Roots of American Golf

[Sven Nilsen]

I've always held the perhaps mis-conceived notion that the early efforts of playing golf in America were isolated attempts by a few individuals, and that the game didn't really have a place in the national spotlight until its first big boom in the mid-1890's.  Whether it was in Savannah, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, West Virginia or a farm in Nebraska, the story seemed to center around one or two individuals who had had exposure to the game elsewhere.

But perhaps the game was more widely known than we give credit for.  It was being played to the North in Canada, and there where certainly immigrants from the UK and other countries that at the very least had seen the game played.

There are two articles from the 1880's that give a bit of support to the thought that even those that had never traveled abroad may have known about the game.  The first if from the Oct. 2, 1880 edition of The News and Herald.  It not only describes how golf was played, but makes it sound like it was not that far from taking off here as a club sport.



The second article is from the Dec. 1886 edition of Outing.  The question asked in the last paragraph by its author was certainly prescient.

[Peter Pallotta]

Fascinating, Sven - thanks.
The Outing article in particular: hardly yet a glint in America's eye, and yet already that nature of the game and its adaptability to various topographies, and the potential for a new (and new world) approach to golf were already being discussed -- a dialectic that would continue for another 3O+ years as the focus/ideal shifted back and forth across the Atlantic, sometimes with the original/GB&I principles (via CBM) gaining ascendency; sometimes with the new greats (eg Pine Valley) garnering praise; and sometimes with a melding of the two (with The Old Course returning to centre stage and Dr Mac and Bobby Jones creating Augusta as a nod back and a look forward simultaneously).
One can only begin to imagine what the conversations (re golf course architecture) might've been like amongst the young, wealthy and well educated Americans who fell in love with the game in the 1910s and early 1920s and who had the time and money to immerse themselves in the topic and travel back and forth across the ocean as they figured out what golf in America could and should be like.
Peter

PS - one immediately gets a better sense of how the Crumps and Wilsons and Fownes of the world could, by temperament and 'training', honour the GB&I approach while not being slaves to it/feel duty-bound to replicating it.   

[BCrosby]

The Field, a British country gentleman's magazine, began covering golf regularly sometime in the early 1870's. UK newspapers began covering golf 'fixtures' at about the same time. By the mid/late 1880's there were a number of other UK periodicals with columns on golf. The first Golfing Annual was published in 1888 in London. I'm not sure when The Times started its golf column, but I'd guess it wasn't long after that.


It seems reasonable to think that a fair number of Americans, even if they had not traveled to the UK, read those magazines at the time. The Field, for example, had a diverse readership. It focused on the whole spectrum of 'country' interests, from raising cattle and chickens to building walls and everything in between. So readers who bought the magazine for pointers on managing their properties would have also run across articles on golf on a regular basis.


I have always thought that the rise of popular journals like The Field were part of the story of the growth of golf, even in the US.


Bob       

[Tim_Cronin]

Sven, nice find. Where was the News & Record located?


The Chicago Tribune ran a story about golf, more a book review of "Golf: A Royal and Ancient Game," on Nov. 6, 1875, but it didn't suggest that the game would cross the Atlantic.