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Chapter 1: What were the highlights of Andy and Matt's trip to Scotland?
I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a fried egg, fried egg, the dreaded fried egg, fried egg, fried egg, fried egg, fried egg, fried egg lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course. Welcome back to the Friday Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson, and I'm excited.
I'm back from Scotland, back from the Masters, wrapped up a ton of crazy travel, and wanted to unpack... a little from our trip from Scotland. So we've got a couple of things for you in today's episode. We have our live podcast with Scott McPherson, the great author, historian, golf course architect who wrote The Evolution of the Old Course, an exhaustive history
on all the changes and kind of how the old course came to be as we know it. But first, I'm going to unpack Scotland a little bit with one of my colleagues, Matt Ruches, who joined the trip. And we're going to talk a little bit about golf in Scotland, the old course, old course reverse. And then we'll kick it over to our live podcast that was held at the Bayer Theater in St. Andrews.
really organized and put together by the links trust big thanks to both of them for doing that um it was kind of part of their programming for old course reverse a a great event that i would uh suggest Everybody enter the lottery for. I know that lotteries can be frustrating if you don't get it, but enter for the rest of your life and maybe you'll get it once. Maybe you'll get it twice.
I met somebody who had won it twice in the short couple of years since they restarted doing the big lottery for it. So it was really fun, a really great event, and Scott was a wonderful guest. So we'll do that. But before we get to Matt, let's talk about our friends over at Perfect Practice. Perfect Practice, they make just really smart, sensible practice equipment.
whether it's their chip shot, which is the best way to perfect your short game at home. Uh, it has an automatic ball return in the chipping net, uh, and has a, it comes with a grass net, a grass mat and a target net that lets you get a ton of reps without chasing balls. It's great for indoor outdoor use.
Um, and, uh, that whether it's that, whether it's their putting mat that made them famous with the, you know, automatic ball return. The, the great kind of felt, uh, I think it's felt, I'm sorry if I don't know the exact material putting that the putts really true. I personally love it because of the, the lines on it. Uh, I love putting on a chalk line, uh,
And I putt best when my stroke's coming a little inside. And by having that straight line, I'm able to see that putter moving inside on the takeaway, which allows me to release the putter. So I love their putting stuff. They also have mirrors.
They also have kind of like an alignment string that's really effective if you're putting on a practice screen and working on right-to-lefters or left-to-righters. So they have a lot of awesome, awesome practice tools. You can get some of them at select Costco locations in California and Nevada, but the easiest way to buy them It's perfectpractice.com.
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Chapter 2: How does the Old Course at St. Andrews compare to other golf courses?
I've consumed so much of the old course, yet it still feels almost like this foreign thing that I can't yet fully wrap my head around.
Yeah, having been there, I don't know, a ton now. I spent eight days during the Open in 22 walking around. Went out there last year, and then this year,
I would say the only thing I understand about the old course, like to a very, you know, to deep understanding of the holes are one, nine and, and 10 are the ones that I really, I, and eight, eight and nine, 10, because they're like the simple ones, you know, one, it's like, okay, I get how this works and it's dead flat and it's kind of,
you know, you got to burn and you understand how that works. But then, you know, the, the holes in the middle, I, I think like, and I think there's a lesson here about, about golf. It's like, it is the most entrancing place to play because of the sophistication. And it's not the sophistication in the architecture. Like it wasn't built to be sophisticated. It's just what the natural contours do.
to you know where like there's so many ways to play every hole and you don't necessarily know what's right and in because the greens are so large in the double green aspect of of all the greens There's so many combinations of everything that can happen in a way. In a nutshell, the old course represents what I think is so amazing about golf is that you never hit the same shot twice.
um twice in your lifetime and at the old course between the wind the contours in the ground throughout it and these giant greens it's unlikely that you'll ever play one of the holes and have it feel remotely similar to the day to another day that you played the holes
Yeah, another thing that sort of kind of illuminated to me is how one-of-one the old course is. Like, we probably saw almost 10 golf courses on this short trip jumping around, and they're all Scottish Lynxland golf courses. And none of them feel remotely even close to the old course in the amount of complexity and just the way that the golf course plays and the land that it plays over.
Yeah, the courses right next door, the new course and the Eden on either side have very similar characteristics. landforms and the contours can be similar but they're not presented in the same way that the old course is with just like so much plain ground and such wide corridors for the holes that you have all these other contours that
I would presume are on the new course in Eden and all the other courses at St. Andrews. But maybe there's a gorse bush over the top of them. So you're not quite like getting as much of that complexity in the in the visual part when you're playing those other courses. So there's really just it's just an endless like.
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Chapter 3: What makes the Old Course a unique golfing experience?
A lot of simple architecture is great architecture, but if it's really windy and it's firm and it's fast turf... You're able to put a bunker 10 yards in front of a green, and if it plays downwind a lot... That bunker all of a sudden is right where you want it to be. And if you did that in America, it wouldn't matter because you just fly it over it and you land on the green and whatever.
Everything has to be pushed up into the green. And if you're talking about, especially, say, golf architecture in St. Louis or Washington, D.C., Everything has to be geared towards aerial.
And I think the benefit of Scotland's situation, and I think it's similar with Ireland, is that you have aerial and ground game, where in certain situations, even the most aerial player, a Rory McIlroy or a Scotty Scheffler, have to land the ball short of the green.
And that makes just more golf architecture come alive, whether it's contouring, whether it's bunkers, like that changes the whole dynamic of like what a golf course could be. And just that turf, the turf and the, the wind and the natural elements allow rudimentary architecture to play better than really sophisticated architecture in America without elements.
Yeah. And one thing that kind of adds to that is like with those elements, you can simply have like one singular feature, kind of like the fourth hole on the old course. There's just a singular like bump right in front of the green and it causes
so much like thought anxiety of how am i going to get around this thinking about where do i need to land it to to properly use it and not have it kind of hurt hurt your shot so that's another thing is what you're saying and how you can just it can be so simple yet so captivating i feel like we we often found ourselves admiring such a small like detail on certain holes
and being just wowed by it because of how much impact it had on how you played that golf hole.
Yeah. I think there's also something about Scotland where the way we experience it is you're kind of going out there and it feels like you don't know a lot sometimes about some of the courses you're going to. And you're just looking for something. And if you discover... a couple things that you like about it, you feel this like gratifying feeling of like, yeah, it was awesome playing out here.
And I think part of the, some of that, it always goes back to like the turf, like the turf being the way it is and allowing you to hit all these different shots absolutely lends itself to you having a better experience out there.
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Chapter 4: What are the historical changes that shaped the Old Course?
Like, we're playing over there? That makes no sense. Like, it's just pretty wild. But all in all, like, it was more so like, it worked better than I anticipated and thought it would, which... I wouldn't say I had the strongest desire to play it in reverse when I was going, just because I haven't played it the normal way yet.
Um, but now after walking it and seeing it, like I do, I do have a pretty strong interest in, in trying to play it both ways.
Yeah. I, um, I was also shocked at how well some of the holes, as you said, the back nine on the regular course, on the course you know it, I thought it might actually be better going reverse. I think the ninth hole is better going reverse, for sure. But there's...
I think if you mowed it out completely, one of the tricky things is because they play it the regular way all year round, some of the approaches aren't mown. If you mowed that out, I think it's a really good golf course. I think the biggest issue with some of the holes on the front nine, where it gets... The regular course is front nine, so the back nine of the reverse course.
It gets a little weird, but I think that's mostly because of the mowing situation. But, you know, it makes you... it definitely makes me appreciate the loop and what Tom Doak did more there. Um, having done this, it also makes me realize like how freaking good the old course would be if it was fully mode, fully presented going both ways.
Um, you know, it would make, it makes me want to have more reversible golf courses in, in golf. I think that's one of the big takeaways. Like, yeah, maybe one way is more famous, but, It's really fun to play the other way. I'll say that I played... With Scott had an extra set of hickories that I played the reverse course with. And it was amazing.
Some of the shots and the way you have to bounce shots in and the way bunkers. I think that's something that's been lost in a point that Scott makes. And I think he makes it in this live podcast. If he didn't, he made it a lot with us on camera playing. But the. The old course used to be known for its hazards, not its greens.
And now it's known, as you said earlier, it's known for its greens, not necessarily its hazards. But when you're playing with the hickories... God, the hazards are terrifying.
And you have to do things that you don't want to do in order to avoid hazards, more so than with the aerial approach to the game now, where you have to get to certain sides of the fairway to play in because you just can't stop.
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Chapter 5: How do different pin positions affect play on the Old Course?
I mean, it's just still, everyone talks about 17 and rightly so it's a great hole, but I think, I think from a design perspective and from a playing experience, 14 is still a really fantastic hole.
I mean, that green is just an unbelievable green. You know, it's like a contrary. I think, you know, I spent 2022, the Open, all day, every day out there watching and walking. And, you know, it's just a counterintuitive green where, to me, Rory McIlroy lost that game. major by not getting his second shot past the hole and having to contend with that severe false front.
It's like, if you can get it past, which is so counterintuitive, you know, most golf holes, you just learn long as dead. And it's like, you push it past, then you're chipping right back up the hill. You know, and it's actually much easier.
Chapter 6: What insights does Scott McPherson provide on golf course architecture?
You don't have to contend with that false front.
That's right. So we're almost leading ourselves into this conversation around the reverse course as well, right?
Yeah.
So you've been caddying, and we'll get into the reverse in a second, but what led you from there to start what became this exhaustive book project?
Well, the... I like to know why something might have happened. So once I put together, within the book, for those who have it, towards the back, there's a double-page fold-out. And it shows the length of all the holes for all the Open Championships held in St Andrews. And that was, for me, my entry into trying to figure out when the old course had changed, which led to a why.
So it became, there's very little data from early on. So the first Open was at St Andrews in 1873. And then it's sort of been played reasonably regularly ever since. But there's not a lot of early data until really the late 1800s, 1890, 1895. And then it's very good data from then on. And I started to see really quite significant changes to the length of the old course.
And particularly around 1900 was the first big one which we can track with accuracy. there was a, huh, moment. Like, why would that be? And at the same time I was tracking length, I was starting to look at technology as well, and it was quite clear that if we follow the ball in particular,
Golf had been played in St Andrews in the 1400s, and then the feathery golf ball came in in 1618, and we went for about 220 years until the gutter percher, which everyone will know had a big impact on old Tom and his relationship with Alan Robertson. And we ran with that ball for quite a long time, and then in 1848 came the gutter percher, and then we moved into the Haskell, which was 1901.
So here you're starting to have this alignment now between changes to length of the old course and technology. And they added between those two opens, 1900 and 1905, exactly 200 yards, most of it to the front nine. And you can correlate it exactly back to the introduction of the Haskell ball. So for me, that was like, oh, that's quite interesting.
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Chapter 7: What are the advantages of playing the Old Course in reverse?
They're probably members of the at that point, well, it still would have been the St Andrews, sight of St Andrews golfers having become the RNA at that point. So there would have been familiarity. And then there's more people coming, people who don't know each other probably don't know the golf course.
So there's this buildup, the course is getting wider and busier, and there's this need to try and have some degree of separation between the two courses. So From really around the 1870s up until sort of just after the open in 1873, up until about 1905, there was the left and right-hand course, which was the terminology of the day. And it alternated week on week.
And the idea was that the competition course was always the right-hand course. And that stood except for one time. And that's the course they play today, the right-hand course. Correct, correct. So we now play the right-hand course. And so the question was, well, why did they choose... to length in the right-hand course?
And the answer really is safety related in terms of the reverse course or the left-hand course has three crossovers. It's possible to do it with two crossovers, but at the moment, really, it's always been three crossovers. So you have one in 18, and then you've got sort of seven and 11, which we kind of have And then there's 9 and 10.
And so that's a less safe course than what the right-hand course is with just a single crossover at 7 and 11.
So effectively, because most people here will experience this, because you're playing and you're going to have tee shots going in opposite directions while people are playing hole, that's how they decided the right-hand course had to win out.
Yeah, I think it was as simple as that. It was literally a safety related. And of course, then once they start, so we've got this time, 1888, when individual separaties can be built right around the same time.
So there's this correlation between the rules changing, equipment changing, old course changing, that led to a series of decisions that we now see the old course through a modern prism, just through But it was like, well, how did we get to where we are?
So once they started lengthening the right-hand course, which is the course we know, right, and play today mostly, you've got to kind of keep going at that point. And probably the one way, the one hole that we can see what's happened, which is T's come right and they go back, is the 14th hole again.
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Chapter 8: What are the essential tips for first-time players at the Old Course?
Thank you for listening to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. And big thanks to our A-plus producer, PJ Clark. We'll be back next week. And I hope you guys enjoyed this chat about the old course in Scotland.