A Brief History

To understand the evolution of golf course design one must first have a general understanding of the history of the game itself. Golf was not a game that was invented in a day. It was essentially a building of ideas created by most likely bored men hundreds, even thousands of years ago. History records have been found that talk of a crude form of the game in which people, often Sheppard's, used wooden sticks or staffs to hit rocks at targets. Accounts such as these have been found in places such as China, Rome, England, and Scotland.

The history that many people are familiar with, however, is that golf originated in Scotland as a gentleman's game played in pastures or on sea side dunes using crude wooden golf clubs which resembled, more or less, curved wooden sticks. Similar to the crude formation of these golf clubs the balls were often made of an animal skin filled with bird feathers. This later changed, however, into the many evolutionary steps of golf ball design. Players would play these balls around the course not into the perfectly manicured greens and holes we find today but rather into simple rabbit holes or other holes in the ground.

As the previous paragraph implies, the courses that these early "golfers" played on were not designed by any stretch of the imagination but rather they were "laid out" along sea side dune land or in open pastures. The length of these courses were not substantial due to the limitations of golf club and ball technology. Along these same lines, very little earth was moved due to the lack of excavation equipment. As you could probably imagine, a good bulldozer or excavator was hard to come by in the 15th century. Thus courses were built or more likely in their case adjusted by hand using crude tools.

As technology improved so did the capabilities of designers to build more modern courses to challenge modern golfers. One point in history really stands out as the pinnacle of golf course design which is known as the "Golden Age" of golf course design. This was a time period in the early part of the 20th century when golf in America was really taking off as the modern sport we still play today. Technology improved which allowed course designers such as Donald Ross, AW Tillinghast, and Allister Mackenzie to build courses using not just hand work but also crude trucks, and horse drawn excavators. With these tools they built many of the courses that we still revel today.

In a more modern era with more modern technology, golf course designers have been able to build some of the most beautiful and difficult courses known to man. Designers such as Pete Dye, Robert Trent Jones Sr. and Jr. and the III, and Jack Nicklaus use modern technology to build golf courses in places that one would think a golf course could be built. They also have allowed for the mass viewing of golf tournaments such as in Pete Dye's famed TPC Sawgrass course in Florida.

There has been an immensely broad evolution in the golf course and with ever changing technologies one can only wonder, "Where will it go next?" As this blog progresses, I hope that an investigation of the past will help answer these questions for the future.