"Leaving those things untouched in the ground is a powerful and sobering reminder that the game...is bigger and more important than any one of us."
I appreciate Brad Klein's sentiment in this follow up story on the Old Course changes debacle, but I just can't get past something in the story.
It’s one thing to add back tees – an odd-enough exercise where some new platforms technically are beyond course boundaries. And a case can be made for reducing the slope of a section of the 11th green from 4 percent to 6 percent slope to a more manageable pitch of 2 percent to 3 percent to accommodate modern green speeds and recapture historic hole locations, such as the one Bobby Jones used in 1921. But moving bunkers, shifting the terrain and filling in hollows like the legendary one on the seventh hole – widely regarded to be a maintenance nuisance, but one that probably traces itself back to sheep taking shelter from the wind a half-millennium ago – all need to be undertaken at a slower pace than these edits have been through.
There’s a worrisome precedent here, namely that the same body responsible for protecting the game is out there changing the world’s most closely watched layout. There’s no doubt that Dawson, Hawtree and the Links Trust are going about this with historical sensitivity and technical skill.
Uh, no there is plenty of doubt, actually.
The seventh hole, as Klein notes, did okay a certain way for several hundred years.
Also, if there was real skill and sensitivity, (A) why was there something to hide in not announcing the work, and (B) why is Dawson now second-guessing these suggested changes on the fourth hole because they were nominated by the course superintendent?
Maybe because they are ignorant ideas put forth by greenkeepers instead of architects?
Anyway, he concludes accurately:
But the threshold of change needs to be exceedingly high when we’re dealing with a historic treasure as St. Andrews.
The latest changes to the Old Course all are individually defensible as improvements. But what’s wrong with the occasional flaw and blemish? Leaving those things untouched in the ground is a powerful and sobering reminder that the game, like a very few of its historic layouts, is bigger and more important than any one of us.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 09:36 PM
Reader Comments (12)
* The replacement bells are intended to 'restore' the sound the bells made in the 17th century -- they are not 'modernising' the bells so they produce a '21st century' sound. They are not 'softening' the sound. The new bells will have the same weight and diameter as the current bells.
* The most-significant bell, the 'Bourdon Emmanuel' -- the '11th green' of the bells if you will -- will be untouched.
* The bell experts quoted are in agreement with Notre Dame's decision and methodology.
This does not sound like most of the changes at St Andrews, in fact quite the opposite in cases like 11 green, which most certainly is not being rebuilt to its 17th century, 18th century, 19th century, or even 20th century contours. Perhaps the rebuild of the Road Hole bunker on 17, but despite Peter Dawson's continued claims to the contrary there's been very little concern expressed. (The concerns about changes to the contours around 17 green are a different issue.)
But at least, I don't see a range going into TOC's 17th hole. Ouf!
Eden = crime of the century...
A self-inflicted wound if ever I caused one. And I've caused many!
To be serious for a moment, I don't think historic preservation is ever cut and dried, unless I suppose we are dealing with something like a literal monument, like an obelisk.
The Notre Dame fracas shows as well as anything the tension between form and function. Is it the bells themselves, their physical fact as they exist today, that should be preserved or, if their sound has 'degraded' over the centuries, is it their original qualities -- namely sound -- that should be restored? What are we preserving, the object or its function?
In the most-general, off-the-top-of-the-head way, then, there does seem a parallel between the bells and the 11th green -- BUT the HUGE distinction, the crusher really, is that at St Andrews the form of the 11th is being changed to something it never has been. To serve a function that owes a nod to the past, yes, BUT that function could have been restored simply by slowing the green speeds. It is as though the bells of Notre Dame were changed in response to the small memory capacity and tinny sound of .mp3 files.
Yes...that's it...'the bells need to lose their bass sound so they will sound better on earbuds.'