Of Pale Kings and Paris

 

I saw pale kings and princes too …
—John Keats.
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819).

… and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle, but no man was moving there …
—Alfred Tennyson.
Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur (1871).

 

“It’s difficult,” the lady from Boston was saying a few days after the attacks in Paris, “to play other courses when your handicap is established at an easy course like this one.” She was referring to the golf course to which I have repaired following an excellent autumn season at Medinah Country Club: the Chechessee Creek Club, just south of Beaufort, South Carolina—a course that, to some, might indeed appear to be an easy course. Chechessee measures just barely more than 6000 yards from the member tees and, like all courses in the Lowcountry, it is virtually tabletop flat—but appearances are deceptive. For starters, the course is short on the card because it has five par-three holes, not the usual four, and the often-humid and wet conditions of the seacoast mean that golf shots don’t travel as they do in drier and more elevated locations. So in one sense, the lady was right—in precisely the same sense, as I suspect the lady was not aware, that Martin Heidegger, writing at an earlier moment of terror and the movements of peoples, was right.

Golf course architecture of course might be viewed as remote from the preoccupations of Continental theory as the greens of the Myopia Hunt Club, the lady’s home golf course, are from, say, the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Yet, just as Martin Heidegger is known as an exceptionally, even historically, difficult writer, Myopia Hunt Club is justly known to the elect as an exceptionally, even historically, difficult golf course. At the seventh U.S. Open in 1901—the only Open in which no competitor managed to break 80—the course established the record for highest winning score of a U.S. Open: a 331 shot by both Willie Anderson (who died tragically young) and Alex Smith that was resolved by the first playoff in the Open’s history. (Anderson’s 85 just edged Smith’s 86). So the club earned its reputation for difficulty.

The nature of those difficulties are, in fact, the very same ones those who like the Chechessee Creek Club trumpet: the deeper mysteries of angles, of trompe l’oiel, the various artifices by which the architects of golf’s Golden Age created the golf courses still revered today and whose art Coore and Crenshaw, Chechesee’s designers, have devoted their careers to recapture. Like Chechessee, Myopia Hunt isn’t, and never was, especially long: for most of its history, it has played around 6500 yards, which even at the beginning of the twentieth century wasn’t remarkable. Myopia Hunt is a difficult golf course for reasons entirely different than difficult golf courses like Medinah or Butler National are difficult: they are not easily apparent.

Take, for example, the 390-yard fourth: the contemporary golf architect Tom Doak once wrote that it “might be the best hole of its length in the free world.” A dogleg around a wetland, the fourth is, it seems, the only dogleg on a course of straight holes—in other words, slightly but not extraordinarily different from the other holes. However the hole’s green, it seems, is so pitched that a golfer in one of the course’s Opens (there have been four; the last in 1908) actually putted off the green—and into the wetland, where he lost the ball. (This might qualify as the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to a U.S. Open player.) The dangers at Myopia are not those of a Medinah or a Butler National—tight tee shots to far distant greens, mainly—but are instead seemingly-minor but potentially much more catastrophic.

At the seventh hole, according to a review at Golf Club Atlas, the “members know full well to land the ball some twenty yards short of the putting surface and allow for it to bumble on”—presumably, players who opt differently will suffer an apocalyptic fate. In the words of one reviewer, “one of the charms of the course” is that “understanding how best to play Myopia Hunt is not immediately revealed.” Whereas the hazards of a Butler or Medinah are readily known, those at Myopia Hunt are, it seems, only revealed when it is too late.

It’s for that reason, the reviewer goes on to say, that the club had such an impact on American golf course design: the famed Donald Ross arrived in America the same year Myopia Hunt held its first Open, in 1898, and spent many years designing nearby courses while drawing inspiration by visiting the four-time Open site. Other famous Golden Age architects also drew upon Myopia Hunt for their own work. As the reviewer above notes, George Thomas and A.W. Tillinghast—builders of some of the greatest American courses—“were influenced by the abundant placement and penal nature of the hazards” (like the wetland next to the fourth’s green) at Myopia Hunt. Some of America’s greatest golf courses were built by architects with first-hand knowledge of the design style pioneered and given definition by Myopia Hunt.

Coore and Crenshaw—the pale kings of American golf architecture—like to advertise themselves as champions of this kind of design: a difficulty derived from the subtle and the non-obvious, rather than simply by requiring the golfer to hit the ball really far and straight. “Theirs,” says the Coore and Crenshaw website, “is an architectural firm based upon the shared philosophy that traditional, strategic golf is the most rewarding.” Chechessee, in turn, is meant to be a triumph of their view: according to their statement on Chechesee’s website, Coore and Crenshaw’s goal when constructing it “was to create a golf course of traditional character that would reward thoughtful, imaginative, and precise play,” and above all to build a course—like a book?—whose “nuances … will reveal themselves over time.” In other words, to build a contemporary Myopia Hunt.

Yet in the view of this Myopia Hunt member, Coore and Crenshaw failed: Chechessee is, for this lady, far easier than her nineteenth-century home course. Why is that? My speculation, without having seen Myopia Hunt, is that whereas Coore and Crenshaw design in a world that has seemingly passed by the virtues of the past, the Massachusetts course was designed on its own terms. That is, Coore and Crenshaw work within an industry where much of their audience has internalized standards that were developed by golf architects who themselves were reacting against the Golden Age architects like Tillinghast or Ross. Whereas Myopia Hunt Club can have a hole—the ninth—whose green is only nine yards wide and forty yards deep, the following generation of architects (and golfers) rejected such designs as “unfair,” and worked to make golf courses less “odd” or “unique.” So when Coore and Crenshaw come to design, they must work against expectations that the designer of Myopia Hunt Club did not.

Thus, the Golden Age designers were in the same position that, according to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the Pre-Socratic philosophers were: in a “brief period of authentic openness to being,” as the Wikipedia article about Heidegger says. That is, according to Heidegger the Pre-Socratics (the Greek philosophers, like Anaximander and Heraclitus and Parmenides, all of whom predated Socrates) had a relationship to the world, and philosophizing about it, that was unavailable to those who would come afterwards: they were able, Heidegger insinuates, to confront the world itself in a way different from those who came afterwards—after all, the latecomers unavoidably had to encounter the works of those very philosophers first.

Unlike his teacher then, Edmund Husserl—who “argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience”—Heidegger himself however thought that the Pre-Socratic moment was impossible to return to: hence, Heidegger claimed that “experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being.” So while such a direct confrontation with the world as Husserl demands may have been possible for the Pre-Socratics, Heidegger is seemingly willing to allow, he also argues that history has long since closed off such a possibility, and thus forbade the kind of direct experience of the world Husserl thought of as philosophy’s object. In the same way, whereas the Golden Age architects confronted golf architecture in a raw state, no such head-on confrontation is now possible.

What’s interesting about Heidegger’s view, as people like Penn State professor Michael Berubé has pointed out, is that it has had consequences for such things as our understanding of, say, astronomical objects. As Berubé says in an essay entitled “The Return of Realism,” at the end of Heidegger’s massive Being and Time—the kind encyclopedic book that really emphasizes the “German” in “German philosophy”—Heidegger’s argument that we are “always already” implicated within previous thoughts implies that, for instance, it could be said that “the discovery of Neptune in 1846 could plausibly be described, from a strictly human vantage point, as the ‘invention’ of Neptune.” Or, to put it as Heidegger does: “Once entities have been uncovered, they show themselves precisely as entities which beforehand already were.” Before Myopia Hunt Club and other courses like it were built, there were no “rules” of golf architecture—afterwards, however, sayings like “No blind shots” came to have the weight of edicts from the Almighty.

For academic leftists like Berubé, Heidegger’s insight has proven useful, in a perhaps-paradoxical way. Although the historical Heidegger himself was a member of the Nazi Party, according to Berubé his work has furthered the project of arguing “the proposition that although humans may not be infinitely malleable, human variety and human plasticity can in principle and in practice exceed any specific form of human social organization.” Heidegger’s work, in other words, aims to demonstrate just how contingent a lot of what we think of as necessary is—which is to say that his work can help us to re-view what we have taken for granted, and perhaps see it with a glimpse of what the Pre-Socratics, or the Golden Age golf architects, saw. Even if Heidegger would also deny that such would ever be possible for us, here and now.

Yet, as the example of the lady from Myopia Hunt demonstrates, such a view has also its downside: having seen the original newness, she denies the possibility that the new could return. To her, golf architecture ended sometime around 1930: just as Heidegger thought that, some time around the time of Socrates, philosophy became not just philosophy, but also the history of philosophy, so too does this lady think that golf architecture has also become the history of golf architecture.

Among the “literary people” of his own day, the novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe once complained, could be found a similar snobbishness: “it is one of the unconscious assumptions of modern criticism,” Wolfe wrote, “that the raw material is simply ‘there,’” and from such minds the only worthy question is “Given such-and-such a body of material, what has the artist done with it?” What mattered to these critics, in other words, wasn’t the investigatory reporting done by such artists as Balzac or Dickens, Tolstoy or Gogol, but rather the techniques each artist applied to that material. The human misery each of those writers witnessed and reported, this view holds Wolfe says, is irrelevant to their work; rather, what matters is how artfully that misery is arranged.

It’s a conflict familiar both to literary people and the people that invented golf. The English poets, like Keats and Tennyson, who invented the figure of the Pale King were presumably drawing upon a verse well-known to King James’ translators; literary folk who feared the cost of seeing anew. The relevant verse, imaginably the source of both Keats and Tennyson, is from the James translation of the Book of Revelations (chapter 6, verse 8):

And I looked, and behold a pale horse:
and his name that sat on him was Death,
and Hell followed with him.

But opponents of the Auld Enemy saw the new differently; as novelist John Updike once reported, according the “the old Scots adage,”

We should be conscious of no more grass …
than will cover our own graves.

To the English, both heirs to and inventors of a literary tradition, the Pale King was a terrible symbol of the New, the Young, and the Unknown. But to their ancient opponents, the Scots, the true fear was to be overly aware of the past, at the expense of welcoming in the coming age. As another Celt from across the sea, W. B. Yeats, once put the same point:

Be not inhospitable to strangers,
lest they be angels in disguise.

Parisians put the same point in the aftermath of the shootings and bombings that Friday evening on Twitter by using the hashtag “#PorteOuverte”—a slogan by which, in the aftermath of the horror, thousands of Parisians offered shelter to strangers from whatever was still lurking in the darkness. To Parisians, like the Scots before them, what matters is not whether the Pale King arrives, but our reaction when he does.

Great Lengths

‘A first class hole must have the subtleties and strategic problems which are difficult to understand, and are therefore extremely likely to be condemned at first sight even by the best of players.’
—Alister MacKenzie, The Spirit of St. Andrews (1933; pub. 1995)

Both men were over two hundred yards from the hole when we arrived at their golf balls, far to the left side of Streamsong Red’s thirteenth. My player, though not as skilled a golfer as his companion, was slightly closer to the green; the other player was further away. His caddie counseled him to take a long club, and play up to the right of the dune fronting the thirteenth’s green. The man did, hitting a heroic shot that flew over the center fairway bunker, to the right of the dune. It left him with a short wedge into the green, only partially obscured by the massive dune. My player looked at me, presumably expecting me to counsel similarly. But while I told the other player, “good shot,” I was handing my guy a wedge.

My reasoning, had there been time to follow it at length, had much to do with a golf course nearly three thousand miles away: Riviera Country Club, outside Los Angeles. The thirteenth hole on Streamsong’s Red Course draws from that golf course on two distinct levels: in the first place, it is a short par five, designed to follow the long par four twelfth—a rehash of a trick the Coore and Crenshaw team had already used on the first and second hole of the same course: a short par five following a par four of nearly the same length. The artifice is inspired by the opening holes of Riviera, a course that begins with one of the easiest par fives in golf and is followed by one of the most difficult par fours. But the Red Course, and specifically the thirteenth, also draws much from the thought of Riviera’s architect, George Thomas.

“Each hole at Riviera,” reads the course’s review at the website, Golf Club Atlas, is a ‘how to’ of golf architecture.” One of these is the contrast between the first and the second holes: one of the easier par fives on tour (often not even requiring a driver to reach in two shots) followed by the course’s number one handicap hole. The idea is a kind of rhyme, where what happened on the previous hole matters in a way not often found in less sophisticated designs.

One way the first two holes at Riviera rhyme, for example, is by contrast of their greens: the first hole’s green is very wide, yet not very deep, while the second’s is the opposite. Hence, the one mitigates a shot that is the correct distance but is indifferently aimed, while the second mitigates the opposite kind of shot. Conversely, each also punishes the “wrong” sort of shot—the sort that might have been just the thing on the previous hole. It’s a subtle but far-reaching effect, one that can be hard to detect—unless you happen to read the scorecard.

A careful reading of any course’s scorecard can, in other words, reveal holes of extremely similar distances; the lesson Coore and Crenshaw, following Thomas, would impart is: “Pay attention when two holes of similar lengths have different par values.” The numbers are a clear signal to the careful golfer, because the choice of length is not haphazard; it is a sign that those two holes have a relation to each other. In the case of the thirteenth and the twelfth on Streamsong’s Red, each is—in part—a funhouse version of the other. Where one is downhill (the 12th) the other is uphill (the 13th), and where one offers a clear view of the green the other obscures it. But the dune of the thirteenth is not just a mirror; it is a razor.

It’s a razor because the thirteenth on the Red Course embodies George Thomas’ thought in an even more subtle sense. “The spirit of golf,” Thomas wrote in his Golf Architecture in America, of 1927, “is to dare a hazard, and by negotiating it reap a reward, while he who fears or declines the issue of the carry, has a longer or harder shot for his second.” Everything in golf revolves around that axis mundi; it is the turtle upon which the disc of the world, as the recently-deceased Terry Pratchett might have appreciated, rests. Proceed by one path, and others become unavailable—every choice, like Borges’ “Garden of Forking Paths,” is determined by previous choices.

One way the thirteenth does this is by separating the golfer from a clear view of the green until he nearly stands upon it. But it does not do that entirely: from the extreme left it’s possible to see the flag, if not the green itself. The trouble—and of course, as George Thomas’ maxim advertises, there is a trouble—is that, from the left, a player must traverse nearly a hundred yards of sand; not so from the right, where a smooth road of fairway grass chases gently to the green. The architecture appears to be designed, in Thomas’ sense, to reward a “spirited carry” over the dune.

Some version of that thought, presumably, is why my colleague counseled his player to play up the right side with the strong shot he hit. Yet two wedge shots of just more than a hundred yards would easily reach the green—a shot that even the worst golfer can usually manage. So, why have a player choose a club far more easily mishit, like a long iron, to a target that grants only a modest advantage? I didn’t ask the other caddie for his rationale, but I’d presume it has something to do with the conventions of golf, at least as played by Americans in the early 21st century—conventions that seem to ignore the second part of George Thomas’ remarks about the “spirit of golf.”

That second part is this: “yet the player who avoids the unwise effort gains an advantage over one who tries for more than in him lies and fails.” In other words the player who can pull off a difficult shot should get the edge over the player who can’t—but the player who knows his own game ought to get the edge over the player does not. In that sense, the thirteenth’s “spirited carry” over the dune rewards, as it should, the player with a possible eagle—but as few seem to realize, it does not reward a heroic second shot that does not finish on the green. In fact, it positively threatens the player who makes that choice.

Just out of sight from the fairway, concealed from anyone standing at a distance from the green, about eighty yards short and to the right of the green, Coore and Crenshaw dug a deep bunker that threatens any ball hit past the beginning of the tall dune, but not onto the green itself. In other words, to try to hit a long shot that does not attempt the green risks sticking the struck ball in that bunker. Needless to say, it is a difficult recovery that more or less takes par—and certainly birdie—off the table. The player who know he cannot carry the dune, and lays up in front of the dune, has a much easier time of it than the golfer who hits a long second shot that does not reach the green.

The answer for most American golfers, I’d say, is to hit it as far as possible anyway—even if there isn’t a reward at the other end. But that is the ruse of the Red’s thirteenth: sometimes it’s actually more “daring” to decline the dare. It may be worth noting that Thomas himself, at least as ventriloquized by the golf writer Geoff Shackelford, was rather pessimistic about that possibility of such a lesson ever being learned: “I sense that that the combination of technology, refined conditioning, the aerial game and the overall curiousity with fairness have combined to eliminate strategy,” says “Thomas” in an interview published in Golf Club Atlas, and these are signs, the great Californian concludes, of “a society willing to go to great lengths to avoid thought.” This may yet be unfair, however: the existence of the thirteenth at Streamsong’s Red is an argument to the contrary.

Is Streamsong Real?

“Young man, the Soviet Union is our adversary. Our enemy is the Navy.”
    —General Curtis Le May

Just finding Streamsong, the new golf resort ballyhooed as the “Bandon Dunes of Florida,” is an exercise in navigation: miles from any interstate highway, it’s surrounded by what appears, alternately, to be the savannah of the Serengeti Plain or an apocalyptic post-industrial hellscape. Either a lion pack or Mad Max appear likely to wait around the next turn. It’s a Florida unknown to the tourists on either coast—but Streamsong exists where the real map of Florida is being drawn, where the real history of the state is being written. That, even if one of Florida’s major exports is a denial that history exists, and the resort’s operations may in one sense dispute the very idea of maps.

Streamsong is located in the central part of Florida, far from the tourist beaches; there are no other big-time golf courses in the area. It consists, so far, of two 18-hole golf courses, the Red and the Blue. The Red was designed by Tom Doak’s Renaissance Design team, and the Blue by the partnership of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, the Masters winner who is a connoisseur of golf course design. Both teams are grouped together as part of golf’s “minimalist” design movement; according to Renaissance Design, the “minimalist’s objective is to route as many holes as possible whose main features already exist in the landscape.” The landscape at Streamsong, however, that faced the two architectural teams was by no means natural.

This part of Florida is the preserve of enormous cattle ranches and massive phosphate mining operations. They’re industries that don’t often make it into the tourist brochures. Yet as dependent as Florida is on tourism—and at least some of it is definitely golf-related—Streamsong is the result of changes in the second of those industries. And, as it happens, it’s mining that’s at the center of a debate over the future of the state itself, as reported in the Tampa Bay Times in 2010.

Phosphate mining is, according to the director of the Tampa Port Authority Richard Wainio, “a singular industry … Florida doesn’t have a lot of big industries, and this is at or near the top of the pile as far as economic benefit for the state.” The phosphate industry, which ships its product through Tampa Bay, is in other words the economic machinery that the gloss of Disney World and South Beach obscures. Most of the state’s visitors, and likely by far the majority of its citizens, have little notion of what phosphate mining is nor how it can affect their lives. A little backstory might be in order then.

It begins somewhere around 50 million years ago, during the Eocene era—when the piece of Africa that would become Florida broke away from its parent plate and attached itself to the North American plate during the event that shattered the super-continent Pangea. In the eons since, shallow seas rose and fell over the rock, depositing the fossils that, when they were discovered in the 19th century, led to the central part of the state to be called “Bone Valley.” Animal bones and teeth concentrate phosphorus, as does the existence of animal life generally: phosphorus contains a lot of energy within its chemical bonds, which makes it necessary for nearly all life on earth—and thus, valuable.

“Bone Valley” is drained by the Peace River, which rises near the town of Bartow, the nearest larg(ish) town to Streamsong. A report by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the river—done because the Corps manages the slow-flowing “river of grass” called the Everglades—not long ago held that “phosphate mining had led to the loss of 343 miles of streams and 136,000 acres of wetlands in the Peace River region.” That finding was a major piece of the evidence introduced by the enemies of phosphate mining in their lawsuit.

The largest company to mine phosphates in the Bone Valley is a company called Mosaic, a behemoth corporation formed out from a merger of two predecessors: IMC Global and the crop nutrition department of Cargill, each of them massive companies in their own right. Mosaic “is the largest producer of finished phosphate products, with an annual capacity greater than the next two producers combined.” If any one company has contributed to the degradation of the Peace River, then Mosaic—whose corporate forebears have operated in the Peace River watershed since before 1909—is the primary suspect. And Mosaic is, also, the owner of Streamsong—despite being such a large company, the resort is the company’s first foray into golf, or anything like tourism at all.

It’s an odd kind of timing, of course, since the numbers of golf courses in the United States are declining, not rising these days. Golf is an industry that took a major hit during the recent economic troubles: “Over the past decade,” said the New York Times in 2008, “the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession.” Nevertheless, Mosaic went ahead and built two courses by top-name design teams at just the time many courses in the United States were shutting down. Just what that timing may, or may not, have to do with a lawsuit filed in 2010 by environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, seeking to limit phosphate mining is unclear.

If building Streamsong is a tactical exercise meant to further a long-term corporate goal—and there’s no knowing at the moment if it is—then it’s well-within a Florida tradition of commercial strategy. European intellectuals, for instance, have long noted that Florida is, perhaps even more than California, known as a place with a tenuous connection to reality: the homeland of what the sophisticated Europeans call “hyperreality,” a place where signs no longer refer to an external “reality.” Where, in fact, the difference between signs and their referents no longer exists.

One such thinker, the Frenchman Jean Baudrillard, conjured up the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ fable, “On Rigor In Science,” to describe Disneyland. Borges’ short, one-paragraph tale describes an imperial society so wedded to precision that nothing less than “a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire” would do. In such a place, the difference between a place and its representation would break down; so too, Baudrillard argues, are the Disney parks “perfect model[s] of all the entangled orders of simulation.” Another such Florida place, which as it happens was the starting point for my own trip to Streamsong, was that seemingly-dull “retirement community” (as they’re called), “the Villages.”

According to one resident, the Villages are “one of the places the Spanish looked for the Fountain of Youth.” But where Ponce de Leon left empty-handed, the new residents of the place are more fortunate: “‘we found it!’” Just how the Villages found this “Fountain of Youth” is something that the Mosaic Company might do well to examine. Assuming, to be sure, that it hasn’t already.

The real history of the Villages is that they began as a way to sell Florida swampland in the Lady Lake area of the state when the previous way of selling it—mail order—was outlawed by federal law in 1968. (Because it lent itself to fraud so easily, obviously.) Partners Harold Schwartz—significantly, a former Chicago advertising executive—and Al Tarrson’s attempts to develop the land as a mobile home park throughout the 1970s largely failed until in 1983 Schwartz bought out Tarrson and brought his son, H. Gary Morse (also a Chicago ad man), on to run the company. Morse’s idea was to re-aim their company towards a higher-income bracket than potential mobile-home owners; the master-stroke was building a golf course and not charging greens fees to play it. Tens of thousands of residents followed.

That isn’t, obviously, the history that the resident who talks about Ponce de Leon refers to when he mentions the Fountain of Youth. THAT history, it seems, comes from another source: according to a story from the St. Petersburg Times in 2000, “the Morse family (with the help of a bottle of Scotch and a case of beer) concocted a ‘fanciful history’” of the Villages; complete, in fact, with a reference to a tale of a visit from Ponce de Leon himself. The reason for this fabricated history is simple enough: as Gary Morse himself told the St. Petersburg Times reporter, “We wanted a town to remind them of their youth.”

Yet while the original “town center” development in the Villages—“Spanish Springs”— began the idea concocting “history” out of whole cloth, it’s the newest,—“Lake Sumter Landing”—that sails to a farther shore. “It features,” one Timothy Burke, a student at the University of South Florida notes in his paper, “An Economy of Historicity: The Carefully-Crafted Heritage of the Villages,” “no fewer than 76 ‘historic’ locations”—despite the fact that many of these sites “hadn’t existed six months prior.” Nearly every shop in the shopping district has a plaque adverting the building’s antiquity, complete with some tale or other of a previous tenant or notable: as Umberto Eco, author of “Travels in Hyperreality,” might say, Lake Sumter Landing “blends the reality of trade with the play of fiction.” So, the local movie theater not only claims to be an old vaudeville palace, it asserts that a traveling magician once “threw a playing card from the stage at the ceiling of the theater so hard that the card lodged in a crack in the plaster—where it remains to this day.” The top? Yeah, we’re over it.

Still, the idea behind the plaques isn’t just for entertainment value. Reading these plaques, nearly all of which refer to how the “original” inhabitants of the place arrived there from somewhere else—as, perhaps not coincidentally, do the current residents. It’s one way that, as Burke says, “the stories contributed to their adaptation of the Villages as a ‘home’”: the fictional characters described in the fictional histories inevitably come from places like Maine or New York, not Alabama or Tennessee. So, for instance, the fictional Upton family, proprietors of the eponymous Feed and Tack Store—“now” a restaurant—came to Lake Sumter from Pennsylvania. Almost certainly, the meaning of these varied origins is meant to reflect the varied origins of the current residents: the former Nebraska businessmen or Cleveland dentists who chose to spend the rest of their lives there. The “fanciful history,” in other words, allows each new resident to imagine themselves already having “roots” in what is, in reality, a landscape almost wholly ignorant of what actually preceded it.

Burke interviews one resident, for instance, about the fictional history, and asks whether “she felt there was an authentic heritage to the Lady Lake area that was being overlooked” by the fictional history of Spanish Springs and Lake Sumter Landing. “‘Oh,’” the former New Jersey schoolteacher says, “‘but this is Florida. It probably wasn’t the nicest history.’” Perhaps so: actual local historians, Burke says, report that before the “northern invasion” of the Chicago advertising executives, “the Lady Lake area was ruled by cattle baron Clyde Bailey”—who, given the history of the cattle industry in America, was presumably not a Boy Scout.

Assuming though that we can juggle the distinction between “real” and “fake” on top of “nice” and “not nice”—a pretty complex mental operation—maybe we can presume that—though the “fake” history of Lake Sumter Landing is likely “nicer” than the “real” history of Clyde Bailey’s Lady Lake—it doesn’t necessarily mean that the real history of the Villages is all that much different from that of Lady Lake. Like the old-time robber barons of a company town, Gary Morse owns “all or part of pretty much everything worth owning in the Villages, including the bank, the hospital, the utilities, the garbage collection company, the TV and radio stations, and the newspaper,” according to a story in Slate. But not merely that—which is what got Morse in trouble with the IRS recently.

This summer, the IRS ruled that government bonds issued by the Villages’ governing board—called a community development district, or CDD—“did not deserve to be tax-exempt” like other bonds issued by CDDs throughout Florida. Why? “Because,” as Slate said, “everyone who sits on the district board—like everything else in the Villages—is controlled by Morse.” Or as the New York Times reported: “the IRS states that the district does not function like a true government.” An actual government, for example, is usually worried about what its voters might think about how that government spends its money.

That’s why IRS agent Dominick Servadio questioned “why the Village Center Community District used $60 million in bond proceeds to buy guardhouses, golf courses, and small parks that cost Mr. Morse … less than $8 million to build,” according to the Times. “‘If I was a resident of The Villages,’” Mr. Servadio wrote, “‘I would be outraged by this transaction.’” The Villages, it seems, has responded by saying that Mr. Servadio is not nice: “‘It’s really been upsetting the residents,’” the Times quotes Janet Tutt, district manager for the Villages, “‘to deal with the stress and anxiety.’” One imagines that yes, there is likely some stress involved when discovering that one’s government has been swindled for a 700 percent profit—but just where that blame lies is perhaps not so clear-cut as Ms. Tutt might say.

None of this, to be sure, has anything directly to do with Streamsong which, so far as I know, does not pretend to have always been there. It is true that a golf course—particularly one built in Florida, which was unaffected by the Ice Ages—is always a kind of fakery, because despite what Tom Doak might claim no golf course simply takes the land it’s built on as is: “All over the world,” says geologist Anita Harris in John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, “when people make golf courses they are copying glacial landscapes.” Yet fairly obviously, the resort wasn’t built simply because the company felt that its land demanded a golf course to be put upon it, in the way that some say that the sea by Monterey, California demanded Pebble Beach be built. Almost certainly, the company expects some return for its investment: a return that may or may not have any reference to the Sierra Club’s lawsuit.

Yet even were there some “plot” involved in the building of Streamsong, the judgement of whether it actually signifies something “nefarious” or not ultimately comes down to what value you place on phosphate mining generally. As it happens, phosphates are part of all living things: it’s an essential nutrient for plants, for instance, and necessary for nearly all metabolic processes in animals. Phosphates also allow muscles to store energy for immediate use, and they build our teeth and bones. This is not even to address industrial uses—without phosphate mining, in short, a great deal of the contemporary world, “natural” and “artificial,” falls apart.

Countering those points, the Sierra Club notes what opponents of mining always note: that the benefits of mining rarely accrue to those living near the site of the mine. Sixty percent of the ore shipped out of Florida, for example, leaves the United States—historically, mostly to China—and while the mining industry provides some jobs, those numbers are dwarfed by the numbers of jobs in Florida that depend on a clean Peace River watershed, including the hundreds of thousands that drink Peace River water. As with nearly all mining operations, phosphate mining leaves behind it a cleanup trail—and in the case of Florida, that includes small amounts of radioactive uranium that will likely outlast even the corporations that do the mining, much less any of us human beings alive today.

To which Jean Baudrillard, for one, might reply “Just so.” Already, in 1975, the French intellectual had published “Simulacra and Simulations,” which argued that, today, the distinction between the Real and the Imaginary had fallen: in his words, the “territory no longer precedes the map.” “Disneyland,” he says, “is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real.” Or, to put it in a way that might be more applicable to those residents of the Villages who appear quite ready to believe that the place was built by Santa Claus, Disneyland “is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe the adults are elsewhere, in the ‘real’ world, and to conceal the fact that childishness is everywhere.” Is Streamsong a cover for iniquitous business practices, or an attempt at an “enlightened” capitalism that recognizes the (alas, completely necessary) damage it does?

Or, to put it another way: Is Streamsong Real?

Windy Orders

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
–Modern Saying

There’s a story told at Royal Troon, site of the “Postage Stamp” par-three hole, about the lady golfer, playing into an extreme wind, who was handed her driver by her caddie. After she hit the shot, as the ball fell helplessly short against the gale, she shouted reproachfully, “You underclubbed me!” It’s a story that has a certain resonance for me—perhaps obviously—but also, more immediately, due to my present work at a golf course in South Carolina, where I have repaired following the arrival of snow in Chicago. It’s easy enough to imagine something similar occurring at Chechessee Creek’s 16th hole—which, if it did, might not furnish the material for a modest laugh so much as, in concurrence with the golf course’s next hole, demonstrate something rather more profound. 

     Chechessee Creek, the golf course where I am spending this late fall, is a design of the Coore/Crenshaw operation, and it’s very well known that Ben Crenshaw, one of the principals of the firm, considers Chicago Golf Club to be the epitome of good course design. It’s reflected in a number of features of the course: the elevated greens, the various “dunes” strewn about for no apparent reason. But it’s also true that Chicago Golf is, despite its much greater age, by far the more daring of the two courses: it has blind shots and incredibly risky greens where putts can not only fall off the green, but go bounding down the fairway twenty yards or more. There are places where at times it is better to hit a putt off the green deliberately—because that is the only way to get the ball to stop near the hole. Chechessee Creek, for good or ill, has none of these features.

     What it does have, however, is a sense of what David Mihm, writer of the EpicGolf website, calls “pacing.” “Golf is a game,” he points out, “that is experienced chronologically”—that is, it isn’t just the quality of the holes that is important, but also their situation within the golf course as a whole. “By definition,” he says, “part of a hole’s greatness must depend on where it falls in the round.” 

     Chicago Golf Club has that quality of pacing in abundance, starting with the very first hole, Valley. By means of a trompe l’oeil the hole, in reality a 450 yard monster of a par four, appears to be a quite sedate, much-shorter hole. It’s only upon seeing his drive “disappear” (into the concealed vale that gives the hole its name) that the golfer realizes that his eye has misled him. It’s a trick, sure, that would be fantastic on any hole—but is particularly appropriate on the first, since it signals to the golfer immediately—on the first shot of the day—that this is a different kind of golf course, and that he cannot trust what he sees. 

     I would not say that Chechessee Creek exemplifies that notion to the same degree; it may not be too much to wonder whether South Carolina, or at least the Lowcountry, Tidewater parts of it, might not be too level of a countryside really to lend itself to golf. (“All over the world,” says Anita Harris, the geologist turned tour guide in John McPhee’s monumental Annals of the Former World, “when people make golf courses they are copying glacial landscapes.” South Carolina, needless to say, did not experience the devastations of an ice sheet during the last Ice Age, or any other time.) Still, there is one set of holes that does exhibit what Mihm is talking about—and perhaps something more besides. 

     The sixteenth hole at Chechessee is, as perhaps might be put together, a long par three hole; so long, in fact, that it isn’t unlikely that a short hitter might use a driver there. But, of course, there is the small matter of pride to contend with—few (male) golfers ever want to concede that they needed a driver on a “short” hole. It’s something I saw often working at Medinah, when coming to the thirteenth hole—almost inevitably, someone would not hit the correct club because he took as it an affront to suggest hitting a driver or even a three wood. Fair enough, one supposes; these days, the long par three might be close to becoming a design cliche (and in any case, all iconic courses I have seen have one: Olympia Fields, Chicago Golf, and Butler do, as does Riviera). 

     Just having a long par three isn’t enough, obviously, to satisfy Mihm’s criteria, and it isn’t that alone that makes Chechessee unique or even interesting. What makes the course go is the hole that follows the sixteenth, the seventeenth (duh). It’s an intriguing design in its own right, because it is an example of a “Leven” hole. According to A Disorderly Compendium of Golf (and what better source?), Leven holes are modeled on the 7th at the Leven Links, a hole that no longer exists. The idea of it is simple: it is a short hole with an enormous hazard on one side of the fairway; at Chechessee, the hazard is a long-grassed and swampy depression. Thus, the question posed is, how much of the hazard will you dare? Bailing out to the side leaves the player with a poor, often obstructed view of the green; at Chechessee, that function is furnished by an enormous pine tree.

     Yet that dilemma alone isn’t the real crux of the matter—what matters is that the seventeenth follows the sixteenth. After all, at the sixteenth the golfer is tempted, by his own ego, not to hit enough club. Conversely, at the seventeenth, the golfer is tempted to hit too much club. The quandary posed at each tee, in short, is precisely the mirror of the other: failing to reach for a driver on the sixteenth can cause the player to demand it on the seventeenth—with disastrous consequences in each case. And that is interesting enough merely in terms of golf, to be sure. But what is likely far more intriguing about it is that the placing of these holes could not be better situated to illustrate—nay, perform—what two psychologists said about how the human mind actually works.  

      The psychologists were Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky—Kahneman recently received the Nobel Prize for his work with Tversky, who couldn’t receive the award because he died in 1996. What their work did was to uncover, by means of various experiments, some of the hidden pathways of the human mind: the “cognitive shortcuts” taken by the brain. One of these discoveries was the fact that human beings are “loss averse”—or, as Jonah Lehrer put it not long ago in the New Yorker, that for human beings “losses hurt more than gains feel good.” Kahneman and Tversky called this idea “prospect theory.” 

     The effect has been measured in golf. In a paper entitled “Is Tiger Woods Loss Averse? Persistent Bias In the Face of Experience, Competition, and High Stakes” two Wharton professors found that, for PGA Tour golfers, “the agony of a bogey seems to outweigh the thrill of a birdie.” What their data (from the PGA Tour’s ShotLink system, which measures the distance of every shot hit on tour) demonstrated was that tour players “make their birdie putts approximately two percentage points less often than they make comparable par putts.” Somehow, when pros are faced with a par putt instead of a birdie putt—even though they might be identical putts—they make the former slightly more than the latter. What that translates into is one stroke left on the table per tournament—and that leaves $1.2 million per year in prize money being given away by the top twenty players.

     It’s a phenomenon that’s been found again and again in many disparate fields: investors hold on to too many low-risk bonds, for instance, while condos stay on the market far too long (because their owners won’t reduce their price even during economic downturns), and NFL coaches will take the “sure thing” of a field goal even when it might actually hurt their chances of winning the game. This last, while being about sports, has also another dimension of application to golf: the way in which what can be called “social expectations” guides human decision-making. That is, how our ideas about how others judge us plays a role in our decisions.

     In the case of the NFL, studies have shown that coaches far more likely to make the decision to kick the ball—to punt or attempt a field goal—than they are to attempt a first down or a touchdown. This is so even in situations (such as on the opponent’s 2 yard line) where, say, scoring a field goal actually leaves the opponent in a better position: if the team doesn’t get the touchdown or first down, the opponent is pinned against his own goal line, whereas a field goal means a kickoff that will likely result in the opponent starting at the twenty yard line at least. NFL coaches, in other words, aren’t making these decisions entirely rationally. To some, it suggests that they are attempting to act conventionally: that is, by doing what everyone else does, each coach can “hide” better.

     What that suggests is just why golfers, faced with the sixteenth hole, are averse to select what’s actually the right club. Each golfer is, in a sense, engaged in an arms race with every other golfer: by taking more club than another, that implicitly cedes something to the player taking less. This, despite the fact that rationally speaking selecting a different club than another golfer does nothing towards the final score of each. Taking less club becomes a kind of auction—or as we might term it, a bidding war—but one where the risk of “losing face” is seen as more significant than the final score. 

     The same process is, if it exists at all, also at work on the seventeenth hole. But this time there’s an additional piece of information playing out in the golfer’s mind: whatever happened on the last hole. One plausible scenario—I’ve seen it happen—is that the player doesn’t take enough club on the sixteenth, and comes up short of the hole. Having made that decision, and been wrong, the golfer determines on the next hole to make the “sensible” choice, and lays up away from the hazard—leaving a difficult second shot to a small green. But here’s the thing: the “carry” on the tee shot on seventeen, which I’ve withheld until now, is only about 210 yards—which is about the same as that of the sixteenth hole. In other words, the reality is that—evaluated dispassionately—golfers should probably hit about the same club on each hole. If they don’t, it’s probably due to a collision between “prospect theory” and “pacing”—which is to say that the Coore and Crenshaw design of Chechessee Creek is, all things considered, clubbed about right.   

Now and Forever

[B]ehold the … ensign of the republic … bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as “What is all this worth?” nor those other words of delusion and folly, “Liberty first and Union afterwards” …
—Daniel Webster. Second Reply to Hayne. 27 January 1830. 

       

       

The work on Medinah’s Course #1, older-but-not-as-accomplished brother to Course #3, began almost as soon as the last putt was struck during this year’s Ryder Cup. Already the ‘scape looks more moon than land, perhaps like a battlefield after the cannon have been silenced. Quite a few trees have been taken out, in keeping with Tom Doak’s philosophy of emphasizing golf’s ground (rather than aerial) game. Still, as interesting as it might be to discuss the new routing Doak is creating, the more significant point about Medinah’s renovation is that it is likely one of the few projects that Doak, or any other architect, has going on American soil right now. Yet today might be one of the best opportunities ever for American golf architecture—assuming, that is, Americans can avoid two different hazards.

The first hazard might be presented by people who’d prefer we didn’t remember our own history: in this case, the fact that golf courses were once weapons in the fight against the Great Depression. While immediately on assuming office in early 1933 Franklin Roosevelt began the Federal Emergency Relief Agency—which, as Encyclopedia.com reminds us, had the “authority to make direct cash payments to those with no other means of support,” amazing enough in this era when even relief to previously-honored homeowners is considered impossible—by 1935 that program had evolved into the Works Project Administration. By 1941, the WPA had invested $11.3 billion (in 1930s dollars!) in 8 million workers and such projects as 1,634 schools, 105 airports, 3,000 tennis courts, 3,300 dams, 5,800 mobile libraries. And lastly, but perhaps not leastly, 103 golf courses.

As per a fine website called The Living New Deal, dedicated to preserving the history of the New Deal’s contributions to American life, it’s possible to find that not only did these courses have some economic impact on their communities and the nation as a whole, but that some good courses got built—good enough to have had an impact on professional golf. The University of New Mexico’s North Course, for instance, was the first golf course in America to measure more than 7000 yards—today is the standard for professional-length golf courses—and was the site of a PGA Tour stop in 1947. The second 18-hole course in New Orleans’ City Park—a course built by the WPA—was host to the New Orleans Open for decades.

Great architects designed courses built by the WPA. Donald Ross designed the George Wright Golf Course in Boston, opened in 1938. A.W. Tillinghast designed the Black course at Bethpage State Park, opened in the depths of the Depression in 1936. George Wright is widely acclaimed as one of Ross’ best designs, while the Black hosted the first U.S. Open held at a government-owned golf course, in 2002, and then held an encore in 2009. Both Opens were successful: Tiger won the first, Lucas Glover the second, and six players, total, were under par in the two tournaments. In 2012, Golf Digest rated it #5 in its list of America’s toughest courses—public or private. (Course #3 at Medinah ranked 16th.)

Despite all that, some time ago one Raymond Keating at the Foundation for Economic Education wrote that “Bethpage represents what is wrong with … golf.” He also claimed that “there is no justification whatsoever for government involvement in the golf business.” But, aside from the possibility of getting another Bethpage Black, there are a number of reasons for Americans to invest in golf courses or other material improvements to their lives, whether it be high-speed rail or re-constructed bridges, at the moment.

The arguments by the economists can be, and are, daunting, but one point that everyone may agree on is that it is unlikely that Americans will ever again be able to borrow money on such attractive terms: as Elias Isquith put it at the website The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, the bond market is “still setting interest rates so low it’s almost begging the US to borrow money.” The dollars that we repay these loans with, in short, will in all likelihood—through the workings of time and inflation—be worth less than the ones on offer now. That’s one reason why Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, says that “the danger for next year is not that the [federal] deficit will be too large but that it will be too small, and hence plunge America back into recession.” By not taking advantage of this cheap money that is, essentially, just lying there, America is effectively leaving productive forces (like Tom Doak’s company) idle, instead of engaging them in work: the labor that grows our economy.

America, thusly, has an historic opportunity for golf: given that American companies, like Tom Doak’s or Rees Jones’ or Pete Dye’s or Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore’s, or any number of others, are at the forefront of golf design today, it would be possible to create any number of state-of-the-art golf courses that would first, stimulate our economy, and secondly, reward American citizens with some of the finest facilities on the planet at what would be essentially little to no cost. And, it might be worth bringing up, maybe that could help us with regard to that troublesome series of golf events known as the Ryder Cup: maybe a generation of golfers weaned on fine public, instead of private, courses might understand the ethos of team spirit better than the last several ensembles fielded by our side.

Unless, that is, another faction of American citizens has their sway. On the outskirts of San Francisco, there is a golf course known as Sharp Park. It was originally designed by Alastir MacKenzie, the architect who also designed Cypress Point and Pasatiempo, in California, and public golf courses for both the University of Michigan and the Ohio State University (both thought to be among the finest college courses in the world)—and also a course for a small golf club named the Augusta National Golf Club. Sharp Park remains the only public course MacKenzie designed on the ocean, and MacKenzie’s goal in designing it was to create “the finest municipal golf course in America”—a goal that, present-day conditioning aside, many experts would say he succeeded, or nearly succeeded, in doing.

Unfortunately, a small number of “environmentalists,” as reported by San Francisco’s “alternate” newspaper, SFWeekly, now “want the site handed over to the National Park Service for environmental restoration.” According to a story by Golf Digest, the activists “contend it harms two endangered species, the San Francisco garter snake and California red-legged frog.” A year ago, though, a federal judge found that, contrary to the environmentalists’ accusations, “experts for both sides agree[d] that the overall Sharp Park frog population has increased during the last 20 years.” Ultimately, in May of this year, the judge found the evidence that the golf course’s existence harmed the two endangered species so weak that the court in effect dismissed the lawsuit, saying it were better that the public agencies responsible for monitoring the two species continued to do their job, rather than the judiciary.

I bring all of this up because, in investigating the case of Sharp Park, it is hard to avoid considering that the source of the environmentalists’ actions wasn’t so much concern for the two species—which, it must be pointed out, appear to be doing fine, at least within the boundaries of the park—as it was animosity towards the sport of golf itself. The “anti-Sharp Park” articles I consulted, for instance, such as the SF Weekly piece I mentioned above, did not see fit to note Alister MacKenzie’s involvement in the course’s design. Omissions like that are a serious weakness, in my view, to any claim of objectivity regarding the case.

Still, regardless of the facts in this particular case, the instance of Sharp Park may be illustrative of a particular form of “leftism” can be, in its own way, as defeatist and gloomy as that species of “conservatism” that would condemn us to lifetimes of serving the national debt. Had we a mass “environmental movement” in the 1930s, in other words, how many of those golf courses—not to mention all of the other projects constructed by the WPA and other agencies—would have gotten built?

That isn’t to say, of course, that anyone is in favor of dirty air or water; far from it. It is, though, to say that, for a lot of so-called leftists, the problem with America is Americans, and that that isn’t too far from saying, with conservatives and Calvin Coolidge, that the “business of the American people is business.” We can choose to serve other masters, one supposes—whether they be of the future or the past—but I seem to recall that America isn’t supposed to work that way. The best articulation of the point, as it so occurs, may have been delivered precisely one hundred and forty-nine years ago on the 19th of November, over a shredded landscape over which the guns had drawn quiet.

I’ll give you a hint: it included the phrase “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The Mark of Z

“One way to characterize professional golf,” wrote John Cassidy earlier this summer in The New Yorker, “is to say that it has reached parity—there are so many good players, and they all have a roughly equal chance of winning.” Cassidy called it the “random golfer theory,” and has trotted it out after Webb Simpson’s win at Olympic and Ernie Els’ win at Lytham. The idea is that anybody within the top 100 has a shot of winning any major: an idea that is, more or less, borne out by the fact that of the past 17 majors, there has been 17 winners. Until now, which is to say that Rory’s win at the PGA has blown that idea up just as surely as the events of the past five years has blown up both the Black-Scholes formula and the hype of this year’s Ryder Cup at Medinah to what will, especially in the Fleet Street press, be absurd levels.

The cry will be, as it’s been since McIlroy won the U.S. Open at Congressional a year ago, for a Tiger vs. Mac showdown during Sunday’s singles matches, only with an even heightened pitch now that Rory’s won his first two majors at a more rapid clip than Tiger won his first two. And as it happens, Tiger’s second major was also a PGA, and, also, it was at Medinah. Which, as it further happens, was also the first time Tiger faced a competitor who seemed to have all the tools he did, but was from Europe—and younger to boot. And after that PGA, in 1999, Sergio Garcia, like Rory’s fans today, demanded to play Tiger in that year’s Ryder Cup.

Obviously, European fans are hoping for a different outcome this time around: that Ryder Cup was at the Country Club in Brookline, and the Euros got smoked in singles; that was the year that the American captain, Ben Crenshaw, said the night before the finale, “I got a good feeling about this.” It was also the year of the “excessive celebration” after Justin Leonard made his putt on the 17th hole of regulation—which came before Jose Olazabal had a chance to make his putt, which would have at least continued the match, a point that, if you believe the London papers, all of Europe has been brooding about for the past nearly-decade-and-a-half. Not that Europeans are well-known to carry around centuries-long grudges or anything.

In any case, this year’s Ryder Cup is shaping up, at least from the wrong end of the Atlantic, to be a kind of revanchist’s dream, only without soaking the fields of Flanders in blood. In place of Sergio, they have Rory, who actually wins tournaments, and even majors, without regripping his club twenty-five times or casually insulting entire states. And most alarmingly, at least from this side of the Atlantic, our main guy not only has never made a big deal out of these kinds of team events—Tiger is on record as saying he doesn’t regard the Ryder Cup as being the same as one of the four majors—but he hasn’t won a major in four years. Or, in other words, since their kid starting winning them. Which is where the Black-Scholes point comes in.

“If Capital One was trading at $30 a share,” says Michael Lewis in The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, the Black-Scholes model for pricing options—those obscure financial instruments that have had so much say in our lives recently— “assumed that, over the next two years, the stock was more likely to get to $35 a share than to $40, and more likely to get to $40 than to $45, and so on.” This makes sense to us, intuitively: we like to think that “slow and steady wins the race,” for instance. But the real world does not always behave in that slow and incremental way: everyone would have bet that dinosaurs would be the dominant species on the planet for eons, until a meteorite crashed in southern Mexico. Sometimes things can change quite suddenly—and not reach any intermediate stops. Once, there were billions of dinosaurs. Then, there weren’t.

Once, there was a Tiger, and now there’s a Rory. In between there’s been a collection of Keegan Bradleys and Webb Simpsons, a collection that has largely made the golf press uneasy at best and, at worst, spooked. Golf is, after all, one of the few sports—the other that I can think of at the moment being horse racing—where nobody likes an underdog, at least until the point where it seems like the underdog can actually win; or, in short, become the overdog. Rory, with his eight-shot win at the PGA, might just have reached that point: a point that, as it happens, the wonks over at Grantland have quantified using a measure they call “Z-Score,” which is apparently a standard part of the average mathematician’s toolbag.

“Z-Score” is calculated by taking the winner’s score and subtracting the average score of all the players who finished the tournament, then dividing that against “the variance between the scores and the average performance,” as Grantland’s resident golf stat-head, Bill Barnwell, says. In other words, a tournament where the winner shot “20-under-par and the last-place finisher shot 20-over-par” would have a higher value than a tournament “in which the winner shot 3-under-par and the duffer in last shot 4-over.” Of the top ten scores ever figured, Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus have three apiece, with Tiger Woods’ performance at the 2000 U.S. Open, where he blew away the field by fifteen shots, achieving the highest “Z-Score” ever recorded at -4.12 (meaning that he was more than four standard deviations better than the average performance in the tournament.

It’s a good methodology in that it factors out things like weather (everyone plays in similar conditions, within reason) and so on, and to a degree allows us to compare performances across the generations. For instance, it’s now arguable that Jack Nicklaus’ performance at the 1965 Masters might be better than Woods’ win in 1997, even though Woods broke Nicklaus’ scoring record (271, or -11 to par, versus 270, or -12 to par), because while Woods’ “Z-Score” in 1997 was -3.24 Nicklaus’ “Z-Score” was -3.48. Or in other words, Woods was only a bit more than three times better than his competitors in 1997, while Nicklaus was nearly three-and-a-half times better. Obviously, this doesn’t really matter much (though Davis Love’s win at the 1997 PGA, which he took by five shots and produced a Z-Score of 3.54, looks a lot better after running it through this formula), but it’s fun to compare scores across eras.

Like, for instance, the scores Tiger Woods produced in his prime versus the scores Rory McIlroy has produced in his two major wins: last year’s U.S. Open at Congressional and this year’s PGA. McIlroy won both tournaments by eight shots, which is the kind of performance necessary to place on the Z-Score leaderboard, but Z-Score isn’t factored by how much the second-place guy shot, but rather by how much the field as a whole shot. Rory’s Z-Score for the tournaments places him comfortably within the top twenty Z-Scores ever recorded, but his -3.07 score for Congressional, together with his -3.15 score for Kiawah, aren’t enough to place him very close to Tiger’s epic win in 2000. The Congressional score, in fact, doesn’t even place Rory close to Jack Nicklaus’ -3.22 at Turnberry in 1977—you know, the “Duel In The Sun” Jack lost to Tom Watson.

Rory’s wins, that is, have been big—but they haven’t been that big, at least by comparison to Jack and Tiger. The win at Congressional, at least as measured by Z-Score, isn’t even as good as Padraig Harrington’s British Open win in 2008, which the Irishman won at 3-OVER par, only four shots better than his nearest competitor—Harrington rang up a -3.09 Z-Score during what was a famously-windblown tournament. Still, Rory’s fans might cite Barnwell’s observation that through “his first nine majors, McIlroy has put up an average Z-Score 0.97 standard deviations below the mean,” an average only exceeded by Seve Ballesteros (-1.04) and Ernie Els (-1.25) in anyone’s first nine majors. Rory is, obviously, still very young; it’s quite possible we still haven’t seen his best stuff.

Still, what the Z-Score tale tells us is that while Rory is a very, very good golfer, he doesn’t go to the same dimension-bending, dinosaur-slaying, places Tiger Woods could go in his prime. But if we haven’t yet seen Rory’s best, there are few places Rory could demonstrate that to better effect than Medinah, the course Tiger has tamed twice for two of his fourteen major titles and a membership in the club itself. It’s no honorary membership, either: Tiger has the same rights as any other full member, an honor the club presented him with after his second win in 2006, which is to say that, in a sense perhaps more real than any other course, Medinah really is Tiger’s home turf. For Rory to beat Tiger there would be, one suspects, a grievous blow to the competitive Tiger—all the implacable laws of sport, which are even more inflexible than any mathematical model, thus demand that there is only one possible final match for the Ryder Cup’s finale at the end of September: Woods v. McIlroy, for all the stakes that there are. May the best Z-Score win—and to hell with the “random golfer theory.”