READING THE GREENS
BOOKS ON GOLF FROM THE ARTHUR W. SCHULTZ COLLECTION
PART FOUR
- 13th Hole: Imagining the Course
- 14th Hole: Chicago Courses
- 15th Hole: American Courses
- 16th Hole: Courses Around the World
- 17th Hole: Masters of the Course
- 18th Hole: Green Dreams
13TH HOLE:
IMAGINING THE COURSE
For purists, the only true setting for golf is the land of the links, the sandy stretches of property considered useless for agriculture that were left unoccupied along the Scottish seacoast. It was here that the earliest golf courses were laid out, taking advantage of the natural swales of the undulating landscape, rough patches of sea grass, small dunes and sandy burrows exposed by foraging sheep, and twisting streams and tidal ponds. Remade over many years into the fairways, bunkers, roughs, water hazards, and greens of St. Andrews and other classic Scottish courses, the links remained for many the model of what a golf course should be.Transported from Scotland to England and then across the Atlantic to America, golf course design at first relied on the accumulated personal experience of Scottish golfers like Old Tom Morris, William Park, Jr., and Willie Dunn, who were given the responsibility of shaping new courses. The rapid growth of the game and increasing sophistication of players, however, argued for a more systematic understanding of the structure of the game and the ideal course. Charles Blair Macdonald of Chicago was among the first to abandon the so-called "penal" course that punishes the player who strays from an established ideal path and to conceive instead a "strategic" course that requires the golfer to choose one of several alternative routes to the green. Dr. Alister Mackenzie, a British physician and passionate golfer, expanded on these developments in his pioneering and influential text, Golf Architecture (1920). Among the key features of Mackenzie's ideal course were that it require little walking between a green and the next tee, that every hole should have its own distinct character, and that the golfer should be required to use a variety of strokes and clubs to achieve a successful round.
In recent decades, the once casual craft of golf architecture has become an ever more highly sophisticated business. Pete Dye, Tom Fazio, and Robert Trent Jones, Jr., are widely recognized as being among the most successful contemporary golf architects. New strains of grass are being developed for different climatic zones. Desert courses are being built in areas that would once have been thought inhospitable to golf. Lavish new golf clubs and entire golfing communities are becoming a common feature of America's leisure-oriented culture. Books by and about the latest golf architecture trace the imaginative reshaping of the natural landscape and the ways in which it is being transformed into the distinctive fairways, roughs, bunkers, and greens of thousands of individual new golf courses.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Doak, Tom. The Anatomy of a Golf Course: The Art of Golf Architecture. New York: Lyons & Burford, c1992. Signed by author.
Fazio, Tom. Golf Course Designs by Fazio. [Jupiter, Florida: Golf Course Designers, Inc.], 1984.
Hunter, Wiles Robert. The Links. New York; London: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926.
Jones, Robert Trent. Golf by Design: How to Lower Your Score by Reading the Features of a Course. Foreword by Tom Watson. Boston; New York; Toronto; London: Little, Brown and Co., 1993.
Lumb, Nick. A Beginner's Guide to Golf. New York: Gallery Books, 1987.
Mackenzie, Alexander. Golf Architecture: Economy in Course Construction and Green-Keeping. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co. Ltd., 1920. Ex libris Metropolitan Club Library.
Thomas, George Clifford. Golf Architecture in America: Its Strategy and Construction. Los Angeles: Times-Mirror Press, 1927.
14TH HOLE:
CHICAGO COURSES
Golf came to Chicago in 1875, when Charles Blair Macdonald, a young American of Scottish descent, returned to the city from undergraduate studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland. In 1893, stimulated by his exposure to British golf, Macdonald led the formation of the Chicago Golf Club, the area's first golf association, and laid out a nine-hole course for the club in suburban Belmont (now Downer's Grove). Moved to Wheaton and doubled in size by 1895, the layout of the Chicago Golf Club was the first eighteen-hole golf course in America.Macdonald's example quickly led to the formation of a number of other Chicago-area clubs by 1900: Onwentsia, Edgewater, Glen View, Exmoor, Midlothian, and Skokie, all private clubs, and the Jackson Park Public Links, the first golf course west of the Alleghenies to be opened to the general public. Chicagoans formed the Western Golf Association in 1899 and the Women's Western Golf Association in 1901. The golf boom continued, and in the 1920s an average of one new golf course a month was being opened in the Chicago area. Suburban Olympia Fields Country Club, the largest in the country upon completion in 1925, stretched over nearly 700 acres and offered 72 holes of golf, a $1-million clubhouse, a wildlife preserve adjacent to the fairways, and residential cottages on the grounds.
With the growth of Chicago golf came an array of books, periodicals, and ephemeral publications describing every facet of life on the fairways. Yearbooks, magazines, club histories, and directories followed the development of the game and the achievements of individual players. They also helped document the important tournaments played in Chicago, including the U.S. men's and women's Open, the men's and women's Amateur, the PGA Championship, the Walker Cup, the World Championship of Golf, and the Western Open.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Western Advertisers Golfers Association. 50th Yearbook, 1906-1956. S.l.: [Western Advertisers Golfers Association, c1956].
Bob O'Link Golf Club. Year Book, 1952. Highland Park, Ill.: S.n., 1952.
Blue Book of Chicago Golfers, 1925-1926. Chicago: W. S. Chambers, c1925.
- Chicagoland Golf. Chicago: Chicagoland Publishers.
- June 1952 issue.
- July 1952 issue.
- November 1952 issue.
The Clubhouse: Tam O'Shanter Country Club. [Chicago: Tam O'Shanter Country Club, 1950?].
Golf . . . Where the Best Courses Are . . . And the Best Course to Take in Reaching Them. [Chicago: Outing and Recreation Bureau, n.d.]
Hamilton, Edward A., and Charles Preston, eds. Golfing America. Text by Al Laney. Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1958. First edition.
The Nordic Country Club. [Chicago: The Nordic Country Club, n.d.].
Olympia Fields Magazine for 1944. Olympia Fields, Ill.: Olympia Fields Country Club, 1944.
- Scorecards:
- Exmoor Country Club
- Medinah Country Club
- Onwentsia Club
- Shoreacres
Westgate Country Club. Golf Bulletin, 1964. [Palos Heights, Ill.: Westgate Country Club, 1964].
Capper & Capper. Rules of Golf [for Onwentsia Club]. [Chicago: Capper & Capper, 1916].
Bartlett, Michael. Celebrating One Hundred Years: Skokie Country Club, 1897-1997. Glencoe, Ill.: Skokie Country Club, 1997.
Goodner, Ross. Chicago Golf Club, 1892-1992. Wheaton, Ill.: Chicago Golf Club, c1991.
Chicago Women's District Golf Association, 1955. [Chicago: Chicago Women's District Golf Association, 1955].
Chicagoland Golf, vol. 3, no. 1, 1954. Chicago: Chicagoland Publications, Inc.
Ewen, Gordon H. Indian Hill: The First 75 Years, 1914-1989. [Winnetka, Ill: Indian Hill Club], 1989.
Onwentsia Club, 1895-1995: A Centennial History. Lake Forest, Ill.: Onwenstia Club, c1995.
Skokie Country Club. Year Book: Fiftieth Anniversary. Glencoe, Ill.: Skokie Country Club, 1947.
- Scorecards:
- Edgewood Valley Country Club
- Lake Shore Country Club
- North Shore Country Club
- Northmoor Country Club
15TH HOLE:
AMERICAN COURSES
Golf in America has been traced back as far as 1650, when Dutch residents of New York were recorded as playing colf; and 1743, when a consignment of 96 golf clubs and 432 balls was shipped from Leith, Scotland, to Charleston, South Carolina. There is general agreement, however, that the first permanent American golf association, the St. Andrew's Golf Club, was formed in Yonkers, New York, in 1888, by Scottish-born John Reid and his friends. Three years later, the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club opened on Long Island with a twelve-hole course for men designed by Scotsman Willie Dunn and a nine-hole course added soon thereafter for women. Graced by an elegant clubhouse designed by architect Stanford White and laid out on a rolling seaside tract reminiscent of true Scottish links, Shinnecock Hills has been recognized ever since as the first classic American golf course.Other American golf clubs and courses were soon established. Sixteen golf courses had been created in the United States by 1893, eighty by 1896, and 982 by 1900, a number exceeding the total in all of the British Isles. Four decades later, the number of American courses had swelled still further to more than 4,500, and among them were famous names from Baltusrol and Pinehurst to Greenbrier and Pebble Beach. Some were private, some public, some open to women players and others restricted rigorously to white males only. Some courses were established by clubs whose sole interest was in providing a place to play golf, for example the site of the annual Master's golf tournament, the Augusta National Golf Club designed by Bobby Jones and Dr. Alister Mackenzie. Others, borrowing their name from The Country Club of Brookline, Massachusetts, were more broadly conceived "country clubs" offering members a complete range of sports that might include golf, tennis, swimming, polo, and riding to hounds, along with the facilities of an exclusive private club available for weddings, parties, and other social occasions.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Baltusrol Golf Club. S.l.: S. n., 1945.
Conte, Robert S. The History of the Greenbrier: America's Resort. Charleston, W.Va.: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., 1989.
Curtiss, Frederic Haines., and John Heard. The Country Club, 1882-1932. Brookline, Mass. Privately Printed for the Club, 1932. First edition.
Beardwood, Jack. From Browns to Greens: A History of the Los Angeles Country Club, 1898-1973. [Los Angeles: Los Angeles Country Club, 1973].
The Jekyll Island Club. [Brunswick, Georgia: Jekyll Island Club, n.d.].
Pace, Lee. Pinehurst Stories: A Celebration of Great Golf and Good Times. Pinehurst, N.C.: Resorts of Pinehurst Inc., 1991.
The Roads to Knollwood. Vest pocket edition with map. S.l.: S.n., 1922.
Tolhurst, Desmond. St. Andrew's Golf Club: The Birthplace of American Golf. Rye Brook, New York: Karjan Publishing, Inc., 1989.
- Scorecards:
- The Apawamis Club
- Cypress Point Club
- Los Angeles Country Club
- Mauna Kea Beach Hotel
- Pinehurst Hotel and Country Club
- Pebble Beach Golf Links
- Seminole Golf Club
- Shinnecock Hills Golf Club
- Teton Pines Country Club
- The Valley Club of Montecito, Santa Barbara
- Wianno Club
Peper, George. Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, 1891-1991. S.l.: Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, 1991.
16TH HOLE:
COURSES AROUND THE WORLD
From its home on the eastern seacoast of Scotland, the game of golf spread south across England and then west to Ireland. By the early nineteenth century, as Britain's colonial empire extended around the globe, golf began to appear in more distant places. The first golf club to be organized outside the British Isles was formed in Calcutta in 1829, and it was followed by another in Bombay in 1842. Golf moved to mainland Europe in 1856 with the founding of the Pau Golf Club in France in 1856. Canada's first golf course was opened in Montreal in 1873, and four more Canadian courses were built in the next ten years, well ahead of comparable developments south of the border in the United States.British engineers constructing railroads in South America brought golf to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1878 and to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1890. In the period from 1888 to 1890, more British-inspired golf courses were built in Malaya, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The Australian enthusiasm for golf had its origins in the founding of the Royal Melbourne golf club in 1891, and the first Japanese course opened near Kobe in 1901. Eventually, golf courses could be found nearly everywhere in the world except Antartica, as far south as the Port Stanley Club of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, and as far north as the Golfklubber Akureyrar in Iceland, only fifty-five miles from the Arctic Circle. Brilliantly colored greens appeared miraculously in the stark setting of American Southwest desert golf resorts; and in the Persian Gulf kingdom of Dubai, where bentgrass was not worth the effort or water to maintain, golf greens were replaced by "browns," a rolled mixture of sand and oil.
David Hamilton's satirical commentary on the sport's international expansion, The South-Sea Brithers (1992), recounts the history of the Great North Bodoni Railway Company golf club at Port Baskerville, San Serriffe. While San Serriffe cannot be found in any known atlas of the Pacific, Hamilton's humorous tale of the Port Baskerville club members captures the spirit and frustrations of early golfers as they extended their game across a wider world.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Cousins, Geoffrey, and Don Pottinger. An Atlas of Golf. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., c1974.
Golf Clubs of the Empire: The Golfing Annual. London: Clougher Corporation Ltd., 1930.
Hamilton, David. The South-Sea Brithers. Kilmacolm: Partick Press, 1992. No. 122 of 150 copies bound in quarter-leather, signed by the author. With facsimile bank note, postage stamps and railway ticket in rear pocket.
Leigh-Bennett, Ernest Pendarves. Some Friendly Fairways. [London]: Southern Railway of England, [1929].
Price, Robert. Scotland's Golf Courses. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989.
Weeks, Bob. The World's Greatest Golf Courses. New York; Avenel, N. J.: Crescent Books, 1992.
- Scorecards:
- Banff Springs Golf Course, Canada (2 courses)
- Castle Harbour, Bermuda
- Club de Golf Islesmere, Quebec
- Club de Golf Sto. Grande
- Durban Country Club, South Africa
- Gleneagles Hotel Golf Course (2 courses)
- Golf La Moraleja, Madrid, Spain
- Golf de Gujan, France
- Golf de Saint-Cloud, France
- Gullane Golf Club
- The Hon. Co. of Edinburgh Golfers, Scotland
- Jasper Park Lodge Golf Course, Canada
- North Berwick Golf Club
17TH HOLE:
MASTERS OF THE COURSE
From the 1920s onward, the greatest players in the game, the acknowledged masters of the course, have come to personify the popular image of golf. Books by and about these masters, from "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias's Championship Golf (1948) to Gary Player's 395 Golf Lessons (1971), define the performance standards and set the personal goals of millions of golfers who play the game.Among the men, Bobby Jones is considered the greatest amateur of all time, four-time winner of the U.S. Open, three-time winner of the British Open, and winner of four major championships, the U.S. and British Opens and U.S. and British Amateurs, all in the same year of 1930. Jones was followed by the great professionals, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen in the 1920s and 1930s; Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Byron Nelson in the 1940s and 1950s; and Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Other professional players from Chi Chi Rodriguez and Lee Trevino to Severiano Ballesteros and Greg Norman helped sustain public interest in the sport as it attracted greater audiences. Women players also played a role in extending support for the game. "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, Mickey Wright, Hollis Stacy, and Amy Alcott all became renowned as winners of the U.S. Open championship. Nancy Lopez rejuvenated interest in women's golf in 1978, when she emerged on the scene as a 21-year-old rookie and won nine major tournaments.
Books published by the great masters of the course emphasized the ways in which the amateur and casual player could benefit from the experience and expertise of the professional. Titles were often low-key and inviting: Jack Nicklaus' Take a Tip from Me (1968), Lee Trevino's I Can Help Your Game (1971), or Sandra Heynie's Golf: A Natural Course for Women (1975). Others suggested the basic level of investment required: Gene Sarazen's Common Sense Golf Tips (1924), Sam Snead Teaches You His Simple "Key" Approach to Golf (1975), and Building Your Swing for Better Golf with Amy Alcott (1981). What these and other similar books by the masters of golf share is an attitude of optimism and enthusiasm. Like the earliest instructional books of the 1880s and 1890s, they assure the average golfer that mastery of the difficult and frustrating game of golf is not only possible but readily achievable by anyone who can execute the fundamental elements consistently.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Demaret, Jimmy. My Partner, Ben Hogan. New York; Toronto; London: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., c1954.
Jones, Bobby. Golf Flicker Books, nos. 11a, 11b, 11c.
Jones, Bobby. "How I Play Golf." In How to Play Golf, ed. by Innis Brown. Spalding's Athletic Library, no. 224. New York: American Sports Publishing Co., c1935.
Nicklaus, Jack. Take a Tip from Me. With drawings by Francis Golden. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968. First edition.
Norman, Greg. Shark Attack! Greg Norman's Guide to Aggressive Golf. New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Tokyo: Simon and Schuster, c1988.
Palmer, Arnold. Situation Golf. Paintings by Jesus J. Gutierrez. New York: McCall Publishing Co., c1970.
Player, Gary. 395 Golf Lessons. Northfield, Ill.: Digest Books, Inc., c1972.
Rodriguez, Chi Chi. 101 Supershots: Every Golfer's Guide to Lower Scores. Illustrated by Dom Lupo. New York: Harper & Row, c1990. First edition.
Sarazen, Gene. Gene Sarazen's Common Sense Golf Tips. New York; Chicago [etc.]: T. E. Wilson & Co., c1924.
Snead, Sam. Sam Snead Teaches You His Simple "Key" Approach to Golf. New York: Atheneum, 1975.
Trevino, Lee. I Can Help Your Game. London; New York: W. H. Allen, 1972.
Berg, Patty, and Mark Cox. Golf Illustrated. The Barnes Sports Library. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., c1950.
The New Golf for Women. John Coyne, ed. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1973.
Haynie, Sandra. Golf: A Natural Course for Women. New York: Atheneum, 1975. First edition.
Kaskie, Shirli. A Woman's Golf Game. Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc., c1982.
Lewis, Beverly. Golf for Women. Photographs and illustrations by Ken Lewis. Stradbroke: Sackville Books, 1989.
Lopez, Nancy. Lopez on Golf. London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd., c1987.
Valentine, Jessie. Better Golf, Definitely! As told to George Houghton. [London]: Pelham Books, c1967.
Lupo, Maxine Van Evera. Building Your Swing for Better Golf, with Amy Alcott. Illustrations by Jan Nichols. San Diego Ca.; New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., Inc.; London: Tantivy Press, c1981. First edition.
Zaharias, Babe Didrikson. Championship Golf. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., c1948.
18TH HOLE:
GREEN DREAMS
The contemporary fascination with golf has spurred the popularity of a new type of golf publication, the large-format book focusing on the greatest courses and most challenging golf holes in the world. With increased recreational and business travel in recent years, the horizon of many golfers has expanded from playing at a local course or country club to following the events of the annual PGA tour and sampling the growing number of challenging courses across the Atlantic and Pacific. As the range of golfing experience has expanded, so too has an interest in reviewing and comparing the most outstanding achievements of the golf architect's exacting art. However distant the courses of South Africa, Australia, Japan, or Hawaii may once have seemed, they now form part of a farflung but increasingly integrated circuit of elite golfing environments.Works such as Davy Hoffman's America's Greatest Golf Courses (1987) and Andre-Jean Lafaurie's Golf; Great Courses of the World (1991) represent some of the most impressive examples of the large-format golf book.. Lavishly illustrated with double-page color photographs, these books present the game of golf at its most beautiful and most ideal, the early light streaming across clipped grass or hanging over the waters of a still pond, an inviting and beguiling green dreamscape for golfing enthusiasts at any level of skill.
These richly detailed photographs bring the printed page as close as possible to the actual sensations and stimulations of the golf environment; equally important, for fans of golf manuals, novels, histories, biographies, and other species of golf literature, they are a welcome invitation to set the books aside and re-enter the real game with a fresh approach to reading the greens.
ITEMS EXHIBITED
Hoffman, Davy. America's Greatest Golf Courses. New York: Gallery Books; New York: The Image Bank, 1987. Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, Southampton, New York, 18th hole.
Morgan, Brian. A World Portrait of Golf. New York: Gallery Books, 1988. Augusta National Golf Club, Augusta, Georgia, 15th hole.
Jones, Robert Trent. Golf's Magnificent Challenge. Photography by Tony Roberts. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., c1989. Sugarloaf Golf Club, Carrabassett Valley, Maine, 10th hole.
Machat, Udo. The Golf Courses of the Monterey Peninsula. Text by Cal Brown. New York: Simon and Schuster, c1989. Poppy Hills Golf Course, Monterey Peninsula, California, 16th hole.
Lafaurie, Andre-Jean. Golf: Great Courses of the World. Photographs by Jean-Frangois Lefhvre. New York; London: Artabras, 1991. Tournament Player Club Stadium Golf Course, La Quinta, California.
McLean, Stuart. South African Golf Courses: A Portrait of the Best. Cape Town: Struik Publishers, 1993. Fancourt Country Club, South Africa, 6th hole.
Ramsey, Tom. Golf Courses of Hawaii. Photography by John Knght. San Francisco: Collins Publishers, 1991. King's Course, Waikoloa Resort, Kohala Coast, Hawaii, 5th hole.
Miller, Dick. The Town & Country World of Golf. Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., c1992. Ocean Course, Kiawah Island Resort, South Carolina, 3rd hole.
READING THE GREENS:
BOOKS ON GOLF FROM THE ARTHUR W. SCHULTZ COLLECTION