Scientific Management Goes Golfing

Imagine one of today’s management gurus becoming so absorbed with golf that he gives up his lucrative consulting contracts to devote full time to the total quality management of the PGA Tour. Perhaps it is not a completely far-fetched idea, given the game’s irresistible appeal and the global reach and multibillion-dollar size of the modern golf industry. But think back to the beginning of the century, when it took teams of horse-pulled pans and scrapers—and a phalanx of manpower—to clear land of rocks and boulders and build a playable golf course. Now try to imagine the most esteemed, best-paid management expert of this bygone age, a man whom Progressive reformers and even a Supreme Court justice called a national hero, becoming obsessed with finding “the one best way” to build golf greens. Such a person did exist. Frederick Winslow Taylor, the pioneer of time-and-motion study and scientific management, eventually spent more time and energy growing grass for putting greens and experimenting with swing mechanics and innovative club designs than he did maximizing the efficiency of loading pig iron onto railroad cars.

Born in 1856, before America’s first country club was built, F. W. Taylor enjoyed a privileged Victorian upbringing in Germantown, Pennsylvania (now part of Philadelphia). His father was a successful lawyer interested in classical literature; his mother, from whom Taylor received his early education, was a Quaker and an ardent abolitionist who fought alongside the women’s-rights leader Lucretia Mott. Taylor spent his early teens first in private schools in France and Germany, then at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. From Exeter he was supposed to go to Harvard Law School, but a lively interest in mechanical invention, plus an eye problem resulting from long hours spent with books in prep school, took him instead into the noisy machine shops of America’s manufacturing industries.

At age 18 the young and cultured Philadelphian put school on hold and apprenticed himself as a pattern-maker and machinist in the shops of the Enterprise Hydraulic Works, which made shaft pumps. In 1878 he joined the Midvale Steel Company of Philadelphia as a common laborer. He swiftly rose through the ranks to become Midvale’s chief engineer. At night he took courses at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, New Jersey, and earned a degree as a mechanical engineer. Obsessed with notions for improving industrial efficiency, Taylor in the 1880s thought out innumerable inventions and refinements in machinery and manufacturing methods, the outstanding one being the design and construction of the largest successful steam hammer ever built in the United States.

In 1893, following three years as general manager of Philadelphia’s Manufacturing Investment Company, which operated large paper mills in Maine and Wisconsin, Taylor started his own consulting firm, using a business card that read “Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty.” Almost overnight he had created a new profession. For $35 a day he would install his management system in any plant or factory if the plant owner agreed to do exactly as Taylor told him.

One of his first major clients was Bethlehem Steel. Within months Taylor had saved the giant company thousands of dollars by working out elaborate rules for speeding up the shoveling of coal, iron, and coke, thereby reducing the number of employed shovelers from 600 to 140. He hired teams of men to photograph the workers and time them with stopwatches as they used different shovels and shoveling motions, searching for the most efficient combination. Then he ordered the workers to do things his way or be fired. Management was overjoyed at the gains in efficiency; the workers were less so.

As his fame grew, Taylor systematized his industrial theories, delivered them in speeches to engineering organizations, and committed them to writing. At the turn of the century his principles of efficiency captivated American business and industry in the same way that re-engineering and continuous quality improvement engrossed the corporate world of the 1980s and 1990s. Taylor’s basic message, popularized in his 1903 booklet Shop Management , was that workers did not know how to work and managers did not know how to manage. Both tasks required the guidance of an expert, and everything about industrial manufacturing needed to be rethought according to modern scientific principles.

By the time Taylorism caught fire, however, Taylor himself had found a new object for his scientific approach to efficiency: golf. His earliest biographer, Frank B. Copley, wrote in 1923 that “the most remarkable examples” of Taylor’s “passion for improving and reforming things” are to be found not in his ideas for restructuring work in the steel industry but in his grass-growing experiments for putting greens. These Taylor conducted at the turn of the century at his Red Gate home in Germantown and, starting in 1904, on the grounds of his 11-acre Boxly estate (named after its century-old box hedges) in the Chestnut Hill district of Philadelphia.

Golf flourished in the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia. By 1900 the environs of the Quaker City had 13 courses, 5 of them on private estates. The game obsessed Taylor. Copley says he “practised before breakfast, during breakfast, and after breakfast.” He played in cold and stormy weather. “For years a rainstorm to him was only a ‘dew,’ and heavy had to be the snowfall which could keep him off the links.” Once when he was scheduled to meet with Robert Linderman, Bethlehem Steel’s president, Taylor showed up 30 minutes late, swinging a club, and insisted on talking about golf. Linderman soon terminated his contract. This was fine with Taylor; he had made enough money from consulting to retire. That left more time for golf. He played well enough, earning an eight handicap and once shooting a 76 on Walter J. Travis’s outstanding Ekwanok course in Manchester, Vermont. But like millions of golfers after him, he could never simply enjoy the game as relaxation. As Copley wrote, “In Taylor’s case, the thinking stimulated by golf, having to do with the nature and use of tools, was all too closely allied with his customary thinking” about industrial problems. The sport aroused in Taylor “his terrible spirit of earnestness.” For him, playing golf was work, and work, in whatever form, had to be attacked scientifically.

Already an expert on the design of metal-cutting machines—not to mention a master of shovel sizes and shapes —Taylor now experimented with golf clubs. He built scores of them, arriving at prototypes only after several stages of design had been completed involving careful measurements, his beloved systematic variation of parameters, and the use of charts and graphs. To give his clubs exactly the right balance, Taylor even built his own pair of scales, portable yet delicate enough to weigh accurately within one-eighth of an ounce.

Several of his concepts proved quite wise. He designed a highly original mashie (five-iron) having a slightly ribbed face for greater backspin. Into the face of the club he set a regular file, which projected below the head so as to dig slightly into the turf. He also spent a number of years evolving (and eventually patenting) a driver a foot longer than normal with a much thinner lower shaft for greater flexibility.

In this regard Taylor’s approach portended future technology. Today extra-long driving clubs—46 inches and more —have become popular with golfers for the additional distance they promise. And of course club manufacturers have experimented endlessly with different flexes in shaft materials—stainless steel, aluminum, fiberglass, graphite, titanium—to provide extra distance with greater accuracy.

Boldest of all was Taylor’s 1905 design of a croquet-style putter. After scrutinizing the biomechanics of putting for a decade, he determined that the best way to wield this most essential tool of the sport was to swing it as a pendulum between one’s legs, directly facing the line from ball to hole. The shaft entered the head of his putter midway between the two ends (Copley incorrectly believed that Taylor’s was the first putter to do so), and even more unusual, two forking arms ran from midway up the shaft, giving the overall appearance of a pogo stick. The golfer rested his forearms against the branches, making the putter easier to hold and swing on line.

Soon after Taylor started using the unusual club during rounds at the Philadelphia Country Club, United States Golf Association representatives questioned its legality. Eventually the USGA outlawed the forked arms. Nonetheless, Taylor’s illegal putter has for many years since been on exhibit in the USGA Museum and Library in Far Hills, New Jersey. The USGA’s Golf Journal published a picture of it in 1993, the caption suggesting that Taylor “probably created the putter to help deal with a serious case of the yips.”

Actually, Taylor’s own particular putting woes could not, by his standards, serve as the basis for a scientifically designed putter. He built his putter the way he did because he thought it represented “the one best way” of putting. The father of scientific management always cloaked himself, as one historian has written, “in a mantle of science by claiming that [his] method was scientific and his determinations therefore beyond reproach.” Taylor, one of the most irony-resistant men in history, obviously did not see anything inappropriate—and certainly nothing funny—about applying his notions of efficiency to a pursuit in which inefficiency was the whole point. Sir Winston Churchill would later call golf “a game where one tries to knock a ball into a hole with instruments singularly ill-suited for the purpose.” Taylor aspired to correct that sort of notion.

It is not known exactly how Taylor reacted to the USGA’s ban on his putter (which he also patented), but Copley offered that “the barring caused him many a pang.” Extrapolating from the scorn he felt for the president of Bethlehem Steel and anyone else who questioned his pet ideas, one imagines that Taylor gave a USGA official quite a tongue-lashing. For the ruling body of American golf to outlaw his “one right” putter was tantamount, in Taylor’s mind, to obscurantism.

After the USGA ruling Taylor retained the lower part of his putter, lengthened the shaft, and continued to play with it. Companions said he was “slightly better in putting than in other departments.” To Taylor’s satisfaction, if not to that of his golf cronies, his style of putting was “far more scientific than the ordinary style.” There is no evidence to suggest that Taylor ever addressed the crucial question of what constraints might be necessary in a technological age to keep golf a sport, nor did he ever acknowledge any fundamental disparity between playing golf and shoveling coal.

Taylor also justified his golf swing, which was even more unconventional than his putter, by reference to scientific management principles. Sacrificing stability, he placed his feet close together and at an oblique angle to his target line. Thus, with his back turned away from the ball, looking back at the ball over his left shoulder, he initiated his backswing, trying to generate the greatest possible force into his body. “At the upper limit,” Copley observed, “his back practically was to the direction the ball was to take, and to see the ball he had to screw his head around. Revolving his long club till it finally began to revolve in the direction he wanted it to take, he, with body and arms going together, would swing through, pivoting on the ball of his left foot.”

As sensitive golfers of all eras are apt to do in the presence of such upsetting swing mechanics, many of Taylor’s playing partners closed their eyes while he was hitting or stared off “into dreamy space or straight up at the high blue vault of heaven.” Some intolerant club members refused to play with him, complaining that just being in the vicinity of Taylor’s swing put them off their game. Close friends viewed the length to which he carried out his golf experiments as “an amiable failing.”

In 1911, after newspaper and magazine stories had turned Taylor into a national figure, one of his betterhumored cronies threatened to “expose” him: “I will get me a motion picture machine and … take two miles of motion pictures of him in various attitudes (surrounded by flying divots) and then tour the country with the films, exhibit them at Harvard [where Taylor lectured at the business school], and say to them: ‘Look at this alleged scientist! Can he know anything about science when he plays golf in such a fashion?’”

But Taylor stood by his swing, though he was keenly aware that people laughed and joked about it. And his results were not half bad. At the top of his game, he drove the ball 250 yards, which was farther than he had ever driven when aligned conventionally. He won a number of handicap tournaments, noting that “every year I hang up a few more scalps in my lodge.” A few times he even won or placed high in the lower divisions of scratch tournaments. Through the years Taylor continued to explore the nuances of his swing in relation to biomechanical principles and never gave up the idea that through a careful recording of his performance, he would arrive at “the one right way.”

Taylor’s historical significance for golf rests not in his strange swing or unorthodox clubs, however, but in his putting-green experiments. Elaborately staged on his Boxly estate, they were unprecedented in the history of agronomy; they also epitomize his commitment to scientific principles and demonstrate how far he would go to control and refine his natural surroundings. At his previous Red Gate home, Taylor had converted “a rough piece of lawn” into “an ordinarily good putting green.” At Boxly he took his passion much further, determining to create the best surface ever made for a rolling golf ball.

As the nation’s number one crusader for standardization of work processes, Taylor rankled at the lack of system practiced in the making of putting greens and the building of golf courses generally. He embarked on his first round of grass-growing experiments with the firm belief that greens could be made in much the same way that an article was manufactured in a machine shop or factory. Science would reveal the specific requirements for fine turf, and Taylor, knowing these requirements, would meet them using standardized materials.

He wanted his scientifically manufactured green not only to roll fast and true but also to grow in quickly, be economical to build and maintain, and survive inclement weather and heavy golfer traffic. He also desired a highly contoured green on which skillful putters would excel. Copley suggested that Taylor’s green may have been the first in the United States with a specially planned curving surface. Rolling greens caused by the natural lay of the land had always been in use on golf courses, but none seem to have been systematically mapped and prepared with knolls and depressions until Taylor’s experiment.

Taylor did not rush into the construction of his green just to practice his putting stroke, however. First he consulted with the best grass experts available and mastered the know-how of golf-course builders nationwide. In Taylor’s words, “best practice” in the early 1900s consisted of “chemically analyzing the soil where the putting green was to be made” and “attempting to supply it with the fertilizer and the manure or lime needed to put it in proper condition for growing grass.” Contemporary best practice also meant sowing different seeds in different greens (or even different parts of the same green) to meet varying conditions.

It took three years of experimentation, until 1907, for Taylor to identify the fundamental errors in contemporary turf practices. He learned that the one right grass was not primarily a matter of the right manure or fertilizer or proper irrigation. The answer rested in the physics and chemistry of the soil, which often, because of its grain composition and moisture-holding properties, did not permit grass roots to penetrate and grow as they should. In keeping with his standardization principle, Taylor’s object became “to suit the soil to the grass, not the grass to the soil.” If he could synthetically mix an appropriate soil, he could then identify the one best grass to grow from it. No longer would golfers have to be satisfied with spotty putting greens. They could enjoy ideal putting surfaces, consistently green in color and with uniform resistance. Also, they would not have to wait for greens to mature. Firstclass greens could develop in a matter of months, a radically abbreviated time span generally thought impossible by pre-Taylor grass experts.

Taylor selected peat moss as the basis of his soil mixture. It offered several valuable qualities, including a high water-holding capacity, free circulation of air, and invulnerability to weed seeds. Adding 1 part of powdered bone to 12 parts of shredded peat moss, Taylor developed a recipe that came to be known as “Taylor soil.” Country Life magazine ran an illustrated article about it. Written by Taylor and titled “The Making of a Putting Green,” the piece appeared in five installments (Taylor was famously long-winded) during 1915.

Taylor soil offered a number of unique features, some of which conflicted with orthodox views. Most unusual was the large quantity of bone and pulverized limestone. For a decade, however, no one raised objections, and greens at several new courses along the East Coast were created using his technique. Much of this can be explained by his national reputation as the father of scientific management and the wave of sympathy that followed his untimely death from bronchial pneumonia in 1915. During World War I, which lasted into late 1918, few golf courses were being built anyway.

Agronomists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture made the first objective appraisal of Taylor’s soil in the early 1920s. While praising the “uniform and thoroughly satisfactory strand of grass,” they objected to Taylor’s use of bone and lime in his soil mix, the former because it promoted the growth of clover and the latter because it worked against the creeping bent grass and red fescue that Taylor had concluded were best. The USDA experts also reported that greens built according to Taylor’s methods settled unevenly because of the large amount of organic matter in their foundation.

The USDA scientists also questioned whether Taylor’s method was truly economical, given the cost of the organic matter required plus the other specified materials and methods of construction. “According to his own estimates the cost of constructing a green of average size would be approximately $2500,” the USDA report said. Ordinary greens, by contrast, cost only $600 to $700, but they required an additional $100 to $200 annually in upkeep. Taylor had said his greens would practically abolish the cost of upkeep by doing away with constant feeding and seeding and reducing watering to only once every two or three weeks. “At the end of six years after making one of our greens,” he had argued, “the original cost, plus the annual expense of maintaining it, will be less than that of a green under the usual way.” The USDA experts did not take sides on this question.

Although historical records about green construction are not nearly as complete as they are for overall course designs, Taylor made significant contributions to the creation of some classic American golf courses. In 1911-12 he appears to have personally supervised the making of at least four greens on the new course being built by the Merion Golf Club, at Ardmore. This historic course, outside Philadelphia, hosted its first U.S. Amateur Championship in 1916, and several other major championships followed. Taylor’s gardener at Boxly, Robert Bender, who managed a special crew of 10 to 30 men just to do grass experiments, eventually became one of the East Coast’s most sought-after builders of putting greens. Starting in 1904, he made “rolling greens” (that is, Taylor’s specially mapped contoured greens) for courses at Whitemarsh, near Philadelphia, and at Asheville, North Carolina. More significant, in 1914 Bender built the greens at Pine Valley Golf Club,the challenging George Crump/H. S. Colt layout in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Pine Valley still ranks number one on many lists of the greatest golf courses in the United States, and Bender’s highly contoured Taylor-made greens are one of the primary reasons.

In line with Taylor’s thinking, American golf developed a distinctive technological character in contrast with its more naturalistic British parent. From the 1920s on, golf-course designers in the United States slowly eliminated many of the irregularities and random elements of the traditional Scottish links course: mounds, craters, and tumbling, disorderly terrain. In its place American golf-course architects cultivated a scientifically managed landscape for golf. Instead of routing a course over open, largely treeless terrain, which allowed players on old courses to choose different strategic paths from tee to green, the American course set fixed, narrow routes of play within planted, mostly tree-lined corridors.

Americans embraced artifice on their golf courses much more than did the British. In place of the little horsepulled pans and scrapers that had modestly shaped early American courses, in the 1920s builders began using bulldozers, steam shovels, and dump trucks to move small mountains of earth. Since the 1950s heavy machinery has revolutionized golf-course construction, turning fairways into highly engineered, sculpted, and artificially contoured designs. By the 1980s bulldozers had often moved as much as two million cubic yards of dirt to turn a barren and expressionless piece of ground, often a desert or swamp, into a championship layout.

British observers bemoaned this trend in American golf design. Instead of being played essentially as the classic ground game, with balls skirting across the surface of a course and quality shot making dependent on how one handled the inadvertent bumps and rolls, American golf was turning, these observers charged, into an aerial game of cross-country darts.

In 1955 Robert Browning, the Scottish editor of Golfing magazine, one of the best British golf periodicals, commented on one aspect of this trend in American golf: “Even while I admire the marvelous co-ordination between eye and muscle called for by this modern target golf, I cannot but regret that it has taken us so far from the original conception of the old cross-country game. One of the things which distinguished golf from every other pastime was that while other games were imitations of war in miniature, golf was an imitation of life, in which the player had to thread his way among unexpected dangers and undeserved bad lies.” While British links courses still allowed golf to be played with “the perfection of artists,” American-style layouts now required “the precision of machines.” And “in the long run,” as Browning well knew from the growing domination of American golfers in international tournaments, “the artist will always be beaten by the machine.”

Frederick Taylor lived only until 1915, designed no golf courses, and certainly cannot be credited with (or held responsible for) changing the path of American golf-course development. Still, his personal campaign to use scientific management to manufacture “the one best soil” for “the one best grass” for “scientific putting” reveals a significant fact: The industrial paradigm has exerted an overwhelming power over the modern world. Taylor’s elaborate efforts to engineer a model putting green in the front yard of his Boxly estate demonstrates in an unusual way how the logic of engineering and of the modern technological order was spilling over into everything by the early twentieth century. Even something as capricious as chasing a white ball across a native terrain had to become “scientific.” In modern industrial America it turned into a measured expedition across a highly manufactured, immaculate, and increasingly artificial landscape involving ever more progressive technology and precision instruments.

The French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who has written extensively about the sweeping power and autonomous nature of modern technology, would not have been surprised to find scientific management and sports coalescing during the Progressive Era into a pursuit for unambiguous results. American golfers began to believe that tee shots hit down the middle of the fairway should always result in perfect lies to set up the next shot and that putts hit with the proper technique should always go into the hole. Today’s campaign to eliminate spiked shoes in order to protect greens is the most recent manifestation of this sort of vision.

As Ellul has argued, “In our times, technical growth monopolizes all human forces, passions, intelligences, and virtues.” It becomes a “milieu in which man is required to exist,” a “closed circle” that captures all values and ideas. This tendency was a historical force from which golf could not possibly have escaped.