Where The Game Began

In fact, what historians believe is the first reference to golf on our shores may not have involved the game itself, but rather a dispute over who would pay for the after-round drinks. Some things never change.
In 1657, a court in the Dutch settlement of Fort Orange in what is now Albany, New York, dealt with a case involving men playing kolven, an early Dutch offshoot of golf. According to The Story of American Golf, three men were cited for playing kolven on ice on a Sunday. However, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Golf says the actual offense involved a fight over who would pay for the after-round drinks.

The next - and first undisputed - reference to golf appeared in April 1779 in Rivington's Royal Gazette: "The season for this pleasant and healthy exercise now advancing, gentlemen may be furnished with excellent clubs and veritable Caledonian balls by acquiring at the Printers."

Despite a good number of Scottish troops stationed in the New York City area at the time, there is no record that a game was actually played.

The game, or at least the word "golf," appears to have made its way south around 1786, when both the Charleston City Gazette and the Georgia Gazette carried club notices for the South Carolina Golf Club and the Savannah Golf Club, respectively. These notices were mostly reminders of club anniversaries. Indications are that these clubs, despite "Golf" being part of the name, were more social than sporting. Adding credence to the social club theory is the existence of an invitation to a ball dated 1811.

But - isn't there always a but? - records for Port Leith indicate that a consignment of 96 clubs and 432 balls arrived in Charleston in 1743, suggesting that Charleston may be the original home of American golf.

After the War of 1812, mentions of golf clubs or the game itself disappeared until later in the century. Most historians agree that the game finally found a permanent foothold on Feb. 22, 1888, the 156th anniversary of George Washington's birth, prompting Charles Price to write in his book The World of Golf: "Thus, on the birthday of a man who is alleged never to have told a lie in his life, was played the round which presaged a pastime that has since created more lying than any other, save fishing."

The round held on that day was the culmination of years of work by John Reid, a Scottish immigrant, and five of his friends, who roughed out three rudimentary holes in a cow pasture next to Reid's home in Yonkers, New York. Using six clubs made by Old Tom Morris at St. Andrews in Scotland and brought to the States by another friend, Robert Lockhart, Reid and John B. Upham were the two who actually played on that balmy February day, but even the four spectators were enthralled and became ardent golfers.

So great was their passion for the game that the six played every Sunday, inciting local clergy to predict that anyone who indulged was likely to meet "His Satanic Majesty."

Brushing aside the clerical protests, the six friends chartered America's first golf club on November 14, 1888, and Reid dubbed it St. Andrew's in homage to the Scottish links course. Lockhart became the first member.

Their attempt to indulge their love of the game was not the first in the United States; it was just the most successful. However, this account is not without its critics, who claim that Reid is given too much credit. They believe the Scotsman was simply lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.

Russell W. Montague nearly succeeded in founding a club in 1884 in Oakhurst, West Virginia. He and others laid out a course on his property and formed the Oakhurst Country Club, holding tournaments on Christmas. Unfortunately, the men eventually lost interest, but nostalgia has intervened. The course re-opened on its original site in 1995 with a nine-hole, 1,980-yard layout. You can now tee up your gutta percha ball on a pile of sand, and navigate the sheep droppings and other reminders of a bygone era at the "new" Oakhurst. The club hosted a tourney featuring 85-year old Sam Snead in 1997; for the occasion, Snead used a hickory club that had belonged to President Woodrow Wilson.

Meanwhile, across the border in Virginia, a remnant of the game's history is accessible to the public at one of the nation's most prestigious, exclusive resorts, the Homestead in White Sulphur Springs. The original No. 1 tee, constructed in 1892 when the original Donald Ross Old Course came into existence, remains in use today, making it the oldest first tee in continuous use in the United States.

Horace Hutchinson, who was the British Amateur champion at the time, was invited to demonstrate the game at the Meadow Brook Hunt Club of Long Island in 1896, but his audience was unable to stifle yawns.

"I played golf a good many years ago in the United States, when probably I was the only man that did," Hutchinson wrote of the experience. "The game was over an improvised course at the Meadowbrook Club on Long Island. . . The Meadowbrookites of that day were kind enough to say they thought golf seemed 'a very good Sunday game.' Nowadays, it appears that some Americans think it's quite good enough for some of the weekdays."

Another adherent of the game, Alexis J. Coleman, wrote in 1899 of a game being played in Chicago in 1887: "Tradition has it that the first foursome ever played in Chicago, if not the first golf ever, was in Jackson Park in 1887, when four ardent Scots who had brought clubs from the old country, played a foursome using stakes instead of holes, and altogether enjoyed themselves greatly, though at the expense of the scoffing natives."

With Reid's founding of St. Andrew's in Yonkers, the scoffing began to abate and newspapers, skeptical at first, were quickly on the bandwagon.

The New York Times provides an example of this phenomenon. The paper reported in 1894 that golf was the latest outdoor fad in "the fickle minds of the Four Hundred (in the Social Register)." But by December 1895, the paper was saying that "in the history of American field sports, there can be found no outdoor pastime that developed and attained such popularity in such a relatively short period as the game of golf."

By the turn of the century, 1,000 golf clubs dotted the American landscape, and industrialist Andrew Carnegie was moved to call the sport "the indispensable adjunct of high civilization."

So indispensable, it seems, that Carnegie completed one of the first business deals to be consummated on a golf course during a round at St. Andrew's. The result: a partnership with Charles Schwab and the formation of U.S. Steel.

Henry E. Howland, in a May 1895 Scribner's Magazine article, summed up the love affair Americans developed and still have with golf, despite a beginning that had more ups and downs than a round with Seve Ballesteros: "From the moment one of the Philistines essay a stroke and by accident make a fair drive from the tee, his conversion is assured. . . . Henceforth, he will adopt the motto: Drive it if you can, club it if you will, kick it if you must."

This review courtesy of Athlon Sports.