Paul -

Never in the history of GCA has there been a post with so many layers of irony.

You are da man. Take care.

Bob

"In regards to what the eye "sees" I have spent considerable time in the last 7-8 years trying to eliminate lines on a golf course.  I refer to this as corridor golf.  Standing on a teeing ground, modern architecture has developed a need to have things in parallel.  When creating a golf course  we try to blur that line so that the golf course appears more natural.

I believe that the golf course should be viewed as infinite and it should not appear to have a starting and stopping point visually.  Even though we have created 18 individual holes.  My goal would be to create a golf course that is viewed as one playing ground with 18 individual parts."


Jim Urbina:

For some reason I missed that post of yours. "Eliminate lines'!!

That is a wonderful thought--real food for thought.

Good show.

"Neither Behr nor any of his disciples--past, present or future--have the faintest clue as to the difference between a "sport" and a "game."

Richard:

It would be virtually impossible for you to know that because you have no real idea what Behr meant when he made that distinction between golf the sport and golf the game.

"PS--I think I know what Behr was trying to say, but I'm not telling."

Well, of course you aren't telling. How could you do that if you don't know?

Peter

Thanks for the thoughts and the thread.

As you may understand, I tend to be deliberately hyperbolic when commenting on Tom Paul's periodic fawnings over the memory of Max Behr.  He has promised to send me yet more of the great man's writings to see if he can win me over.  When and if I receive them, I will reconsider my position, even if only briefly.

As for the "sport vs. game" issue, it really is a non-issue, at least to me.  Splitting hairs and angels dancing on the head of a pin are just two of the cliches which pop to mind.  Vis a vis your hypotehtical, I think you (and many others on this site) misunderestimate the strategies that can be played on the tree-lined hole and misoverestimate the range of strategies available to any player on the wide open hole.  Just taking two ex-scratch or better players that we know and love well, I suspect that Tom Paul and Pat Mucci in their prime would play the first hole very diferently, given their differences in length, ball flight and mentality.  Likewise, I suspect that they would play the latter hole more similarly than you might expect.

One of the most deceptive of the iconic images that influence the mindset of many of us is the Mackenzie drawing of the 14th hole at the Old Course.  He shows 3-4 different ways of playing the hole, but these ways are not, IMHO, different ways that players of the same ability would play the hole, but rather ways that players of different abilities might play the hole.  If this is true, you could make a similar diagram of the narrow tree-lined hole you postulate.  The hacker can and should play the hole very differently than the scratch player, and vice versa.  This is true but trivial.  This is so because all golf holes and golf courses are equally "strategic," with the equality being the null set.  Golfers are "strategic."  Golf courses are not.

Behr's argument as to golf as a sport is not definitional but aspirational.  He would like to see it as an activity which has a sense of adventure more like (say) fox hunting than (say) baseball.  The fact that golf is conducted on a relatively heterogenous field of play supports this aspiration, as does the fact (well documented and argued by Tom Paul) that early courses were influenced by steeplechasing and other equine activities.  However, there is one fact so significant that it trumps all others regarding the difference between golf and fox hunting or shooting or fishing....

....the golf hole!

The hole is fixed.  It is also situated on a prepared surface which both makes it easy to find but also easier to "capture" (i.e. hole the putt) once you get near it.  Foxes, deer, fish and all the other critters that men chase in their "sports" (by Behr's definition) have the annoying characteristic of locomotion.  In fact, if they could not or did not move, these sports would be pretty formulaic and, dare I say, golf-like.  I'll agree that golf is a sport in the Behrian sense, if and only if the holes are completely hidden and moved every day by the greenkeeper.

Now there's a great idea for the other thread on alternaitve uses for golf courses!

Hopefully constructively

Rich

I have not read all the posts but some sound interesting.  I wonder what Pete Dye would think about this given his use of different grasses for varying hues and contrast and definition?  

Rich -

As best anyone can figure, MacK's multiple routes on the 14th at TOC first came up in a conversation he had with Jones sometime in the mid-20's. (The idea first appeared in an O.B. Keeler piece about Jones and TOC.) The different routes were ones that Jones suggested he would play depending on the wind and other conditions.

You might not have been to St Andrews before, but it can be windy and cold there sometimes.

Helpfully,

Bob

Peter
In regards to what the eye "sees" I have spent considerable time in the last 7-8 years trying to eliminate lines on a golf course.  I refer to this as corridor golf.  Standing on a teeing ground, modern architecture has developed a need to have things in parallel.  When creating a golf course  we try to blur that line so that the golf course appears more natural.

Jim -

I remember playing golf at Kiva Dunes at the time of year when the greens merged into the fairways imperceptibly, and thought it was a fantastic look.

Would it work if you took a fairway mower and equipped it with a raising mechanism? When you neared the fairway edge you hit a button and the deck raised gradually until it was cutting at the rough height.

This would eliminate lines and save the step cut mowing operation.

.

Richard - thanks for the interesting and challenging thoughts. Maybe I should take a more modest tack:

If I am playing a game of tennis against a good player, it wouldn't matter a whit if I was feeling under the weather that day: I would still need to respond/react to that player's actions/shots, and couldn't expect any allowances whatsover for a ball that's just barely outside the prescribed field of play. I could decide, of course, to play by myself so as still to experience the pleasure of hitting tennis shots without risking a humiliating defeat, but it wouldn't be much of a game then.  In other words, I have a choice, but not much of one.

If I am engaged in the sport of fly-fishing, I can be by myself or with others, feeling in the pink or under the weather, free to choose -- while still clearly engaged in the sport -- to sink within myself and thus maximize the pleasure/experience of a perfectly executed cast, or the play of wind and water on my senses (and on my decisions on where to best drop that fly), and not forced to react to anything or anyone while still, hopefully, catching fish.

So, a simple question: does golf remind you more of the game of tennis or the sport of fly fishing?

Peter  
PS - just trying to get for myself a better understanding of what Behr might've meant.

Mike McGuire:

I read something years ago about Oakmont that in the old days the guys who mowed the greens were trained to lift up the mowers very precisely after they made a pass across the green, so that instead of a "collar" as we perceive it now there was a gradual transition from putting green height up to rough height, much as you just suggested for a fairway unit.

This would have eliminated all of those awkward lies "up against the cut" that you see nowadays in professional tournaments.

I would love to see the fairway mower invention you speak of but I doubt it's practical because it wouldn't work when the fairway is being mowed diagonally, etc.  I guess it would work if you set up a mower just for the clean-up pass (which is essentially what they do with that "first cut" today) -- in fact it would work better, because you could move the edge in and out a couple of feet each pass and not mow right over the same path every time.

Bumping for the whiners who don't think there's anything good on the site anymore.

 

Mike:

Yes, that's what I was thinking about.  I like the idea enough that I may suggest it to one or two of the clubs where we consult ... they are always trying to figure out something new and going from fairway to native rough in one step is not easily done.

If it works well I will suggest it to Mike Davis at the USGA to get rid of all those damn parallel mowing cuts they make for championships.

[quote author=Mike McGuire
This is likely not practical but what if you set up a first cut mower where the blades are slightly angled. If you had 4 blades, each one tilted slightly and successively higher that the previous one, mowing the first cut in the typical fashion would seamlessly blend the fairway into the rough.

 Hmmmm...  I once came up with the idea of installing ovoid tires of various diameters on belly scrapers to give a randomness to fairways.  I think your idea is more feasable and less spine damaging to the operator.

[quote author=Richard Farnsworth Goodale
Norbert

I'll bet you a weeks worth of slag that those flat-topped fingers of land/dunes that stretch between the 12th and 15th holes at Dornoch are natural and not flattened out by man.

Ricardo

Quote

 You're on!  But I figured that by now everyone here has had their fill of slag.

 I propose that we should only allow the paramount judgement - the final answer - from Scotsman Robert Price to conclude the truth of the quandary.  

You can ask Mr. Price, but I doubt he knows the specifc landform well enough to comment.  If he does, however, and I believe his argument, the slag will be on its way!  One can never have enough slag....