New Melvyn Morrow In My Opinion piece is posted

[Sven Nilsen]

My favorite GCA bee swarming trick when someone says they prefer something other than the groupthink, is to immediately challenge how many courses they've has played. 

My favorite is to criticize their grammar.

It was a typo, Sven.  Thanks for pointing it out.  I was only on my first cup of coffee this morning and these things tend to happen.  Then again, as we all know, good spelling and grammar are only for those who lack vision and common sense.

That got a chuckle.

[BCowan]

  Then again, as we all know, good spelling and grammar are only for those who lack vision and common sense.
[/quote]

I'm glad ur learning.  I didn't think you had it in you.  You left out "most".  Never deal in absolutes.

[David Kelly]

Jason,

You need to write the following on the chalkboard 50 times before you post again:

I WILL NOT SAY ANYTHING DIFFERENT (NOT DEGRADING OF, BUT JUST DIFFERENT) FROM THE GCA GROUPTHINK

So we're supposed to take seriously the opinion of someone who says, " Considering that I'm probably less fond of Donald Ross than virtually anyone on this site..." 
And then a few posts later says that despite playing only 13 Ross courses, they make up 25% of his personal Top 25 Courses list?

[Sean_A]

MM


Allow me to apologize on behalf of GCA for this train wreck.  Hopefully people can ignore the nonsense and enjoy the piece.


Ciao

[Mark Pearce]

MM


Allow me to apologize on behalf of GCA for this train wreck.  Hopefully people can ignore the nonsense and enjoy the piece.


Ciao

+1

[Jon Wiggett]

MM


Allow me to apologize on behalf of GCA for this train wreck.  Hopefully people can ignore the nonsense and enjoy the piece.


Ciao

+2

[Terry Lavin]

Agreed, but this is but a small reflection of what MHM brought to our table.

[Sean_A]

Agreed, but this is but a small reflection of what MHM brought to our table.

Why not just agreed rather than offering an excuse for poor the form demonstrated on this thread?


Ciao

[Jon Wiggett]

Agreed, but this is but a small reflection of what MHM brought to our table.

which is no different to that which you have brought to the table in this thread and countless others. Yet here you still are.

[John Mayhugh]

People who want to better understand the concept of confirmation bias would do well to study this IMO piece.

If I understand correctly, the author is the great great grandson of Tom Morris.  He has written an opinion piece that tells us:

• The first Open Championship was in 1861, not 1860.  (OTM won the 1861 event and was runner up in 1860)
• Hall Blyth is inaccurately and unfairly given credit for the work of OTM.
• Harry Colt ruined the New Course with his changes. (OTM designed the New)
• Very little is new in golf course design. The only true innovators (gamechangers) were OTM & Allan Robertson

All of the article snippets and research posted support his assertions.  And it should, I guess, as this is just one writer's opinion.  One wonders how much time he spent looking for evidence that disproved any of his hypotheses.
Look at the discussion of how Colt "took one of the best courses ever designed and turned it into an also-ran."  Where does this opinion come from?  Was this a common opinion? According to Morrow's IMO:
"The New Course, once revered by Old Tom Morris as better than The Old Course, is now relegated to the status of another St Andrews course subservient to The Old Course, which it had once surpassed." 

So OTM, who designed the New and not the Old, thought the New was better.  And that makes it so?  The Dundee Courier article snippet Morrow dates as 8 November 1919 includes this: "This fine course, in some respects superior to the Old, will be greatly altered in character."  That doesn't suggest that most felt the New was superior.

The same Dundee Courier article talks about the planned changes, including fairway widening that "will find favour with the majority of players."  The subsequent article snippet from the same newspaper dated 27 April 1921 mentions general dissatisfaction with the changes.  It would be interesting to read the entire article and see what followed the section titled "The Main Objections."  I wonder if something positive might also have been written?

I have not studied the design evolution of the New, and perhaps Colt's changes were all things that most on GCA would view negatively as well.  But the fact that players at the time were grumbling about some of the changes doesn't mean that the changes were not needed or made the course poorer.

I appreciate MHM's efforts to be sure that OTM gets the credit he deserves.  It is unfortunate that he seems to think praise for others (like the audacity of referring to a Golden Age that didn't involve OTM!) somehow denigrates his ancestor's accomplishments.  It does not.

[Rich Goodale]

John

You may or may not remember that the concept of a "Golden Age" originally related to the advance of European civilisations, particularly involving Greece and Rome, with the former being the "Golden Age" and the latter just a stronger but less elegant successor.  To the British in the post-colonial era, the concept was used to describe the relationship between the UK and the USA, with the PM (MacMillan) telling the POTUS (Kennedy) that America was Rome to Britain's Greece.  This quaint attitude continues to this day (viz. the "Special Relationship).  Melvin is just following his upbringing.

Vis a vis GCA, one can certainly argue that the "Golden Age" was in the late-19th century, and that the Scots were the Greeks, but who were the GCA Romans?  I would argue that they were the English, and their successors in the USA were first the Huns (Dunn, etc) and then the Ottomans (MacDonald and Mackenzie, etc.) and then there was the Dark Ages (RT Jones, etc.).....

I think that we are just in the beginnings of a Renaissance, as the Two Toms (Paul and Doak) have written and Doak and C&C, etc. have expressed with their works.  We are lucky to be alive.

[Peter Pallotta]

Yes, MM has an agenda/goal for his In My Opinion Piece, and in the service of that agenda might (I wouldn't know for sure) overstate his case.  But in this regard he is exactly the same as every other person who has ever written an In My Opinion piece.  And, since he has taken on such a dominant bit of conventional wisdom as the timing of golf's "golden age", I tend to give him a little more latitude; coming out swinging in a fight for lost causes is more understandable to me than doing so when you've got the clout of consensus opinion on your side.  And yes, MM does have a certain "personality" in his writing - but forgetting that everyone else does too is like a man from Mississippi (or Liverpool or Toronto) saying that only Australians speak English with an accent.   
Peter

[Pat Burke]

I need to be corrected obviously.  I am not a historian, but have simply read a lot
of (what could be) myths and legends about St Andrews.
As I understood.
The Old Course was cleared and played before Old Tom.
The number of holes changed and there were numerous changes on the course.
Old Tom was the person largely responsible for creating the double greens and new tees (along with other changes) that basically gave us the course that is revered today?


He then laid out the New and obviously thought highly of it. 


If he, in fact, believed the New better than the Old, sure would seem he was giving his thoughts from a pretty strong position given his involvement in both courses?


Now please, I'm a golf fan, just spitting out whatever stories/theories I have read...
I'm ok with being mistaken

[Jon Wiggett]

John

You may or may not remember that the concept of a "Golden Age" originally related to the advance of European civilisations, particularly involving Greece and Rome, with the former being the "Golden Age" and the latter just a stronger but less elegant successor.  To the British in the post-colonial era, the concept was used to describe the relationship between the UK and the USA, with the PM (MacMillan) telling the POTUS (Kennedy) that America was Rome to Britain's Greece.  This quaint attitude continues to this day (viz. the "Special Relationship).  Melvin is just following his upbringing.

Vis a vis GCA, one can certainly argue that the "Golden Age" was in the late-19th century, and that the Scots were the Greeks, but who were the GCA Romans?  I would argue that they were the English, and their successors in the USA were first the Huns (Dunn, etc) and then the Ottomans (MacDonald and Mackenzie, etc.) and then there was the Dark Ages (RT Jones, etc.).....

I think that we are just in the beginnings of a Renaissance, as the Two Toms (Paul and Doak) have written and Doak and C&C, etc. have expressed with their works.  We are lucky to be alive.

 

I need to be corrected obviously.  I am not a historian, but have simply read a lot
of (what could be) myths and legends about St Andrews.
As I understood.
The Old Course was cleared and played before Old Tom.
The number of holes changed and there were numerous changes on the course.
Old Tom was the person largely responsible for creating the double greens and new tees (along with other changes) that basically gave us the course that is revered today?


He then laid out the New and obviously thought highly of it. 


If he, in fact, believed the New better than the Old, sure would seem he was giving his thoughts from a pretty strong position given his involvement in both courses?


Now please, I'm a golf fan, just spitting out whatever stories/theories I have read...
I'm ok with being mistaken

Nice take on it Pat.

[John Mayhugh]

Yes, MM has an agenda/goal for his In My Opinion Piece, and in the service of that agenda might (I wouldn't know for sure) overstate his case.  But in this regard he is exactly the same as every other person who has ever written an In My Opinion piece. 

Do you really think that all of the other IMO writers are as likely to overstate their case as Mr. Morrow?

Pat,
My feeling is that OTM is more responsible for the design of TOC than any other person. 

Did people view him as the designer of TOC back in 1895?  Did he view himself as the designer then?  I've no idea. 
When did he say he preferred the New to the Old and in what context? 
Isn't it at least plausible that someone would prefer their own design to changes that they made to someone else's?

I am simply questioning the assertion that Colt's changes to the New course made it worse.  OTM's supposed preference and a snippet of a newspaper article don't have me convinced.

It's possible (maybe probable) that no one had a greater influence on golf course design than Tom Morris.  But even if that is true, does it then mean that Colt was a hack?  Or that Fowler had no new ideas?  Right or wrong, it seems widely accepted that those men managed to improve courses designed by Morris.

 

[Niall C]

I don’t profess to be an expert on the Old Course and indeed my memory of its evolution is fairly sketchy but I tend to think the key moments/stages on how it evolved would be as follows;
 
1 – the direction of play ie. out and in being a given, then the first key stage I imagine would be when the  hole positions became standardised with their being 11 holes out and 11 holes back.

2 – second key stage would be reducing the course to 18 holes by way of merging some of the holes.

3 – widening the course by chopping out gorse so as to create parallel fairways (not that they were known as that then)

4 – creation of double greens and relaying of greens (might have been separate events ?)

5 – creation of Bruce embankment to effectively create 1^st fairway.

6 – building of new bunkers on right hand side of holes going out to compensate for course being too wide.
 
I’m not sure I’ve got the chronology entirely correct, some key stages are likely missing and for certain some of these events were before Old Tom’s time, but I think you have to consider what Old Tom’s involvement was in each or any of these stages before you decide how much design credit to give him for TOC.

I also think that judging Old Tom’s design abilities by what is left of his work now is a fraught business, even more so than for the later old dead guys like Colt, MacKenzie etc. given how much of it has been altered, tweaked, extended, redesigned or simply abandoned. The game changed so much in his lifetime it’s perhaps little wonder that there perhaps isn’t a huge amount of his work left unchanged. I don’t see that as a knock on his design abilities but just that a lot of what he designed was no longer fit for purpose.

Niall

[Dan Moore]

The first map of the Old Course is from 1821 the year Old Tom was born. It shows it was already 18 holes, 9 out and 9 back and was over 6,300 yards. The out and back holes used the same fairway corridors (essentially over what is today the back nine), the same greens and even the same cups on the 8 greens that did double duty for both the outgoing and incoming 9's. In 1832 Alan Robertson added the first 2nd cup on the Hole O the Cross green. The use of two cups per green didn't become common until the 1950's when Old Tom was at Prestwick. Robertson later built the Road Hole green. 


Old Tom returned from Prestwick in 1864 at a time when golf's popularity was growing and play on TOC was increasing significantly with the advent of the guttie and expansion of the Scottish rail system. I'm sure there is much more he contributed, but, as I understand it, he built new 1st and 18th greens, expanded many of the other greens to accommodate separate hole locations for each direction of play and he dramatically widened the course to the right going out so each fairway would have its own corridor of play. I'm not clear to what extent Old Tom added new bunkers to the course, particularly on the newly widened side of the course. Clearly he took what was there already and transformed it into the modern version of TOC.


Tom routed many other courses including Lahinch, Muirfield and Royal County Down, each of which was significantly modified, and, I think most would agree, were significantly improved at later points in time.


I have no idea how to answer this question, but was Old Tom a strategic designer?  What were his main design characteristics? 

[Sean_A]

Dan


When you look at OTM's routing of Muirfield the flow is remarkably similar to today's version.


Ciao

[Niall C]

Dan


Many thanks for providing the detail. I'd forgotten about the 18th green and not sure I knew about the 1st green, or if I had it was erased from my memory. I have a very vague memory that the greens were relaid sometime in the 1860's, don't know why I think that but that's what I seem to recall. If that were the case (big if) and Tom was involved the question is then who's idea was it ? Likewise with moving the 18th green back and who exactly decided on the design, was that Tom left to get on with it on his own ?


Widening the course, that surely would have been an executive decision and while it obviously had a big bearing on how the course played, how much design would have been involved in that ?


As for the bunkering down the right on the holes going out, I'm pretty sure that was R&A/Low/Blyth and all that.


Re other courses that Tom designed/routed, I'm not sure that all the ones he got credited with were necessarily routed by him and yes they were improved at later dates, however I think that it would be wrong to imply that the courses weren't very good when Tom designed them. The fact is they simply became not fit for purpose. When Tom was in his designing hayday a good drive went 150 yards which is about as far as some of todays pros now hit a wedge.


Also as Sean pointed out, often the general flow/routing of his original course had a big bearing on what came after.


Niall

[DMoriarty]

Dan


When you look at OTM's routing of Muirfield the flow is remarkably similar to today's version.


Ciao

I am comparing the modern aerial to the 16 Hole OTM routing as posted by Melvyn (as well as the 18 Hole Blythe routing as posted by Melvyn) and I would not describe these old routings as "remarkably similar" to today's routing.   It looks like here are a handful common corridors and a handful of common green locations, but otherwise it seems like a substantially different routing.

Am I missing something? If so, what?

[Sean_A]

David


OTM got the flow going clockwise around the outside of the property and about half of the flow for counterclockwise on the back nine.  Yes, there are dramatic differences by the time Colt came round...he solidified the loop within a loop and created many different holes, but using similar corridors.  To me, OTM should be given the most credit for the routing because its shape is quite similar from 1891 to now or at least it is easy to see how Colt jumped into his plan.  But I think Willie Park Jr should get credit for the concept of reversed loops within each other.  I always wondered if Colt didn't click onto the idea from Willie Park Jr's work at Stoneham.


Ciao

[DMoriarty]

Whatever the flow, the routing seems to have been changed extensively.  And perhaps not just the routing. My understanding is that Muirfield was considered to be a pretty poor course initially, and only became great through years of improvements.  Here is Harry Hilton writing about the course in 1906:

. . . Whether Musselburgh at the time [1892] was a better test of the game than the initial course at Muirfield is a question best left to those who were thoroughly acquainted with both links, but if Musselburgh did not provide a better test than the course over which the Championship was played in 1892, all I can say is that the Championship never should have been played over Musselburgh, as when one looks back and reflects, it is more and more driven home to one what a shockingly indifferent course it was. It lacked length, it moreover lacked condition, and altogether there were about four good holes on it. In later years someone set to work and attempted a metamorphosis at Muirfield, and the man who did it accomplished wonders. He got more out of the ground than ever appeared possible, and as a feat of golf links architecture it stands unrivalled, as, in the first instance, he obtained length, and that was very difficult in such a confined space, and moreover he managed to eliminate several indifferent holes. That was not so difficult on account of the fact that he had so much material to work upon. And, again, he considerably improved many of the holes. In fact he accomplished just about all that was possible for a human being to do; and still there is a doubt whether Muirfield is quite a sufficiently good course to merit the distinction of a Championship being played over it. The truth is, nature has not been sufficiently kind to allow a first-class course to be built in the space at command, and, again, the hand of man has built a wall round the links, and that wall is neither fair as a hazard nor is it picturesque in appearance. . . .

I am not sure to whom he was referring, but I don't think it was OTM.

[BCrosby]

Hilton wasn't alone in criticizing Muirfield. Many others disliked it. I assume that is at least part of the reason why it underwent so many changes in the first 35 years of its existence. Muirfield's modern reputation dates from Colt's redo in the mid-1920's.

I suspect Muirfield hosted several Opens early on not because of the quality of the course but because of the influence of Benjamin Hall Blyth, Walter Simpson and other powerful members of the HCEG.


Bob 

[Niall C]

Bob

I think Muirfields move up the rankings started before the 1920's irrespective of Hiltons jaundiced take on the course 1906. I think the first guy to have ago at extending/redesigning the course was one of the Wauchop brothers, then Robert Maxwell had a couple of go's at it, the second time in conjunction with Colt and then Simpson did his bit.

The courses reputation improved significantly after Wauchop but that might have been as much to the course having bedded in, improved drainage etc. All that's not to say what Old Tom did was all that bad but clearly the game was a lot different pre-Haskell when Old Tom first laid out Muirfield to post-Haskell which was only 6 or 7 years after, so basically the course fairly quickly became unfit for purpose especially as a championship links.

Niall

[Sean_A]

Hilton wasn't alone in criticizing Muirfield. Many others disliked it. I assume that is at least part of the reason why it underwent so many changes in the first 35 years of its existence. Muirfield's modern reputation dates from Colt's redo in the mid-1920's.

I suspect Muirfield hosted several Opens early on not because of the quality of the course but because of the influence of Benjamin Hall Blyth, Walter Simpson and other powerful members of the HCEG.


Bob

Bob


Muirfield was the site of several Opens because it was the links of the HCEG...which were one of the the hosts of the Open...being one of three clubs which donated funding to purchase the Claret Jug after YTM won the Challenge Belt outright and it was given to him.  Before Muirfield was built Musselburgh was used for the Open because HCEG played over the links.   


Ciao