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Ordinary And Outstanding Golfers

The game boomed in the United States long before its current explosion in Japan and the Far East. The early apostles of golf were almost invariably Scots, who set up golf courses wherever they traveled, so they could indulge in their favorite sporting pastime. They were largely responsible for establishing the game in the United States.

The men credited with much of the early pioneering effort in the United States were John Reid and Robert Lockhart, two expatriate Scottish school friends from Dunfermline in Fife, a town famous for its linen and not far from St. Andrews itself. Reid, a resident of Yonkers, New York, and manager of an iron works, is now generally regarded as the "father of American golf," but Lockhart, a New York linen merchant, had an extremely significant part to play as well. Lockhart was in the habit of bringing unusual gifts back from Scotland, which he visited in pursuit of his linen business. On one trip he brought back tennis racquets and balls, but failed to create much interest in that game among his acquaintances.

In the summer of 1887, Lockhart visited Old Tom Morris's shop in St. Andrews and ordered six golf clubs and two dozen gutta percha golf balls, presumably with the intention of taking them back with him over the Atlantic. However, it seems that the order for the clubs was not completed in time for his departure, and his implements had to be despatched by sea, reaching him some time later.

The clubs were ordered on behalf of John Reid, but before he passed them on, Lockhart, who had played as a youth on Musselburgh links and at least knew the rudiments and basic rules of the game, decided to put the clubs to the test himself. There are several accounts of what happened that day in late autumn 1887, including one which claims that Lockhart had to be bailed out by Reid after being arrested for playing golf in a public place. The most accurate description of the event is probably that given by Robert Lockhart's son, Sydney. He recalled accompanying his father and his brother Leslie one Sunday morning to "a place on the river which is now Riverside Drive." There his father selected a teeing ground, watched by a mounted policeman.

"Father teed up the first little white ball," Sydney Lockhart writes, "and, selecting one of the long wooden clubs, dispatched it far down the meadow. He tried all the clubs and then we boys were permitted to drive some balls too." Their efforts attracted the policeman's attention and he asked if he could join in. "The officer got down off his horse and went through the motions of teeing up, aping father in waggling and squaring off to the ball and other preliminaries. Then he let go and hit a beauty straight down the field which went fully as far as any that father had hit. Being greatly encouraged and proud of his natural ability at a game that involved a ball and stick, he tried again. This time he missed the ball completely, and then in rapid succession he missed the little globe three more times; so with a look of disgust on his face he mounted his horse and rode away."

Thus initiated, the products of the craft of Old Tom Morris, three woods and three irons acquired for around $2 each, were presented to Lockhart's friend, John Reid, who then embarked - although one suspects he did not know it at the time - on a mission that was to change the sport future of his country forever. It was in midwinter, on February 22, 1888, Washington's birthday, that Reid and five of his friends - John B. Upham, Henry O. Tallmadge, Harry Holbrook, Kingman H. Putman, and Alexander P .W. Kinnan - took themselves into a cow pasture across from Reid's home on Lake Avenue, Yonkers, to lay out their course. They found it difficult to make six clubs serve the needs of so many players, but they played the first "round." That

they were able to do so was only by the good fortune of a sudden thaw, however. Their pioneering efforts on their three-hole course lasted less than three weeks, for a blizzard left it under 3ft of snow, and the American golf revolution came to a temporary halt.

Once the snow had cleared, however, Reid and his friends were back on the course, and they were soon looking for another place to build a bigger one. They moved around the corner to a 30-acre site owned by a German butcher by the name of John C. Shorts. Reid and his friends had neither asked nor been given permission to use the land for their new course, but since they were among Mr. Shotts's best customers he felt it prudent not to make any complaint. So the game had begun, and the pioneering players persevered in their pastime.

Through the summer they played on, incurring in turn the ridicule of other local residents and the wrath of the clergy for playing on the Sabbath. But since the Scots had been ignoring clerical edicts on the subject for centuries they were not concerned on that front. Indeed, criticism rather strengthened their resolve to bring a more structured form to their activities. To this end Reid invited his golfing friends to his home after their round on November 14, 1888. There they formed the St. Andrew's Golf Club, named after the famous links course on the east coast of Scotland known throughout the world as the home of golf. The club was distinguished from its namesake in Scotland by the use of the apostrophe (St. Andrew's, not St. Andrews), but the same principles and traditions of the game were to apply to both. It was hoped that the name would help inspire and generate the same enthusiasm for the game in the United States as existed in Scotland. It turned out to be a propitious choice, as the subsequent history of golf in North America was to prove.

Following the example of their predecessors in St. Andrews, Scotland, more than a hundred years before, the founders adjourned to dinner to celebrate their new club and to toast the future of golf in their country. Reid was elected as president, with Upham as secretary and treasurer, and the game of golf had officially arrived in the United States.

Among the other early American golf pioneers was Theodore Havermeyer who, despite some lack of enthusiasm among his contemporaries, built a course in Newport, Rhode Island, a resort for the wealthy. In 1894, Havermeyer was elected the first president of the United States Golf Association (USGA) when it was formed at a meeting of five of the newly established clubs: St. Andrew's, the Country Club of Brookline, Newport, Shinnecock Hills, and Chicago. Newport was selected as the venue for the first official US Open and US Amateur Championships that were held the following year.

The great golf-course building explosion of the late nineteenth century - in the United States alone 1,000 golf courses were built in the 1890s - coupled with the invention of the superior-quality rubber-core ball, which made golf altogether easier to play, set the game well on the way to becoming today's mass-particiption sport. The large number of clubs around the world celebrating centenaries at the end of the twentieth century was a testament to the scale of the golf revolution at that time.

With the new courses came players eager to learn, and the professional golfer came of age. New technology brought rapid advances in golfing equipment. Golf continues to boom around the world, encouraged by the televised exploits of the new generation of superstar players.

There have been two major periods of growth in the game in the past 120 years. The first was in the last two decades of the nineteeth century when golf moved across the Atlantic and took hold in the United States. The second came in the last two decades of the twentieth century when the demand for golf, fueled by exposure to television, brought a massive influx of new players into a game that struggled for some time to provide facilities for them. Two million golfers in America in the 1920s doubled to four million by 1950. In 1960, it was estimated that five million were playing, and that figure had expanded to 11 million by 1970. By the beginning of the new millennium there were close to 27 million American golfers.

The Golf Research Group reported that by the year 2000 there were just over 3 million golfers in Britain, and that figure had remained almost static through the decade of the 1990s. In the UK one of the key growth sectors going into the twenty-first century was women golfers. Another finding of the Golf Research Group was that only 7 percent of golfers in England were women, the lowest percentage in any European country. In the United States the figure was put at 23 percent, although there were indications that the number of US women golfers was beginning to fall.

In Japan, the world's second biggest golf market worth some $3 billion, efforts to take the game to a wider audience were set back by the collapse of the Japanese economy in the late 1990s. In a country where the game is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of ordinary Japenese golfers, a new policy of lower green fees had succeeded in making the game more accessible.

But at the beginning of the twenty-first century the majority of Japanese golfers still seemed destined to play their golf on driving ranges. Around 13 million golfers were estimated to actually play golf in Japan, but many were restricted in the number of rounds they could afford to play. Perhaps the start of the twenty-first century will mark a gradual slowdown of development, as happened at the start of the twentieth century.

Universally, this period also saw major developments in the concept of the golf academy, where the provision of first-class practice facilities is coupled to the very latest in teaching technology, with an instructional staff trained to make the very best use of both.

The golf academy has become the natural successor to the long-established golf school concept pioneered by eminent teachers such as former GB & I Ryder Cup captain John Jacobs, working extensively in Europe and the United States. There has been further specialization in the academy concept with the Colin Montgomerie Links Golf Academy at the Turnberry Hotel in Scotland. The academy specializes in teaching the peculiarities of traditional links golf through a program developed by the Ryder Cup star.

Equipment and golf courses have changed out of all recognition, but the game itself still stands much as it has done since the first players put club to ball on an open, windswept stretch of linksland on the east coast of Scotland all those centuries ago.

The preservation of the values and traditions that developed from those earlier times, and remain at the heart of the game, are a responsibility for all of us who call ourselves golfers to protect. It is a responsibility that we must hand on to future generations, and by so doing retain that which the great champion Sir Henry Cotton described as something "more important than just a game."

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