The new issue of LINKS magazine is a must read!

[Tom_Doak]

(2) You write: "The five-time Open champion Peter Thomson described the Old Course as 'the rock on which the game of golf anchors itself.' We cannot chip away at that rock forever. It should take much more than a small committee to bring out the jackhammers."

Agree completely. Bravo.

Dan

Dan:

The ironic thing about that quote is that Thomson wrote it for the foreword to Scott Macpherson's book on the history of The Old Course. 

As to the appeal of The Old Course, you are certainly right that many of the things you listed are more of a factor for people other than myself.  Understanding how other people think has never been my strong point.

However, I'll stand by the part that the Old Course has lots and lots of features that no architect would dream of building today.  Going hole by hole, here are things I haven't seen any modern architect build:

1.  A fairway as wide and as flat as the first fairway, and a green one foot on the other side of a burn
2.  The moguls in the front left of the second green that blind the flag [if anyone was going to build something like that, it would be me, and I've yet to build anything nearly that severe]
4.  The sharp mound that divides the fairway into two sections -- one a bit too narrow for comfort -- and the sharp knob right smack in front of the green
5.  A deep blind swale in front of the green on a par five -- and a gigantic, relatively flat green
9.  A hole as flat and nondescript and yet maddening as the ninth
10.  See 9
12.  Two nests of blind bunkers in the middle of the fairway leaving no clear path to the hole
14.  A cross bunker so nasty that lots of people play into another fairway to avoid it; and a fallaway green just behind a five-foot false front
17.  As you said

[Dan Kelly]

(2) You write: "The five-time Open champion Peter Thomson described the Old Course as 'the rock on which the game of golf anchors itself.' We cannot chip away at that rock forever. It should take much more than a small committee to bring out the jackhammers."

Agree completely. Bravo.

Dan

Dan:

The ironic thing about that quote is that Thomson wrote it for the foreword to Scott Macpherson's book on the history of The Old Course.  

As to the appeal of The Old Course, you are certainly right that many of the things you listed are more of a factor for people other than myself.  Understanding how other people think has never been my strong point.

However, I'll stand by the part that the Old Course has lots and lots of features that no architect would dream of building today.  Going hole by hole, here are things I haven't seen any modern architect build:

1.  A fairway as wide and as flat as the first fairway, and a green one foot on the other side of a burn
2.  The moguls in the front left of the second green that blind the flag [if anyone was going to build something like that, it would be me, and I've yet to build anything nearly that severe]
4.  The sharp mound that divides the fairway into two sections -- one a bit too narrow for comfort -- and the sharp knob right smack in front of the green
5.  A deep blind swale in front of the green on a par five -- and a gigantic, relatively flat green
9.  A hole as flat and nondescript and yet maddening as the ninth
10.  See 9
12.  Two nests of blind bunkers in the middle of the fairway leaving no clear path to the hole
14.  A cross bunker so nasty that lots of people play into another fairway to avoid it; and a fallaway green just behind a five-foot false front
17.  As you said

Thanks, Tom --

For those who don't understand the irony you note: Scott Macpherson was on the facing page of Links, taking the Affirmative in the debate, under the heading "Alter the Old Course."

("Jane, you ignorant slut!")

Now I'm wondering:

If you and other architects wouldn't dream of building the quirk you describe on all of those holes ... why wouldn't you dream of it? I can understand that the lawyers wouldn't want you to have people playing into adjacent fairways -- but other than that, why wouldn't you dream of a green hard behind a burn, and moguls hiding a flag, etc.?

(I actually have seen a fallaway green behind a steep false front -- but it was on a course built by an owner, not an architect [and it's not a course I would hold up as any sort of role model other than a negative one]: No. 14 at Mississippi Dunes, in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. Those of us GCAers who play Mississippi Dunes, generally very early or very late in the year, always wonder how good a course could have been built there, had the excellent land been entrusted to you or some other imaginative architect.