened to the game to better understand the difference. From centerline bunkers, that have all been grassed over, to the prolific use of unrecoverable hazards, man's, or the market's, definition of what golf should be, has led us down this road which is all but putting everybody to sleep.

Understanding human nature is likely at the cornerstone of MB's thinking, but I have only read the sound bites. Knowing that nature, is key to "getting" the difference between a sportsmans definition of sport versus Lady Wellington's notion of fainess.

TeP- If one were to start a new project today, and the underlying foundation was to have something "totally different"  would constructing a course completly following MB's principles foot that bill?

When I think about C.B trying to get the masses interested in golf, in Chicago, before the turn of the century, I am sickened by how that gift has been wasted on the wrong sort.

[ForkaB]

Adam

Your post referencing MB's "principles" reminded me of that great riposte:

Gladstone said to Disraeli, "I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease". Disraeli replied, "That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress."

My concern has nothing at all to do with center line bunkers, which we all (rightly) applaud, and which were there long before Maxie came onto the scene, but with clarity of thought.  If Max or Tom or Geoff or you, or whomever can't tell me what is the difference between a game and a sport, I will go on thinking (as I do) that there is none, and that any arguments Behr (or whomever) makes utilising the false premise that there is one, is flawed.

Michael

I take your and Tom's (and Max's(?)) point re: infinity, if and only if you play golf on a course without tees and without holes and where nothing is out of bounds........  When you find such a course, let me know and I'll drop everything to come and play it!

Tom P

Do you remember when I started the "Haultain" thread about a year ago suggesting that he had thought of things that Max Behr only copied a generation later (in inferior prose), and how wroth with anger you were then, even though you hadn't read our dear Arnold?  I do, and I'm so glad that you have finally read Haultain, as I suggested.  I still am not sure if Max B did, or if he did, whether or not he understood it