WCAIHIG? Retrapping and Bunkering a Course Often Work Wonders (last of series)

[Joe Bausch]

Well, that is the title of a series of articles by P.C. Pulver in the New York Tribune that appeared pretty much weekly (18 articles total) beginning June 6, 1909.  There is plenty of talk in the upcoming articles about NGLA, Garden City, and other goodies.  I'm assuming these will be enjoyed by many here so I'll slowly post them in order (perhaps one a day) as I process the files from the LOC newspaper web page, plus it will perhaps give you the chance to digest and discuss them.

I believe these nicely give us at least one person's idea of the evolution of courses taking place in the USA right before things really took off in the Golden Age.  I think P.C. Pulver was a fairly accomplished golfer, FWIW.

Here is the first to start things off (later in the series P.C. Pulver's name appears, so I'm assuming he wrote all of them):

[TEPaul]

Joe:

The very first point P.C. Pulver makes in his article above is the very same point I tried to make in post #13 in your Library of Congress website thread about what some over here were obviously feeling and saying----why did Macdonald feel the need to go abroad when we had plenty of good holes to copy for an ideal course right in this country?

Macdonald did seem to say at this time that other than perhaps three courses over here there were no courses in this country at that time to match the best courses abroad. But certainly what were considered to be the best courses abroad were not built with the idea of creating eighteen ideal holes to make an ideal course.

At that time it seems to have become not uncommon for people to make lists of the best holes abroad or even over here that would make up an ideal course and even Macdonald did that himself, on paper (not NGLA). That kind of thing was sometimes referred to as a composite course (doing it on paper). The primary point of doing it that way was really just a matter of identifying an ideal arrangement of variety and balance (hole lengths, shot requirements etc) but again on paper and one can certainly not make a course on the ground using those selected holes that appeared in those composite courses on paper.

In a sense Macdonald seemed to be about to attempt to put a kind partial ideal composite course on the ground and fill in between them with whatever fit or worked best given his site's ground characteristics and such, as even he admitted to how any site would create limitations to the complete arrangement/sequencing of some ideal composite course on paper.

 

[Jim_Kennedy]

Tom,
If CBM was looking for holes with time-tested stratagems he would have had to go to the home of golf where they had existed for hundreds of years.  Otherwise, what kind of credibitity would he been able to generate for his idea?
And I don't think his ego would have allowed him to use a hole built by one of his American contemporaries.

[TEPaul]

"Tom,
If CBM was looking for holes with time-tested stratagems he would have had to go to the home of golf where they had existed for hundreds of years.  Otherwise, what kind of credibitity would he been able to generate for his idea?"


What kind of credibility would he have been able to generate for his idea? The credibility generated by a group of about twenty of the most recognized experts in GB golf around the turn of the century that resulted from the incredibly visible "Best Hole Discussion" that was generated by London's Golf Illustrated in 1900, arguably the most significant periodial for golf in the world at that time.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Tom,
Sorry for the confusion, but that's what I was saying, or at least trying to say. 
I should have put some quotation marks around "go to" as I wasn't thinking of the physical trip, more that the ideas had to come from the home of golf where they had existed for centuries. 

[Rich Goodale]

Jim

When CBM first visited Scotland in the 1870's, most of the holes he eventually used as templates had been in existence for less than 50 years.  Some had not even yet been created.  Very few if any golf holes we know today, or he would have seen a century ago, have "existed for centuries."

Just to elaborate why I am posting this correction, if we try to go back mentally to 1909 when the article was written, the facts seem to be that the British templates were not really much older than the potential American ones.  I understand well the deference shown to all things British by upper-middle class Americans in those days, but it does not mean that they were right in doing so.  The article is a bold call to self-confidence and self-reliance, which I find both interesting and cool.

Rich

[Joe Bausch]

PC Pulver continues this very interesting series with an article touching on a handful of topics, including some holes at Myopia.  This is from the June 13, 1909 issue of the New York Tribune:

[BCrosby]

What's fascinating to me about this "ideal" hole business is what was going on behind the curtain.

Rich is right, some of CBM's template holes weren't that old. They were the by-product of thinking in the UK on design issues that was about a generation ahead of thinking in the US. But that was a big, important generation's worth of thinking.

What had been going on in the UK for that 15 or 20 years was people trying to figure out what it was about "natural" links courses that could be transcribed to "scientifically" built inland courses. They were trying to figure out (a) what was it about links courses that made them so good, (b) why are our Victorian inland courses so dull and (c) what were the lessons to take from one to improve the other.

At the time, no one was very clear - at an abstract level - how to talk about that problem. So they turned to "ideal holes." In the absence of a developed theory of golf design that was able to explain the strengths of great links holes, you go to the next best thing - you give examples. That is, you point to "ideal holes". If I can't tell you what good gca is suppposed to be, I'll show you what good gca is supposed to look like.

People in the UK were about a genertion ahead of people in the US on that learning curve. CBM and a few other Yanks understood that early on and used it to their great advantage.

Bob     

[BCrosby]

BTW, many thanks Joe.

Please keep 'em coming.

Bob

[Rich Goodale]

Very good points, Bob.

To those such as me who are ancient, a generation can seem like the lifespan of a mayfly, but in those heady days around the turn of the last century, when golf was just really coming of age, 10-15 years must have seemed like a lifetime to most of those trying to be a part of its future.

Joe

Another great post.  Keep them coming.

Rich

[Peter Pallotta]

Bob - yes, good and interesting thoughts; and yours too, Rich.

I liked reading "certain principles long since discovered by the Scots" because I tend to think in terms of architectural principles and I use that phrase a lot, but I so rarely see it being used back in the old days.  But what's interesting I think -- and to Bob's point about a still-developing language -- is that after suggesting that these principles exist, Pulver doesn't describe/explain what those principles are...

Peter

[BCrosby]

Peter -

You touch on an interesting point. You can think of what was going on at the turn of the last century as archies and commentators trying to solve a puzzle. The puzzle was - what made good links holes so damn good?

There are parallels with a chemist trying to figure out a reaction he doesn't understand.

In both cases an explanatory framework is needed. A phenomenon no one quite understood needed to be accounted for.

Until they could come up with an explanatory framework, the best they could do was to point to examples. Thus all the talk about ideal holes. 

Bob 

[Rich Goodale]

Bob

I'm sure this is not too difficult.  After all, how was it decided that a baseball diamond should be 90' square with a mound at 60' in the "middle?"  Or that for less powerful players (Little League) the dimensions should be a 60' square with a mound at 45'?  Surely it was through experience, just as when Old Tom Morris and others built some of the earliest courses they kept hole yardages between 100-400 yards, with hazards placed where they might stimulate the most thought.  To me, that part of the game is not rocket science, but matching the land available to those simple principles is.  Have those things changed over the past 100+ years, and if so, how?

Rich

[BCrosby]

Rich -

The base dimensions of golf courses were always more or less understood. If that's all there was to designing a good hole, there would have been no puzzle.

The puzzle, as John Low put in in 1903, was "what were principles that guided the placement of hazards" on great links holes? That is, what was it that made them so interesting to play?

It was not a academic question. They needed to figure that out befoe they could figure out how to fix the Victorian inland courses of the day, which Low, his friends Colt, Fowler and others thought were neither interesting nor challenging.

Bob

[Sean_A]

I think another important consideration of these ideal holes is where they are.  Being part of Prestwick, TOC and North Berwick was essentially the creme de la creme.  This alone gave credibility to using these holes rather than American counterparts.  Out of interest, what American holes would have been used as templates?

Ciao

[TEPaul]

Joe:

In years past and in various places I've seen this guy, P.C. Pulver, and his articles. What do you know about him?

Do you think he's Tillie using one of his couple of dozen pseudonyms and disguises?  

[Tom_Doak]

Rich:

If you wanted to make the same argument today, you could say that the Golden Age courses have only been around 80-90 years, and the moderns 10-20, so there's no real difference in time-tested value there.  But you'd be laughed out of the room.

[Rich Goodale]

Tom

As you well know, experience is logarithmically accumulative, so all courses built today are by definition miles better than any built in that so-called "golden age."

Or was that the other way around....?

Rich

[Joe Bausch]

Joe:

In years past and in various places I've seen this guy, P.C. Pulver, and his articles. What do you know about him?

Do you think he's Tillie using one of his couple of dozen pseudonyms and disguises?  

Tom, the Public Ledger used to publish some of his stuff in the teens.

But, just a few minutes ago I searched specifically for "P C Pulver" in the database of old newspapers that I have access to and lo' and behold he did a series of articles (20 total) in the Boston Sunday Journal in 1900.  Here is the blurb announcing his articles:



If you wish, I can start gathering up those 20 articles and start a new thread.

[TEPaul]

I particularly like the following statement in the No. 2 article by Pulver:


                                                                                        LOCAL SENTIMENT SHOULD RULE

Along the same line it may be well to remember, especially for those disposed to criticize, that private courses are laid out for the benefit and amusement of the members thereof, and or that reason the committees of the clubs should to a certain extent be deaf to outside comments and rather consult their own constituents. Where the local sentiment is strongly in favor of cross bunkers it would be folly for clubs to eliminate them, and should a championship tournament be assigned to such a course, it would be well for the critics to remember that this kind of hazard was not laid out for them especially.





This kind of thing should probably be far more considered on this particular website even though considering it too much may stop much discussion altogether which clearly won't be a very good thing.

In my opinion, Patrick Mucci should be made to stay after school for a couple of months, at least, and write the above passage hundreds of times in the hopes it may sink into his thick and highly critical head at least a bit. And if he wants to keep writing threads about Pine Valley and the tree situation there and that his ideas for it, and not the membership's, is the only right way----well, well then, perhaps he might start by AT LEAST offering to pay for it even if he is not a member of the club and probably never will be!  

[TEPaul]

"If you wish, I can start gathering up those 20 articles and start a new thread."


Joe, you have produced such a wealth of newspaper material on this website I would be very hesitant to ask you do to more but if you want to do it sure I'd like to see it on here. Do it at your pace, though, not mine.

Thanks for the stuff on Ensign P.C. Pulver, the knowledgeable reporter of these articles and others, who knew everybody from Vardon to the prominent amateurs and clubs. I really do think Pulver was probably Tillie though in one of his many guises. The description of Pulver in that blurb fits Tillie to a Tillie---I mean to a tee!

[Jim_Kennedy]

Rich,
Thanks for the correction, but even though there was only a 40 year gap, not centuries, between NGLA and 1870 I think you know what I was getting at.

How 'seasoned' were the Eden and Road holes when he started using them?

[Joe Bausch]

Here is #3 of 18 in the series:

[Joe Bausch]

Tom, PC Pulver also was editor for some publication from the PGA.  The following is from:

http://www.pga.com/pgaofamerica/history/1920-1929.html

1920:
The first issue of The Professional Golfer of America is published in May by The PGA, with P.C. Pulver named editor.

[Joe Bausch]

Here is article #4 in the series: