{"id":896,"date":"2012-07-16T12:32:50","date_gmt":"2012-07-16T17:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=896"},"modified":"2012-07-16T12:45:05","modified_gmt":"2012-07-16T17:45:05","slug":"links-golf-and-the-creation-of-augusta-national-and-a-chance-to-win-the-golf-trip-of-a-lifetime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/golf\/896\/links-golf-and-the-creation-of-augusta-national-and-a-chance-to-win-the-golf-trip-of-a-lifetime","title":{"rendered":"Links Golf and the Creation of Augusta National–and a Chance to Win the Golf Trip of a Lifetime"},"content":{"rendered":"

Links golf courses are not popular in China, where Augusta National is regarded as the beau ideal<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 This is ironic, because Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie both esteemed links course above all others, and the Old Course at St Andrews most of all.\u00a0 Mackenzie insisted that the \u201cSpirit of St Andrews\u201d pervaded Augusta National, although its ghostly presence may no longer seem obvious.\u00a0\u00a0 Not reading too much\u00a0about the design implications\u00a0into the contrast between Augusta’s verdant perfection and the mottled chiaroscuro of a typical links requires some understanding of what strategic golf design is.\u00a0\u00a0 That takes some work, as Bobby Jones himself discovered.<\/p>\n

The British Open is always played on one of the nine links courses of the \u201crota,\u201d the Royal & Ancient\u2019s select group of championship venues.\u00a0\u00a0 This year the Open is being held for the 11th time at Royal Lytham & St. Anne\u2019s, on England\u2019s northeast coast, near the Irish Sea.\u00a0 Jones\u00a0won the first Open ever contested at Royal Lytham.\u00a0 Links courses such as Lytham have an unruly, rumpled feel, especially around their edges, where gorse and heather and waist-high dune grasses contrast with the closely-mown turf of the playing ground.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

What Inspired Mackenzie--Hell Bunker on the Old Course<\/p><\/div>\n

When golf first migrated from Scotland, carried in the minds and hearts of Scottish professionals to England, the United States, Canada and other British dominions, the links course was the accepted standard.\u00a0\u00a0 But linksland is uniquely coastal, and golf courses had to adapt as the game spread inland to new locations characterized by different kinds of soils and vegetation.\u00a0\u00a0 Sandy inland sites do exist\u2014Pine Valley, which many experts regard as the best course in the world, is essentially an inland links course, built far from the coast in the sand barrens of southern New Jersey\u2014but true linksland is rare.\u00a0\u00a0 In the 1990s, golfers discovered a new Mecca in the Sandhills of Nebraska, which has hundreds of square miles of perfect linksland even though it\u2019s thousands of miles from the sea.\u00a0 Chile has the best linksland I’ve ever seen,\u00a0but no golf courses at all. \u00a0And Bandon Dunes in Oregon, by most rankings now the world\u2019s number one golf resort, has resurrected interest in true links golf in America with its four links-style courses.<\/p>\n

In the absence of linksland, a new golf course style evolved in England and America, borrowing from the landscape tradition of the formal garden.\u00a0\u00a0 By the 1920s, this so-called \u201cparkland style\u201d predominated on inland golf courses, whether in the UK or the USA.\u00a0\u00a0 Parkland courses differ from links above all in having trees along the fairways, a design element entirely missing from links courses.\u00a0 Parkland courses combine formal landscape elements, such as specimen trees, ponds and formal plantings, with the normal features of a golf course.\u00a0\u00a0 Hazards–and especially bunkers–took on a stylized precision quite unlike\u00a0the irregular, random-seeming hollows and fizzures one sees, for example, in the bunkers at Royal Lytham–even though the Lytham bunkers, too, were dug by humans, not sheep.<\/p>\n

The fairways at Royal Lytham are dotted with more than two hundred bunkers, mostly placed where they\u2019re hard to see from the tee and shaped so that even a good tee shot can roll into one.\u00a0\u00a0 Golfers playing in the British Open have to accept their fates\u2014the ball will go where it wants.\u00a0 Mackenzie said that the \u201creal object\u201d of hazards was not to punish players but rather \u201cto make the game more interesting.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 By this measure, Lythem has interest galore.\u00a0 And in Mackenzie\u2019s view, not just bunkers but \u201cundulating ground, hummocks and hollows\u201d are themselves \u201ca minor kind of hazard.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 At Augusta, Mackenzie took advantage of the terrain to shape and place the holes, but his design called for only 22 bunkers.\u00a0\u00a0 He also forswore rough, which he thought was simply \u201cpenal\u201d and not a true hazard as he would define it.\u00a0\u00a0 Again, this is true to links golf, where the boundary is not between perfect fairway and graduated rough, but between fairway and gorse or whins, or at best tall but wispy unmown\u00a0grasses.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Royal Lytham's Bunkers--What Makes Golf Interesting<\/p><\/div>\n

The Lake Course at the Olympic Club, where the US Open was played in June, has only one fairway bunker, but Olympic\u2019s canted fairways embody Mackenzie\u2019s observation that the ground itself can be a hazard.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What really differentiates links golf from a parkland course is the uncertainty of the roll and the firmness of the fairways.\u00a0 Balls bounce erratically on links courses, whereas they typically stop where they fall on the soft watered fairways and greens of a parkland course.\u00a0\u00a0 If you\u2019ve been raised on a parkland course, as Bobby Jones was, a links course on first encounter can seem odd, unfriendly and even unfair.\u00a0 Jones disliked the Old Course so much the first time he competed in an Open in 1921 that he tore up his scorecard and disqualified himself before finishing his third round.\u00a0 He\u2019d made a six on the par three 11th, a hole Mackenzie would later call \u201cone of the most ideal holes in the world.\u201d\u00a0 The 11th, Mackenzie said, could frustrate a great player trying to make a birdie (as Jones was), while it concedes a bogey to a duffer who\u2019s willing to avoid the risky direct line to the hole.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the sort of thinking that is embedded in Augusta’s routing, where risk-reward strategy\u00a0prevails.<\/p>\n

The Scots were deeply offended by Jones\u2019 tantrum, and a local newspaper wrote that “Master Bobby is just a boy, and an ordinary boy at that.”\u00a0\u00a0 Jones was ashamed about his behavior, and by the time he returned to St Andrews for the Walker Cup in 1926, his view of links golf had changed completely.\u00a0 He finally understood what Mackenzie taught: first-class players can hit the shot they must from a hanging lie, while a lesser player will fail.\u00a0 Harder conditions, Mackenzie knew, favor the best player.\u00a0 That\u2019s what makes the links courses true championship tests–can you accept the challenge?<\/p>\n

Once Jones understood this, he would win an Open on the Old Course in 1927 with such brilliance that the citizens of St Andrews embraced him, literally\u2014they carried him from the course in triumph on their shoulders.\u00a0\u00a0 Jones later won the British Amateur on the Old Course in 1930, and long after his playing career was over St Andrews would\u00a0name him a \u201cFreeman of the City.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jones won the first of his three Opens at Royal Lytham in 1926, right after playing in the Walker Cup at St Andrews.\u00a0 In those days, the two final rounds were played on Friday, so the members could have the course back for the weekend.\u00a0 Jones went to his hotel to rest between the final rounds, and on returning discovered that he had left his competitor\u2019s badge in his room.\u00a0\u00a0 The security guards didn\u2019t recognize him, so he had to buy a ticket to get in!<\/p>\n

Bernard Darwin, grandson of the great scientist Charles Darwin and England\u2019s most famous golf journalist, described Royal Lytham in 1911 as \u201cvery smooth and trim, and just a little artificial.\u201d\u00a0 For Darwin, just as for many students of golf course design today, \u201cartificial\u201d was an unflattering word.\u00a0\u00a0 Not long after, many of the bunkers we see today were added.\u00a0\u00a0 Just as Mackenzie did, Darwin believed that all proper golf courses should look \u201cnatural,\u201d and that\u2019s still a guiding principle for most modern course designers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Lytham would look a little more “natural” if it were adjacent to the sea rather than set\u00a0inland, separated by dwellings.<\/p>\n

Links golf above all else is about providing golfers with choices.\u00a0 Too many modern courses provide only a single way to play a hole, while the links courses, and the designs of Alister Mackenzie inspired by them, lay out strategic options.\u00a0 Mackenzie\u2019s brilliance still reigns over Augusta National, but it was learning the lessons of the linksland that gave Mackenzie the secret to his success.<\/p>\n

A CHANCE TO PLAY GREAT LINKS COURSES,\u00a0COURTESY OF\u00a0PERRY GOLF<\/p>\n

If you’ve never had the chance to play links golf in Scotland, Perry Golf, the preeminent golf travel company, has the opportunity of a lifetime for you.\u00a0 Go to\u00a0\u00a0www.perrygolf.com\/win<\/a>\u00a0to learn more.\u00a0 The lucky winner will travel to Scotland next April and play, among other courses, the Ailsa Course at Turnberry, the estimable Royal Dornoch, where Donald Ross learned what makes a great golf hole, to Gil Hanse’s new Castle Stuart course, where India’s Jeev Milkha Singh just won his way into the Open by beating the Italian Francesco Molinari in\u00a0a playoff in the Scottish Open.\u00a0\u00a0 Golf’s international appeal is exciting, but going to the fountainhead of golf is a life-changing experience for an avid golfer–go for it!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

What's Awaiting You at Prestwick<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Links golf courses are not popular in China, where Augusta National is regarded as the beau ideal.\u00a0\u00a0 This is ironic,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6132,6133,420362,420363,1008,32,9,2226,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-open-championship","category-british-open","category-visitscotland","category-venues-scotland","category-turnberry","category-golf-course-architecture","category-golf","category-perrygolf","category-courses-and-travel"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2012\/07\/Old_Course_Hell_Bunker_18971.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions\/903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}