2025 Year in Review
A surprising amount of heady articles.
The name of this Substack is an archaic colloquialism that means a fist fight between gentlemen, and I want to make sure I’m not immune to criticism. So, once again, I’ve decided to do another year in review. I like to briefly discuss the articles I wrote and ask for feedback again, especially constructive criticism. I’ll throw in some of my favorite personal photos (all captioned) and talk about the website. Please let me know what you thought of these articles, where I’m doing well, and where I could improve.
The Private History of San Francisco Golf Club
This all started when I — genuinely accidentally — found out this not-for-public-consumption book had somehow ended up in the SF Public Library. The article starts by talking about an interesting book about golf history, but then spirals into a discussion of the culture and economics of exclusion in golf.
We’re Not Going to Agree on What Links Golf Means
If there is one article I ever wrote that overlaps with my academic background, it’s this one. Language is so much more complicated than people give it credit for, and that often leads to people fighting over meanings in a completely backwards sense. This comes down to deductive vs inductive frameworks. People tend to instinctually see language as a deductive framework, starting with words and meanings and then finding their counterparts in the real world. I think most academics in fields around language will suggest that words and meanings are inductive, that is, they are created and use to describe existing things in the world, whether or not they are in formal categories. This a subtle, but completely different framework. Now, sometimes words that reflect things in the world do have precise axiomatic definitions, but often they don’t. The term “links” is a fantastic example illustrating the differences.
Why I Advocate for Golf for Non-Golfers
I live in the Bay Area and we had a looming budget deficit crisis two years ago. Last year the crisis went went from looming to very real, and part of balancing the budget meant cutting a big chunk of funding from the Rec & Parks department. A very real part of that cut was cutting subsidies to the golf program.
At that point, many of the folks in the public golf space started grumbling about how we needed to fight this. I strongly disagreed. This article was me trying to articulate my position on municipal golf and the politics of golf, especially during periods of austerity. I don’t think mine is a popular position, but I hope the piece communicates why I advocate for some very different positions on how municipal golf venues should serve the general public in areas where golfers are a small minority of the population.
A Generalized Theory of Green Speeds
To me, this was the second in a series of heavyweight academic topics I went into this year. There is a small-but-noisy contingent of folks in the golf space who advocate for slowing down the green speeds. I wanted to articulate not only why I’m a part of that group, but when it’s appropriate. It’s not enough to just say we need to slow them down, but why and how. The essay is focused on connecting the parallel relationship of faster and faster green speeds with the rise of high launch clubs, the dominance of the bomb-and-gouge strategy, and how that’s all but killed the ground game. Slower green speeds, ironically, could renew interest in the ground game with thoughtful course design.
Great Par 4’s: #9 at Soule Park
This hole stuck with me after playing Soule Park. It made me want to write another entry in the series where I take a single hole and talk about the unique things that make it so interesting.
From Doak to Digest: Golf Rankings Are Built on Assumptions No One Talks About
This is the third academically focused article I wrote this year. It’s part of a series about course rankings/ratings that started last year.1 This piece discusses the axioms underlying ranking/rating frameworks, and how they affect the resulting lists/scores. It is one of the articles that I’m really proud of, even though it’s not written for anyone but myself. I think this stuff is subtle and interesting, but I understand why most people don’t care. It’s just that, the only reason why I care about course ratings is to learn about cool courses I want to play. However, I like very, very different kinds of courses; e.g., I absolutely love both Machrihanish and Iona but for entirely different reasons. So, if I’m going to figure out which courses I’ll like from a list, I really need to understand why the folks rating them give them a certain score.
George Waters on the Designing Golf Podcast
I honestly thought it was just a really, really good interview, because it really got into the details of how course conditioning, and more importantly expectations about course condition, affect the greater golf economy.
The Case for Doubt: Prestige, Friction, and Corruption in Golf Course Rankings
This was part of the series about course rating/ranking.2 Yet another academically focused article that deals with the epistemological problems that come with golf course rankings/ratings and the outlets that publish them. I was surprised that this article got the attention it did. Though, while I would certainly suggest the actual subject matter is boring and philosophical, what actually falls out of that is a bit more interesting, because it points to some strong economic incentives that would lend themselves to corruption in the golf media industry. Still, for me, the most interesting topic was a kind of “literature bias” that allows us — even forces us — to better appreciate certain courses we visit.
1990-2010
Golf media completely ignoring the awkward history of Cypress Point Club when the Walker Cup shows up is as predictable as it is disappointing. I thought this was a very appropriate tie-in with the previous post about the potential for misaligned interests between golf media and the golfing public.
I Did Some Research for SF Public Golfer Magazine
Just wanted to share some fun stuff I worked on that ended up getting published.
How I Designed a “Perfection” Template
I did really well in a template design contest and wanted to share the tools I used to do it very, very quickly.
How I Think About Finishing Holes
The first in a series were I take long-winded thoughts I have in golf forums, and then try to convert them into something publishable so people interested in my writing can find them.
The Course Diaries from Scotland
So, I tend to avoid doing “course reviews” unless I’ve played the course a dozen times and I want to talk about the merits of every hole on the course. I’ve done this for Gleneagles SF and I plan to do it for Golden Gate Park Golf Course in the future. These are courses I understand. When I play a course once, or even a few times, I still mostly have no idea what I’m talking about, and don’t want to pretend to.
However, I went on a trip to Scotland this year and wanted to do some kind of write-up. While my thoughts on these courses are mostly very ignorant, I can at least talk about my experiences there, and I see a course diary as the best way to do this.
North Berwick West Links
Musselburgh Links
History, Hickory, Fun
Gullane Golf Club
Three courses on a hill
The Machrihanish Golf Club
An exceptional links
Dunaverty Golf Club
Perhaps the ultimate third place in golf
Iona
If there is a place I most enjoyed in Scotland, it was here.
I will likely continue this series with a piece on the Bruntsfield Links in Edinburgh, which is a very important place to me.
Golf Course Wiki
It’s a good reminder here that this Substack is here to support my efforts to build a kind of Wikipedia for Golf Courses. Growth this year has been reasonable, but I will admit to hoping things progress more next year.
Fully Mapped Additions
I’ve mapped a few courses this year including Brambles, Dunaverty, Musselburgh Links, and a completely unnecessary mapping of the Bruntsfield Links made simply because I love that place so much.
Again, anyone can add the details of a course they love so folks can research different courses and print out the course guides for free.
Tournaments software stalls
The main headwind was beta testing the tournament system I’ve built into the wiki. I just haven’t found anyone interested, and I haven’t had a ton of time to do it myself.
Front-end changes coming eventually
The second major project was revamping the front-end of the site to make it more modern and more user friendly. That’s made progress, but it is not complete, which has stalled a lot of other work on the site, because I don’t want to get the front-end work and the back-end work so far apart from each other that merging them becomes extremely complex.
Bots everywhere all at once
Finally, I’ve had a ton of problems with bots this year. My page rank is pretty good on most search engines, and with the proliferation of AI, that’s meant a hoard of bots hit my pages all day every day. It’s probably increased hosting costs for me by 4x. I’m very, very hesitant to put my site behind Cloudflare, because it could really slow things down. I will probably try to integrate Anubis instead, but that might take some time.
What’s Next
I’m currently working on a general theory of golf design. Ambitious? Yes!
This year I read the academic textbook Characteristics of Games, by George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield and K. Robert Gutschera. Garfield and Elias have really influenced my thoughts on golf, and I’ve referenced their work on multiple occasions here even though they’re talking about games more generally. I also read Every Shot Counts, by Mark Broadie simply because I was very frustrated by the presuppositions of the strokes-gained system, and wanted to actually read the source material. Ironically, I think the tools in the strokes-gained system, combined with the characteristics that Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera discuss in their book, will provide a roadmap to get a coherent theory done, and I’m hoping to actually get that written down.
I always tell people to reach out, especially if you’re in the Bay Area. I’d be happy to grab a round of golf. And thanks for reading again this year,
— Matt
The golf course ranking/rating series is:
(1) “Golf Course Rankings are Mostly Useless”
This examines what the point of rating courses even is.
(2) “From Doak to Digest: Golf Rankings Are Built on Assumptions No One Talks About”
This examines the axiomatic structure of different ranking/rating systems and their implications.
(3) “The Case for Doubt: Prestige, Friction, and Corruption in Golf Course Rankings”
This examines some epistemological problems of golf course ranking/rating outlets, including the principle-agent problem, various biases raters might have, and the inherent problem of scope in evaluating courses given the constraints of life.
See footnote above.