Golf Courses as Products of Culture

I’ll never forget listening to The Controversial Beginnings of Royal St. George’s, an episode of the Fried Egg Podcast that aired in July of 2021. Golf historian Bob Crosby joined Garrett Morrison to talk about Royal St. George’s and, more broadly, Victorian golf. I was fascinated by Crosby’s explanation of how the golf course architecture of the Victorian period reflected Victorian precepts from everyday life.

Crosby said, “Every aspect of your life in Victorian England had a moral component, and golf was no exception. All shots in golf, good or bad, should deserve their outcomes.”

On a more recent episode of The Fried Egg Golf Podcast, Andy Johnson asked Tom Doak for a response to Webb Simpson’s claim that golf courses just need more rough and more trees to counteract distance gains.

Doak replied, “I don’t know Webb Simpson’s game well enough, but any time a player says more rough and more trees, he’s a straight hitter and not a really long hitter, and he just wants the long hitters punished when they hit a wild tee shot.”

In my naivete, I’d found both of the comments above compelling without considering how they might apply to me. I often talk about golf courses and how golf courses should test professional golfers, but I’d never considered the extent to which my opinions might be informed by my worldview. Much like those living in Victorian England, my morals and biases likely manifest themselves in my thoughts on golf course design.

For instance, I have a strong preference for golf courses that penalize golfers in relation to their degree of miss. In my view, narrow misses should incur a small penalty. Wide misses should incur a larger penalty. Risk and reward should be tightly related.

Similarly, if there’s no penalty for missing the center of the club face when bashing away at driver, proper ball-strikers don’t reap an appropriate reward, which doesn’t sit well with me.

I doubt it’s purely coincidental that my thoughts on risk and reward on the golf course align with my thoughts on risk and reward off the golf course. As someone who pays close attention to traditional financial markets and crypto, these are interesting times! As a bunch of crypto projects collapse and banks experience financial challenges, it’s interesting to explore the considerations of regulators and private actors who are picking up the broken pieces and trying to make people whole. They’re attempting to keep the engines running and minimize pain without creating bad incentives for the future. If risk-takers are bailed out when the tides turn against them, risk and reward tilt out of balance. Under those conditions, others bear the cost when you miss the center of the face, so you might as well bash away with driver.

I’m sure many people turn to golf just to get outside and play a game with friends. But maybe, subconsciously or consciously, others are attracted to golf for the larger ideas the sport represents. If the Victorians and Webb Simpson are any indication, I’m probably not alone in inherently appreciating golf courses’ ability to represent ideas larger than their acreage.

I’m not knowledgeable about many other examples of golf intersecting with culture, so I’d like to crowdsource some responses:

To what extent are golf courses a reflection of a broader cultural context? What can we learn about other societies and historical periods from the golf courses they produce?