Some Early Views of the Popularity of the Game

[Sven Nilsen]

While scrolling through some old newspaper sites, I came across a series of articles from the Quincy Daily Journal that portray an interesting story about the development of the game in this country.

I'll add the articles in separate posts in the order in which they appeared in my search, starting with this article from August 23, 1895:

SOCIETY PLAYS GOLF

The English Game Has Come to America to Stay

It Was Started as a Fad But Has Already Shaken the Popularity of Tennis at Nearly All of the Easter Resorts

Rudyard Kipling is having golf links laid out on his estate near Burlington, Va.  Kipling is too English to count, but everybody else who can beg, borrow or steal land enough is doing the same thing, and so one is forced to a conclusion.

Golf has vitality.  It was going to be a fad.  I has become a game.  It has shaken the popularity of tennis at nearly every summer resort in the east this season.  Golf is contagious.  One place catches it from another.  Presently it will rage.

The country clubs are becoming nothing but golf clubs.  The chief use of the bicycle is to take you to a place where you can spend the day golfing.  The man in golfing tweeds and highland gaiters takes better with the summer girl than the white duck young man; that's a pointer.  The girls you pass on the country roads are sure to be discussing the wrist movements, "holes" and "drives," that's another.

Golf sprouted in earnest at Newport last summer; this year it is in full blossom.  The great canary-colored country club house out on the Ocean drive, that is so nondescript in its architecture without, and so luxurious within, is furnished with an eye single to the comfort of golfers.  There are baths for use when you are heated, and tired from golfing.  There are massage operators to rub you down when you are stiff with too prolonged following of the course.  There are hair dressers to make you pretty again, if you happen to be a woman and have gotten your curls all out of order tramping over the links on a hot afternoon.  The only souvenirs that Newport girls prize are golf sticks, and if you look a the back of their frocks you will see that the jeweled pin that catches the belt to teh blouse is almost always a golf club in miniature.

But at Lenox they play harder and get more out of the game.  The Lenox Golf club has an eighteen-hole links and the two miles and a quarter of rough country it covers gives one more than exercise enough in dog days.  The best girl player at Lenox this summer has been Miss Gertrude Vanderbilt, who has gone over the entire course with eighty-three strokes only.  Mr. James Barnes hold the record thus far this summer, with fifty-three strokes, and that on a not very favorable afternoon.  There are good private links at Lenox, as well as that laid out by the Country club.  Mr. Anson Phelps Stokes has a six-hole course, which is hard enough to be interesting, if not long.

At Bar Harbor golf outweighs every other attraction.  The headquarters of the golfers are at the beautiful Kebo Valley clubhouse, well out on the Eagle Lake road, under the mountains and away from the village.  It's a sight worth a trip to Mount Desert to see Bishop Lawrence play there, his brows knit and figure poised in meditation, as if on the stroke depended the future welfare of a score of souls.  Even more picturesque are the golfing attempts of the Japanese minister, Kurino.  No more courageous effort to harmonize one's self with one's environment was ever seen than the spectacle of this dignified and most courteous oriental on the links, curiously examining his golf club from end to end.

[Article truncated.]

[Sven Nilsen]

The second article dates from March 21, 1904:

SOCIETY IS TIRED OF GOLF

Swell Set Abandons it for the Automobile and Motor Yacht - Fashionable Devotees of Sport Will Devote Their Attention to Tennis and Polo This Season - Millions of Dollars have Been Invested in Golf.

So far as fashionable society is concerned, golf is doomed, says the New York Press.  After maintaining a strong supremacy among outdoor sports for ten years it has been abandoned for the motor yacht.

Two of the richest men in the world, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, are among the enthusiastic devotees of golf, but they are unable to save it from drifting into the hands of a very different class of persons from the men and women who, when the golf craze was at its height, spent millions in purchasing valuable tracts of property for links and in putting up palatial club houses.

Following the example of golf clubs in the fashionable winter colonies in the South, the East Orange Golf club, for seven years one of the leading organizations in Northern New Jersey, has decided to disband at the end of this month.  A similar movement is looked for, not only among other golf clubs in the Oranges, but in other suburban districts within a hundred-mile radius of New York.  Although the members of these clubs are abandoning their erstwhile favorite sport they are disposed to let it down easy.  They spare it a knockout blow by announcing that their golf links are required for building purposes.  Investigation shows that so far as a limited number of small clubs with extensive grounds are concerned this may be true.  But it certainly is not true of long-established clubs with extensive grounds and expensive houses that have decided to give golf the go-by this summer and devote more attention to tennis.

While tennis never has died out, it has been kept in the background by golf for a good many years.  This year it promises to regain something of its old-time popularity.

Polo likewise will benefit by the passing of golf, particularly at some of the New Jersey country clubs.  The Essex County Country club for instance, the strongest organization of its kind in New Jersey, leased its fine polo grounds a few years ago to the golfers in the club.  There are no finer links in the state.  Polo threatened to become a back number just at the time.

Sine George Gould brought it to the fore again at Lakewood, the sports of the Meadowbrook colony have fallen into line, and now the Essex County club is anxious to get into the game again.  Stephen Van Rensselear, jr., Fred Van Ness and a few others of the old polo team who retained their ponies have been trying to persuade the golfers to forfeit their lease.  For two years they appealed in vain.  This year, the rumor counts for anything, the golfers will have their ear to the ground for the general slum pin the game, and will be disposed to come to terms with the poloists.

The article also contains sections covering how "Golf Balls Have Made Fortunes for Their Makers" and "1,300 Big Golf Clubs in the United States" (the later noting there were 1,300 established golf clubs in the United States and questioning if the game could survive its desertion by high society.

[Sven Nilsen]

The third article dates from June 30, 1915:

GOLF IS BECOMING MUCH PLAYED GAME

One Authority Calls it Greatest American Game, But, They Differ Widely.

Concerning the great American game, golf, one contributor recently had the following to say on golf, which must be weighed some:  Golf has become America's national game.  More American men play golf today than play baseball.  The total number of men and women who play golf every day during the open season is greater than the total number of men and women who witness baseball games or play at baseball.

Golf is the real national game now because both sexes can and do play the game.  Baseball gathered its devotes from the masculine ranks only.  The only way an American woman could participate in a ball game was as a spectator.

Baseball is a game that the majority of Americans can play only until they are around 21.  After that they quit the game as a regular form of exercise and pleasure, unless they go into the professional ranks.  Baseball is too strenuous a game for any one who does not play regularly.

But golf is a game for all ages.  The old man can play as well as the young.  It is a muscle builder without being a muscle strainer.  It gives one as much fresh air as baseball, and it keeps one healthy without submitting one to the terror of sore and aching muscles.  And this imported game of golf was sneered at by the Americans less than ten years ago.  Golf is a game for the poor as well as the rich.  Those who could afford to play baseball can afford to play golf.  It is not much more expensive.  A set of golfing clubs, balls and other equipments do not cost very much more than a baseball uniform, a half dozen bats, spiked shoes and other pharphenalia.

There are in America today something like 600 golfing clubs allied with the United States Golf association.  That represents a golf population of at least 500,000.  But that is only a small portion of the standing army of golfers.  In every city where there are public links there are tens of thousands of golfers not associated with golfing clubs.  They play either on the public links or on the private links at the invitations of some friend who happens to be a member of the club that owns them.

Growth of Game.

In the Greater New York vicinity alone, it is estimated that there are 200,000 golfers.  In New York state the grand total is somewhere around the 800,000 mark.  Golf has a firm grip on the natives of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, California and some of the other big states in the union.  It is estimated that Pennsylvania has at least 400,000 golfers within its confines - and the army is growing larger every day.  There are at least 2,500,000 - probably 3,500,000 - golfers in America today.  They may not play every day or every week but they are golfers just the same.  Just as soon as the big cities in the country build more public links the golfing army probably will be increased by another 2,000,000.  Golf of course, never will outshine baseball as a spectator's game.  In baseball the spectator takes his seat and watches the game from the grandstand.

[Article truncated.]

[David_Tepper]

Sven -

Thanks very much for posting those articles. They certainly show that golf in the U.S. has endured at least one boom & bust (and boom again) cycle in the past.

Perhaps the current gloom & doom Cassandras can find some comfort in that.

DT
 

[Kris Shreiner]

Sven,

I'll second David's thanks for posting those wonderful looks at the early ebb and flow of golf's popularity in America. Have things really changed at all on that score? It's a damn tough game that ain't cheap. It's not for everybody...and it never will be.

The second article has a real beauty of a line in it..."unable to save it from drifting into the hands of a very different class of persons from the men and women who, when the game was at its height, spent millions..." Perish the thought!

Cheers,
Kris

[Peter Pallotta]

Thanks Sven.

The articles reminded me of Haultain's "The Mystery of Golf" (published around 1908, i think - so right in the same period). The natural/outdoor aspect of the game, the exercise and game for all ages aspects.

I was also struck by that line in the second article:  "Two of the richest men in the world, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, are among the enthusiastic devotees of golf, but they are unable to save it from drifting into the hands of a very different class of persons..." Ha ha - I guess the writer meant the hoi polloi, a class of people like US! Well, if golf could survive such a devastating step down in class, I guess it can survive anything....

Peter

[Sven Nilsen]

Kris and Peter:

Contrast those lines with the statements in the third article about the number of people that played the game, or to borrow the phrase used, the "army of golfers."

At some point during this time period golf moved from a sporting activity for the leisure class to a big business.  Millions had been invested in the development of courses and clubs (including some fairly lavish clubhouses), and the equipment and ball business was exploding.  There was more than one reason to perpetuate the sport on these shores.

Even back then it appears that there were boat people and golf people, although I'd bet the golf people were getting a bit more physical benefit from their chosen outdoor activity.

Sven

[Kris Shreiner]

Let's remember it WAS the boat people...in the form of the Scottish caddie turned professional... you know, the guys from the lower orders...that brought and taught the game to the monied folk stateside who could spend the time and dough to develop and enjoy the game.

No knock on the successful or genetically lucky...they made it happen. But the story is left a few chapters short of the full telling if the TITANIC contributions of caddie-golf to U.S. golf(and numerous other countries around the world) are not given their full due. I would also assert that the "army of golfers" cited included thousands of wretches who found the game from the caddie ranks. How do you think that number of those from modest means could earn enough money AND also have access to the game?

The game of golf itself doesn't care how much money you have or where you came from. It never has. All that matters is that you can enjoy it and want to stay playing it for as long as you are able. ANYONE can afford to play golf on some level. Some dirt-poor caddies from Brazil even built their own course recently. The only real variable is the presentation level. Heck, the less fortunate can even play some of the finest courses in the world...and DO...on caddie days!

Cheers,
Kris

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