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The Fried Egg Golf Podcast

A History of the Stymie

The Fried Egg Golf Podcast

thefriedegg.com

Golf, Sports

4.61.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today we tell the story of one of the great lost elements of match-play golf: the stymie. A stymie occurred when one player’s ball on the green ended up between the hole and the opponent’s ball. Unless the balls were within six inches of one another, the ball closer to the hole could not be lifted. The player who was away simply had to figure out what to do next. When the governing bodies eliminated the stymie in 1952, more than a curious little quirk of match play was lost, according to our guest Stephen Proctor. In a conversation with Garrett Morrison, Stephen argues that the stymie embodied a larger attitude toward the game—an attitude that fell out of favor in the mid-20th century, but one that is worth remembering, and perhaps reviving, today. Stephen's book The Long Golden Afternoon is available for pre-order now.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Mr. Green, for example. I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

0:05.0

And when I find my ball in a Friday egg.

0:07.0

Friday. The dreaded Friday.

0:09.0

Friday. Friday. Friday. Friday. Friday.

0:11.0

Friday. Friday. I'm about ready to run off the golf course course.

0:30.0

Hello, and welcome to the Friday podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we have a special episode on a particular aspect of match play golf.

0:44.0

Or I should say something that used to be a factor in match play. And that is the stymie.

0:51.0

Basically, a stymie worked like this. You and your opponent were both on the green, but your opponent's ball blocked your path to the hole.

0:59.0

Now, today, you can ask your opponent to mark their ball and even move their mark out of your line.

1:05.0

But until 70 years ago, that wasn't the case.

1:08.0

Unless the two balls were within six inches of each other, you just had to play it as it lay.

1:13.0

You were stymied.

1:15.0

As you can imagine, this led to all sorts of complications.

1:18.0

It was an entire dimension of match play golf that good players had to master.

1:23.0

The strategy of it, the question of whether to create a stymie intentionally, the techniques for playing around or over another ball, all that kind of stuff.

1:32.0

But in the 20th century, the stymie became controversial.

1:36.0

Many golfers began to think of it as a relic of an old antiquated form of the game.

1:41.0

And finally, in 1952, when the USGA and RNA came out with their first jointly published set of rules, the stymie was abolished.

1:51.0

So the basic goal of this episode is to tell the story of the stymie.

1:55.0

And I hope one thing that becomes clear is that it wasn't just a charming little quirk of match play, though it certainly was that.

2:02.0

It was also an embodiment of a whole attitude toward the game, an attitude that fell out of favor around the same time and for many of the same reasons that the stymie did.

2:12.0

And the result was, essentially, modern golf.

...

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