Have we on GCA.com stopped caring about the History of Golf?

[Melvyn Morrow]

I am referring to that excellent article by Phil Young and introduced by Ran Posted "In My Opinion" section of GCA.com called ‘The Terror and the Whiffensnoozer: A.W. Tillinghast and the Man Behind the Myths’.

Nearly 200 have read the post but no one has made any comment, which surprised me when you consider the on going debate re Merion and the numerous OT topics floating about.

Phil has put tremendous effort and time into preparing this article and I for one believe he has produced a very informative piece of work on one of the important American Architects of all time. Yet, not a word from our American Members, however many seem more than interested in submitting OT subjects that do not reflect or relate to golf let alone one of your own greats.

What is happening to this site, when men like Phil Young produce quality work, yet it just seems to be ignored?

Thanks to people like Phil, I am learning about the early American Designers, why they played & designed golf courses and their contribution and legacy to us, the great courses. However as it’s not an OT subject perhaps many do not want to comment on GCA.com. Is this a true signs of the times and the Membership of GCA.com. surely not.

I, for one, am proud to have Phil Young on GCA.com. 

Melvyn 

[Tom Huckaby]

It is a hell of an article without a doubt.

I just don't know what one can say really in response to that thread other than "thanks, Phil, that was great."  And those posts to me seem trite.  I may go in and add mine I guess, because now you have made me feel guilty....

 

I'm just not sure what you expect here, Melvyn.  The article has not been ignored... I'd guess it has been read at least 200 times in the one day since it was posted.  To me that's pretty damn good.  Give it some time.

I am also proud to have Phil Young as a participant here.  I just don't agree that a lack of commentary on that article says anything about this site.

Yours as always,

Tom Huckaby

[Phil_the_Author]

Melvyn,

Thank you for the very nice words and sentiments. I know that it has been read as I've received private emails on it and am very pleased by the response...

[Tom Huckaby]

Melvyn,

Thank you for the very nice words and sentiments. I know that it has been read as I've received private emails on it and am very pleased by the response...

See, there you have it Melvyn. Lighten up. 

Phil - it is indeed one hell of a great article and it is much appreciated.. even by me, for whom architects and their histories are typically about as interesting as Lithuanian pottery styles.  Read that to mean I read that article somewhat out of guilt more than interest... but I loved it.  Great stuff making it accessible to the layman like me.

[Phil_the_Author]

Tom,

I really appreciate the kind words. Guilt is powerful and makes us do many things we ordinarily wouldn't. It is rare that doing so turns into a pleasant surprise and I'm glad it did so for you.

Of course, there is one small section with a few sentences that I thought would have especially piqued both your interest and your sense of humor. It was also in the biography I did, yet despite my belief that some would find it most controversial I've yet to receive one question of surprise on it!

Again, thanks...

[Tom Huckaby]

Phil:
DAMN!  There are literally DOZENS of items in there that piqued my interest... I am not finding the one you have in mind.  Remember I am slow on the uptake.  It's gonna kill me when you reveal it.  But please do... not here as that's no fun - hopefully someone more clever than I will identify it.. but please send to me via email if you would be so kind.

Hey you want an even higher compliment? I sent the article to MY DAD... who has absolutely NO INTEREST in golf course architecture, that's for sure.. I sent it to him as an example of great writing!  An author be he, very small time, but also taught creative writing his entire 40+ career as a teacher.

Thanks again....

Tom H.
huckaby72@yahoo.com

[BCrosby]

Melvyn -

These things take a bit of time to read. It was posted less than 24 hours ago. Bear with us. I am eager to read it, but things like work and family have a way of slowing people down.

Bob

[Lou_Duran]

As we are in the midst in the U.S. of forgetting, obfuscating, or re-writing our history, the following might be an apropos selection of quotes on the subject.

George Santayana:
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Gerda Lerner:
We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.

Henry Ford:
History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.

Mark Twain:
A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

Thomas Carlyle:
History, a distillation of rumour.

Kurt Vonnegut:
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Benjamin Disraeli:
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

David Ben Gurion:
Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

Winston Churchill:
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

[Melvyn Morrow]

Tom

The amount of non-golf crap on this site is increasing.

A pictorial review of courses get comments from a few word to a few paragraphs.

News on golf, places to play, stay or eat after a round gets good responses.

Questions have only recently been asked about Tillinghast drinking, yet when an article appears no response by the Discussion Group just seem strange, so I though I would bring the subject back into the Lime Light.

Feel guilty or not, comment or not, that your choice, but I found not only the subject but the writing most enjoyable so I have just asked some plain honest and straight forward questions. No agenda, but is this not what GCA.com is meant to be all about.

One good think is that we agree on the quality of Phil work.

Melvyn 

[Brent Hutto]

There is only so much interest in the history of golf-course architecture in me. In the several years I've participated in this fourm, including the early days where I voraciously devoured every historical tidbit I could find in the archives, I have managed to sate about 99.9% of that interest. If I'm discussing next year's trip to where-ever that's a whole different line of inquiry with much more immediacy than leaning yet another bit of trivia about yet another guy who 100 years ago designed another golf course I'll probably never see.

At this point, my only historical interests tend to coincide with courses I expect to see or play in the forseeable future. So I may cycle back to Philip's article five years from now as part of looking forward to visiting one of Tilly's courses. But as an abstract line of inquiry it holds almost zero interest for me. Sorry.

[Tom Huckaby]

Melvyn:

You have not participated in this forum nearly long enough to make any statements like you just did.  My apologies for the harshness of that, but it's the truth.  How can you know what this forum once was, to compare it it what it is now?  And if you mean to say this has occured during your relatively short tenure, well I respectively disagree.

The other truth is this forum is now what it ever has been.  OT stuff, in-depth stuff, this and that, it all goes in cycles.  When the US Open is played, 90% of the talk is about that.  Such is how it is now and how it always has been.

So... I'd say it's better for you to stick to what you're good at:  golf history and crusading for what you see as the good of the game.  And I say this as very sincere, very well-intentioned, very friendly advice.

But yes, we do agree that Phil's work is excellent.

TH

[Melvyn Morrow]

Tom

Here you go again, with your school master approach to new members. I am not going to get into a deep boring discussion with you, but what I will point your attention to is the pages and pages of post/topics that go back years - all still available. Detailed records of the sites activities are open to study, so I am surprised that you are trying to talk down to me. 

What I do not understand is why are you making such a big think about this. We should be talking about Phil’s article not this crap. You do so love to try putting me in my place instead of having an enjoyable debate.

Melvyn

[Tom Huckaby]

Melyvn:

None of that was my intent whatsoever.  What part of this do you not understand:

And I say this as very sincere, very well-intentioned, very friendly advice.

Many, many people have told me to give up on you, that you can't be helped.  Man I refuse to believe it.  But you have me teetering on the edge, my friend.

So let's try it again, one last try.

I am not making a big deal out of this.  I am just responding to your post.  I think you are quite a bit off here if your intent is to criticize the group for lack of response to the thread about Phil's article.  Given that sure as heck is what you wrote... I find it not out of line at all to respond.  The author himself has said he is very fine with the response he has received.

So perhaps let's just leave it at that.  Can you accept this and move on?

And once again, please try to understand I am smiling as I type, I consider you a friend not yet met, and this is indeed a friendly jibe more than anything else.  In fact I rather took this all as "enjoyable debate" and it pains me you have seemingly missed that.

The hatchet was buried long ago.. or at least I thought it was.

However, when you're wrong you're wrong.  And you are wrong in your first post here.  SMILING.

Tom Huckaby

[Lou_Duran]

What is they say about pots and kettles?

[Phil_the_Author]

Brent,

Trust me, even I get tired reading about Tilly, especially when it is my own words!

[Melvyn Morrow]

M’Lord Tom

Should I say “The Last Man Smiling” or is it “Don’t Do As I Do But Do As I Say” or just “The Teacher Gets The Last Word, Grasshopper”?

Melvyn

PS Phil who said you could get involved in our little chat, you want to comment start your own topic

[Tom Huckaby]

M’Lord Tom

Should I say “The Last Man Smiling” or is it “Don’t Do As I Do But Do As I Say” or just “The Teacher Gets The Last Word, Grasshopper”?

Melvyn

PS Phil who said you could get involved in our little chat, you want to comment start your own topic

Now that was good.  Well done.

 

[Brent Hutto]

Brent,

Trust me, even I get tired reading about Tilly, especially when it is my own words!

Yeah, nothing like writing a well-researched piece about a favorite subject to turn it into a non-favorite subject. 

But if I found out next week that I was going to outing in a few months at a Tillinghast course I'd be reading every detail 20 times between now and then.

[RJ_Daley]

I understand that Melvyn is concerned that the at large GCA.com community appears (to him) slow to respond to what is obviously a wonderful work of research and writing that Phil has done.  There is much to appreciate in Phil's work, including Phil's own writing style and ability to bring the biography to life, and the always enjoyable quotes Phil uses from Tillie, which I always enjoyed with Tillie's by-gone era vernacular. 

But, perhaps like Brent, I don't just rush into the apparent historical minutia threads readily anymore.  Yes, like Brent, I once in earlier GCA.com days would devour such.  But, one too many pedantic and nattering and bickering threads like the many Merion threads that devolved, became for me the point of loss of enthusiasm.  I just don't have the energy anymore to endure them. 

Yet, I don't want to miss the good stuff like Phil has offered here, or Stuart Bendelow gave us in his book on "the Johnny Appleseed of Golf" or Chris Clouser gave us in his "midwest Associate" or the Tillie trilogy. 

I just am glad that this thread brought my recently waning attention in GCA.com back to Phil's piece, and hope that any discord over points of minutia in the story that may be at odds, gets pointed out efficiently, and then let the reader decide and enjoy them for what they get out of it; rather than minutia mercilessly beaten and flogged for anyone's personal validation as some sort of titan of researching said "historical truths" on very small points.  I also love the biographies aspect and when food fights over chronological minutia and crosstides of historically insignificant points of order to the overall big picture break out, I get a bit off-put at all the personal invective. 

So Melvyn, that is why I for one was slow to respond to Phil's essay.  But thanks to you and Tom for bringing it to my attention and agreeing Phil did a fine job.

[Phil McDade]

Tom

The amount of non-golf crap on this site is increasing.

A pictorial review of courses get comments from a few word to a few paragraphs.

News on golf, places to play, stay or eat after a round gets good responses.

Questions have only recently been asked about Tillinghast drinking, yet when an article appears no response by the Discussion Group just seem strange, so I though I would bring the subject back into the Lime Light.

Feel guilty or not, comment or not, that your choice, but I found not only the subject but the writing most enjoyable so I have just asked some plain honest and straight forward questions. No agenda, but is this not what GCA.com is meant to be all about.

One good think is that we agree on the quality of Phil work.

Melvyn 

Melvyn:

There is much to like about GCA (save for the redesign!), but I approach various parts of the site differently than others.

I spent 20 years working in newspaper newsrooms, and one of the reasons I enjoyed it was that newsrooms tend to be filled with interesting people, from different walks of life, with various experiences that were different than mine, and we were all jammed into a room together. It wasn't so much the work of newspapering, but the conversations in the newsroom, that I really liked. Invariably, when something odd or unfortunate would happen in California, or Mexico, or Africa, someone in the newsroom would have some kind of personal experience there, or know something about it. Guys who served in Vietnam sat next to guys who were conscientious objectors to that war, and got along fine. The guy who ministered to the drunks at the Salvation Army worked alongside the avowed athiest. Folks who had never lived a day outside Wisconsin worked with folks  who served in the Peace Corps in Africa.

In many ways, I miss the newsroom, but in an interesting way the Discussion Board serves a similar purpose. It's full of really interesting people, almost all of whom I've never met, nearly all of whom seem whip-smart, and the collective group of active posters knows a whole lot about a lot of stuff. It's one reason I've never gotten terribly worked up about the OT thread debates, because I can always not read them, but when I do, I sometimes come across some insightful information, or consider an opinion that had never crossed my mind. For me, the DB is my newsroom -- a place sometimes populated by meaningless chatter, but I always come back, because inevitably (it usually doesn't take much more than a day) I find something of interest (esp. when Sean Arble is posting photo threads!).

The rest of the site strikes me as a library of sorts -- a place for long, quiet, contemplative reading, away from the sturm und drang of the DB. No, I haven't read Philip Young's piece yet, but I plan to, after the hecticness of this week falls away. Philip and I have actually had some off-line emails about Tillie's work on a course here in Wisconsin, and I hope to resume our conversation now that the Open at the Black has passed as well. I don't think he'd object if I confessed I hadn't gotten to it yet. And sometimes some of the most interesting stuff on this site doesn't necessarily lend itself to the back-and-forth nature of the DB in the same manner as, say, the 18th at the Black does. There were several multi-page threads about the Black in the last week, and say what you will (and I said plenty, having participated in them), they really reflected what this DB does best -- inspire passionate debate about golf architecture and design.

[Tom_Doak]

Melvyn:

Not to reflect in any way upon Phil's piece, which I will sit down and read when I have a bit more time, but honestly, I used to care much more about the history of golf than I do anymore.  For two reasons:

1.  I just find too much of history is being rewritten in the internet age, where everyone's ideas seem to be given equal weight.  Heck, there is history being written about golf courses I have worked on which is flawed or manipulated, if they'd ask me.  It's not just golf -- I am starting to lose faith that anyone can write about anything impartially.

2.  Ultimately, the thing that has stayed with me most about my year in Great Britain and Ireland after college was not the history of the game there but the attitude toward the game by its current residents.  This is no doubt influenced, for some, by their own reverence for history -- but one does not need to know the history (much less dissect the history) in order to appreciate the game.

[Mike Benham]

The amount of non-golf crap on this site is increasing.

"Non-golf" or "non-Golf Course Architecture" crap?

[Melvyn Morrow]

Brent, Tom, Phil McD, RJD & Mike

I can fully understand your point of views, and yes, there is no need to know the history of the course or of golf to appreciate the game. Yet I wonder why so many travel to the Home of Golf and tour GB&I each year. Yes, there are many great courses in our islands but checking against the annual best 100 they represent just a few, but still attract the overseas visitors.

In addition, what is defined as history, we are (well living history that is) in the eyes of our children. My thoughts and what I have so far written in this post is already history. However, we are talking about history of golf, courses and design, which is slightly different.

I am not bored by it, I do not need to know its history to play a specific course.

Nevertheless, I believe that we do not really know the full history of the Game of Golf. Examples; There is still no full understanding of how courses were designed in the mid to late 19th Century – the stake the course AM and play a round PM is the recorded belief of many including this site. Yet the full story is there in full sight (and print) if one wanted to really understand. Records that once existed, confirming who formed the club/course, designed or modified the course or understanding of the original course layout have gone up in smoke with the old timber club houses. The record seems to show that between 20-25% of the history of the Scottish clubs have disappeared perhaps forever.

We, those who research and happily pass on our finds and information, have through our searches had a rough idea of how many courses are reputed to be by certain designers. Phil mentioned in his article that around a third of Tillinghast courses have been found/located. Old Tom up to recently was  thought to have 60, but so far I am just shy of 100, plus another twelve courses still to check out in detail. That is the position so far this month.

I have recently been working with Niall Carlton (a fellow GCA.com Member) seeking Old Tom’s design at Kelvinside and with his own in-depth search of Glasgow archives, he has uncovered quite a few articles on other clubs.  We have found the Kelvinside course site and its original layout. Of late, through Niall efforts, we have also passed on information to many clubs not associated with Old Tom re their formal opening, their original designer and also who extended their original course from 9 to 18 holes. One club/course that springs to mind is Lamlash (http://www.lamlashgolfclub.co.uk/). I have been in contact with Jim at the club for nearly a year trying to collate their early history (when the club was formed, who attended the opening, who designed the 9 holes and who extended it). We have a full record and thanks to Niall and his find of the original copy of the 9 hole layout have been able to present a comprehensive picture of the important dates and design information to complete Lamlash’s history to Jim and his club. On seeing the plan the clubs reaction was Thanks for this once again. This layout is nowhere near our understanding of the first nine holes. We had always assumed that the 2nd, which is still evident to this day was the first hole and that the site of the clubhouse was always where the course started. The first hole on the map is the present 18th, and the 7th the present 14th the only ones of the original course still in use today. So when Willie Auchterlonie planned the 18 hole course many of the holes set out by W.Fernie were altered and the clubhouse was then sited in the present location.

I am please to say that many clubs are benefiting from our searches even though we are not intentionally looking for their information, but seeking out Old Tom’s courses.

We, the golfers, are the real beneficiaries of this work. The clubs get hopefully a complete record of their history and evolution, which I hope they build upon when future modifications are undertaken.

I agree, as I said earlier that we do not need to know the history in order to appreciate the game, but it helps understand the development of the course you are paying good money to play.

This of course is just my point of view – which is now history. 

Mike, I trust that you may find some info on GCA in the Lamlash reply

Having said all of that Phil’s article is certainly worth reading.

Melvyn
   

[Phil McDade]

Melvyn:

Lamlash was one of the course's I regret missing on my trip to Scotland in 1999, as my stay on Arran was limited (I took in Shiskine and the funky Corrie course). Good to see that your digging is appreciated at the club level.