Strong test of driving vs. Harry Colt

[paul cowley]

tomp and tomd......from my experimentation with older clubs and balls [all the way back to spoons and gutties ], i've found that consistant direction was much more of a factor than now .....talk about serious bananas balls etc....one needed width just to play ones ball [and find it ,lost balls being more dear than now].

  in non irrigated times ,width was easy to achieve and the design concept of rough as a penalty had yet to develope.

i see a very natural evolution from all things past til now.

[Patrick_Mucci]

TEPaul,

In our conversation this morning I indicated that I felt that several factors conspired to narrow fairways.

Item (b) as outlined by Tom Doak above.

The prefered flight of the ball, a low draw.

The equipment vis a vis Paul Cowley's response,

The huge fairway gang mowers which needed tremendous room to turn

The new single line irrigation systems.

And, lastly, the need for clubs to cut costs as they went through difficult times.

Today, you might want to add the cost of real estate as a factor.

[TEPaul]

"Tom P:  I think all the fairways were wider in the old days because
a)  That was the standard,....."

Tom Doak:

But why was that?

Pat:

I think we all have a pretty good handle on why fairways got narrowed in a standardized fashion--what I'm more interested in is WHY they were ALL so wide in a standardized fashion before that? I see SOME fairways on the old aerials where the standardized width on them seems irrelevant to their strategies. Forget about wide or narrow, isn't it standardization, period, that should be questioned?  

[Tom_Doak]

Tom:

What most people fail to realize is that most of the great links were much wider pre-1900, because they were on common land, and the sheep and cattle grazed everywhere they could.  You only have to go to Westward Ho! today to get a sense of what it was all like back then.

That standard was brought over from Scotland by a bunch of Scottish golf pros who laid out all the early golf courses in the USA.  They didn't want the beginner golfers to lose golf balls, as Pat pointed out.  And it was far less costly to keep the grass reasonably short in the days before irrigation; one good "shock mowing" at the right time and you might not have to mow again for a month!

Why wasn't there ANYONE who bucked the trend?  I think there probably was, but I don't know who; those things aren't very well documented.  I've heard Myopia keeps its fairways very narrow because that's the way they've always been, but I can't confirm that.

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