It is a question that has long vexed me, one which I’ve pondered for years: namely, why are we such a mediocre city for golf? Ottawa, my hometown, may be a fine place to live and work and raise a family, but to put it mildly, it is far from the best city in Canada in which to be a golfer, whether private or public. Unless sheer quantity is how you define quality; otherwise, by most any metric, we are one of the worst major ones in Canada.
In short, we lack, what I would term as, a true “headline” golf course—a Toronto Golf Club or St George’s; a Capilano; a Mount Bruno; a Calgary Golf Club; or a Blackhawk. In other words, a single golf course around which you’d plan a trip. We had merely 2 top 100 candidates according to our last ranking, neither of which cracked the top 50 (although a 3rd will make our next list). We have not hosted a Canadian Open since 1932 (although we have successfully hosted a number of du Maurier Classics/Canadian Women’s Opens over the decades). And in terms of public options, we did not have a course included amongst the top 100 (and nothing that really comes close to cracking the list, in truth). A sad state of affairs, indeed.
So what happened? How did we get here? Was it always this barren or did it devolve over the years and decades? My modus-operandi for this piece is more explorative than definitive, although as I progressed with the research and its composition, I do think I’ve come up with a rather decisive thesis statement, if you will. However, I understand that these are loaded questions, which feature layer upon layer of factors at play, social, economical, and even psychological, so I don’t dare propose that my conclusion is the definitive one.
The first thing you’ll likely notice, upon reading my brief introductory paragraph, is that most of these “headline” golf courses date from the “golden-age”, when land near what were then burgeoning urban centers was still widely available for development. Of course, at the time, these golf courses were on the far-outskirts, or even well outside, of their respective cities and thus required significant commutes. As the years progressed, however, their nearby cities grew, annexed other ones, and these golf courses were soon enveloped by them. To this list, I would also add Rosedale, Mississauga, Scarboro, the now-NLE versions of Royal Montreal and Beaconsfield and Elm Ridge, Bowness near Calgary, and Shaughnessy.
Prior and during the golden-age, unlike nearly every other major city in Canada, the Ottawa area, strangely and unfortunately, never saw a Stanley Thompson come to fruition. He did, however, design the private Seigniory Club—now the Fairmont Chateau Montebello—for the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose vital role in the development of Canadian golf cannot be underscored; and its no-expenses-spared golf course was considered among Thompson’s (and thus the country’s) very finest for a lengthy period. Yet, it’s about an hour east, at best, from downtown Ottawa; and since, time and neglect have done their dirty deeds upon it, to the point that it is quite disenchanting to play now. Such historical callousness is a recurring theme in our city’s golfing history, one which I will return to later.
Not far from Chateau Montebello, across the border, once stood the opulent Caledonia Springs Resort, which, originally and primarily, attracted international renown for its healing hot-springs and plethora of other wellness-related offerings, but also featured three different iterations of an associated nine-hole golf course. According to Donald Childs’ research, which is soon set to be available on his website, the first version was likely built by Willie Dunn Jr in 1900, the second by C.R. Murray in 1904, and the last by Tom Bendelow in 1909. The idea to add golf to the health-focused resort was instigated by the Grand Trunk Hotel company; eventually, in 1905, however, C.P. Rail took charge of the resort from its struggling competitor.
Although the nine-hole golf course was of modest length, measuring slightly less than 2000 yards in its Bendelow version, the resort nevertheless attracted many of the era’s leading golfers, including the last 5 Canadian Open winners, to its first annual invitational, which was played in 1909. “Sporty” and “engaging” were terms used to describe Bendelow’s tricky golf course, which crossed creeks, plunged into gulleys, and alternated between thick woodland and open field. The resort continued to host this event, along with a number of others, including some reserved for women, for a handful of years; and it thus played a key role in the early development of professional golf and in fostering a competitive amateur culture in Canada.
However, despite the popularity and strong reputation of its golf course, in 1915, at the height of the war, C.P.R. abruptly closed the resort. As Childs surmises, “alas, the golf course had not failed the hotel; the hotel had failed the golf course.” In effect, one can’t help but suppose that had it survived the war, and remained as well-thought of among golfers from both Ottawa and Montreal, then perhaps one of the major “golden-age” architects—such as a Willie Park Jr or a Stanley Thompson or a C.H. Alison, all of whom visited the area in the years following the war—might have been hired to lengthen the golf course and even add nine more holes. The Caledonia Springs Resort, all traces of which have effectively been erased, remains a tantalizing “what-if”.
At this time, too, adjoined to Aylmer’s Victoria Hotel was a golf course reportedly considered among the country’s best (whatever that meant in this very early period in the evolution of golf in Canada). In his essay on this golf course, Childs directs us to the Ottawa Citizen’s description that “the links was “within three minutes walk of the Victoria hotel” and that “the links extend from the hotel some distance up along the lake shore.” It seems that a Joseph Baizana may have laid out the golf course, although no traces of it or the resort, which burned in a fire, remain. Considering its water-front property, had it lasted until the 1920s, who knows what may have come of it. too?
The biggest “what-if”, however, is likely the failure of the proposed “Hillcrest Golf Club”, where Stanley Thompson was set to build 36 holes on a tract of land just north of the Royal Ottawa Golf Club’s current location. In his lengthy study of the golf course, Donald Childs notes, here, that it was incorporated in 1923 and “lasted for about a year, but it never managed to build a single golf hole, let alone two golf courses.” In fact, it remained incorporated until the mid-1970s.
In short, as Childs concludes, the ambitious project primarily failed due to its dubious business plan, one devised by men who knew little, if anything, about golf and about how to start and operate a golf club.
However, Kenneth Welton, chief engineer of Stanley Thompson and Company, gave a good report of the property’s potential, as did George S. Lyon, who in fact received an honorary membership to the club for his services.
Welton stated that “this property is of a similar nature, both in soil and contour, to that upon which its immediate neighbour, the Royal Ottawa Country Club [sic], is built.”
Could something have been done in conjunction with the Chateau Laurier, in downtown Ottawa, which fell under C.N.’s ownership in 1923 and for whom it became a flagship property? In the late 1930s, Thompson, along with his then-still-green associates Robert Trent Jones and Geoff Cornish, built the 9-hole Norway Bay Golf Course, along C.N.’s rail-line, a few hours up the Ottawa River, in Bristol, Quebec. And a decade and a half earlier, he of course built for C.N arguably his, and the country’s, best golf course at Jasper Park Lodge. Why the Chateau Laurier opted not to add a golf course has long perplexed me, in truth. (Perhaps there’s a reason that I am unaware of.)
Then as now, the Royal Ottawa Golf Club was the nation’s capital’s leading light, its foremost and namesake club. For a time, too, it stood neck-and-neck not only with the country’s best, but with the new world’s best, according to various reports. Upon moving to its Aylmer location, the club hired Tom Bendelow to lay out its links, and by all accounts, he produced a very fine one, indeed, but one that could nevertheless be improved. In particular, critics noted its back-and-forth routing and lack of bunkering as significant weaknesses, although there were naturally sandy patches on the course, such as in the depression short of the par 3, 6th green, which has remained unmoved. In 1905, Childs highlights that the Ottawa Journal reported “that “outside golfers who have visited the Ottawa Club’s links are unanimous in declaring them the finest natural links in Canada.”
Seven years later, famous English golf writer Henry Leach, while on duty covering Harold Hilton’s tour of North America, offered his own glowing assessment: “At Ottawa there is a course which, to say the least, stands very high in the list of the very best on the American continent {…} I mean specially that it is making a new course for itself which I, as a wandering critic, came to believe will be recognized as the finest in North America. I suppose that at the present time that distinction rests between Myopia, the National Golf Links on Shinnecock Island, the Country Club at Brookline – all these being in the United States – and Ottawa.”
In this instance, this “new course” that Leach is referring to is Harry Colt’s cataclysmic version of the Toronto Golf Club, which forever changed the landscape of golf in the country. But, as with the Royal Montreal, Mr. Colt was also summoned to Ottawa by its members, who, at the behest of George Sargent and others, recognized, in particular, that their golf course needed a new bunkering scheme and that Mr. Colt was the most able man to implement it, even though Donald Ross had made modifications to the club in 1912 (according to Ross’ book, Golf Has Never Failed Me, he “remodeled” the golf course in 1912; to what extent he did, however, still hasn’t been discovered.)
Harry Colt arrived in Ottawa on May 12th, 1913, and he stayed at the house of club member Lieutenant-Colonel H.C. Lowther. In its May 13th edition, The Ottawa Journal reported that “in addition to planning a new route of play, Mr. Colt staked out yesterday a large number of prospective bunkers, and some of the long handicap stalwarts of the club are likely to have to order snowshoes to get around among the sands.”
Despite his sterling reputation, many members judged his plan too radical and thusly voted it down: “After a two hours’ discussion, the Royal Ottawa Golf Club decided against acting upon the advice of Mr. Colt, the British expert who recently made an inspection of the local club links and planned a number of radical changes. The expense in connection with the proposed changes, coupled with the fact that the club already have a heavy bill of expense on their hands with the laying of a new drainage system at the club house, caused the rejection of the motion to proceed with the work. Some of the suggestions will be taken up, mostly in connection with improving the present course.”
Slowly, though, as is typical to such club politicking, the club’s pro-Colt contingent began to chip away at the internal resistance, and a number of Colt’s recommendations were implemented, beginning with his bunkering. However, identifying exactly how much of his plan was in fact used gets murky, as World War 1 delayed progress and a clubhouse fire in 1930 burned his blueprints. Moreover, Willie Park Jr. was hired in 1920 to renovate the course himself, adding further touches to Bendelow’s original.
Returning to the (viral) piece that I wrote earlier this year, as with so many of Quebec’s golf courses, The Royal Ottawa was not spared from, what Marie-Helene Voyer diagnoses as, Quebec’s “anesthetic habit of destruction”, a callousness that extends far beyond its golf courses and has resulted a “cult of destruction” brought about by “cocktail of ignorance, negligence, and administrative ineffectualness.”
Studying aerials taken in 1958, significant changes to the golf course are already clearly discernible, taking it further and further away from Colt’s and Park’s versions of it, a direction that continued with Robbie Robertson’s involvement in the 1970s, Graham Cooke’s afterwards, and most recently, Neil Haworth’s. As an outsider, apart from Childs’ research and some of mine, the club, for whatever reason, seems to have marginalized, if not entirely dismissed, its connection to Harry Colt (and to Ross as well, although they do somewhat acknowledge Park’s role).
Set at the base of the Gatineau Hills, what the Royal Ottawa will always be blessed with, however, is its wonderfully tumbling, segmented property, replete with meandering creeks, a stately central hill into and off which several of the holes play, and deep ravines that influence play. This is the type of intense land that is common to the best “inner-city” golf courses that I have played, whether that be St Georges’, Toronto Golf Club, San Francisco, or even Old Town Club.
Across the river, on the Ontario side, in general the land is far less intense, with the city-proper mostly being surrounded by hard-clay based land, most of which is either broad farm-field or dense woods. If we adhere to Occam’s Razor, which I often do, then is the explanation for our lack of world-class golf as simple as concluding that the city is located in a region that is largely unconducive to producing it? Perhaps, and quite possibly, but considering the number of quality golf courses that Colt, Alison, and Park produced on less-than-ideal tracts of land elsewhere than Ottawa, I don’t think that the stewards of our clubs can or should be totally exempt from blame
One obvious exception to this is the tract of land upon which the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club selected Willie Park to lay out its golf course in 1920. Early reports, published in different local journals and available for selection on the club’s website, wax poetically about the raw potential of the property: “last but not least,” stated the Ottawa Journal in 1920, “the grounds of the Hunt Club were a veritable Sahara desert, as foreign to grass as the ice-floes of the Arctic.” They also claimed that “although the work on the greens will be artificially created, the architect’s idea is to produce as near as possible a perfectly natural course. All traps and fareways will be so constructed as to blend with the surroundings.”
Both the Ottawa Journal and Ottawa Citizen, on March 18, 1920, cited Park’s golf course as being among the country’s best: “Extensive plans and arrangements for the building of an eighteen-hole golf course, the equal of any in Canada were made at a meeting of the board of directors of the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club,” cited the later, and then “today, with but two years gone by, their courage and their optimism stand vindicated. In golfing architecture, in location and design, in picturesqueness of surroundings, in quality and quantity of membership, in financial basis, in everything that goes to make a golf club a success, the Ottawa Hunt and Motor Club – whose links are to be formally opened on July 1 – stands foremost among the great courses of the country,” emphasized the later.
We now know full-well to view such proclamations with a measure, if not a full heaping, of skepticism; however, knowing the land, knowing the quality of Park’s other, still-preserved works, and seeing some of the old aerials of his golf course at the Hunt Club, I don’t think that these claims were too far-fetched.
Like the Royal Ottawa, the Hunt opted to go in a different direction with the evolution of their golf course, one that was, in their defense, very much the ethos of the period. Looking at aerials taken as early as 1958, already we see a different bunkering scheme, different mowing lines and shapes, and far more trees encroaching upon the lines of play. As was prevalent in Canada throughout the middle of the 20th century, chances are that these changes were mostly done in-house, but in the late 1980s Thomas Mcbroom was hired to perform a full-scale renovation. Most recently, the club hired Dr. Michael Hurdzan to perform his own renovation to Mcbroom’s earlier one. Ultimately, SCOREGolf ranked it 55th in 2022 (down 13 spots from its 2020 ranking, the first time it was eligible under its new face), top100 had it 67th, and we had it 57th. Considering that Calgary and Mount Bruno are both ranked among the top 20, you can’t help but be slightly disappointed with the direction of the Hunt’s evolution—especially since its property is better than both of those.
The other notable course built during the golden-age was Rivermead, a C.R. Murray design that George Cumming first expanded and which has long played second fiddle to its more renowned and nationally known neighbor, The Royal Ottawa. Their stories, specifically in regards to the evolution of their golf courses, are quite similar: narrowing the mowing lines, cleaning up the edges, greening the turf, and planting trees and trees and more trees. In other words, Quebec’s anesthetic habit, or cult, of destruction and ugliness rearing its head, again. In this case, Ken Venturi’s firm, which performed a renovation while in town building Eagle Creek, is foremost to blame for the deterioration of the golf course (just compare the 1976 aerial to the 1991 aerial for proof of their work).
Despite the wonderful renovation that Jeff Mingay recently completed, which in my view has vaunted it to the city’s best golf course, it still now pales in comparison to the state of the golf course throughout the first half of the 20th century (mainly due to a number of factors now outside of Jeff’s and the club’s control).
Since Park left the Hunt Club in 1920, sadly, very little of note has been built in and near Ottawa. Norway Bay, despite its impressive pedigree of practitioners, was of a rather modest scope and scale, and never sought to be anything more than local curiosity for cottagers. Such modest ambition, more or less, characterizes most of the other golf courses that were built during the “golden-age” and either went out of business towards the middle of the century or have lasted to the present day: Kingsmere; Larrimac; Mississippi; and Champlain (Glenlea), among some others.
A more ambitious resort, featuring a golf component, was planned for Meach Lake in the early 1930s at the behest of S.S. Holden, a successful manufacturer of sporting goods. However, the onset of the Great Depression likely torpedoed his dream to bring world-class golf to the Ottawa Valley.
And George Cumming’s Chaudiere Golf Club, which is now the Chateau Cartier and a shell of its former self, was reportedly a quite strong golf course in its heyday. Even amidst all of the deterioration and annexing, it’s easy to detect some good bones scattered about, especially where the layout runs along the Ottawa River. Was it a world-beater? Probably not. But the old aerials of the golf course show promise.
The strong uphill par 3, 15th, at Camelot
More recently, Thomas McBroom built two private golf clubs, neither of which are top 100 quality. And Terry Matthews’ The Marshes, the last collaboration between Trent Jones Sr and Jr built with an eye towards hosting the 2007 President’s Cup, is fine, and that’s about it. How much was this almost seventy-five year lull in golf construction caused by the NCC’s cabal-like stranglehold on the city? I presume at least somewhat, if not a lot. For those who don’t know what the N.C.C. is, here are two descriptions that I found on Reddit that attest to their influence on the city: “federally owned land equals barriers and red tape for development. Prime real estate that sits baron and wasted instead of being developed for use by residents. Ex: LeBreton Flats”, and “it’s just another layer of politics adding friction rather than ever accomplishing anything. It’s more bureaucracy, more process, more approvals, more rejection, more RFP, more endless diligence, more posturing as a sort of federal steward but existing in a vacuum of unconsciousness.” And if you want more, here’s a whole website dedicated to their countless and continual failings.
All in all, though, Ottawa’s golden age, when considering it further, was a fruitful period for golf, with some of the leading practitioners of the time building first-rate originals or renovating existing products. In a story far too common to this country, as I’ve progressed with this article, my main take-away is that our city’s golf scene is in the dire state it is in today not due to the failings of its first or second generation visionaries and founders, but rather due to those of its subsequent stewards, who for decades and decades were drunk on “cocktails of ignorance, negligence, and administrative ineffectualness.”
