“TE - Yes, the issue of Behr having re-cast the whole debate is a very interesting element of all this, and Bob is probably right; but for the life of me I'm not able to understand the issue very well at all...not because (I don't think) I don't understand what Behr, Mac and Jones are talking about, but because I think I'm still missing some of the, for lack of a better word, nuance of Crane's essential/original argument.”
Peter:
It seems Crane’s original argument is pretty well reflected in Bob’s following comments about what Crane was fundamentally trying to do or to suggest with golf and architecture.
“But Crane thought golf presented unique problems. He worried that too many golf courses failed to assure competitive “fairness.” If golf courses were to function as venues for true sporting competitions, he thought it important that the linkage between golf shots and their outcomes be as rational and predictable as possible. Why, Crane asked, shouldn’t concerns with competitive equity that were so important in other sports apply with equal force to golf?”
I think particularly Behr, and also Mackenzie, Bob Jones, perhaps Macdonald et al felt what Crane thought were the ‘unique problems’ in golf and some of its architecture---eg outcomes that seemed irrational and unpredictable and that created a lack of competitive equity and a lack of fairness=luck and random results were in fact much of the very essence of golf and in architecture (natural and natural appearing architecture) and should never be minimized or removed but always preserved and maintained.
Crane obviously felt, and he WAS suggesting and proposing that golf and golf architecture should more closely replicate some other games with playing fields more strictly defined to maintain the necessarily different areas of reward or penalty in those games in which most of the point and structure of them is to highlight competition between human opponents who necessarily vie for a common ball. Games structured that way strive and should strive to minimize luck and unpredicatableness simply to produce competitve equity and fairness to better isolate and highlight the mano a mano competition of vying for a common ball which is the very point of those types of games.
That is just not the way golf is (or the way Behr et al saw it) and Behr, Mackenzie, et al obviously felt Crane did not understand or appreciate that fundamental aspect or essence of it or fundamental difference of it compared to other games and therefore they sort of recast the debate in that way and in that context and really went to town on Crane and his ideas that were headed in what they felt was very fundamentally the wrong direction-----eg to make golf as competitively predictable and fair as those other very differently structured games that frankly had very different points they were attempting to accomplish than golf is attempting to accomplish or should attempt to accomplish.
You and I have talked for years, Peter, about what-all the various meanings (obvious or nuancy) are in golf and that golf is a very rare game or sport in that there is no common ball vied for between human opponents. This may've been sort of the base-line of what Crane failed to see or appreciate with what he was proposing or suggesting and it may've been basically the baseline of what Behr et al were pointing out to him and the fundamental importance of it.
Ahhh, but then anyone could reasonably ask why shouldn't the reward and penalty areas of golf courses be as strictly defined and maintained as other games where a common ball is vied for between human opponents even if golf is not that way?
It's a very good question of course!
Behr et al felt and responded that if that was done to golf it would actually remove from it the other and actual opponent for any golfer (since his human opponent is not vying for his golf ball)----the golf course itself which they felt should always use or replicate the very essence of the unpredictability of Nature itself!
That to them was the essence of the "sporting" challenge of golf and for any golfer whether playing alone or against opponents or fellow competitors---the unpredicatableness and randomness of Nature itself----that they considered to be an essential opponent also. And that is why sporting hunters hunt their prey in nature and not in cages and why sporting fishermen fish for their quarry in nature and not in tanks. This analogy is also why Behr referred to golf as a sport (like hunting and fishing) and not a game like tennis, baseball, lacrosse or even football. He defined it or referred to it that way simply to make that point of its essential difference from tennis et al and other games where a common ball, for instance, is vied for between human opponents.