Natural selection and golf courses.....

[paul cowley]

...while flipping thru the Origin of Species researching the recent Bernard Darwin thread, [seems like the Galapagos might have some interesting potential golf sites], many golf course parallels became apparent ......so much is debated here about how to, or not to, allow for the evolution of a course and it seems to me that the strongest , the ones possessing the best genes from inception , survive with the least amount of effort.
 As all golf courses are living , growing organisms, the best seem to evolve naturally, while staying true to their initial strengths and esthetics ....different looks and maintence standards come and go, but the best seem to survive.
 Lessor courses that don't possess enough core strengths are changed and modified to survive ....some evolve, some devolve and are no longer with us .....sometimes just having a good pedegree doesn't guarentee that all offspring are equal or should be viewed as such.
 
If a course doesn't inherrently have the core strengths and an ability to evolve, I would spare the bandaids and let nature take the course.

[Mike_Young]

Paul,
I agree and think this mainly occurs in linksland because  sand is the base.  IMHO once we began to play golf on land away from its natural beginnings then we developed the need to ,renovate,restore,remodel or whatever.  

[john_stiles]

As the ball and equipment and 'golferman' evolved,  the courses everywhere had to be remodeled, changed, or abandoned.  

If you had a smashing good golf course but not enough land to evolve as golferman grew, you were toast; regardless of the merits of your origin design.

Golferman dropped the primordial hickory and featherie, fashioned steel shafts and balatas, and now recently bought the ProV1 and titanium out of the devils' workshop.  Hence every course has been required to change lest it fall out of favor and evolve into condos.

Many, many sand based courses developed the need to be renovated, restored,remodeled,  or abandoned.

I missed the point somewhere I guess as it applies to GCA.

Equipment and the ball and golferman have been the driving force.

[Mike_Young]

John,
I am speaking of agronomic features and issues and not strategic.  I am saying the basic grasses etc just seem to be more prevalent in the sand conditions within specific climates.  Outside of those areas we have to improvise such as where we are in the South.  Ex: bent greens in our climate is no different than if we were trying to grow banana trees IMHO
Mike

[john_stiles]

Mike,

I see your point and didn't see that through Paul's start with the thread as man determines everything on the course rather than a raw 'natural' selection or evolution.

With almost limitless budgets, shaping the land to any contour, engineered plants,   Darwin and any natural evolution is no where to be seen or compared in GCA terms IMO.

John

[paul cowley]

 Gentlemen...I initiated this thread more as a reponse to the debates here about purism , what to save and not to save, when to improve or not to improve a course regardless of it's pedigree etc....... the Darwin inclusion was tongue in cheek, indicative of my confused craniums attempts to communicate at times .

[Tom_Doak]

Paul:  It's not your topic exactly, but I wish someone could find and reprint Bernard Darwin's essay from THE BOOK OF THE LINKS, which is surely not under copyright protection anymore.

It was about natural selection of the golf swing ... how, before 1850, when golfers didn't travel from course to course, their swings evolved based on the needs of their home course and the style of the best local players.  So, there was a St. Andrews swing, a Prestwick swing, and a North Berwick swing, all very different from one another.

It was all the travel and comparison which made people want to standardize golf.

[Phil_the_Author]

Tom,

You wrote, "before 1850, when golfers didn't travel from course to course, their swings evolved based on the needs of their home course and the style of the best local players.  So, there was a St. Andrews swing, a Prestwick swing, and a North Berwick swing, all very different from one another."

I find that a fascinating thought but wonder how the course itself would have so great an impact on a golf swing. Might it have been more a product of the equipment and balls being used. For example, the qualities found in the Gutties as a golf ball type greatly varied depending upon the talents of the person making them, as were the clubs. Wouldn't these have a greater effect on the golf swing than the course, though I am sure that they were created because of the courses they would be used on.

An example of what I am trying to say, and probably doing so poorly, was the creation of the sand wedge as a specialized club for use in a special situation (yes, I know it was a 20th century invention, just using it as an example). Before this club, players used a variety of general clubs and adjusted there swings for how they wanted to play the shot.

So, wouldn't this have been more of the case in earlier days, with swings based more on the clubs than the course?  

[Brent Hutto]

I think the point of the referenced article was that player's swings were copied from other players at their home club. Since that's the only model available to a person who rarely travels more than a few miles from home there would be a lot of similarity among members of a club relative to the large differences in technique between clubs.

[Tom_Doak]

Brent:

It was more than that.  You could have a long, loopy swing at St. Andrews because it was a long and fairly open golf course and you weren't penalized too much for an off-line shot.  The North Berwick men didn't have a big swing at all since the holes were mostly short; their swings were built for precision.

[Neil Regan]

...before 1850, when golfers didn't travel from course to course, their swings evolved based on the needs of their home course ...

You could have a long, loopy swing at St. Andrews because it was a long and fairly open golf course and you weren't penalized too much for an off-line shot.

 I thought that St. Andrews was very narrow until gorse was removed and the fairways were widened by Allen Robertson post-1848.

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