You didn't walk in front of Bobby Jones if you knew what was good for you

Fascinating thread over at the Golf Club Atlas forum, asking Did Jones and Roberts Throw MacKenzie Under The Bus? A question that I'm sure regularly crosses all our minds...

The 'money post':

"ANGC was intended to be revolutionary. That's what MacK and Jones thought they were doing. That's what they thought they had built. That's how contemporary observers with any expertise in gca saw ANGC at its opening.

The heart of that revolution was taking the elements that they believed made TOC the best course in the world and emphasizing those to a degree that had never been done before. Specifically the idea was to stress

- width and playability,
- little rough, few bunkers,
- reliance on existing contours,
- large asymmetric greens that stressed angles of approach
- water hazards that inflict tough, disproportionate penalties because they are only engaged with longer clubs if you are trying for a sub-par score.

Those are the things usually cited in the abstract. But you got to look at the pictures in Byrdy's book to grasp how wild MacK's implementation was. It was strategic golf on acid. Terrific, edgy, gutsy stuff. It was almost a satire of strategic concepts. Over the top features that were and remain unprecedented in the history of gca. (ANGC was not the only place MacK was trying this wild stuff. See Pasa and Crystal Downs for slightly toned down versions.) There has never been anything like it. For that reason, because of the uniqueness of ANGC as an architectural experiment, it's loss hurts. Everyone, but especially the Ron Whitten's of this world, ought to feel that loss.

Very few people (thanks in part to the tireless efforts of gca commentators in the mass media) have an appreciation of the daring nature of that experiment. Yes, if ANGC has been kept closer to its original form and the Great Depression hadn't intervened, I think RTJ's Dark Ages might have turned out very differently. But who knows.

The urge to recover parts of ANGC is not just me being a purist about old gca. (In fact I'm not a purist about those things.) It's that ANGC was a special case. It was a unique architectural experiment carried out with great courage by the best golf architect ever to trod this mortal coil.

For those reasons I would would have thought people with a sense of the history of gca would pause a moment before cheering on the bulldozers."

Be warned, as philosophy briefly hijacks the debate, the thread disappears up its own rectum for a while but then this is the Golf Club Atlas forum: the forum which recently debated "which courses have the best feng shui?" with not a discernible shred of irony.
......................................................................................

Pic of the Day XVI. Winners for February and March, incidentally...